Introduction to Rabbinic Literature

Rating:
Summary: Useful, but lacking basic nuts and bolts information
Review: a useful guide to the major rabbinic works of the first millenium. If you have ever wanted to know the difference between the Mishnah and the Mekhilta, or what the major types of Midrashic books were, this book is at least worth skimming. The book's discussion of these works' literary style was a bit over my head, but the excerpts gave me more of a feel for midrashic reasoning.

Rating:
Summary: more than a bit dry, but . . .
Review: a useful guide to the major rabbinic works of the first millenium. If you have ever wanted to know the difference between the Mishnah and the Mekhilta, or what the major types of Midrashic books were, this book is at least worth skimming. The book's discussion of these works' literary style was a bit over my head, but the excerpts gave me more of a feel for midrashic reasoning.

Rating:
Summary: Useful, but lacking basic nuts and bolts information
Review: Having bought or borrowed several other books by Neusner I sort of knew what to expect and have found the survey of Rabbinical Literature useful - certainly in terms of literary form.

However one major ommission that really should have been included in an "Introduction" is basic contextual information such as dates of composition and addition, transmission, current extant texts and so on. In other words the sort of text-by-text information you would find before each section in a good introduction to Dead Sea Scrolls or Pseudepigrapha. This is less relevant perhaps to Rabbinical Literature where transmission is part of the tradition, but that doesn't change the fact that, as with any ancient, or even medieval, text there are still variant text sources for many of the documents described and an estimate of place and time of composition and transmission is useful. Having looked at various chapters I'm still not a great deal wiser "did this document come out of Sephardic North Africa 500CE or Ashkenazi Silesia a thousand years later?", "does it exist in one editio princeps or 100 local variants?" etc. And it would have (presumably) been so easy to address these questions at the start of each chapter.

But again, if you're mainly interested in literary form, then go for it. Neusner is excellent in these areas.