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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
The canonical books of Judaism, to which we turn for the definition of theological categories and doctrines, rarely set forth ideas in the form of abstractions and generalizations, with the result that understanding any generative theological categories requires the philological exegesis of texts. In the case of the Judaic canon, the pertinent texts are those of the Torah, written and oral. When we turn to the written Torah, which the West knows as the Old Testament, and to the Oral Torah, which Judaism assembles out of the Mishnah, the two Talmuds, the Midrash-compilations of the formative age, our work only begins. For we have also to determine for ourselves what words, in the canonical writings, stand for, or refer us to, the counterpart category that our Christian and Greek philosophical heritage has conferred upon us. When, as we shall see, we ask ourselves about how the classical theology of Judaism conceives of ‘eternity’, we therefore engage in a prior inquiry into what we mean by ‘eternity’ and how in the Judaic canon's substrate of theology we may locate the counterpart-language for that meaning. Not only so, but we have further to find out in what context thought takes place on the category, ‘eternity’: when and why is discourse on eternity precipitated in the canonical theology of Judaism? And when not?
page 36 note 1 Gentiles considered as individuals, not part of political entities, do not come under consideration. The sins or crimes that deny a person the world to come all pertain to beliefs or actions of Israelites (as M. 10: 1D1, 2, and E make dear). The ethnic venue of ‘Epicurean’ is not so self-evident as the others; I take it the sense is that it is an Israelite who maintains Epicurean beliefs or attitudes. The context surely requires that view.
page 37 note 2 Once more it seems to me that Israelites are treated as persons whose individual actions bear consequence, while gentiles are not.
page 40 note 3 The remainder of the passage is given in The Social Study of Judaism, Chapter Eight.
page 41 note 4 In his Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, Erwin R. Goodenough underlined the passion for eternal life contained within the symbols used by Jewish artists for synagogues and cemeteries. Here in the depths of the Mishnah, in its politics for Israel, I find the same source of passion, in a context never considered by Goodenough, since these literary evidences fell (quite properly) outside of his range of analysis. That the results converge is suggestive.