Tanakh in the context of "Five Megillot"

Jewish eschatology is the area of Jewish theology concerned with events that will happen in the end of days and related concepts. This includes the ingathering of the exiled diaspora, the coming of the Jewish Messiah, the afterlife, and the resurrection of the dead. In Judaism, the end times are usually called the "end of days" (aḥarit ha-yamim, אחרית הימים), a phrase that appears several times in the Tanakh.

These beliefs have evolved over time, and according to some authors there is evidence of Jewish belief in a personal afterlife with reward or punishment referenced in the Torah.

Biblical law refers to the set of rules found in the Jewish Tanakh, and sometimes also Christian commentaries on these laws in the New Testament. Christianity and Judaism have different approaches to Jewish law.

A rabbi (/ˈræbaɪ/ ; Hebrew: רַבִּי, romanized: rabbī, IPA: [ʁəbːi]) is a spiritual leader or religious teacher in Judaism. A person becomes a rabbi by being ordained by another rabbi—known as semikhah—following a course of study of Jewish history and texts, including the Tanakh, Midrash, Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud, Halakha, and rabbinic commentaries thereon. The basic form of the rabbi developed between the Second Temple (167 BCE–73 CE)—being heavily influenced by the Pharisees—and Rabbinic periods (70–640 CE), when learned teachers—overlapping with the Tannaim, Amoraim, Savoraim, and early Geonim—assembled to codify Judaism's written and oral laws. The title "rabbi" was first used in the first century CE. In more recent centuries, the duties of a rabbi became increasingly influenced by the duties of the Protestant Christian minister, hence the title "pulpit rabbis." Further, in 19th-century Germany and the United States, rabbinical activities such as delivering sermons, pastoral counseling, and representing the community to the outside all increased in importance.

Within the various Jewish denominations, there are different requirements for rabbinic ordination, and differences in opinion regarding who is recognized as a rabbi. Non-Orthodox movements, including Conservative Judaism, Reform Judaism, Reconstructionist Judaism, and Jewish Renewal, have set their requirements for semikhah based on what they consider halakhic reasons (as in Conservative Judaism) and ethical reasons (as in Reform and Reconstructionist) Judaism).

Jewish philosophy (Hebrew: פילוסופיה יהודית) includes all philosophy carried out by Jews or in relation to the religion of Judaism. Until the modern Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and Jewish emancipation, Jewish philosophy was preoccupied with attempts to reconcile coherent new ideas into the tradition of Rabbinic Judaism, thus organizing emergent ideas that are not necessarily Jewish into a uniquely Jewish scholastic framework and worldview. With their admission into broader modern society, Jews with secular educations embraced or developed entirely new philosophies to meet the world's demands in which they now found themselves.

Medieval rediscovery of ancient Greek philosophy among the Geonim of 10th-century Babylonian academies brought rationalist philosophy into Biblical-Talmudic Judaism. During the Geonic period, philosophy was generally in competition with Kabbalah. Both schools would become part of classic Rabbinic literature, though the decline of scholastic rationalism coincided with historical events that drew Jews to the Kabbalistic approach. For the Ashkenazi Jews of Western Europe, emancipation and encounters with secular thought from the 18th century onwards altered how philosophy was viewed. Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe and Sephardi communities had comparatively later, more ambivalent interactions with secular cultures than those of Western Europe. In the varied responses to modernity, Jewish philosophical ideas were developed across a range of emerging religious movements. These developments could be seen as either the continuation of or breaks from the canon of Rabbinic philosophy of the Middle Ages and the other historical dialectic aspects of Jewish thought, resulting in diverse contemporary Jewish attitudes to philosophical methods.

The Masoretes (Hebrew: בַּעֲלֵי הַמָּסוֹרָה, romanized: Baʿălēy Hammāsōrā, lit. 'Masters of the Tradition') were groups of Jewish scribe-scholars who worked from around the end of the 5th through 10th centuries AD, based primarily in the Jewish centers of the Levant (e.g., Tiberias and Jerusalem) and Mesopotamia (e.g., Sura and Nehardea). Each group compiled a system of pronunciation and grammatical guides in the form of diacritical notes (niqqud) on the external form of the biblical text in an attempt to standardize the pronunciation, paragraph and verse divisions, and cantillation of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) for the worldwide Jewish community.

