Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism

Towards Judaism

As China is the only country in the Far East world in which Jews have continually lived for over 1,000 years, "Chinese Judaism" -referring to the religious belief and practices of those Jews who had lived or are now living in China -is unique. Within this long history, a significant distinction must be made. Jews who came before modern times, before 1840, became part of Chinese society almost w...

Resurrection of the Body in Early Judaism and Early Christianity: Doctrine, Community, and Self-Definition

In the first chapter, the author studies the concept of resurrection among Sadducees and Pharisees, using material from Josephus, the Gospels, Acts, and the Rabbinic literature to examine how each conceives the idea of resurrection and the symbolic boundaries through which its builds an identity. The second chapter analyzes the idea of resurrection among the first followers of Jesus including i...

Judaism on medicine.

Many religions, I'm tempted to say all religions except Judaism, are death cults. Religions deal typically with the problems of death and are attempts to bypass death, deny death, or distort death. The most obvious example would be the Eygptian religion, since, as we now know, the cult, the pyramids, the priest-craft, and the sacred texts were all designed to assure at least the Pharaoh of immo...

Behavioral and Phenomenological Judaism

Judaism and reproductive technology.

Reproductive technology offers a bewildering number of options for infertile men and women to have children, including ovary and testis freezing, transplantation, in vitro fertilization (IVF), donor sperm, donor eggs, stem cells, gestational surrogacy, genetic diagnosis of embryos, and, of course, birth control. These technologies cut to the very core of personal and religious belief systems. T...