The academic study of Judaism requires a systematic inquiry into the history, literature, and religion—and eventually the theology—as revealed in the historical documents themselves. Under this premise, Three Questions of Formative Judaism encounters the canonical writings of Judaism in the context of their creation at a certain time and place. How something is said thus becomes as important as what is said. Bringing nearly fifty years of research to bear on these fundamental questions, Jacob Neusner challenges his readers to face the difficult, often unasked or neglected questions about the nature, background, and purposes of Rabbinic Judaism and rewards them with an enriched understanding and a stronger foundation for tackling the even more elusive questions concerning the theology of formative Judaism. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

Each Rabbinic document, from the Mishnah through the Bavli, defines itself by a unique combination of indicative traits of rhetoric, topic, and particular logic that governs its coherent discourse. But narratives in the same canonical compilations do not conform to the documentary indicators that govern in these compilations, respectively. They form an anomaly for the documentary reading of the Rabbinic canon of the formative age. To remove that anomaly, this project classifies the types and forms of narratives and shows that particular documents exhibit distinctive preferences among those types. This detailed, systematic classification of Rabbinic narrative supplies these facts concerning the classification of narratives and their regularities: [1] what are the types and forms of narrative in a given document? [2] how are these distinctive types and forms of narrative distributed across the canonical documents of the formative age, the first six centuries C.E.? The answers for the documentary preferences are in Volumes One through Three, for the Mishnah-Tosefta, the Tannaite Midrash-compilations, and Rabbah-Midrash-compilations, respectively. Volume Four then sets forth the documentary history of each of the types of Rabbinic narrative, including the authentic narrative, the ma'aseh and the mashal. How the traits of the several types of narratives shift as the respective types move from document to document is spelled out in complete detail. This project opens an entirely new road toward the documentary analysis of Rabbinic narrative. It fills out an important chapter in the documentary hypothesis of the Rabbinic canon in the formative age.

The Rabbinic compilations in the canon of Rabbinic Judaism, from the Mishnah through the Bavli, ca. 200-600 C.E., are comprised by two classifications of writing, [1] documentary and [2] non-documentary. Documentary writing conforms to a protocol paramount in, and particular to, a given text, non-documentary writing ignores the distinctive preferences of the compilation in which it appears. The former is defined for each Rabbinic document, respectively, by a unique combination of choices as to form or rhetoric, topic or problem or proposition, and logic of coherent discourse and analysis (terms explained presently). The latter type of writing simply ignores the indicative documentary traits. It thereby crosses the boundaries that separate one text from another, indeed a given canonical compilation from all others. 'Texts without boundaries' refers to writing that ignores the protocols of the document(s) in which it is preserved.

This book responds to a question that came to the author from Professor Maren Niehoff of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: 'Have you written a simple introduction to your documentary theory and method, which can serve as a starting point for my students?' In this book are gathered eight of the more fundamental items of documentary theory and practice_three in theory, five in practice_for Professor Neihoff's students and anyone else who takes an interest in the formative history of Judaism. The documentary thesis of Rabbinic literature holds that the document_the Mishnah, Sifra, Lamentations, Rabbah, the Bavli, for example_forms the basic building block of the Rabbinic tradition. Excluded by that definition are sayings attributed to, and stories told about, named sages. These cannot serve in the reconstruction of the Rabbinic tradition, its literature, history, religion, and theology.

The Rabbinic compilations in the canon of Rabbinic Judaism, from the Mishnah through the Bavli, ca. 200-600 C.E., are comprised by two classifications of writing, [1] documentary and [2] non-documentary. Documentary writing conforms to a protocol paramount in, and particular to, a given text. Non-documentary writing ignores the distinctive preferences of the compilation in which it appears. The former is defined for each Rabbinic document, respectively, by a unique combination of choices as to form or rhetoric, topic or problem or proposition, and logic of coherent discourse and analysis (terms explained presently). The latter type of writing simply ignores the indicative documentary traits. It thereby crosses the boundaries that separate one text from another, indeed a given canonical compilation from all others. 'Texts without boundaries' refers to writing that ignores the protocols of the document(s) in which it is preserved.

The Rabbinic compilations in the canon of Rabbinic Judaism, from the Mishnah through the Bavli, ca. 200-600 C.E., are comprised by two classifications of writing, [1] documentary and [2] non-documentary. Documentary writing conforms to a protocol paramount in, and particular to, a given text, non-documentary writing ignores the distinctive preferences of the compilation in which it appears. The former is defined for each Rabbinic document, respectively, by a unique combination of choices as to form or rhetoric, topic or problem or proposition, and logic of coherent discourse and analysis (terms explained presently). The latter type of writing simply ignores the indicative documentary traits. It thereby crosses the boundaries that separate one text from another, indeed a given canonical compilation from all others. 'Texts without boundaries' refers to writing that ignores the protocols of the document(s) in which it is preserved.