Conclusion

John Selden ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 229-250
Author(s):  
Jason P. Rosenblatt

This draws conclusions based on John Selden’s acceptance of the Talmud as an authoritative source. His many references to Jewish ancestral custom and opinion reveal his understanding that ancient Talmudic traditions exist independent of the Bible, and of course these include the Adamic/Noachide laws. Despite its dubious historicity, Selden accepts the tradition of a seamless transmission of judicial authority in both sacred and civil issues from Moses to the time of the synedrion, which he regards as a model for Parliament. He regards the sages of the Talmud as legal scholars rather than as religious figures. In the fierce debates in the Westminster Assembly over Deuteronomy 17:8–10, the Presbyterians read the text literally, which gave priority in adjudication to the clergy, while Erastians like Selden followed the rabbinic interpretation, which favored those who were skilled in the law. The conclusion tries to explain why both Selden and Milton (at least in his divorce treatises and in the middle books of Paradise Lost) relied on simile and analogy rather than metaphor and typology. Milton would have found everything he needed to create the laws of paradise in Selden’s De Jure Naturali et Gentium, with its thousands of marginal references and its method of giving a fair hearing to all opinions.

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Dariusz Konrad Sikorski

Summary After 1946, ie. after embracing Christianity, Roman Brandstaetter would often point to the Biblical Jonah as a role model for both his life and his artistic endeavour. In the interwar period, when he was a columnist of Nowy Głos, a New York Polish-Jewish periodical, he used the penname Romanus. The ‘Roman’ Jew appears to have treated his columns as a form of an artistic and civic ‘investigation’ into scandalous cases of breaking the law, destruction of cultural values and violation of social norms. Although it his was hardly ‘a new voice’ with the potential to change the course of history, he did become an intransigent defender of free speech. Brought up on the Bible and the best traditions of Polish literature and culture, Brandstaetter, the self-appointed disciple of Adam Mickiewicz, could not but stand up to the challenge of anti-Semitic aggression.


Author(s):  
Lisbeth S. Fried

Ezra-Nehemiah and 1 Esdras are the books of the Bible that describe the return to Judah under the Persians, so it is important to understand what in their portrayal is accurate, and what can be assigned to the imagination of the writers. Text-critical, historical-critical, and archaeological methods enable us to disentangle these elements. They confirm returns to Judah under Cyrus, Darius, and Artaxerxes I, a temple rebuilt under Cyrus and Darius, and a rebuilt wall around Jerusalem under Artaxerxes. We may confirm as well that a man named Ezra was an official in the Persian Empire who served as the “eyes and ears of the King,” but that he did not bring either the Torah or Torah-law to Judah, and there was no law-reading ceremony. The law-reading ceremony, currently described in Nehemiah 8, was written in the Maccabean period, perhaps to emphasize to their Seleucid overlords that even the Persians had supported Judean traditions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-32
Author(s):  
Rubyantara Jalu Permana ◽  
Sonny Eli Zaluchu

The literal differences found in the text of Exodus 34 verses 1 and 28 can trigger accusations of Bible inconsistency. In fact, in the Christian view, the Bible is a book that cannot be wrong or inner. Evangelical Christian beliefs assert that the Bible contains God's word and God's word itself. If there are differences and inconsistencies in the Bible, is that an indicator to deduce the low credibility of truth in the Christian scriptures? This study aims to answer that question through a hermeneutic and theological analysis of the differences in texts in Exodus 34 or 1 and verse 28, about who actually wrote the two new tablets. God as referred to verse 1 or Moses as read in verse 28. In addition to conducting text analysis, the author also uses the source approach and theological concepts. As a result, verse 28 actually legitimizes verse 1 that God himself wrote the law. This perspective also confirms that the search for the meaning of texts in context does not merely involve a grammatical approach.


2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (5) ◽  
pp. 123-151
Author(s):  
Janusz Lemański

Deut 22:5 marks the single instance of a prohibition of transvestitism in the Bible, and in its whole cultural milieu. The context in which it is situated suggests that it may have been inserted there as an addition, after the Babylonian captivity. That helps to narrow down the range of speculations as to the original Sitz im Leben of the law, and enables us to read it most of all within the canonical framework of the entirety of the Pentateuch. Hence, the precept pertains mainly to the principle of division of the human nature into the two sexes (Gen 1–2), the principle of retaining the order of creation (by not mixing kinds; Lev 19:19; Deut 22:9–11), and of keeping the procreational power, referred to here predominantly to masculinity (Gen 5:1–3; cf. Gen 1:28; 9:1.7).


