“Where is Sarah Your Wife?” Cultural Poetics of Gender and Nationhood in the Hebrew Bible

1998 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Seeman
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Cultural Poetics ◽  
Kinship Theory ◽  
William Robertson ◽  
The Way

William Robertson Smith wrote in 1885 that the biblical convention whereby aman is said to “go in” to his bride represents a linguistic trace ofonce widespread “beenamarriage,” in which men joined the natal households of the women who took them as husbands. It was an error of literalist reductionism, but one that lent support to an imposing infrastructure of systematic kinship theory and evolutionism that continues to excercise an influenceon some contemporary scholars. Another way of saying this is that Robertson Smith failed to recognize a significant biblical metaphor—that of men enteringwomen's tents—when he saw one. This misapprehension of biblical poetics has had important consequences for the way in which he and his successors have interpreted the Hebrew Bible.

My Mother was a Wandering Aramaean

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Mareike Schol-Wetter
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the applicability of Rosi Braidotti’s theory of nomadic becoming to the Hebrew Bible by way of two examples: Lot’s unfortunate wife, and Ruth, the Moabite who became an Israelite. Nomadic theory is distinguished from most current feminist and postcolonial approaches by its dynamic understanding of identity and its emphasis on change and affirmation rather than oppression and loss. Framed as instances of ‘nomadic becoming’, Ruth and Lot’s wife can be seen to effectively undermine conventional approaches to (Israelite) identity as fixed and opposed to various ‘others’. Read as ‘nomadic figurations’, they prove Braidotti’s claim that minorities—in this case, women and ethnic outsiders—must lead the way towards an ethics that has overcome the opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Clio and Canons: in Search of a Cultural Poetics of the Hebrew Bible

1997 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 300-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Cultural Poetics ◽  
Leading Edges

AbstractThe enterprise of writing "histories" of "ancient Israel" in which biblical historiography is reproduced by old credulists or critiqued by new nihilists represents one of the leading edges of contemporary biblical studies in relation to the Hebrew Bible. This quest for a cultural poetics or cultural materialist accounts of the Bible is virtually equivalent to a New Historicism in the discipline. In this article analyses of three topics from current debates in biblical studies (historiography of "ancient Israel", the empty land topos, canons and context) are used to provide insights into how new historicist approaches to contextualizing literature may contribute to these current debates about the Bible.

Practical Materialism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eliyahu Stern
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Primary Target ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Russian Jews ◽  
Russian State ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
The Way

The discovery of Karl Marx’s writings by Russian Jews in the mid-1870s changed the way they viewed their situation and provided a framework for them to become political actors. The chapter provides a careful reading of Jewish philosophical texts and propaganda literature from the late 1870s. It suggests that Jews who were drawn to Marx viewed Marx in conjunction with, not in opposition to, the Hebrew Bible and the Kabbalah. The early Jewish Marxists’ primary target was the Russian state, not their Jewish parents. The Jewish materialists teased out the messianic universal aspirations and nationalist assumptions that they saw behind Marx’s theories of revolution.

scholarly journals Litteratur og politik

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (104) ◽  
pp. 148-165
Author(s):  
Frederik Tygstrup ◽  
Isak Winkel Holm
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Poetics ◽  
The Common ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Way

Literature and PoliticsLiterature is political by representing the world. The production of literature is a contribution to a general cultural poetics where images of reality are constructed and circulated. At the same time, the practice of literature is institutionalized in such a way that the form and function of the images of reality it produces are conceived and used in a distinctive way. In this article, we suggest distinguishing between a general cultural poetics and a specific literary poetics by using Ernst Cassirer’s neo-Kantian concept of »symbolic forms«. We argue that according to this view, the political significance of literary representational practices resides in the way they activate a common cultural repertoire of historical symbolic forms while at the same time deviating from the common ways of treating these forms.

IMPLIED ANTECEDENTS IN JOB XL 2B AND PROVERBS III 6A

2002 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-284
Author(s):  
Timothy Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article proposes a solution for identifying two problematic antecedents in two separate verses of the Hebrew Bible. I suggest that these antecedents are implied nouns instead of specific nouns standing in the text. The first example of this occurs in Job lx 2b where the third person singular feminine suffix refers to an implied noun that is associated with a nearby participle. The second more controversial example is found in Prov. iii 6a. Here the LXX, whose antecedent is an implied noun, serves as the necessary guide for opening the way to understanding the MT, where another implied noun is used. In each verse, clarity of interpretation is gained, with the latter analysis resulting in a more severe break from traditional views.

On Hebrew Soul

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Nava
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Teresa Of Avila ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
The Way

This chapter begins with a consideration of the terminology of nephesh in the Hebrew Bible, and also explores the meaning of this concept from a more elevated, bird's-eye perspective—one that surveys the dense, tangled forest of the soul from a literary and narrative perspective. Because the concept of the soul is the product of a story—a “living book” as Teresa of Ávila said—this chapter attempts to unspool the narrative threads of this story, with a specific focus on the way the Bible commingles tragedy and comedy and hence weaves together its drama with high and low strands of thought. The result is a pattern that features, in bold color, the sensibilities of the outcast, the outsider, and the downtrodden, so that if one can speak of the heart and soul of the Bible, it will be found in the Bible's predilection for these themes.

