This dissertation explores the language employed by the editor(s) of Leviticus Rabbah in their articulation of women's physiology and gestation in chapter 14. Established as a compilation of aggadic literature from 4 th and 5th century Palestine, Leviticus Rabbah reflects the so…
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Pseudo-Philo's Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum is a revisionary rewriting of Biblical narrative (Genesis through 1 Samuel), distinguished by its imaginative weaving of 'secondary' scripture into the primary narrative sequence. This study examines the exegetical and hermeneutical f…
This dissertation collects every example of a historical anecdote in the tannaitic midrashim—any passage which relates any incident purported to have occurred from the close of biblical times up to the composition of the midrash collection being studied. I set forth the percenta…
This dissertation explores the theology and worldview of Habakkuk as represented by the Old Greek (OG) text form according to the Gottingen edition. While the primary focus is upon the OG, the information obtained is subsequently compared to the Massoretic (MT) text form accordi…
Contrary to the generally accepted interpretation of Genesis 34 that Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah, was raped, What Dinah Thought, by Deena Metzger, and The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant, clearly state that Dinah loved Shechem, the man who was alleged to have raped her, and had…
Bakhtin theorizes that literary allusions create a heteroglossic text, a text that is enlivened through the dialogic interaction of the writer and the text quoted. My study of autobiographies written by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust asserts that certain works engage in such …
This dissertation provides the first full-scale literary and theological treatment of the motif of humans confronting God in rabbinic literature. The sages do not challenge God directly, but indirectly by placing moral critiques of God into the mouths of various biblical heroes.…
This dissertation seeks to provide a plausible alternative to the consensus interpretation of Jesus' "do not judge" teaching in Matt 7:1-5. While the overwhelming majority of recent interpreters understand "do not judge" (7:1) and its concurrent sayings such as "take the log out…
This dissertation analyzes the literary techniques and the cultural background of Late Antique rabbinic parodies that target rabbinic and Christian texts. Over the last decades, it has become commonly acceptable to treat rabbinic texts as literature. More recently, scholars have…
This dissertation proposes a new way of understanding Cynthia Ozick's aesthetic project. I argue that her short stories and novels are engaged in untangling her self-styled contradiction between the creative impulse and Jewish observance. That is, while her non-fiction essays ar…
My dissertation offers a new reading of one of Denmark's great writers of the nineteenth century as first and foremost a Jewish artist. By offering an alternative to the nationalistic discourse so prevalent in the scholarship, my study examines Goldschmidt's relationship to the …
After the canonization of the Hebrew Bible in the first century CE, Jewish creativity turned to interpretation; one style was rabbinic midrash . As modern dislocations created disconnections with “Jewish tradition” a literature called “modern midrash” emerged. Some of its practi…
The "Holy Spirit" is a familiar concept in Christianity, but in its original Hebrew construction as Ruah ha-Kodesh, it also plays an active role in classical Rabbinic literature. This dissertation surveys uses of the term Ruah ha-Kodesh in major texts from the Tannaitic period t…
One of the distinctive features of biblical myth in general and of the Gospels in particular, as David Friedrich Strauss observed in his The Life of Jesus Critically Examined in 1835, is the making of myths out of historical (and historical-seeming) events. Strauss was the first…
This study examines the broad rhetorical, attributional and thematic features of Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael (MRI) to evaluate the extent to which it is a coherent text and to suggest possible purposes underlying its composition. Part I introduces the topic. Chapter 1 reviews scho…
The debate in Rabbinic literature over the merit of Israel and the redemption from Egypt is worthy of investigation, because it is a major preoccupation of the Rabbis, beginning as early as the end of the first century BCE and continuing for many generations. A study of this deb…
This dissertation argues that the foundation for the message of the Letter of James is his Jewish theological roots. The project demonstrates that James is a Second Temple Period sage who uses midrash to explicate to his audience a teleological Sitz im Leben that reflects the im…
The Tsene-rene is a Yiddish text first published in the early 1600s that some have described as a Bible for women. Attributed to Ya’akov ben Yiẓḥak of Yanov, a figure we know little about, the Tsene-rene is a seamless compilation of Bible stories, commentaries, and folktales arr…
The midrash Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer is a rabbinic composition of fifty-four chapters that has influenced Scriptural exposition since the medieval era, and provides a variety of traditional and innovative interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, which are frequently organized accordin…