The “Holy Spirit” is a familiar concept in Christianity, but in its original Hebrew construction as Ruah ha-Kodesh, it also plays an active role in classical Rabbinic literature. This dissertation surveys uses of the term Ruah ha-Kodesh in major texts from the Tannaitic period through the Aggadic Midrash and the two Talmuds. Drawing on Scriptural roots, the Rabbis identify Ruah ha-Kodesh as the divinely given power that enables individuals to prophesy. While the term never loses this biblical meaning, the Rabbis take Ruah ha-Kodesh further by personifying it as a metonym for God, and more specifically, as “the divine voice in Scripture.” This dissertation first surveys the historical background of the term in pre-Rabbinic ancient Judaism, and then turns to a detailed textual analysis of its uses as both prophecy and personification in Rabbinic literature. The study notes and examines conventional and formulaic terms associated with Ruah ha-Kodesh. Four major Ruah ha-Kodesh traditions are analyzed in depth over the course of their diachronic development. There are numerous Rabbinic sources that claim that Ruah ha-Kodesh has ended, yet others offer advice on how to achieve it or indicate its existence in the Rabbinic present. The solution to this paradox is that Ruah ha-Kodesh has not gone, but changed. Even as Ruah ha-Kodesh is said to have departed from Israel in her role of inspiring the prophets, she continues to speak actively as part of the ongoing Midrashic dialogue with the Sages. The final chapter examines Ruah ha-Kodesh as a metonym for God, particularly as it contrasts and interacts with other divine metonyms of feminine grammatical gender: the Shekhinah and the Bat Kol. The Shekhinah and Ruah ha-Kodesh are frequently identified, but not identical. The changing role of Ruah ha-Kodesh exemplifies a shift in the locus of divine communication, from prophecy to the Midrashic study of Torah. / text

Thesis advisor: Ruth Langer / One of the enduring legacies supersessionism has imparted to Christianity in general, and evangelical Christianity in particular, is a complicated relationship with the legal material of the Hebrew Bible. There is a common belief that since Christians follow the New Covenant, these laws are deemed null or fulfilled by Christ, and therefore do not require attention, or at least not the same level one would grant other biblical texts. The issue with this belief is that the legal material is part of the Christian canon, and therefore—doctrinally speaking—deserves serious attention. In seeking a robust and enduring reason to engage the legal material, I propose that evangelicals adopt a rabbinic concept that interrogates and develops one’s disposition toward Torah. This rabbinic concept is תורה לשמה (Torah lishmah), or “Torah for its own sake.” In this rabbinic understanding, when one studies Torah, one should study it lishmah, “for its own sake”—and no other. I argue that Torah lishmah for a Christian can mean to study Torah—especially the legal material—not simply because it might be personally or communally beneficial, but because it is divine teaching, because it is given to be studied and known intimately in all its detail, in both its theological and embodied aspects, because studying it is an act of lovingkindness toward God, a giving of oneself out of love and loyalty. How do evangelicals learn how to adopt Torah lishmah? I suggest that we have the rabbis to guide us: a vast array of texts from late antiquity onward, documenting the attempts of numerous rabbis to engage Torah lishmah. I propose that we read these texts alongside our own biblical commentaries, so that we might learn what Torah lishmah is and how it might positively affect our approach to the legal material. To begin this process and to help illustrate my proposal, I start at Mount Sinai and the giving of the Ten Words—that is, the Decalogue, as it appears in Exod 20:2-17. The rabbinic midrashic commentary I use to engage the Decalogue is known as the Mekhilta d’Rabbi Ishmael, a tannaitic halakhic commentary on the Book of Exodus. To help contextualize and ground my explication, I compare the Mekhilta’s interpretations with those of Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), one of the most influential theologians and exegetes among the Church Fathers, and certainly one of the most important progenitors of evangelical Christianity. Together, the Mekhilta and Augustine’s interpretations are then brought into conversation with contemporary evangelical commentaries on the Decalogue. I compare especially each genre’s presuppositions, contexts, interests, insights, and methods. Through these comparisons, I underscore key insights Christians might learn from the rabbinic interpretations. Most importantly, through these comparisons, I determine the meaning and significance of Torah lishmah for an evangelical. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Jesus was a healer, but what may not be as obvious is that he started a legacy of healing. He passed on his skills and abilities to his followers at least three times. Though not as frequently, they continued to heal through the Book of Acts. The legacy continued in the Apocryphal Acts and other apocryphal materials spanning the early centuries of the common era. Secondary literature looks at modern scholarship and leans heavily into Rabbinic literature. Up to this point, other English-language works in healing have sorely lacked luster in providing. The exploration of the healing legacy of Jesus shifted to meet the skills and needs of the healers, patients, and communities involved. Further, the healings had a substantive resultant impact on various levels of socioeconomics for the parties, which is explored by reexamining each group type of healings, from lameness and paralytics to possession and resurrection, and more. The hope is that taking a holistic approach to these healings as possible will allow readers a new way of experiencing the early common era and these events that permeated everyone's lives at one time or another.

