Blood for Thought - by Mira Balberg (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Blood for Thought delves into a relatively unexplored area of rabbinic literature: the vast corpus of laws, regulations, and instructions pertaining to sacrificial rituals. Mira Balberg traces and analyzes the ways in which the early rabbis interpreted and conceived of biblical sacrifices, reinventing them as a site through which to negotiate intellectual, cultural, and religious trends and practices in their surrounding world. Rather than viewing the rabbinic project as an attempt to generate a nonsacrificial version of Judaism, she argues that the rabbis developed a new sacrificial Jewish tradition altogether, consisting of not merely substitutes to sacrifice but elaborate practical manuals that redefined the processes themselves, radically transforming the meanings of sacrifice, its efficacy, and its value.

From the Back Cover

"Blood for Thought offers a groundbreaking way of thinking about the early rabbinic laws of sacrifice as a significant and substantive expression of rabbinic ideology. It promises to become the new touchstone for not only how scholars think about these laws but how they contextualize the rabbis within the larger worlds of antiquity and how they view the Temple and its operations within the schemes of Jewish history."--Beth A. Berkowitz, Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Jewish Studies at Barnard College.

"An ambitious work that offers for the first time a description of rabbinic discourse on sacrifice and posits the idea of sacrifice at the heart of that worldview. This worthy study presents new questions and fresh insights, as it sets the highly detailed rabbinic ritual discussions within their Greco-Roman cultural and political framework."--Yair Furstenberg, Senior Lecturer of Talmud at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Review Quotes

"Blood for Thought is a fresh, powerful, and convincing argument for the distinctive role of Judaism in the history of religions, as well as the relationship between speech and action, human and animal, and the broader human meanings of sacrifice."-- "H-Net Reviews"

"Overall, this monograph is enjoyable and instructive. One is invited to explore related themes that, perhaps surprisingly, are never explicitly mentioned in this book and yet are clearly relevant to its argument, including the Foucauldian notion of power as 'discourse', the question of the struggle for cultural hegemony with Christianity, the effort to justify a religious life without a sacrificial system, and, finally, the emerging cultural rivalry between the Roman imperial religion and the rabbis' 'utopia'. . . . impeccable." -- "Journal of Jewish Studies"

About the Author

Mira Balberg is Professor of History and David Goodblatt Endowed Chair in Ancient Jewish Civilization at the University of California, San Diego. Her most recent book is Fractured Tablets: Forgetfulness and Fallibility in Late Ancient Rabbinic Culture.