This volume seeks to show how Jews, Catholics, and Protestants can and do read the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh/Old Testament simultaneously from a critical and religious perspective. It points out the similarities and differences in how biblical texts are read, interpreted, and applied in each tradition. In particular, it explores how biblical criticism, especially the historical-critical method, can provide a sound basis for a religious reading. While the authors were trained academically in biblical criticism and teach it in their classes, they continue to read the Bible as a meaningful religious document central to their lives. The heart of the book is three essays on reading the Bible critically and religiously from a Jewish (Brettler), Catholic (Harrington), and Protestant (Enns) perspective; each author also offers a response to each of his colleague’s essays. Also included are an introduction to the history of biblical interpretation, a brief conclusion, and a glossary of technical terms.

What do Jews think scripture is? How do the People of the Book conceive of the Book of Books? In what ways is it authoritative? Who has the right to interpret it? Is it divinely or humanly written? And have Jews always thought about the Bible in the same way? In seventeen cohesive and rigorously researched essays, this volume traces the way some of the most important Jewish thinkers throughout history have addressed these questions from the rabbinic era through the medieval Islamic world to modern Jewish scholarship. They address why different Jewish thinkers, writers, and communities have turned to the Bible—and what they expect to get from it. Ultimately, argues editor Benjamin D. Sommer, in understanding the ways Jews construct scripture, we begin to understand the ways Jews construct themselves.

Representing the spectrum of subfields within Jewish Studies, the contributing scholars to this volume use beginnings as a hermeneutic stance to analyze texts in their area. While each essay is a significant contribution to its own subfield - Bible, Talmud, Kabbalah, Modern Jewish Thought, Feminist and Cultural Studies - the essays taken as a whole present new possibilities for exploring the space that is Jewish Studies and beginning an inquiry into what might constitute a definable hermeneutics of Jewish texts.

Explores the question of the kind of canon, privileged status, or Logos, the Torah actually has for the post-modern Western Jew. This book documents the intellectual and spiritual odyssey of one of North America's foremost Jewish biblical scholars.