Author(s):  
Dominique Gaurier

This chapter observes that early writers on the law of war or on the law of peace offered their contributions in an intellectual context that was very different from our own. They were attempting to provide explanations for the questions related to war and peace, and in doing so drew upon interesting elements in Roman or canon law. Yet, none of the sources available to them were sufficient to offer a comprehensive response to related legal issues. Although these authors were all largely relying on the Bible and on ancient or contemporaneous history, some also drew information from their own life experiences. The majority, however, built their theories on the basis of their own readings and legal knowledge. Furthermore, only very few authors addressed the question of the sources of international law.


Grotiana ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-118
Author(s):  
Yvonne Sherwood

In De veritate, sacrifice is appealed to as a universal rite and the ultimate guarantee of immutable truth, beyond reasonable deduction or natural instinct (Book 1, Chapter 7; cf. De satisfactione Christi). But sacrifice also stands as the ultimate example of the abrogation and alteration of law (Book 5, chs. 6–8). As an example of the abrogation of law, sacrifice signifies in both directions. The case of Abraham (Genesis 22) demonstrates God’s sovereign power of dispensatio. Divine right to radical revision is demonstrated in the command to sacrifice. But more generally it is the suspension of the command to sacrifice that stands as the ultimate sign of sovereign right not just to annotate but to radically rewrite the law. In this paper I explore how sacrifice operates as a guarantee of immutability and mutability: the intractability of scripture, and its equally necessary revision and alteration. Sacrifice reaches across all time and space, and stands as a sign of the parochialisation of biblical time and space. This tension relates to the principle of accommodation which, I argue, is already in operation in the Bible. By extrapolating this fundamentally biblical operation, Grotius produces a paradox that will help to sustain the Bible in modernity. The Bible (as emblematised in sacrifice) is localised and parochialised but also persists as a ‘universal’ foundation.


1975 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. D. L. Avis

‘It is now disputed at every table’, declared Whitgift in 1574, ‘whether the magistrate be of necessity bound to the judicials of Moses’. Edwin Sandys told Bullinger of Zürich in the previous year that it was being maintained, to the great trouble of the Church, that ‘The judicial laws of Moses are binding upon Christian princes, and they ought not in the slightest degree to depart from them’. Though often neglected by historians as an important factor in the Reformation, the question of the validity of the Old Testament judicial (as opposed to moral or ceremonial) law frequently arises in the writings of the Reformers, and their various answers made no slight impact on the course of events. It bears directly on Henry VIII's divorce and the bigamy of Philip of Hesse; the treatment of heresy and the possibility of toleration; the persecution of witches; usury and iconoclasm; Sabbatarianism and the rise of the ‘puritan’ view of the Bible as a book of precedents, and the corresponding shift to legalism in Protestant theology. The question is also of fundamental relevance to the thought of the Reformers on natural law, the godly prince and magistrate, and the so-called ‘third use of the law’. This article is an attempt to survey, up to the end of the sixteenth century, the various interpretations of the Mosaic penal and civil laws, with particular reference to the development of legalistic tendencies after Luther.


1986 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-90
Author(s):  
Philip J. Anderson

The events which together finally resulted in a restructuring of the Church of England along Presbyterian lines had been lengthy, complex and exceedingly frustrating for all concerned. Since the earliest days of the Long Parliament, both pulpit and press had been brimming not only with invective against Laudian Episcopacy, but also with a plethora of ideas about church government. After 1643, having accepted the conditions of the Solemn League and Covenant, the Westminster Assembly laboured fitfully to fulfil its responsibility of producing a new polity for parliament's approval. The assembly conducted its work in the midst of independent Dissenting Brethren who argued for a congregational form of gathered churches in the context of toleration, Scottish commissioners who would not be satisfied with anything less than their own rigid model of Presbyterianism, and a parliament that was generally desirous of a Presbyterian settlement but committed to an Erastian structure that would make its own body the highest judicial authority in the Church.


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