Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 194-198
Author(s):  
Brian R. Doak

Ultimately, those who study the past are thrown back upon the problem of history, memory, and interpretation raised in the first chapter of this book: Are interpreters bound to see Israel’s neighbors as Israel saw them—filtered through the Hebrew Bible—or should they use the Bible as but one (flawed) source among many others available to reconstruct the reality of these other nations “as they really were,” giving them their rightful place in history as independent entities who wanted the same things ancient Israelites wanted (safety, autonomy, success, fertility, etc.)? Has the Bible been more of a hindrance than a help for reconstructing the region’s history? Or does the Bible show readers what they truly need to see on some other level, transcending history, in the realms of religion or spirituality? Whatever the case, readers should exercise caution in the face of making simplistic judgments about complex issues of the history, archaeology, language, and geography of the neighbors covered in this book, as well as Israel. There is so much that we do not know—so much left to learn.

Author(s):  
Brian R. Doak

Tellingly for their importance to ancient Israelite audiences, Israel’s closest geographical neighbors—the Canaanites, Arameans, Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Philistines, and Phoenicians—appear nearly as much in the Hebrew Bible as the three dominant empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt. Indeed, several of these smaller neighboring groups individually feature more frequently in the Bible than the mighty Assyrians. These numbers tell us that Israelite authors and their audiences were frequently engaged with their bordering neighbors. The story Israel has to tell about itself deeply involves these smaller, lesser-known nations. By way of beginning the investigation, this chapter clarifies some issues of geography and discusses key terms, such as nation, state, tribe, and addresses other problems of describing borders and national neighbors in the ancient (and modern) world.


Author(s):  
Brian R. Doak

The purpose of this book is to tell the story of Israel’s nearest neighbors—not only discovering what the Bible has to say about them but also what we can know from archaeology, ancient inscriptions, and other sources. The Bible itself presents these neighbors in nuanced and conflicting ways; sometimes they are friends or even related to Israel at a family level, and sometimes they are enemies, spoken of as though they must die in order for Israel to live. We are left wondering how the biblical portrayal might have affected our thinking about these people as historical groups, on their own terms. How would an Aramaean have described her own religion? How would an Edomite have described conflict with Israel? This book explores both the biblical portrayal of the smaller groups surrounding Israel and what people can know about these groups through their own literature, archaeology, and other sources. By uncovering the identity of the Philistines as settlers along the coast at the same time that early Israel carved out their place in the land, for example, one can better understand the social turmoil and political maneuvering that lies just beneath the surface of the biblical narrative, and can see more clearly just how the authors of the Bible saw themselves in the face of others.


Author(s):  
Allan Megill

This epilogue argues that historians ought to be able to produce a universal history, one that would ‘cover’ the past of humankind ‘as a whole’. However, aside from the always increasing difficulty of mastering the factual material that such an undertaking requires, there exists another difficulty: the coherence of universal history always presupposes an initial decision not to write about the human past in all its multiplicity, but to focus on one aspect of that past. Nevertheless, the lure of universal history will persist, even in the face of its practical and conceptual difficulty. Certainly, it is possible to imagine a future ideological convergence among humans that would enable them to accept, as authoritative, one history of humankind.


Author(s):  
Aurora G. Vincent ◽  
Anne E. Gunter ◽  
Yadranko Ducic ◽  
Likith Reddy

AbstractAlloplastic facial transplantation has become a new rung on the proverbial reconstructive ladder for severe facial wounds in the past couple of decades. Since the first transfer including bony components in 2006, numerous facial allotransplantations across many countries have been successfully performed, many incorporating multiple bony elements of the face. There are many unique considerations to facial transplantation of bone, however, beyond the considerations of simple soft tissue transfer. Herein, we review the current literature and considerations specific to bony facial transplantation focusing on the pertinent surgical anatomy, preoperative planning needs, intraoperative harvest and inset considerations, and postoperative protocols.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 3046
Author(s):  
Shervin Minaee ◽  
Mehdi Minaei ◽  
Amirali Abdolrashidi

Facial expression recognition has been an active area of research over the past few decades, and it is still challenging due to the high intra-class variation. Traditional approaches for this problem rely on hand-crafted features such as SIFT, HOG, and LBP, followed by a classifier trained on a database of images or videos. Most of these works perform reasonably well on datasets of images captured in a controlled condition but fail to perform as well on more challenging datasets with more image variation and partial faces. In recent years, several works proposed an end-to-end framework for facial expression recognition using deep learning models. Despite the better performance of these works, there are still much room for improvement. In this work, we propose a deep learning approach based on attentional convolutional network that is able to focus on important parts of the face and achieves significant improvement over previous models on multiple datasets, including FER-2013, CK+, FERG, and JAFFE. We also use a visualization technique that is able to find important facial regions to detect different emotions based on the classifier’s output. Through experimental results, we show that different emotions are sensitive to different parts of the face.


Author(s):  
Richard Wennberg ◽  
Sukriti Nag ◽  
Mary-Pat McAndrews ◽  
Andres M. Lozano ◽  
Richard Farb ◽  
...  

A 24-year-old woman was referred because of incompletely-controlled complex partial seizures. Her seizures had started at age 21, after a mild head injury with brief loss of consciousness incurred in a biking accident, and were characterized by a sensation of bright flashing lights in the right visual field, followed by numbness and tingling in the right foot, spreading up the leg and to the arm, ultimately involving the entire right side, including the face. Occasionally they spread further to involve right facial twitching with jerking of the right arm and leg, loss of awareness and, at the onset of her epilepsy, rare secondarily generalized convulsions. Seizure frequency averaged three to four per month. She was initially treated with phenytoin and clobazam and subsequently changed to carbamazepine 800 milligrams per day. She also complained that her right side was no longer as strong as her left and that it was also numb, especially the leg, but felt that this weakness had stabilized or improved slightly over the past two years.


PMLA ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 72 (5) ◽  
pp. 977-996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fraser Neiman

At least since Matthew Arnold exploited the term Zeitgeist in Literature and Dogma, the expression has been variously a source of irritation and confusion to a number of his critics. Identifying it with a tendency to disparage the past, an exasperated contemporary reviewer of that work in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine cried, “Can anything be more unscientific than such a spirit? It is the very apotheosis of self-opinion intoxicated by its own pride, and flaunting its own dogmatisms with a crude audacity in the face of preceding dogmas.” Among other critics of Arnold, R. H. Hutton protested that the Zeitgeist was a will-o'-the-wisp “who misleads us at least as much as he enlightens”; W. H. Dawson concluded that for Arnold it was “a fetish, a talisman, a thaumaturgy”; for W. H. Paul it became a bore; Hugh Kingsmill began his caricature of Don Matthew, “So forth he sallied, mounted on Zeit-Geist, a hobby horse.” Still others, less annoyed than these by the reiteration, have themselves borrowed it as they write of him—sometimes effectively, because with consistency of meaning, as H. F. Lowry in his edition of Arnold's letters to Clough; sometimes bewilderingly, as when one reads such a statement as this: “Expediency, which had become in Burke's hands an anti-revolutionary doctrine, was equated by Arnold with the Zeitgeist, a force which, in his conception of it, was quite as revolutionary as that of natural right.”


1997 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 300-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Carroll

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.


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