Hermeneutic rules (so-called middot), which developed during the process of the rabbinic literature formation, partially under sopherims' or Greek influence, provided with one of the main viewpoints of hypotext choice in poetry, ruled a combination and an arrangement of elements in poetry. These principles, differenciated during the 2nd century A.D. into two systems - r. Yishma'el's and r. Eli'eser b. Josi ha-gelili's lists (for halakhic and aggadic interpretation) underwent a process of contraction in piyyut. From the recent point of view is the rabbinic hypotext identification possible at most half, since partially poets advanced on the basis of the midrashic texts available, different from extant textual versions. On the basis of original textual variants connected with the identification of the hypotext, this thesis arrived at a comparative work on the development and the understanding of implicite and explicite application of hermeneutic rules. The synagogal poetry assumed a didactical function and historical remembrance function following pre-classical period. As a result of poetic activity the originated the didactical text, which instructed, assisted at the preservation of lessons and topoi taught in yeshibot (Ashkenaz), scholarly circles (Rome, Apulia, Calabria) and later on in synagogues.

La thèse a pour objet d’étudier le phénomène de création festive qui traverse les communautés juives de l’Antiquité à partir du VIe siècle av. J.-C. Ces fêtes nouvelles, de par leur typologie, leur théologie, leurs rites et leurs fonctions, s’écartent du modèle biblique tout en le revendiquant. Leur multiplication à l’époque hellénistique, sensible à travers leur mention dans la littérature juive hellénisée, témoigne d’évolutions qui, même si elles peuvent procéder d’une dynamique interne au judaïsme, témoignent d’interactions avec les communautés religieuses du monde grec puis romain. D’essence essentiellement locale, elles constituent un critère de définition identitaire et sont instrumentalisées pour servir des intérêts variés, notamment en termes de légitimation de l’autorité. Leur caractère récent leur confère une souplesse qui permet une actualisation constante de leur signification au gré des conjonctures, que ce soit à l’échelle locale ou au sein de courants transversaux comme le judaïsme rabbinique. Elles fonctionnent donc comme un révélateur du degré d’intégration ou d’exclusion des communautés juives dans leur environnement politique, social, culturel et religieux. / This dissertation aims at studying festive creativity within ancient Jewish communities from the VIth century B.C. onwards. From a typological, a theological, a liturgical and a functional viewpoint, these new festivals divert from Biblical tradition even though they claim not to. Their increase during the Hellenistic period, a phenomenon made clear in Jewish Literature written in Greek, attest to an evolution which, even though it could, in some cases, proceed from an inherently Jewish dynamic, fall within the category of cultural and religious interactions with other religious communities from the Greek and Roman world. Of an essentially local provenance, they are instrumental to a community’ self-definition and are often used to legitimate their founder or their organizer’s authority. Since they only appeared recently, their meaning can be updated to reflect various situations, either regarding a specific place and time or within such movements as Rabbinic Judaism. New festivals bring light to the place of a Jewish community within its milieu, be it political, social, cultural or religious.