Vampire Religion

2002 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Herbert
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Religious Motivation ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
The Future ◽  
Moral Conception ◽  
William Robertson ◽  
European Civilization ◽  
The Way

THIS ESSAY HIGHLIGHTS AND SEEKS to trace the conflicted logic of the strong religious motivation exemplified in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). First it analyzes the tensions in Stoker's polemic against the primitive other of religion/ superstition, setting that polemic off against those of two late-Victorian anthropologists, William Robertson Smith and James Frazer. For these theorists, the basis of the superstitious mentality lies in the principle of taboo, according to which the divine and the unclean are one and the same and divinity manifests itself in contagious physical transmission. Dracula on the level of its overt homiletic rhetoric presents the campaign waged against vampirism by Van Helsing and his friends as an allegory of the suppression of wicked archaic superstition in the name of enlightened, spiritualized Christian religion. Yet the novel is itself an emanation of a deeply superstitious mentality: it powerfully endorses a moral conception (a familiar one to the Victorian middle classes) based on the perils of the contagious transmission of uncleanness, it portrays the disgustingly filthy Count as an object of religious veneration, and it ascribes frightening magical agency to religious instruments like crucifixes and communion wafers. Along the way it proclaims an ideology of the violent purification of society from the influence of enemies of religion, particularly unclean women and, implicitly, Jews - the ideology against which Frazer particularly warns as posing a lethal danger for the future of European civilization. The argument of Dracula about the relations of religion and superstition is irresolvably contradictory. At the same time, Stoker carries out an exposéé (or offers a case in point) of the perversely reflexive relations obtaining between vampirism and Christian religion in the age of the dominance of evangelicalism. He echoes earlier writers, notably Feuerbach, in diagnosing a strain of vampiric sadism at the heart of Christian piety. In its theme of erotically charged blood-drinking, Dracula evokes in particular the dominant motifs of the Wesleyan hymnal, and thus bears witness to the pathology that energizes Victorian spirituality.

Why I am Such a Good Christian: Comments on Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-298
Author(s):  
Francis Landy
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Complex I ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
The Way

AbstractGil Anidjar begins his immensely ambitious bookBloodwith a strange statement/question “Why I am Such a Good Christian.” I begin by examining this question for its implications for cultural hybridity, for myself as well as for Anidjar, through the lens of Anidjar’s concluding discussion of Freud’sMoses and Monotheism. On the way I critically explore Anidjar’s insistence that blood is not a signifier of kinship or ancestry in the Hebrew Bible or in Judaism, and argue that both are in fact much more complex. I suggest also that Christianity has other elements than blood, such as the bread of the Eucharist, and that Anidjar devotes little attention to the differences between Protestant and Catholic Christianity. I conclude by reverting to Freud’s account of an experience of innocence inThe Interpretation of Dreams, as indicative of Freud’s ambivalent position between Judaism and Christianity.

scholarly journals Generous to a Fault: A Deep, Recapitulative Pattern of Thought in Ricoeur’s Works

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-51
Author(s):  
Joél Z. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Paul Ricœur ◽  
The Way

Paul Ricoeur clearly sought to differentiate between and keep separate his philosophical and theological intellectual endeavors. This essay brings into relief a deep, implicit, recapitulative pattern in Ricoeur’s thinking that cuts across this explicit “conceptual asceticism.” Specifically, it highlights this recapitulative pattern in Ricoeur’s treatment of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible; his understanding of utopia and ideology; the functioning of symbols in The Symbolism of Evil and of sublimation in Freud and Philosophy. On these topics Ricoeur extended his typical generosity toward all that might appear to be outdated, primitive, and even regressive in our collective and personal humanity. The frequently recapitulative nature of Ricoeur’s insights indicates the importance not just of the content of his thought but also the way in which he did his thinking, a pattern which above all was generous, even to a fault. 

H.D. and the Promise of Queer Kinship

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
World War ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Apparent Contradiction ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Kinship Theory ◽  
The Way

This chapter aligns H.D.’s understanding of art as spiritual gift with recent queer critiques of kinship theory. H.D.’s posthumously published Notes on Thought and Vision in part reads as a treatise on kinship—on the way small-scale exchanges provide a basis for large-scale social formations. In identifying homoeroticism as the ground of Western culture and lending equal significance to masculine and feminine relationships, the text offers a queer alternative to Freud’s and Lévi-Strauss’s heteronormative models of kinship. Her World War II memoir, The Gift, also posthumously published, gives mythico-historical form to this alternative, drawing connections between her Moravian matrilineage, settler–Native relations, the current war, and her domestic life with Bryher. By further linking H.D.’s notion of the gift to developments in telecommunications, this chapter takes distance from atavistic, gynocentric, and elitist readings of her work while reconsidering the apparent contradiction between her limited publications and utopian ambitions for art.

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