The Bible and Israeli Identity

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Shapira

ldquo;In our two thousand years of exile, we have not totally lost our creativity, but the sheen of the Bible dulled in exile, as did the sheen of the Jewish people. Only with the renewal of the homeland and Hebrew independence have we been able to reassess the Bible in its true, full light,” Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1953. This statement illustrates several core attitudes of the Jewish national renaissance movement towards the Bible. Ben-Gurion depicted a direct relationship between the state of the Jewish people and the status of the Bible: The two rose and fell together. His words are reminiscent of philosopher Martin Buber, Revisionist leader Zeءev Jabotinsky, and others, all of whom postulated a symbiotic relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel: “Just as the Jewish people need the land to live a full life, so the land needs the Jewish people to be complete” wrote Buber. The Bible, according to Ben-Gurion, was the third component of the Jewish “holy trinity” of people, land, and book. It served as testimony of Jewish national life in the land of Israel in former times, as a blueprint for reestablishing this way of life, as proof of a glorious past and promise for the future. It nurtured a national romanticism and both inspired and buttressed universal ideas; it was the bedrock of myth and epos, of earthliness and valor, and also of a system of ethics and faith that rein in and restrain muscle and brawn. It was paradoxical proof of both Jewish uniqueness and Jewish similitude, “like all the nations” (I Samuel 8:5); “materialism” and “spirituality”; historical continuity and historical severance between the people and the land.

Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman

This chapter reconstructs the meanings of holiness from representative texts of the Jewish tradition. The discussion is anchored on two claims. First, biblical thought does not divide the world into a neat dualism of sacred and profane. Second, the Bible and subsequent Judaism conceive of holiness in three different ways: holiness sometimes refers to a property, holiness indicates a status, and holiness is a value or project. These three characteristics of holiness are examined in detail using the Bible. The chapter is primarily concerned with the ideas of the holiness of the people of Israel and the holiness of the Land of Israel. It considers the sacred/profane dichotomy by focusing on the views of twentieth-century scholars such as Emile Durkheim, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade. It also explores holiness and purity as they relate to God before concluding with an analysis of holiness in ancient and medieval rabbinic Judaism.


Author(s):  
Marvin A. Sweeney

Contemporary Jewish critical scholars share many methodological foundations and viewpoints with their Christian counterparts, but there are nevertheless areas of distinctive concern to Jewish interpreters of the Bible in general and the prophets in particular. This chapter therefore addresses issues faced by Jewish scholars in the field., namely, the place of the prophets in the Tanak, i.e. the Jewish version of the Bible; the historical and social roles of the prophets; and treatment of exile, repentance, and restoration of the people to the Temple and the land of Israel in each of the books of the Latter Prophets, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Book of the Twelve Prophets. Examples of scholars treated include Ehud Ben Zvi, Julie Galambush, Moshe Greenberg, Tamar Kamionkowski, Shalom Paul, Dalit Rom-Shiloni, Benjamin Sommer, Emanuel Tov, and the author.


2004 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-253
Author(s):  
H. Eberhard von Waldow

The Old Testament people of Israel entered the political reality of ancient Palestine as a spiritual community held together by worshipping Yahweh in ‘the God-given land’. When it became a state with a king this spiritual character was threatened or lost. The capital was always the holy city of Jerusalem, as the spiritual—not political—centre o f Yahweh's people, and it survived all political catastrophes, even after the homeland was lost. The people of Israel survived not as a nation but rather as a religious community (Judaism). Only as such can today's Jews legitimately reclaim Eretz Yisrael. Certain claims made by the modern secular Jewish nation-state—for example, that Jerusalem always was and always will be the capital of the Jewish people—are not only problematic, but have no foundation, either in the Bible or in Jewish history: they are fabricated modern myths.


Author(s):  
Clifton Hood

Chapter 1 concentrates on the 1750s and early 1760s when New York City was a minor seaport and provincial capital within an Atlantic economy of empires and trading. In a colonial seaport whose life’s blood was commerce, merchants were the people who made the principal economic decision. From around 1700, a few wealthy merchants – known as “great merchants” – accumulated fortunes that supplied a material basis for a luxurious way of life. New York’s merchants conceived of themselves and were seen by others as being part of a larger provincial upper class that also incorporated royal officials, planters, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. This upper class had taken shape between the 1680s and the 1720s, driven by the expansion of the trans-Atlantic trade. It was characterized by its relative openness and its preoccupation with individual economic advancement. Compared to the stuffy and backward-looking elites found elsewhere in the colonies, the New York upper class was relatively dynamic, adaptable, and aggressive. However, the standing of merchants within this New York upper class was compromised by the code of gentility and by the place of royal officials atop the status hierarchy. The incompatibility of gentility with overly aggressive money-making and the privileged status of royal administrators relegated merchants to a secondary position in that upper class.


Author(s):  
A. V. Melikov ◽  

The results of studying the issue of the evolution of the constitutional and legal status of the Greek king are presented. The monarchical form of government imposed on Greece by the patron powers of the Old World being accepted as the standard of the European form of state structure reflected the processes of reduction, and sometimes even disappearance, of its characteristic features. The history of Greek law and the state in 1830 – 1974 showed periodic changes in the status of the king, which was preceded by internal political tension (in the form of clashes with the will of the people, inconsistencies with the interests of the army, the immaturity of the party system, economic instability, etc.) and constant pressure from outside. When studying the process of changing the constitutional and legal status of the king of Greece, the cause-and-effect relationships of these transformations were identified and the discrepancy between the features of governing the Greek kingdom and the characteristic features of absolute monarchical government were clarified. The limited nature of the status of the king, the dynastic change, the specific transfer of power, which did not personify either the unity of the nation or the historical continuity of the tradition of the head of state, characterize the development of the Greek monarchy as atypical for this form of government. Therefore, according to the author, the form of government in the Greek kingdom can be considered as “non-conventional monarchy”.


