The Boundaries of Divine Ontology: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Meṭaṭron in the Godhead

1994 ◽  
Vol 87 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Abrams
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Physical Characteristics ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Jewish Mysticism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
The One

One of the central aspects of Jewish theology, and Jewish mysticism in particular, is the conception of the nature of God's being and the appearance of the divine before humanity. No one view has dominated the spectrum of Jewish interpretations, since the biblical text is the only common frame for the wide variety of speculations. At issue is whether the one God depicted in the Hebrew Bible is manifest to humans directly or through the agency of a divine, semidivine, or created power. Even the nature of angelic figures in the Bible remains a matter of debate, both in its original context and through later interpretations. Does the angelic figure physically represent God's form, or is it a literary device that metaphorically describes God's presence? The same is true of divine anthropomorphism in the Bible. Do the descriptions of God's hands or feet imply that God possesses a definite shape similar to that of human bodies, or should these descriptions also be viewed metaphorically, reinforcing a similar view to that expressed about angelic figures: no physical characteristics can be attributed to anything heavenly or divine? Finally, how does this accord with the spatial manifestation of God in the tabernacle through hiskavodor glory?

The Origins of the Hebrew Bible: Some New Answers to Old Questions

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-108
Author(s):  
John van Seters
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Extended Period ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
The Other ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
The Bible ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
Stage Process ◽  
The One

AbstractIn two recent studies, one by William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book, the other by David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, these scholars present their answers to the age old question of how the Hebrew Bible came into being as a special collection of edited and canonized books. Both scholars reject the older formula of a three stage process of Law (400 BCE), Prophets (ca. 200 BCE), and Writings (First Century CE). Schniedewind, on the one hand, proposes an editorial process of collection and arrangement of traditional material within the preexilic royal court and among the royal scribes in captivity in Babylon that gave rise to an authoritative corpus, which was then augmented with some later works in the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Carr, on the other hand, sees the collection and selection of biblical books within an educational process of enculturation that was continuous over an extended period from simple oral tradition in early Israel to the final stages of curricular consolidation, i.e., the canon, in which the priests play a major role. This study will examine a set of issues (e.g. orality and literacy; dating and composition of texts; editing and transmission of texts in antiquity; the role of texts in education) that are covered by these studies, and will offer some alternative suggestions for consideration.

scholarly journals Race, Racism, and the Hebrew Bible: The Case of the Queen of Sheba

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 795
Author(s):  
Jillian Stinchcomb
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Physical Characteristics ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Origen Of Alexandria ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Biblical Texts

The Queen of Sheba, best known for visiting Solomon at the height of his rule, is commonly understood to be one of the most famous Black queens of the Bible. However, biblical texts record nothing of her family or people, any physical characteristics, nor where, precisely, Sheba is located. How did this association between the Queen of Sheba and Blackness become naturalized? This article answers this question by mapping three first millennium textual moments that racialize the Queen of Sheba through attention to geography, skin color, and lineage in the writings of Origen of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus, and Abu Ja’afar al-Tabari. These themes are transformed in the Ethiopic text the Kebra Nagast, which positively claims the Queen of Sheba as an African monarch in contrast to the Othering that is prominent in earlier texts. The Kebra Nagast has a complex afterlife, one which acts as the ground for the also-complex modern reception of the character of the Queen of Sheba.

scholarly journals Kristeva: The Individual, the Symbolic and Feminist Readings of the Biblical Text

Text Matters ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 132-144
Author(s):  
Joshua Roe
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Feminist Scholar ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
The Individual

The aim of this study is to develop from Kristeva’s account of time and semiotics the conditions of possibility for a new approach to interpreting the Bible. This will be set against the background of feminist biblical criticism, beginning from Esther Fuchs’s assessment of deception. She bases her comparison on the concept of deceptiveness but I will argue, using Lacan, that the aporia of desire undermines this comparison. Through Kristeva’s framework of the phases of feminism it will be shown that Fuchs’s argument weakness lies in her presupposition of the determinate identities of men and women. By examining passages in Genesis it will be shown that such determined identities are also not easily found in the Hebrew Bible. Then by considering another feminist scholar, Alice Bach, it will be shown that overcoming identity requires a more nuanced approach. In the first version of “Women’s Time” Kristeva suggests that identities could be overcome through moving towards the individual but this also operates in the same structure of identity. In fact Kristeva appears to recognize this problem as when she republishes the essay she considers a different way forward. It will be instead suggested that a type of feminism that recognizes its own weakness is needed. This will be used to interpret Proverbs 31 but in doing so it will become evident that this alone lacks the potency to overcome the diffuse nature of the symbolic.

scholarly journals Maternal Bodies in the Biblical Books of Samuel and Kings: Notes on the Representation of Maternity in Crisis Contexts

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 9-19
Author(s):  
Claudia Andreina D’Amico Monascal
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Maternal Body ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Books Of Samuel ◽  
The One

Although motherhood is the female destiny par excellence in the biblical narrative, it is an experience only accessible through a male point of view. In order to reflect on the problems of representation of the maternal body in the Hebrew Bible, I propose an analysis of different maternal characters present in the books of Samuel and Kings. My reading aims, on the one hand, to identify the features that define the maternal in the biblical text and, on the other hand, to offer an approach that allows to point to the implications that the crisis context the texts reflect have on the picture of the actions and the destinies of these female characters.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Laura Quick
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

This is a book about clothing and adornment in the world that gave rise to the Hebrew Bible. On the one hand, then, this is a book concerned with material culture: with the various garments and items of adornment that we read about in the pages of the Bible, or with the material remains of objects such as jewellery and cosmetic cases that have been recovered from the ancient Levant....

