Simcha Fishbane

In the Seat of Moses

World Religions

“Jack Lightstone writes now as the experienced teacher to a diverse audience just beginning to be exposed to the early literary legal classics of rabbinic Judaism, the Mishnah, Tosefta, legal midrash, the Jerusalem Talmud, and the Babylonian Talmud. . . . With skill and sometimes even humor, In the Seat of Moses carefully, systematically, and engagingly breaks down the barriers by building the reader’s basic knowledge and familiarity with this literature’s most pervasive, core literary and rhetorical forms. In so doing, the book opens up a world of evidence from the early rabbis to the non-expert interested in early Judaism, early Christianity, the foundations of rabbinic Judaism, Greco-Roman culture and literature, or ancient law.”

What Were the Early Rabbis?

World Religions

“This book is a very readable introduction to the core profile and expertise of the cadre of the rabbis just before and after the turn of the third century CE, a seminal era in the evolution of the group that later became the most influential institution in Jewish religious and civil life. Jack N. Lightstone skillfully places the early rabbis in their Judean, Middle-Eastern, and Greco-Roman social and cultural settings. Based on sound scholarship, the book adopts an engaging style of an experienced teacher and storyteller.”