Rewriting Gideon

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Kelly J. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Gender Norms ◽  
Reception History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Jewish Historian ◽  
Book Of Judges

Chapter 1 argues that the Bible we read today reflects periods of rewriting, understood as a kind of reception history, and illustrates how revisions and expansions to earlier texts provide readers with a window onto changing expectations for gendered performance, as inscribed in the biblical story of Gideon. The chapter analyzes the significance of a manuscript found at Qumran, 4QJudga, which lacks the unnamed prophet now in Judg 6:7–10. Additionally, the chapter explores how constructions of gender often define men as the opposite of what is considered “womanly,” citing two examples: first, by examining how the prophet in Judg 6:7–10 connects the story of Deborah to the story of Gideon; and, second, by discussing how the first-century Jewish historian Josephus retells the stories of Deborah, Barak, and Gideon from the book of Judges by rewriting these characters in light of ancient Roman gender norms.

scholarly journals The strange biography of Samson

2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 19-36
Author(s):  
Yair Zakovitch
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Book Of Samuel ◽  
Book Of Judges ◽  
Story Elements

The biblical story of the life of Samson hides much from the reader&&the Book of Judges has deleted from the story elements that were deemed improper for the book’s placement among the Holy Scriptures. In this article, the author shows how the Bible transforms Samson from a mythological hero, the son of a god, to a mere mortal whose extraordinary strength came through the spirit of God that rested with him so long as he kept his Nazirite vows. The biblical storyteller could not prevent the story of Samson from entering into the biblical corpus since it was a tale of tremendous popularity. He thus told it in such a way as to bring it closer to his monotheistic beliefs and world-view. In its ‘biblical’ form the story does not bring honor to the figure of Samson, and so his placement as the last of the judges in the Book of Judges prepares the reader for the establishment of the institution of kingship, in the Book of Samuel.

Rewriting Masculinity

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly J. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Reception History ◽  
Masculinity Studies ◽  
Redaction Criticism ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
History Of ◽  
Book Of Judges

Described variously as divinely appointed “mighty warrior,” fearful son, hesitant solider, clever tactician, commanding father, ruthless killer, and, perhaps, idolater and illegitimate king, the character of Gideon from the biblical book of Judges has long challenged readers. Why are there so many conflicting portraits of Gideon? What might these different portraits tell us about the authors and editors of Gideon’s story, especially in how men were or are expected to act? By interweaving redaction criticism, reception history, and masculinity studies, Rewriting Masculinity: Gideon, Men, and Might explores how Gideon went from mighty warrior to weakling, from successful leader to a man who led Israel astray. This volume considers the ways older traditions about Gideon were rewritten at key moments in ancient Israel’s history, then how later interpreters also rewrote Gideon to match their own models for men, might, and masculinity. This in-depth case study emphasizes the importance of reading the biblical story and its many expansions alongside the reception history of the narrative to better understand how Gideon is, in many ways, the story of masculinity in miniature: an ever-changing, always-in-crisis, constantly transforming ideal.

Latecomers: Four Novelists Rewrite the Bible

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 395-404
Author(s):  
Anthony Swindell
Keyword(s):  
Western Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Going Public ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twenty First Century

AbstractThis essay examines the use of biblical stories as sourcetexts in four novels: David Maine's Fallen, Howard Jacobson's The Very Model of a Man, Muriel Spark's The Only Problem, and Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Café. While each goes about its business of rewriting the biblical story in relation to a particular contemporary agenda or concern (American consumerism, the crisis of theism, the viability of happy endings in fiction, the revolt against patriarchy), they have in common a sense of lateness which they ironically project onto the biblical urtext. A sense of lateness is typical of modern and postmodern rewritings of ancient narratives and indeed is a characteristic of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century literary consciousness. By turning the biblical story into a latecomer, the four novelists simultaneously free themselves from deference to a story deemed sacred in Western culture and pay homage to its indispensability as a platform. Rewritings of this kind are of value both as a reality-test for pro-theological readings of the Bible and, by their very existence, as a barometer of interest in the Bible among the general reading (or cinema-going) public.

Comment le rapport au texte biblique transforme le rapport au texte littéraire au XVIIIe siècle : le cas Rousseau

2013 ◽  
pp. 40-47
Author(s):  
Geneviève Di Rosa
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Xviiie Siècle ◽  
Radical Enlightenment ◽  
Biblical Intertextuality ◽  
Full Force ◽  
Xviiie Siecle ◽  
Book Of Judges ◽  
Literary Reception

In the 18th century, the Bible felt the full force of criticism by radical Enlightenment thinkers who read it piece by piece and denounced the process of its creation as an imposture – thus extending the break initiated by moral and historical critiques of the previous century. In doing so, they nevertheless failed to grant it the literary status of a “profane work”. Yet, Rousseau, who produced a literary rewriting of the Book of Judges with his Levite of Ephraim, pondered over the violence inflicted on biblical intertextuality during his exile in Môtiers: in his Letters Written from the Mountain, he compared it to the violence caused to his own literary works. By draw-ing this parallel, he opened a reflection on the different manners of reading a text, as well as the possibility of regulating the reader’s violence through proposing an ethics of literary reception. Analogy might not work as a substitute; however, it enabled Rousseau to go beyond the mistreatment which anti-philosophers or philosophers inflicted on his works, by giving, among other things, an autobiographical orienta-tion to his writing: one in which the author is ready to take responsibility for giving himself to the reader. The ambivalence of the sacred and the profane, the perception of a common essence of religion – defined either by sacrifice or gift – were thus what helped Rousseau invent the autobiographical pact.

