STUDY QUESTIONS

HUMANITIES CORE COURSE

WEEK 5-1

25-26 OCTOBER 2010

In the time of King Solomon, when the people went to the Temple in Jerusalem to worship, was their religion Judaism?

The statement “Rabbinical Judaism is Judaism as founded and led by Rabbis” is a tautology. What’s a tautology? How do you turn a tautological statement into a non-tautological one? How does Prof. Miles do that in explaining the word rabbinical?

In what details does the secular historical timeline reproduced in LN 4-1differ from the same period as covered in the first two verses of Aboth?

What attitude did the Rabbis entertain toward Judaean kings of their own day such as those of Hasmonean period (152-64 BCE and King Herod the Great?

None of the sages remembered in Aboth is remembered for anything he wrote, yet the chain goes back to the “Men of the Great Synagogue”? What are they remembered for, and why does it matter?

In Rabbinic interpretation, comment on the importance or otherwise of keeping the context of a biblical statement always carefully in mind.

Considering the Genesis Rabbah on Genesis 22, how much of a clear gap or built-in puzzle do the rabbis require before they will step in and expand the received biblical text?

Subjectively, what did the Rabbinic mode of participation in a text do for the individual Jewish student of scripture? Objectively, what did it provide the Jewish leadership?

Did the Jews ever begin to consider the Talmud as scripture on a par with the Tanakh?