Never Before Available in Paperback, Louis Ginzberg's landmark seven-volume The Legends of the Jews assembles the many elaborations and embellishments of Biblical stories that flourished in the centuries following the Bible's own creation. Ginzberg devoted most of his life to gathering these legends from their original sources - written in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syrian, Aramaic, Ethiopic, Arabic, Persian, and Old Slavic - and reproducing them completely, accurately, and vividly. He presents them in their traditional Biblical sequence and reconciles the sometimes contradictory versions of the same stories found in different sources. In addition to four volumes of the legends themselves, The Legends of the Jews includes two indispensable volumes of notes, which provide the sources for every legend, as well as a comprehensive index to the people, places, and motifs found in the legends and their sources.

The contributions compiled in this volume comprise studies of Jewish texts - biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern - as well as of patristic and medieval Christian texts, and in one case, a passage of the Muslim text par excellence, the Quran. The authors, scholars in the fields of Jewish Studies, Catholic and Protestant Theology, Islamic Studies, German philology etc., invited to reflect on texts of their respective disciplines in context-sensitive interpretations, taking into account the link connecting Midrash, hermeneutics, and narrative, provide illuminating narratological and/or hermeneutical insights into the texts in question. The interdisciplinary dialogue that characterized the conference "Narratology, Hermeneutics, and Midrash" that gave rise to the volume proves to be rich and full of potential for further research in the direction proposed by the Series Poetics, Exegesis and Narrative. Studies in Jewish literature and art.