Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel » (Reprint)

Bernard M. Levinson holds the Berman Chair of Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (1997), which won the 1999 Salo W. Baron Award for Best First Book in Literature and Thought from the American Academy for Jewish Research. He is co-editor of four volumes, most recently, The Pentateuch as Torah: New Models for Understanding Its Promulgation and Acceptance (2007) and is the author of The Right Chorale: Studies in Biblical Law and Interpretation (2008). The interdisciplinary significance of his work has been recognized with appointments to both the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.

This book examines the problem of divine transgenerational punishment and the writers who confronted it.

1. Biblical studies as the meeting point of the humanities;
2. Rethinking the relation between 'canon' and 'exegesis';
3. The problem of innovation within the formative canon;
4. The reworking of the principle of transgenerational punishment: four case studies;
5. The canon as sponsor of innovation;
6. The phenomenon of rewriting within the Hebrew Bible: a bibliographic essay on 'inner-biblical exegesis' in the history of scholarship.