Cette thèse examine la particularité de la démarche qui consiste à traduire le Nouveau Testament en hébreu et qui implique de transférer le texte fondateur du christianisme dans un contexte juif. Elle se concentre sur la façon dont le traducteur utilise la Bible hébraïque et la littérature rabbinique ancienne pour accomplir ce transfère. Il est montré que grâce aux liens historiques, théologiques et conceptuels étroits entre le Nouveau Testament et ces deux corpus juifs, l’emploi d’éléments repris d’eux pour rendre des éléments du Nouveau Testament est particulièrement efficace pour augmenter la compréhensibilité du Nouveau Testament en hébreu et son acceptabilité dans un contexte juif. Cependant, l’usage de tels éléments dans la traduction du Nouveau Testament en hébreu risque souvent de gommer les spécificités du Nouveau Testament par rapport au judaïsme. Le travail du traducteur du Nouveau Testament en hébreu implique donc une constante hésitation quant à la pertinence des formes d’expressions hébraïques et des concepts juifs pour refléter les formes d’expression et les concepts du Nouveau Testament, et, plus généralement, quant aux affinités et aux contrastes entre le christianisme et le judaïsme. / This dissertation examines the specificity of translating the New Testament into Hebrew, an activity which involves transferring the founding text of Christianity into a Jewish context. The dissertation focuses on the use of the Hebrew Bible and of ancient rabbinic literature in bringing about this transfer. It is shown that because of the close historical, theological and conceptual links between the New Testament and these two Jewish corpora, the use of elements borrowed from them in rendering elements found in the New Testament is particularly effective for enabling the New Testament to be easily understood in Hebrew and to be accepted in a Jewish context. However, the use of such elements in a Hebrew translation of the New Testament may often result in blurring features of the New Testament that are distinguished from Judaism. For this reason, the translator of the New Testament into Hebrew constantly hesitates whether Hebrew forms of expression and Jewish concepts are suitable for reflecting the New Testament’s forms of expression and concepts, and asks himself, more generally, what exactly unites and distinguishes Christianity and Judaism.

of the dissertation Lenka Uličná This study aims to present and interpret the Old Czech (so-called Canaanic) glosses preserved in medieval Hebrew rabbinic writings Arugath ha-bosem by Abraham ben Azriel, Or zarua by Isaac ben Moses and in the commentary to the Mahzor Nuremberg. So far, linguistic analyses of this language material have been based on the editions. The present work analyzes manuscript versions of the glosses and significantly refines the research. We consider the so-called Canaanic glosses primarily as a sociolinguistic subject and this attitude influenced the selection of methods used in this study. Due to the character of the language material, we had to combine the sociolinguistic methods with methods of contrastive linguistics, paleographic methods and analytical methods of diachronic linguistics. The results of this analysis are presented in dictionary entries and they provide a basis for the following characterization of the so-called Canaanic language and its position towards the so-called Jewish languages on the one hand and towards the Czech language of the Christian majority, on the other. The gloss is i.a. a manifestation of bilingualism of the productor of the text. Being aware of the insufficiency of one language he tries to secure the understanding of a certain term in...

