Rachel Adelman’s book The Return of the Repressed: Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Pseudepigrapha is reviewed here. This study analyzes mythic narratives, found in the 8th century midrashic text Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer (PRE), that were excluded, or ‘repressed’, from the rabbinic canon, while preserved in the Pseudepigrapha of the Second Temple period. Examples include the [...]
Haaretz recently had an article about Shoham Smith’s new book, Ha-Agadot Shelanu (“Our Legends”). Smith, who has already published a book of Greek legends for children, has now published a book of Talmudic legends for children. The article describes a number of earlier books that did just this, including one by H.N. Bialik hiimself. Smith [...]
A number of years ago I wrote about a famous story about two brothers and the place where the Temple was established. See here for the original post and here for a follow-up post. In a recent SMS responsum that was published in the Parashah Pamphlet Be-Ahavah u-ve-Emunah, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner was asked about this [...]
Mostly Kosher has a post that discusses whether the Rabbis believed their own midrashim. Did the tanaim and amoraim believe that the midrashim they created (Assuming at least some of them were created) were telling a true history, or were useful spiritual tools, but never intended to reflect reality? This question never really bothered me [...]
The most recent issue of the Journal of Textual Reasoning is devoted to The Female Ruse: Women’s Subversive Voice in Biblical and Rabbinic Texts. Here are the articles that appear in this issue: From Veils To Goatskins – The Female Ruse in Genesis Rachel Adelmann Matan, The Sadie Rennert Women’s Institute for Torah Study When [...]
Marc Bregman has written a very useful English summary of Isaac Heinemann’s classic work Darchei ha-Aggadah. (here)
The first volume of Rabbi Benny Lau’s popular work on the sages of the Rabbinic period has been translated into English. The Sages: Character, Context, and Creativity is being published by Koren.
The Tali Educational Fund has published a well made web site of visual representations of biblical stories, events, and characters. The web site has plans to expand the selection of images that it already offers.
Martin Cohen explains here how the story of the Hanukkah “miracle oil” may be a midrash on the story of Elisha and the flask of oil in 2 Kings 9.
Biblia Hebraica has started a series of posts on Genesis Rabbah with the original text, translation, and commentary. The first post is here.
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