History provides one way of marking time. But there are others, and the Judaism of the dual Torah, set forth in the Rabbinic literature from the Mishnah through the Talmud of Babylonia, ca. 200-600 C.E., defines one such alternative. This book tells the story of how a historical way of thinking about past, present, and future, time and eternity, the here and now in relationship to the ages, « that is, Scripture's way of thinking » gave way to another mode of thought altogether. This other model Neusner calls a paradigm, because a pattern imposed meaning and order on things that happened. Paradigmatic modes of thought took the place of historical ones. Thinking through paradigms, with a conception of time that elides past and present and removes all barriers between them, in fact governs the reception of Scripture in Judaism until nearly our own time. Neusner here explains through the single case of Rabbinic Judaism, precisely how that other way of reading Scripture did its work, and why, for so many centuries, that reading of the heritage of ancient Israel governed. At stake are [1] a conception of time different from the historical one and [2] premises on how to take the measure of time that form a legitimate alternative to those that define the foundations of the historical way of measuring time. Fully exposed, those alternative premises may prove as logical and compelling as the historical ones. The approach follows the documentary history of ideas, and individual chapters describe the treatment of historical topics in the Mishnah, the Talmud of the Land of Israel (a.k.a., the Yerushalmi), Genesis Rabbah, that is, ca. 200, 400, and 450 CE, and Pesiqta deRab Kahana, ca. 500 CE.

This book is the first volume in Jacob Neusner's ground-breaking trilogy, "The Foundations of Judaism: Method, Teleology, Doctrine." This Part One - "Method" - offers the first systematic explanation of why the midrash collections - that is, books of rabbinical exegeses of Scripture - were written. Neusner investigates the circumstances in which the earliest midrash collections were organized around the Pentateuch, and explains both the purpose of the work and its historical context.

Viewed as ideal types, the Halakhah defines the norm, setting forth what is obligatory, the Aggadah, specifies what exceeds the norm and goes beyond the measure of the law. The striking differences of style and substance that differentiate the two categories of discourse present the question of how they intersect in a single coherent statement, a system that holds together its two distinct media of thought and expression. When we have in hand systematic data on how Aggadah contributes to the Halakhah, and where Halakhah serves the purposes of the Aggadah, we find possible the logical next step: where do the two intersect, and at what points do the respective complexes of category-formations stand autonomous of one another, and that leads to the question: how do Aggadah and Halakhah constitute a coherent religious structure and make in common a single systemic statement? Where, within the formative literature of Normative Judaism, they join together, what affect the one exercises upon the other, and how the whole - Rabbinic Judaism - exceeds and transcends the sum of the parts - the Halakhah, the Aggadah - is spelled out.