In this book, master Talmudist and scholar of the Greco-Roman world, the late Professor Saul Lieberman, elucidates words, texts, customs, and practices in either rabbinic or classical literature, often by reference to passages in the other. In “Greek in Jewish Palestine”, he demonstrates that “almost every foreign word and phrase have their raison d'etre in rabbinic literature” and that “all Greek phrases in rabbinic literature are quotations.” “Hellenism in Greek Palestine” is “an inquiry into the spirit of many rabbinic observations and investigations of the facts, incidents, opinions, notions and beliefs to which the Rabbis allude in their statements.”

Fully acknowledging that Judaism, as described in both the Bible and the Talmud, was patriarchal, Judith Hauptman demonstrates that the rabbis of the Talmud made significant changes in key areas of Jewish law in order to benefit women. Reading the texts with feminist sensibilities—recognizing that they were written by men and for men and that they endorse a set of social relations in which men control women—the author shows that patriarchy was not always and everywhere the same. Although the rabbis whose rulings are recorded in the Talmud did not achieve equality for women—or even seek it—they should be credited with giving women higher status and more rights. For example, during the course of several hundred years, they converted marriage from the purchase by a man of a woman from her father into a negotiated relationship between prospective husband and wife. They designated a bride's dowry to be one-tenth of her father's net worth, thereby ending her Torah-mandated disenfranchisement with respect to inheritance. They left the ability to grant a divorce in male hands but gave women the possibility of petitioning the courts to force a divorce. Although some of these developments may have originated in the surrounding Greco-Roman culture, the rabbis freely chose to incorporate them into Jewish law. 'Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman's Voice' also breaks new ground methodologically. Rather than plucking passages from a variety of different rabbinical works and then sewing them together to produce a single, unified rabbinical point of view, Hauptman reads sources in their own literary and legal context and then considers them in relationship to a rich array of associated synchronic and diachronic materials.

"Reconstructing the Talmud [...] introduces the modern Talmud student to the techniques developed over the last century for uncovering how this literature developed. Opening with an extended introduction outlining the methods employed by scholars to engage in such analysis, Reconstructing the Talmud proceeds with nine examples concretely demonstrating how such methods are applied to actual passages from the Bavli. Sorting out the layers of the Bavli, understanding each layer within its cultural and historical context, and comparing it with earlier sources, reveals a dynamic world of change, debate, halakhic diversity and development far richer and more nuanced than that which is evident in the static and fixed text of the printed edition. Reconstructing the Talmud introduces the reader to the world of academic Talmudic research and opens new venues of exploration and understanding of one of the world's great literary treasures"--