War and Peace in Rabbinic Judaism: A Documentary Account

This book surveys the treatment of war and peace in the canon of Rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity: to what does Judaism refer when it speaks of war and peace in the context of the Hebrew words milhamah (war) and shalom (peace)? But this study is not lexical. It is categorical. War represents a commanding, coherent category-formation, while peace covers a variety of circumstances and transactions. War is specifically a Halakhic category and Peace an Aggadic taxon. Do war and peace present us with a lexical or a categorical phenomenon? War forms a category-formation and peace is a substantive - a word bearing diffuse references. With what consequence? When we come across the word war without further data, we know the context and intent, but peace covers a mass of miscellaneous, free-standing facts and diverse implications. See more