The ben Asher family of Masoretes was largely responsible for the preservation and production of the Masoretic Text, although there existed an alternative Masoretic text of the ben Naphtali Masoretes, which has around 875 differences from the ben Asher text. The halakhic authority Maimonides endorsed the ben Asher as superior, although the Egyptian Jewish scholar, the Saadya Gaon, had preferred the ben Naphtali system. It has been suggested that the ben Asher family and the majority of the Masoretes were Karaites. However, Geoffrey Khan believes that the ben Asher family was probably not Karaite, and Aron Dotan avers that there are "decisive proofs that M. Ben-Asher was not a Karaite."

Karaite Judaism or Karaism is a non-Rabbinical Jewish sect characterized by the recognition of the written Tanakh alone as its supreme authority in halakha (religious law) and theology. Karaites believe that all of the divine commandments which were handed down to Moses by God were recorded in the written Torah without any additional Oral Torah or explanation.

Unlike mainstream Rabbinic Judaism (aka Talmudic Judaism), which regards the Oral Torah, codified in the Talmud and subsequent works, as authoritative interpretations of the Torah, Karaite Jews do not treat the written collections of the oral tradition in the Midrash or the Talmud as binding.

The Book of Malachi (Hebrew: מַלְאָכִי, romanized: Malʾāḵī) is the last book of the Nevi'im in the Tanakh and canonically the final book of the Twelve Minor Prophets. In most Christian traditions, the prophetic books form the last section of the Old Testament, making Malachi the last book before the New Testament. The book is divided into three chapters in the Hebrew Bible and Septuagint, and four in the Latin Vulgate. The fourth chapter in the Vulgate consists of the remainder of the third chapter, starting at verse 3:19.

The author of Malachi may or may not have been identified by the title itself. While often understood as a proper name, its Hebrew meaning is simply "my messenger" (the Septuagint translates it as "his messenger"). It was not a proper name at the time of its writing. Jewish tradition states that the book was written by the Scribe Ezra.

Anno Mundi (from Latin 'in the year of the world'; Hebrew: לבריאת העולם, romanized: Livryat haOlam, lit. 'to the creation of the world'), abbreviated as AM or A.M., or Year After Creation, is a calendar era based on biblical accounts of the creation of the world and subsequent history. Two such calendar eras of notable use are:

• Since the Middle Ages, the Hebrew calendar has been based on rabbinic calculations of the year of creation from the Hebrew Masoretic Text of the Bible. This calendar is used within Jewish communities for religious purposes and is one of two official calendars in Israel. In the Hebrew calendar, the day begins at sunset. The calendar's epoch, corresponding to the calculated date of the world's creation, is equivalent to sunset on the Julian proleptic calendar date 6 October 3761 BCE. The new year begins at Rosh Hashanah, in Tishrei. Anno Mundi 5786 (meaning the 5,786th year since the creation of the world) began at sunset on September 22, 2025, according to the Gregorian calendar.
• The Creation Era of Constantinople was observed by Christian communities within the Eastern Roman Empire as part of the Byzantine Calendar and retained by Eastern Orthodoxy until 1728. Its Year One, marking the assumed date of creation, was September 1, 5509 BC, to August 31, 5508 BC. This would make the current year (AD 2025) 7534 (7533 before September 1).

While both eras reputedly begin with the creation of the world, their disparity in epoch lies in the biblical texts chosen to infer a year of creation. According to the Septuagint, the Earth seems to have been created roughly around 5500 BCE, and about 3760 BCE based on the Hebrew Masoretic text. Most of the 1,732-year difference resides in numerical discrepancies in the genealogies of the two versions of the Book of Genesis. Patriarchs from Adam to Terah, the father of Abraham, are said to be older by 100 years or more when they begat their named son in the Septuagint than they were in the Latin Vulgate, or the Hebrew Tanakh. The net difference between the two major genealogies of Genesis is 1,466 years (ignoring the "second year after the flood" ambiguity), 85% of the total difference. (See Dating creation.)

The Song of Songs (Biblical Hebrew: שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים‎, romanized: Šīr hašŠīrīm), also called the Canticle of Canticles or the Song of Solomon, is a biblical poem, one of the five megillot ("scrolls") in the Ketuvim ('writings'), the last section of the Tanakh. Unlike other books in the Hebrew Bible, it is erotic poetry; lovers express passionate desire, exchange compliments, and invite one another to enjoy. The poem narrates an intense, poetic love story between a woman and her lover through a series of sensual dialogues, dreams, metaphors, and warnings to the “daughters of Jerusalem” not to awaken love before its time.

Modern scholarship tends to hold that the lovers in the Song are unmarried, which accords with its ancient Near East context. The women of Jerusalem form a chorus to the lovers, functioning as an audience whose participation in the lovers' erotic encounters facilitates the participation of the reader.