Jacob Neusner

Judaism's Story of Creation: Scripture, Halakhah, Aggadah (Brill Reference Library of Judaism) Jacob Neusner

The Rabbinic sages of the formative age of Judaism, the first seven centuries C. E., thought deeply about beginnings in light of endings. They imposed upon their sequential reading of each passage the accumulated results of their reflection about all passages. The sages discerned out of detail what they deemed to form Scripture's main lines of structure and order. They encompassed Scripture, so as to describe the world as God had intended it to be. So their statement of matters conveyed Israel's beginning, middle, and the end in a single tableau. This act of intellect consisted in uniting into a single continuous statement resting on Scripture's historical narrative the documentary results of two distinct, ahistorical media of thought and expression, the two massive bodies of information, Halakhah, law, and Aggadah, lore. The Halakhah concerned itself with action and alw, analyzing rules to show their harmony. The Aggadah occupied itself with attitude, synthesizing values to show their ubiquity. The author provides three systematic accounts of the Halakhic reading of the Creation-story, and two Aggadic accounts of the same matter. The Halakhic accounts cover: work and rest; ownership and possession, Eden and the land; and ownership and possession in the household. The Aggadic accounts pertain to the six days of the Creation and Adam and Eve.