Talk:Jewish commentaries on the Bible

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Judaism Portal Jewish commentaries on the Bible is part of WikiProject Judaism, a project to improve all articles related to Judaism. If you would like to help improve this and other articles related to the subject, consider joining the project. All interested editors are welcome. This template adds articles to Category:WikiProject Judaism articles.
Project Judaism To-do: edit purge watch Here are some tasks you can do: Requests: Jewish and Biblical Units of Measurement or some such name, to include material of Ancient Hebrew units of measurement but also Talmudic units and use in Halacha (a la the Hebrew Wikipedia article he:מידות ומשקלות תורניים) Collaboration of the week { Cleanup: Jewish mythology - needs to be rewritten to be inline with our other mythology articles. Expand: Yom Ha'atzmaut - quite short for an article of such importance Wikiversity: School of Jewish Studies. Part of the new open content university, Wikiversity. Stubs: Category:Judaism stubs, Category:Tanakh stubs, Category:Synagogue stubs Update: Portal:Judaism is WikiProject Judaism's frequently updated portal. You can help make this the best portal on Wikipedia. Look at the talk page to see how you can help. Template loop detected: Template:WikiProject Judaism
Start	This article has been rated as start-Class on the quality scale.
High	This article has been rated as high-importance on the importance scale.

[edit] Structure and Organization

Considered porting the entire article from the Jewish Encyclopedia on Bible Exegesis. The JE links to this from "Commentaries on the Bible." However, most of the articles seem to have been covered in existing articles. Porting would only confuse casual users and seriously annoy editors who have probably been through this exercise once already.

Articles, however, are scattered. This is a drawback, not only for Jewish researchers/editors, but for Christian ones as well since nearly all the serious research in the first millenia CE was done by Jewish researchers. "Commentaries on the Bible" has been ported from the Catholic Encyclopedia.

The quality is fair. It is not up to date. It may be missing much research that has gone into Jewish articles. There is no clear way to take advantage of this.

With a different Canon, Christians necessarily draw different conclusions about the commentators results, than do Jewish ones.

In my opinion, the material needs reorganizing.Student7 21:39, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Start class

Normally an article of this length would be B class, but it needs to be longer and better organized. Biblical commentaries are an important topic which should receive more attention, with full paragraphs (at least) for each of the major medieval commentators. Also, there needs to be less redunancy between this article and List of Biblical commentaries . Shalom ^Hello 03:00, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge to biblical commentaries?

This was one of my first projects way back when. I had taken it from the CE 1913 to start the article List of Biblical commentaries. Recognizing it's potential for inadequacy for it's derivation, I guess (can't really remember) I thought it would survive better as a separate article with, presumably Jewish scholars working on it, rather than non-Jewish ones. I could have been wrong. But that is why (if I remember correctly) there are two separate articles covering identical material. If what I say is true, it might be easier to apply what few changes there are here to the original article if you want to change. Alternately, keep this one separate and delete most of the material from Biblical Commentaries and "fork" the article to here with changes ported from List of Biblical commentaries. Student7 (talk) 18:44, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

One of the copies has to go. Both need cleanup and I don't see the point in doing it twice. If you want to summarize the information at List of Biblical commentaries and remove the merge notice that would be great. Jon513 (talk) 23:23, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

The two articles should have very little in common. From a Christian POV, the Mishna's main value is a commentary on the life and times of Jesus, which is the main focus of their Bible. From a Jewish POV, the Mishna is an embodiment of the oral law, and rarely quotes the Jewish Bible. CF Oral Torah Phil burnstein (talk) 03:03, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

You could be right, of course. Who am I to judge? But the article doesn't seem to reflect a Christian bias particularly (which surprised me at the time. 1913 after all). Now the article List of Biblical commentaries(Christian) which arrived at the same time probably does quote Mishna etc., what a Jewish scholar might say, is out of context. That's why the two articles were separate. Or maybe separated (can't remember now). Student7 (talk) 03:18, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

IMHO Any article using the term "Old Testament" (implying that there is a newer one) shows a Christian bias. Add to that a section on commentaries to the "Old Testament" that lists no Jews at all, its obvious that this article is needed.

I am going to try to do a full rewrite. Wish me luck. Phil burnstein (talk) 14:56, 12 February 2008 (UTC)