Prof. Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg of the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies will discuss her forthcoming book The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible, to be published this April by Princeton University Press.  In this book Wollenberg argues that, contrary to the conventional view of Judaism as a movement built around the study of the Bible and steeped in a culture of sacred bookishness that evolved from an unrelenting focus on a canonical text, a close examination of Rabbinic texts reveals that Jewish tradition didn’t truly embrace the biblical text until nearly a thousand years after the Bible was first canonized, and instead embraced a form of biblical revelation in which memorized spoken formulas of the biblical tradition came to be envisioned as a distinct version of the biblical revelation.

Followed by a Q&A with the audience. Zoom link here. Please register here.  Open to the public. Registration requested but not required.