Spinoza’s Biblical Criticism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Divine Election ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Way

Chapter 1 homes in on Spinoza as a Bible critic. Based on existing historiography, it parses the main relevant historical contexts in which Spinoza came to articulate his analysis of the Bible: the Sephardi community of Amsterdam, freethinking philosophers, and the Reformed Church. It concludes with a detailed examination of the Tractatus theologico-politicus, Spinoza’s major work of biblical criticism. Along the way I highlight themes for which Spinoza appealed to the biblical texts themselves: the textual unity of the Bible, and the biblical concepts of prophecy, divine election, and religious laws. The focus is on the biblical arguments for these propositions, and the philological choices that Spinoza made that enabled him to appeal to those specific biblical texts. This first chapter lays the foundation for the remainder of the book, which examines issues of biblical philology and interpretation discussed among the Dutch Reformed contemporaries of Spinoza.

The Gospel as Manuscript

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Keith
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Early History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
Material History

This book offers a new material history of the Jesus tradition. It shows that the introduction of manuscripts to the transmission of the Jesus tradition played an underappreciated but crucial role in the reception history of the tradition that eventuated. It focuses particularly on the competitive textualization of the Jesus tradition, whereby Gospel authors drew attention to the written nature of their tradition, sometimes in attempts to assert superiority to predecessors, and the public reading of the Jesus tradition. Both these processes reveal efforts on the part of early followers of Jesus to place the gospel-as-manuscript on display, whether in the literary tradition or in the assembly. Building upon interdisciplinary work on ancient book cultures, this book traces an early history of the gospel as artifact from the textualization of Mark in the first century until the eventual usage of liturgical reading as a marker of authoritative status in the second and third centuries and beyond. Overall, it reveals a vibrant period of the development of the Jesus tradition, wherein the material status of the tradition frequently played as important a role as the ideas about Jesus that it contained.

Narratology

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genevieve Liveley
Keyword(s):  
Reader Response ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Reception History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Unreliable Narrator ◽  
Affect And Cognition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ars Poetica

This book explores the extraordinary contribution that classical poetics has made to twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of narrative. Its aim is not to argue that modern narratologies simply present ‘old wine in new wineskins’, but to identify the diachronic affinities shared between ancient and modern stories about storytelling, recognizing that modern narratologists bring particular expertise to bear upon ancient literary theory and offer valuable insights into the interpretation of some notoriously difficult texts. By interrogating ancient and modern narratologies through the mutually imbricating dynamics of their reception it aims to arrive at a better understanding of both. Each chapter selects a key moment in the history of narratology on which to focus, zooming in from an overview of significant phases to look at core theories and texts—from the Russian formalists, Chicago school neo-Aristotelians, through the prestructuralists, structuralists, and poststructuralists, to the latest unnatural and antimimetic narratologists. The reception history that thus unfolds offers some remarkable plot twists. It unmasks Plato as an unreliable narrator and theorist, and offers a rare glimpse of Aristotle putting narrative theory into practice in the role of storyteller in his work On Poets. In Horace’s Ars Poetica and in the works of ancient scholia critics and commentators it locates a rhetorically conceived poetics and a sophisticated reader-response-based narratology evincing a keen interest in audience affect and cognition—and anticipating the cognitive turn in narratology’s mot recent postclassical phase.

Bathsheba in Contemporary Romance Novels

2020 ◽  
pp. 405-423
Author(s):  
Sara M. Koenig
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Text ◽  
Reception History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Kings 1 ◽  
Romance Novels ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
1 Kings ◽  
2 Samuel

The biblical texts about Bathsheba have notorious gaps, even by the laconic standards of Hebrew narrative. Post-biblical receptions of the story flesh out the terse chapters of 2 Samuel 11–12 and 1 Kings 1–2, ascribing feelings and motives to Bathsheba and David that are not contained in the Hebrew text. This essay examines the intersection of reception history and feminist biblical scholarship by considering eleven novels about Bathsheba from the twentieth and twenty-first century. These novels expand Bathsheba’s character beyond the text, but in fairly gender stereotypical ways, such that feminist readers of the novels may be left wanting more.

The first century of English protestantism and the growth of national identity

1982 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 309-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
First Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Zeal

Their sense of national identity is not something that men have been in the habit of directly recording. Its strength or weakness, in relation to commitment to international causes or to localist sentiment, can often only be inferred by examining political and religious attitudes and personal behaviour. So far as the early modern period is concerned, the subject is hazardous because groups and individuals must have varied enormously in the extent to which national identity meant something to them or influenced their lives. The temptation to generalise must be resisted. It is all too easy to suppose that national identity became well established in England in the Tudor century, when a national culture, based on widespread literacy among gentry, yeomen and townsmen, flowered as it had never done before, when the bible was first generally available in English, when John Foxe produced his celebrated Acts and Monuments, better known as the Book of Martyrs. Recent work reassessing the significance of Foxe’s account of the English reformation and other Elizabethan polemical writings provdes a convenient starting point for this brief investigation of some of the connections between religious zeal and national consciousness between 1558 and 1642.

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