This issue contains the following essays: Amit Gvaryahu | The Tannaitic Laws of Battery: Scripture and Halakhah Uzi Leibner | The End of the Amoraic Period in the Land of Israel: Periodization, History and Archaeology Yoel Kretzmer-Raziel | The Talmudic Stam as an Evolutionary Phenomenon: The Opening Sugyot of Tractate Nedarim in the Talmud Yerushalmi and the Talmud Bavli Gal Sofer | Lover, Son and Prophet: Magic and Kabbalah in the Autobiography of Yohanan Alemanno English Abstracts

The Book of Kings is the most important source of Jewish history in the First Temple Period. This commentary is intended for Hebrew readers – scholars, university students, high school students, their teachers, and Bible lovers. These readers, whose mother tongue is Hebrew, are inherently close to the source language, and can benefit from a deep understanding of the research.

This book sheds new light on the history of the sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam. It is noticed already in the Quran which describes Muhammad's vision of a nocturnal journey from the "sacred mosque" (al-masjid al-ḥarām) in Mecca to the "far-off mosque" (al-masjid al-aqṣā) namely, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In his night journey to the site of the demolished Temple, Muhammad signaled to his contemporary Jews the course of salvation in which already Moses had led the Children of Israel to their promised land. On the other hand, the Quran praises also the Abrahamic sanctity of Mecca, especially in sūras which reflect the polemical rift with the Jews who eventually refused to recognize Muhammad as their messianic savior. After the death of Muhammad, when the first Muslims came from Arabia to Palestine, their awareness of the Quranic sanctity of al-Masjid al-Aqṣā resurfaced. This book elucidates major aspects of the renewed and growing sanctity of Jerusalem and al-Sham at large, as reflected in the available Islamic traditions. These traditions show also how patterns of the sanctity of Jerusalem were eventually adapted to Mecca in reaction to the growing prestige of Jerusalem, especially during the Umayyad period.

The Hebrew Bible is the cornerstone of Judaism and Jewish culture; as such, it also provides the foundation for the other two monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam. It is a book that embodied numerous revolutions, the most prominent of which was the Monotheistic Revolution, the replacement of polytheism with the belief in one all-powerful God who both created the world and governs it. Among the other revolutionary ideas that are put forward by the Bible we find the establishment of the Sabbath, the granting of one city — Jerusalem — a monopoly over holiness, the opposition to human kingship, and the moral dimensions of prophecy, to name just a few. Over the centuries and millennia, these revolutionary ideas have continued to attract and inspire readers, believers, interpreters and artists.

The Quran is the holy scripture of a religion that has changed the world. It contains the speech of God unto Muhammad the prophet, and through him unto his entire generation -- Idolatrous Arabs, Jews and Christians. This book delineates the major issues which are discovered as one reads through the Quran: How God was revealed to the prophet; in what manner he speaks to him; how he guides the prophet to enlarge the community of believers and face his opponents; how he defines the community of believers; what are the moral and ethical codes which he lays down for them; what is the image of God; what is the religion of Islam which God calls the people to follow; what are the practical ways for expressing the belief in the unity of God; the Abrahamic faith to which one must adhere so as to become a true Muslim. The present book also reviews God's polemics with Jews, Christians and idolaters; the status of the scriptures of the Jews and the Christians; the conditions of war and peace with the unbelievers at large; the descriptions of the resurrection and the day of judgment, as well the colorful descriptions of paradise and hell.

This issue contains the following essays: Assaf and Ishay Rosen-Zvi | Tannaitic Halakhic and Aggadic Methodology Yakir Paz | ‘Binding Crowns to the Letters’ – A Divine Scribal Practice in Its Historical Context Avishai Bar-Asher | Illusion versus Reality in the Study of Early Kabbalah: The Commentary on Sefer Yeṣirah Attributed to Isaac the Blind and Its History in Kabbalah and Scholarship Ariel Zinder | The Siluq in Hebrew Liturgical Poetry from Al-Andalus: New Discoveries Gideon Freudenthal | Maimon the Kabbalist Boris Kleiner | Gradation of the Disjunctive Accents in the Bible Recitation of Jews of Yemen and in Other Jewish Traditions: On the Prosodic Hierarchy in the Recitation Books Received English Abstracts