Grâce à sa vaste production littéraire, le judaïsme rabbinique, d’abord minoritaire, est devenu l’orthodoxie juive à la fin de l’antiquité. Les écrits rabbiniques ne cherchent pas à faire rire, mais nous avons constaté que les études académiques sur l’humour des rabbins de l’antiquité contribuent de manière significative à la compréhension des textes rabbiniques. Ces études ainsi que les théories modernes sur l’humour, les outils d’analyse littéraire et notre propre développement méthodologique, nous ont permis d’analyser les récits humoristiques dans les écrits tannaïtiques. Les résultats des travaux sur l’humour dans le Talmud Yerushalmi, le Talmud Babli et le midrash aggada, trouvent un écho dans les résultats de notre étude. Nous avons découvert dans la Mishna et la Tosefta une très grande variété de formes et de fonctions de l’humour. L’étude exhaustive des récits humoristiques dans ces deux corpus nous a permis de développer des nouvelles perspectives sur ces textes et leurs protagonistes, notamment concernant les polémiques internes et externes au mouvement rabbinique, les traits de caractère de certains sages et leur manière d’étudier, l’évolution de l’humour entre la Mishna, la Tosefta et les Talmudim. La grande majorité des récits que l’on trouve dans la Mishna et la Tosefta n’est pas humoristique, mais cette proportion est inversée dans certaines thématiques : dans les polémiques internes au mouvement tannaïtique nous avons noté un équilibre entre les textes humoristiques et sérieux, et de surcroît, dans les polémiques avec des groupes extérieurs au mouvement tannaïtique, les textes humoristiques sont majoritaires. L’humour des tanna’im s’avère être complexe et varié, il permet de faire remonter les origines de l’humour juif à l’époque tannaïtique, d’expliquer certains textes énigmatiques, et de mieux connaître la pensée des tanna’im. / Thanks to their extensive literature, the rabbinic movement which was a marginal minority during the early centuries CE became, by late antiquity, the Jewish mainstream, and the rabbinic practice of Judaism became Jewish orthodoxy. Rabbinic writings do not aim to make one laugh, but we have noticed that academic research into the ancient rabbis’ humor contribute significantly to the understanding of rabbinic writings.Our tools for analyzing the humor in tannitic texts are based on previous studies, modern theories about humor, literary analysis techniques and our own personally developed methodology. The research results about humor in the Talmud Yerushalmi, the Talmud Babli and in Midrash Aggada are echoed in the results of our work.We have found in the Mishna and the Tosefta humor in various forms and functions. A comprehensive study of humorous anecdotes in these two textual corpora lends a new perspective about the rabbis and their writings: it also sheds light on the rabbis’ personalities and the house of study atmosphere, struggles within the rabbinic movement as well as with outside opponents, and the evolution of humor between the Mishna, the Tosefta and the Talmudim. The large majority of the stories found in the Mishna and the Tosefta are not humorous, but this proportion is reversed in certain themes: in polemics within the tannaitic movement we find an equal number of humorous and serious texts, and in polemics with opponents to the tannaitic movement, humorous texts are predominant. The tannaitic humor is complex and diversified, it traces the origins of modern Jewish humor not only to the Talmud but back to the tannaitic period, it helps explain some enigmatic texts, and to better know the tannaitic ideology.

ギリシア語訳旧約聖書である七十人訳の擁護者たちに対し、ヒエロニュムス（347–420）はヘブライ語原典の優越性、すなわち「ヘブライ的真理」を主張した。しかし、その聖書翻訳論と旧約引用理解とを考慮すると、ヒエロニュムスが「ヘブライ的真理」と言うとき、彼はヘブライ語テクストと七十人訳との文献学的な問題に留まらず、これら二者と新約聖書における旧約引用との神学的な問題をも解決しようとしていたと言える。 / Against many defenders of the Septuagint, namely, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, Jerome (347–420) claims the superiority of the original Hebrew text. Jerome names this idea Hebraica veritas, or "Hebrew Truth." Considering his theory of biblical translation and his understanding of Old Testament quotations in the New Testament, this study concludes that Jerome's real purpose concerning Hebraica veritas is to solve not only the philological problem between the Hebrew text and the Septuagint, but also the theological problem between these two texts and the Old Testament quotations. / 博士(神学) / Doctor of Theology / 同志社大学 / Doshisha University