The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature [Hardcover]

An international team of scholars help the reader confront the enormous and complex rabbinic corpus.This volume guides beginning students of rabbinic literature to the range of historical-interpretive and culture-critical issues that contemporary scholars use when studying the rabbinic texts of late antiquity. The editors have gathered an international collection of scholars to support students' initial steps in confronting the enormous and complex rabbinic corpus.This volume guides beginning students of rabbinic literature to the range of historical-interpretive and culture-critical issues that contemporary scholars use when studying the rabbinic texts of late antiquity. The editors have gathered an international collection of scholars to support students' initial steps in confronting the enormous and complex rabbinic corpus.This volume guides beginning students of rabbinic literature to the range of historical-interpretive and culture-critical issues that contemporary scholars use when studying the rabbinic texts of late antiquity. The editors, themselves well-known interpreters of rabbinic literature, have gathered an international collection of scholars to support students' initial steps in confronting the enormous and complex rabbinic corpus. Unlike other introductions to rabbinic writings, the present volume includes approaches shaped by anthropology, gender studies, oral-traditional studies, classics, and folklore studies.Introduction; Part I: 1. Rabbinic authorship as a collective enterprise Martin S. Jaffee; 2. The orality of Rabbinic writing Elizabeth Shanks Alexander; 3. Social and institutional settings of Rabbinic literature Jeffrey L. Rubenstein; 4. The political geography of Rabbinic texts Seth Schwartz; Part II: 5. Rabbinic Midrash and ancient Jewish biblical interpretation Steven D. Fraade; 6. The Judaean legal tradition and the Halakhah of the Mishnah Shaye J. D. Cohen; 7. Roman law and Rabbinic legal composition Catherine Hezser; 8. Middle Persianlc