Author(s):  
Seyyed Mohammad Razavi ◽  
Marziyeh Saemi

The history of the Bible implies that the Torah has been formed and distorted over time. The Qur'an also confirms this issue. The Holy Qur'an, in addition to introducing the Jews as the People of the Book, uses the word "Torah" eighteen times, "which is a collection of divine teachings bestowed on Prophet Moses." On the one hand, the Holy Qur'an acknowledges and affirms it, and on the other hand, it attributes distortion to this book and introduces the Torah as one of the books that has been distorted throughout history, however, the holy Qur’an considers the part of the Torah that has been preserved to contain the teachings of God and can be acknowledged in general, and considers it a means of guiding the Jewish people and advises them to refer to it. The collection of information in this writing is library-based and their processing is descriptive-analytical. This article seeks to prove the view that the current Torah, with its various versions, has been disappeared in the ups and downs of the times, and that what exists is a very blurred and inconsistent face of the original version, and the Holy Qur'an confirms this.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-328
Author(s):  
Fathul Aminudin Aziz

Fines are sanctions or punishments that are applied in the form of the obligation to pay a sum of money imposed on the denial of a number of agreements previously agreed upon. There is debate over the status of fines in Islamic law. Some argue that fines may not be used, and some argue that they may be used. In the context of fines for delays in payment of taxes, in fiqh law it can be analogous to ta'zir bi al-tamlīk (punishment for ownership). This can be justified if the tax obligations have met the requirements. Whereas according to Islamic teachings, fines can be categorized as acts in order to obey government orders as taught in the hadith, and in order to contribute to the realization of mutual benefit in the life of the state. As for the amount of the fine, the government cannot arbitrarily determine fines that are too large to burden the people. Penalties are applied as a message of reprimand and as a means to cover the lack of the state budget.


Author(s):  
Janusz Adam Frykowski

SUMMARYNon-city starosty of Tyszowce was located in the province of Belz and received the status of royal land in 1462. Its territory included the town of Tyszowce and villages: Mikulin, Perespa, Klatwy and Przewale. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the starosty suffered from a significant increase of various negative phenomena. The crown lands had bitterly tasted devastating fires, epidemics, contributions, requisitions, robberies and field devastations. All these disasters were caused mainly by war and military activities. Marches of soldiers and quartering of troops greatly contributed to the situation and were usually associated with the need of maintaining the soldiers. The requisitions of food, alcohol, cattle, horses and poultry were particularly burdensome for the people. The greatest economic devastation as regards the resources of the starosty and its people was caused by monetary contributions, usually several times higher than the financial capacity of the town and its inhabitants. This work focuses on damages to the starosty caused by the royal cavalry. According to the literature, it is clear that the behavior of the troops in Tyszowce Starosty was not different from the behavior of soldiers in other areas of Poland. It must be admitted that the reprehensible behavior of the army was influenced by many conditions, from the recruitment of people from backgrounds often involving conflict with law, as well as foreigners, to the accommodation system under which the soldiers were forced to supply themselves “on their own.”


Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 72-83
Author(s):  
Tushar Kadian

Actually, basic needs postulates securing of the elementary conditions of existence to every human being. Despite of the practical and theoretical importance of the subject the greatest irony is non- availability of any universal preliminary definition of the concept of basic needs. Moreover, this becomes the reason for unpredictability of various political programmes aiming at providing basic needs to the people. The shift is necessary for development of this or any other conception. No labour reforms could be made in history till labours were treated as objects. Its only after they were started being treating as subjects, labour unions were allowed to represent themselves in strategy formulations that labour reforms could become a reality. The present research paper highlights the basic needs of Human Rights in life.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 37-50
Author(s):  
Muhammad Suleman Nasir

Society means a group of people who are living together. People need society from birth to death. Without a collective life, man's deeds, intentions, and habits have no value. Islamic society is the name of a balanced and moderate life in which human intellect, customs, and social etiquette are determined in the light of divine revelation. This system is so comprehensive and all-encompassing that it covers all aspects and activities of life. Islam is a comprehensive, universal, complete code of conduct, and an ideal way of life It not only recognizes the collectiveness of human interaction. Rather, it helps in the development of the community and gives it natural principles that strengthen the community and provides good foundations for it and eliminates the factors that spoil it or make it limited and useless. The Principles of a successful social life in Islamic society seem to reflect the Islamic code of conduct and human nature. Islam is the only religion that advocates goodness and guarantees well-being. Islam gives us self-sacrifice, generosity, trust and honesty, service to the people, justice and fairness, forgiveness and kindness, good society and economy, good deeds, mutual unity, harmony, and brotherhood. Only by practicing the pure thoughts, beliefs, and unparalleled ideas of the religion of Islam, can a person live a prosperous life and he can feel real peace and lasting contentment in the moments of his life. A descriptive and analytical research methodology will be used in this study. It is concluded that for a prosperous social life it is necessary to abide by the injunction of Islamic principles, which provides a sound foundation for a successful social life here in the world and hereafter.


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