The book is concerned with the main trends in Jewish Liturgy during Late Antiquity and its connections and inter relations with Aramaic Targum, Midrash, mysticism, popular beliefs, structure and rhyme patterns as performed amid Late Antique Synagogues in Palestine, as well as the later spread of these fertile products to Southern Italy and then to the rest of Europe. The book discusses the different layers of poets and performers as presented in ancient manuscripts which were preserved in the Cairo Geniza collections and later in European Mahzorim, and the fascinating struggle of survival of the different liturgical cycles.

This volume from the series of Mikra Leyisrael contains the commentary of the books Ezra and Nehemia , which provide important information on the return from Babylonia and Persia to Judea after Cyrus' decree and the rebuilt of Jerusalem.

Rashi w as the first Biblical Commentator in Northern France/Ashkenaz to compose a comprehensive commentary to the Book of Proverbs , and this commentary has survived in 55 manuscripts scattered in libraries throughout the world. For the first time we present a critical edition of this commentary to Proverbs. This critical edition is based on MS New York JTS Lutzki 778 . Variant readings from six other accurate manuscripts, the two earliest printed editions, and three later printed editions appear in the apparatus of variants . The edition also contains a “super-commentary” in which difficult words & sections in need of clarification are explained. The editor searched for Rashi’s sources - both those explicitly stated and those not . Preceding the critical edition is an introduction which analyzes important topics such as: interpolations to the commentary , Rashi’s exegetical approach, language & syntax and the Jewish-Christian debate.

A qedushta is a series of piyyutim for the ‘Amida prayer, which is expanded in honor of the recitation of the Qedusha, and includes many complex components. Its origins are in the Land of Israel, in the fourth or fifth century. We first see it as a constructed composition with set, complex, rules in the work of the poet Yannai, who lived in the mid-sixth century, the teacher of Rabbi El‛azar berabbi Qillir (who is known popularly as “the Qallir”). The qedushta, as it appears in the hundreds of compositions by Yannai and his followers, conceals many secrets: mysterious strings of biblical verses accompany its first components; a fixed biblical verse concludes the third component, followed by the strange words “El Na”; then comes a fourth component, whose structure is free, and always concludes, for some reason, with the word “Qadosh”; the fifth component in Yannai’s compositions is the ‘asiriya, a poem constructed of a truncated alphabetical acrostic from only aleph to yud, followed by a prayer beginning “El Na Le‘olam Tu‘aratz” – and it is unclear why this prayer appears here; then there is a group of poems called rahitim, which are written, for some reason, in unique, stereotypical structures. These are only a fraction of the various strange features of the qedushta’ot of Yannai and the other poets. The discussions in the book are dedicated to suggesting solutions to all these questions, and to others, and involve uncovering fragments of qedushta’ot that preceded Yannai; by examining these texts, they excavate the literary remains to construct a model of the gradual development of the qedushta over time, from its origins until it reached its complex structure in the days of Yannai and Rabbi El‛azar berabbi Qillir. The book is intended first and foremost for scholars, but it will also enable people interested in piyyut and its history from outside the world of academia to gain exposure to a great corpus of early piyyutim, among which are several stunningly beautiful gems, which are being published here for the first time.

The purpose of this volume, like its predecessor, is to uncover fragments of important Hebrew works hidden in the “European Genizah”. Thousands of pages of Hebrew manuscripts have been discovered in this “Genizah”, which is scattered in hundreds of libraries and archives throughout Europe and even beyond. In the late medieval and early modern eras, these pages were used to bind books and as folders of archival documents. The nine works published herein are from a variety of genres: Biblical exegesis, Talmud commentary, halakhic literature, and liturgical interpretation. They appear in this volume in chronological order, from earliest to latest. The most significant of the works is also the work whose discovery required more effort than all of the others; it appears in the first chapter of the book. This work was written in ninth or tenth-century Palestine. It reveals valuable information on the history of halakhah in Palestine of that era, and also teaches a great deal about how Palestinian Traditions made their way to the European continent.