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[German Version] Most books of the Old Testament were originally transmitted in several recensions. In the centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple, a specific text family with a limited number of internal variant readings came to be accepted as the normative majority text in the Jewish communities of Palestine and Mesopotamia. In the 7th century, scholars of both ¶ regions, the so-called Masoretes, began to vocalize, accent, and divide into verses and sections the proto-Masoretic text, which had until then been transmitted only in consonantal…

[German Version] is understood in talmudic and post-talmudic exposition of the law of Judaism to mean the astute analysis of halakhah texts, that investigates and attempts to solve contradictions and obscurities in ongoing discussion. In order to solve the difficulties, the scholar employs his own innovative understanding, rather than referring back to possible solutions handed down in the tradition. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the term acquires a negative connotation in German and Polish Juda…

[German Version] (acronym MaHaRam; c. 1220, Worms – 1293, Fortress of Ensisheim, Alsace). Probably the most important law scholar in German Judaism in the 13th century, he studied in Würzburg and northern France and spent the greater part of his life in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. When endeavoring to emigrate to the Holy Land in 1286, he was arrested in northern Italy and held prisoner by King Rudolf of Habsburg until his death in 1293. His numerous legal documents (Responsa) convey a detailed pictu…

[German Version] As a result of the Arab conquest of extensive areas of the Mediterranean in the 7th and 8th centuries, the Jewish communities in these areas gave up their ancestral languages (Aram., Gk, Romanic); by the end of the 8th century at the latest, they were using Arabic as their written and spoken language. Judeo-Arabic represents a mixture of normative Standard Arabic and local dialects; it was written in Hebrew characters. The larger consonant stock of Ara-¶ bic meant that one Hebrew character often had to represent two Arabic equivalents. Hebrew kaf, for example, was used…

[German Version] (Ibn Nagrela; 2nd quarter to sometime after the mid-11th cent.), Jewish vizier and military commander for the Berber kings of Granada. He wrote drinking songs, love poetry, and war poetry in Hebrew. The war poems reflect his military experiences in the battles of the minor Muslim kings in the Arab part of Spain. He also wrote a work on Talmudic and non-Talmudic law, a grammar of Hebrew, and a criticism of the Qurʾān. In his Arab environment he nevertheless championed a politically…

[German Version] Notariqon is understood in Judaism until the end of the talmudic period as a common ¶ method of Scripture interpretation by which the letters of individual words in the Bible text indicate the first letters of independent words. For example, the consonants of the word nimreṣet (1Kgs 2:8) produce the words noʾef (adulterer), moʾābı (Moabite), roṣeaḥ (murderer), ṣorer (threatener) and tôʿbāh (horror). The starting word indicates, according to a talmudic interpretation, the insults which Shimei had poured on King David. Hans-Georg v. Mutius Bibliography G. Stemberge…

[German Version] (Solomon ben Isaac [Rashi is an acronym]; 1040, Troyes – 1105, Troyes), probably the most important exegete of the Bible and commentator on the Talmud in the 11th century; he studied in the 1060s in the Talmud academies in Mainz and Worms. After returning to Troyes, he opened a teaching institution for study of the Bible and Talmud, and directed it until his death in 1105. Rashi’s biblical commentaries are marked by a tendency to limit traditional rabbinic Midrash exposition – not by any means discarding it, but paying particular attention to the sensus litteralis of the v…

[German Version] At the close of the early Middle Ages, after the Babylonian Talmud had become the normative law code of the Jewish Diaspora communities, in everyday jurisprudence the Jewish courts often faced problems in applying the legal norms of the Talmud, especially because new questions kept arising for which the Talmud had no (clear) answers. In such cases, the court would often write to a prestigious outside authority, describe the case to him, and ask him to deliver an opinion, which he …

[German Version] (1035–1100) wrote a comprehensive lexicon of the Hebrew-Aramaic vocabulary employed by the two Talmuds and by midrashic literature (Midrash), in the last third of the 11th century. In his detailed analyses of words, he frequently also delves into the real nature of things and draws, among other sources, on the exegesis of the talmudic academies of Babylonia, North Africa, and the Rhineland. His excerpts from the Midrash sometimes contain unique variant readings, or quote from works that are otherwise entirely lost. His lexicon was already widely read in the ¶ Middle Ag…

[German Version] I. Old Testament – II. New Testament – III. Church History – IV. Dogmatics – V. Liturgy – VI. Practical Theology – VII. Law and Legal History – VIII. Judaism I. Old Testament The search, mainly from a Protestant perspective, for antecedents of ordination in the Old Testament does not seem very promising, since no direct equivalent to Christian ordination as public commissioning of office-bearers by the community is to be found in the Hebrew Bible. Relevant research is mainly limited to the OT Jewish background of…