Jewish Ways of Reading the Bible

This volume contains 16 papers presented to the 1999 Annual Meeting of the British Association of Jewish Studies held in Manchester. The conference theme was "Jewish Ways of Reading the Bible". Participants addressed the theme from a wide range of different perspectives; classical, medieval and modern. The result is a book which illustrates the richness and diversity of Jewish attitudes to scripture. Especially significant contributions discuss the plain meaning of scripture in the Qumran (Brooke), the Targumim (Bernstein), the rabbinical attitudes to textual variants (Alexander), the methods of argument in the Mishnah (Samely), the place of the bible in an example of medieval liturgy (Loewe), and the treatment of some biblical women by Jewish authors both ancient and modern (McKay). The volume also contains insightful discussions of inner biblical exegesis: of aspects of early Jewish interpretative method and Enoch and the writings of Philo, of the psychology of rabbinical commentators, of how the bible was read in medieval Jewish book illuminations, of morally problematic biblical passages, of whether the rabbinical discussions of the Flood provide insights for understanding the holocaust, and how the bible is treated in contemporary Jewish Sermons.