Women in Ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Ackerman
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Kinship System ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Women's Culture

The Hebrew Bible is a book that was primarily written by men, for men, and about men, and thus the biblical text is not particularly forthcoming when it comes to the lives and experiences of women. Other evidence from ancient Israel—the society in which the Hebrew Bible was generated—is also often of little use. Nevertheless, scholars have been able to combine a careful reading of the biblical text with anthropological and archaeological data, and with comparative evidence from the larger biblical world, to reconstruct certain features of ancient Israelite women’s culture. These features include fairly comprehensive pictures of women’s lives as wives and childbearers within Israel’s patrilineal and patrilocal kinship system and of women’s work within the economy of a typical Israelite household. Because the Bible is deeply concerned with religious matters, many aspects of women’s religious culture can also be delineated, even though the Bible’s overwhelmingly male focus means that specific details concerning women’s religious practice must be painstakingly teased out of the biblical text. The Bible’s tendency to focus on the elite classes of ancient Israelite society likewise means that it is possible to sketch a reasonable portrait of the experiences of elite women, especially the women of the royal court, although, again, this information must often be teased out of accounts whose primary interest is elite men.

scholarly journals Translation of Biblical and Mythological Allusions in Three Shakespearean Tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (9) ◽  
pp. 36-41
Author(s):  
Habib Alimardani ◽  
Esmail Zare Behtash
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Problem Solving Skills ◽  
Translation Strategies ◽  
Source Language ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
The One

Allusions as a literary device are included in a text to express meanings that go beyond the mere words the author uses and depend to a large extent on familiarity to be comprehended. Thus, they carry meaning in the culture in which they arise while this meaning is missed in another culture. The translation of allusions, therefore, which includes two language cultures, requires enormous problem-solving skills and adoption of strategies allowing the translator to evoke more or less the same reaction as that of the source language audience (Leppihalme, 1997). This study explores the adoption of strategies by Pasargadi (1996) in translating allusions rooted in mythology and the Bible in three Shakespearean tragedies, i.e. Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet based on the classification suggested by Ruokonen (2010). The analysis of the results revealed that the translator made more frequent use of modifying than retentive strategies, 52.69% and 47.31% respectively. Further investigation of the translation strategies employed by the translator sheds greater light on the reliability of the classification by Ruokonen (2010) and results in a better grasp of how to guarantee as close an effect on the target text audience as the one created on the source text audience.  

But in the Original . . .

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
Kristin Swenson
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Final Word ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The One

This chapter tackles the issue of why there is no such thing as an “original” Bible. When it comes to the Bible, “going back to the original” usually means referring to the ancient Hebrew and Greek texts, since those are, respectively, the languages of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament, from which our translations come. However, there is simply no single Bible that old or that otherwise stands as “The One” that gave rise to them all. Our earliest versions come from hundreds of years after the Bible's (both Jewish and Christian versions) contents were finalized. There is no authoritative ur-text that can be consulted for the final word. But while there is no such thing as an original Bible, the facts of the Bible's development, the admission that we have fragments of copies sometimes with competing claims or inscrutable passages, invites us to reconsider the most basic ways to read it.

The Naked Truth of Scripture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Ossa-Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
The One

Like his other works, André Rivet’s magnum opus, the Exercitationes on Genesis (1633), was born from religious controversies. It aimed to uncover the one and only Reformed truth of the biblical message, against the multiplicity of Catholic traditions and textual ambiguities. Exploring the hermeneutical limits of what the Bible could teach, Rivet defended the homogeneity and perspicuity of the Bible, slyly relying on Catholic scholars such as Benito Arias Montano to assert the primacy of the Hebrew Bible and the integrity of its text. Catholic scholars, on the other hand, attempted to account for possible discrepancies in the Vulgate. Both sides deemed themselves holy, and both arrogated Providence to the legitimation of their church and their preferred text. This is to say that textual criticism was ultimately guided by theological and confessional considerations.

Herzog Ernst der Fromme und die sog. Kurfürstenbibel (1641). Höfische Repräsentation und Kommunikation des Wortes Gottes

Daphnis ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-378
Author(s):  
Johann Anselm Steiger ◽  
Franziska May
Keyword(s):  
Media Production ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Biblical Commentary ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

This study on the most extensive work on the Bible that Lutheran Protestantism has ever produced, the so-called Kurfürstenbibel or Elector’s Bible (first published in 1641), presents the bible’s formation under the authorial leadership of Johann Gerhard and Salomon Glassius, the style used in presenting concise biblical commentary, the many supplements to the biblical text, and the impressive array of artwork. This study also demonstrates that the preparation, drafting, and publication of the Kurfürstenbibel is, on the one hand, a media production that serves to represent the elector’s sovereignty. At the same time, however, this medium also communicates the understanding that any mediality of governmental authority finds its limit wherever it sees its own sovereign right on earth confronted with the Son of God who alone is the ultimate medium of salvation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document