Biblical Questioning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Human History ◽  
Highest Good ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Independent Investigation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives

Questions posed by God and biblical characters in the Hebrew Bible are often philosophically empowering moments. They transpire from the very inception of human history, according to the Bible’s own reconstructed version of it. Rather than divinely imposed law, biblical questioning is a vital tool initiating the decisive biblical way toward truth through independent investigation. Questions then recur throughout various biblical narratives, revealing the Bible’s philosophical dimension. As such, they may indicate the Bible’s conception of the essential expression of humanity, or where the Bible locates the beginning of serious thought, and how it suggests proceeding in the search for truth and the highest good. This chapter explores specific episodes where questions are posed, beginning with the Garden of Eden and ending with the book of Job.

The Bible and the avant-garde: the search for a classical tradition in the Israeli theatre

2001 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
FREDDIE ROKEM
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
The State ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
State Of Israel

The Israeli theatre has frequently employed the Hebrew Bible as a source for theatrical performances. Analysing three such performances, this article shows that the Bible, with its charged ideological implications for the establishment of the state of Israel, has perhaps somewhat unexpectedly inspired avant-garde productions that have frequently criticized the accepted ideological and aesthetic norms. The first of the three performances analysed is Hanoch Levin's play based on the book of Job called ‘The Torments of Job’ (Yisorei Iov), which Levin directed at the Cameri theatre in 1981. The second is the play ‘Jehu’ by Gilead Evron, directed by Hanan Snir at the Habima National Theatre in 1992, and the third is the ‘Bible Project’ directed by Rina Yerushalmi, which consists of two independent, but interrelated productions: ‘And He Said And He Was Walking’ (Va Yomer Va Yelech), which premiered in 1996, and ‘And They Bowed. And He Feared’ (Va Yishtachu. Va Yerra) which premiered in 1998.

Living with Unanswered Questions: The Meaning of the Queries about the Book of Job in Isaac Nathan’s Ḥazut Qashah (“Grievous Vision”)

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 193-212
Author(s):  
Ram Ben-Shalom
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Hebrew Text ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
Medieval Text ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Literary Innovation

Hazut Qashah (Grievous Vision) is one of a number of studies on the Hebrew Bible by the fifteenth-century Jewish intellectual Isaac Nathan of Arles. This peculiar Hebrew text is composed of a list of thirteen questions about the book of Job without answers. An analysis of this work on the backdrop of Christian and Jewish scholasticism along with possible Eastern precedents such as Masaʾail, demonstrates its literary innovation, which is derived not from the questions it poses, but rather, from the author’s willingness to acknowledge that the Bible had failed to provide adequate answers to them. Some of the questions were liable to provoke skepticism and raise doubts, but in contrast to the corpus of critical and heretical Jewish literature, Nathan had no interest in destroying the foundations of Judaism by attacking the biblical infrastructure. The significance and power of Hazut Qashah does not issue from any theological insights, but from its novel format. There is no similar medieval text, be it Jewish or Christian, which presents a set of theological problems without offering any corresponding explanations. As such, living with an open question—the existential solution presented in Hazut Qashah—becomes just one more facet of Nathan’s own rich intellectual project.

A Queer Critique of Looking for “Male” and “Female” Voices in the Hebrew Bible

2020 ◽  
pp. 478-493
Author(s):  
Caryn Tamber-Rosenau
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
And Gender

The idea that biblical scholars discern the “gender” of a text or tradition by examining a text’s worldview, voice, and use of language gained currency in the 1990s with Athalya Brenner and Fokkelien van Dijk-Hemmes’s On Gendering Texts: Female and Male Voices in the Hebrew Bible. Since then, a steady stream of books and papers has made the case for “masculine” or “feminine” voices in various biblical narratives. Although the boom in scholarship searching for “M” or “F” voices in biblical texts coincided with the growth of queer-theoretical and gender-critical approaches to the Bible, no queer-influenced critique of the practice of gendering texts has yet emerged. This essay argues that the M/F textual schema both implies and reinforces a fixed gender binary, a notion rejected by queer theory in general and queer biblical criticism in particular. In other words, the attempt to recover female voices in the Hebrew Bible is a noble goal, but the conviction that an exegete provides such a recovery by looking to a text’s stereotyped “gendered” language or interests is unhelpful to feminist biblical studies.

Benefaction, gratitude, and reciprocity within the Bible

2021 ◽  
pp. 000332862110238
Author(s):  
Douglas C Mohrmann
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Client Relationships ◽  
The New Testament

Gratitude as a response to benefactions is manifest variously in social interactions as remembered by biblical narratives. Attention to key vocabulary, which was particularly developed in the patron-client relationships of the Graeco-Roman cultures, is fruitfully joined with attention to gestures, postures, public settings, and other non-verbal modes of communication to witness how gratitude was an essential to these relationships. This article explores several stories from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to discern how the reciprocity of benefaction and gratitude operated. It will also describe how Divine benefaction and human gratitude shared significant similarities with these expressions of reciprocity.

What the Bible and Old Movies Have in Common

1998 ◽  
Vol 6 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 266-291
Author(s):  
Joel Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
World History ◽  
American Film ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Cultural Importance ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Literary Techniques ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis essay explores some shared philosophical territory between the Hebrew Bible and great American film of the classical era (1930s and 1940s). It raises the question not of shared literary techniques, nor of cinematic allusions to the Bible or cinematic treatment of biblical tales, but rather of the position of a traditionist/ storyteller vis-à-vis the crisis points in his or her country's history. Focusing on two films of Frank Capra, on the Book of Job, and on Genesis 47 (Jacob's meeting with Pharaoh, and its aftermath), the essay examines the way themes of crucial cultural importance register in the perceptions of a story's reader or spectator, and the way that both biblical and cinematic story grapple simultaneously with the loss of personal and national innocence. These processes are then situated in the context of twentieth-century world history, where certain connections between Bible, cinema, and the destruction of European Jewry are drawn.

Naming an Unnamable God

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
The Moment

One of the most crucial sources for divulging knowledge about the nature of God and his relationship with his creation are the various names by which God is identified throughout the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic corpus. This chapter examines those names, especially the Tetragrammaton, based on God’s revelation to Moses recorded in Exodus of the name “I will be who I will be.” Close readings of the biblical narratives as interpreted by all the Jewish intellectual traditions, including rabbinic/midrashic, rationalist/philosophical, and kabbalistic/mystical, reveal a God of “becoming” rather than the philosophical God of “being.” The encounter and dialogue, between Moses and God, out of which the name emerges is the moment that transformatively envisages all future divine–human encounters.

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.

scholarly journals “The Might of My Own Hand Has Gotten Me This Wealth”: Reflections on Wealth and Poverty in the Hebrew Bible and Today

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-17
Author(s):  
Joel S. Kaminsky
Keyword(s):  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Social Concern ◽  
Social Safety Net ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Social

The growing gap between the wealthiest and poorest members of society is a pressing social concern regularly invoked in discussions surrounding taxation, the minimum wage, and the social safety net. Advocates of particular positions at times reference various biblical passages. This essay examines several relevant themes and passages within the Hebrew Bible in order to explore ways the Bible might be brought into productive conversation with these contemporary issues.

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