Spinoza’s Hermeneutics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Grafton
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Sitz Im Leben ◽  
Historical Contextualization ◽  
Source Materials ◽  
Outstanding Representative

The biblical scholarship Spinoza deploys in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) stands in a long tradition of humanist philology. The radical thrust of the book lay not so much in the techniques as in the conclusions which Spinoza, spurred by his philosophical agenda, allowed himself to draw from the results. His historical contextualization of the biblical Sitz im Leben resembled what humanist philologists like Joseph Scaliger had done long before: a reconstruction of the circumstances in which a text was produced, with an eye to time, space, and culture. The central chapters in the Tractatus also show that Spinoza was not the most outstanding representative of this scholarly tradition. Drawing, for example, on the commentary in his particular edition of the Hebrew Bible, Spinoza relied only indirectly on Rabbinic source materials, which led him to misrepresent them unduly.

Midian

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Manuel Tebes
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Gulf Of Aqaba ◽  
Southern Levant ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Total Lack ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Archaeological Excavations ◽  
Written Sources

Midian was an ancient region located in northwestern Arabia. Compared with other peoples of the ancient Near East, knowledge about Midian and the Midianites is limited and restricted to a few and relatively late written sources, particularly the Hebrew Bible. The exact geographical location of the Midianites is unknown, and although the Midianite “heartland” is traditionally situated east of the Gulf of Aqaba, in some biblical texts the Midianites appear to be present in Transjordan and even invading Canaan itself. The chronological dating is also imprecise, but because biblical references to the Midianites concentrate in the Exodus and Wilderness wandering stories and are not mentioned by name in Neo-Assyrian and later Mesopotamian sources, they are usually considered to be one of the earliest Arabian tribal groups, traditionally dated between the late 2nd and early 1st millennia bce—the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages of the Syro-Palestinian archaeological periodization. In the Hebrew Bible there is an ambivalent approach toward the Midianites. While in the Patriarchal and especially in the Exodus/Wilderness traditions they are portrayed as close to the Israelites—even to the extent that according to mainstream biblical scholarship worship of Yahweh originated in Midian, this did not preclude military clashes between Israelites and Midianites at the end of the Wilderness wanderings and during the period of the Judges. Later classical, Jewish, and Christian writers located Midian east of the Gulf of Aqaba, connecting the region with the biblical theophany at Mt. Sinai. The Quranic and early Islamic traditions took the Jewish/Christian allusions to Midian and the Moses story, expanding them with ancient Arabian lore. Attempts to define a Midianite material culture in northwestern Arabia and southern Levant through archaeology remain a thorny issue because of the almost total lack of local written sources naming Midian and the few archaeological excavations carried out in northern Saudi Arabia.

Education in the Hebrew Bible

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Schniedewind ◽  
Elizabeth VanDyke
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Biblical Literature ◽  
Ben Sira ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Scribal Culture ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Sources

Education is a wide-ranging topic concerning the variety of ways in which people acquire knowledge, skills, and behaviors. As a key facet of culture, one might expect education and instruction to appear frequently within the Hebrew Bible, yet biblical literature actually provides little direct evidence as to how the ancient Israelites learned. This is true both for traditional vocations, such as the production of pottery or soldiering, and for more scholastic pursuits, such as reading or accounting. Biblical scholarship has particularly focused on scribal education, with less attention to the broader questions of enculturation. Several passages, particularly Isaiah 28, Proverbs 22–23, and Ben Sira 51, refer to education and have engendered numerous discussions. Increasingly, though, scholars have turned to extra-biblical sources in order to understand scribal culture. Studies on scribalism in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Ugarit feature prominently in many overviews of Hebrew learning. In some cases, scholars posit that these foreign scribal systems directly influenced Israelite scribes. The New Kingdom administration of Egypt left its vestiges on the Late Bronze Levant, and the empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia also had a lasting impact on scribal curriculum and tradition. These contextual studies can also be used for comparison, helping scholars model what a scribal community in Israel may have looked like. Epigraphic material from the Levant has supplemented this picture. Archaeologists have excavated a number of school texts and seals that attest to the exercises and extent of Israelite education. However, the interpretation of the biblical, comparative, and epigraphic material remains fiercely contested among scholars. Scribal education had an immediate impact on the composition of the biblical corpus, and inquiries into Hebrew education often become intertwined with theories regarding the history of biblical literature. Furthermore, discussions of scribal culture are often divorced from questions of how the society as a whole transmitted skills and knowledge. The ancient Israelite scribe is thus decontextualized from his original setting. In sum, many questions regarding education in ancient Israel remain unanswered, tantalizing, and crucial to the field as a whole.

scholarly journals Canon, intertextuality and history in Nehemiah 7:72b–10:40

2009 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter M. Venter
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Sitz Im Leben

The forming of the Hebrew Bible can be depicted as an ongoing movement from traditum to traditio. Several parallel and interactive phenomena contributed to this process. One of these was intertextuality, which played a major role in the process. This article indicates that intertextuality was not restricted to mere quotations or the recycling of existing traditum, but also included dialogue with older genres and existing ideological patterns. Aesthetic and polylogic intertextuality are shown to have been part of this process of inner-biblical exegesis. These two aspects of intertextuality are demonstrated in a discussion of the narrative in Nehemiah 7:72b. Aggadic exegesis linked to aesthetic intertextuality is found in several places in this passage. Polylogic intertextuality can be seen in the use of the Gattungen of Historical Review and Penitential Prayer in Nehemiah 9:1–37. These are linked to a Sitz im Leben during the fifth century BCE when an endeavour was made to find a new identity for the Judaeans.

Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Lipka
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Methodological Foundation ◽  
Women In The Bible ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Biblical Texts

There was relatively little scholarship focusing on women, gender, and sexuality in the Hebrew Bible until the 1970s, when modern feminist biblical scholarship first started to emerge as an outgrowth of second-wave feminism. In the 1980s, feminist biblical criticism fully blossomed as a discipline, inspiring a large body of work focusing on issues such as the depiction, treatment, and roles of women, the interrelationship between gender and power, and views toward women’s sexuality in biblical texts, and what can be discerned about various aspects of the lives of women in ancient Israel based on biblical and other evidence. In the past few decades, as the body of scholarship on women in the Bible has continued to grow, it has also broadened its scope as new methodologies and hermeneutical approaches have been introduced. Inspired in part by the rise of third wave feminism in the 1990s, there has also been an increasing amount of scholarship focusing on the intersection of race, class, and ethnicity with gender and sexuality in biblical texts, and an increasing awareness of the need to include more voices from the “two-thirds” world in the scholarly dialogue. In addition to being subjects covered by those engaging in feminist criticism, gender and sexuality studies both emerged as discrete fields in the 1980s, as biblical scholars, building upon the methodological foundation established by theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, began to examine the social, cultural, and historical construction of gender and sexuality in biblical texts. The last few decades have seen a flourishing of scholarship on gender and sexuality in the Bible that continues to both build on these foundations and go beyond them, as scholars incorporate new approaches and methodologies from the areas of gender theory, queer studies, masculinities studies, and, most recently, intersex studies into their work, offering innovative and incisive readings that shed a vivid new light on seemingly familiar biblical texts.

On the Eve of Spinoza

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk van Miert
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
The Status ◽  
Historical Contextualization ◽  
Radical Ideas

Chapter 8 demonstrates how biblical scholarship became part of normal public discourse in the course of the 1650s and 1660s. Discussions on the Sabbath, on usury, on long hair, on vernacular translations, on chronology, on the Septuagint all conspired to normalize textual criticism, linguistic analysis, and historical contextualization as ways of approaching the Bible, in juxtaposition with theological and dogmatic readings. Meanwhile, such theological discussions raged particularly in the 1660s, with pamphlet wars over newly voiced radical ideas. Together, all such disputes made very fertile ground for Spinoza’s radical biblical scholarship, which took its lead from precisely the philology developed and was made popular by Scaliger, the translators of the States’ Translation, Gomarus, Heinsius, Grotius, Saumaise, La Peyrère, Isaac Vossius, and a host of other participants in what had become a highly charged public debate over the status of the biblical text.

The Old Testament Witness

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-113
Author(s):  
Matthew Levering
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Dead ◽  
John's Gospel

In contemporary biblical scholarship that investigates the question of whether Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead, scholars generally pay some attention to the Old Testament. The first part of this chapter therefore examines the findings of the New Testament scholars Dale Allison and N. T. Wright and the Hebrew Bible scholar Jon Levenson. The chapter next examines St. Thomas Aquinas’s use of the Old Testament in commenting on John 20–1, the chapters of John’s Gospel that treat Jesus’ Resurrection appearances. In his commentary, of course, Aquinas is not attempting to investigate the historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection. Commenting on John 20–1, Aquinas includes 139 quotations from the Old Testament. The chapter argues that the verses selected by Aquinas play a valuable cumulative role in supporting the truth of the claim that Jesus rose from the dead.

One Bow or Another? A Study of the Bow in Genesis 9:8-17

2013 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen van Wolde
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Made In

AbstractBecause Gen. 9:8-17 uses the wordqĕšĕtin relation to the deity and to the clouds, the inference has been made in biblical scholarship that the text refers to a rainbow. The plausibility of this inference is tested in this article. Attention is given to the various linguistic aspects of this word in the Hebrew Bible and to the specific textual composition of Gen. 9:8-17 as well as to the broader ancient Near Eastern framework established by comparative literary and iconographic evidence. The conclusion is reached that the wordqĕšĕtdesignates in Gen. 9:8-17 a warrior’s bow which represents both the deity’s might and power as well as his willingness to transfer his power over the earth to those living on it.

scholarly journals IS THERE PHILOSOPHY IN THE HEBREW BIBLE? SOME RECENT AFFIRMATIVE PERSPECTIVES

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 583-598
Author(s):  
Jaco Gericke
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Bible Interpretation ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
Selection Of

This article discusses a selection of the most recent examples from both biblical scholarship and Jewish philosophy of the construction of the Hebrew Bible as a philosophical resource. By way of a descriptive overview of the relevant ideas in the writings of exemplars such as Davies, Hazony, Gericke, Glouberman and Sekine, the study reveals a neglected albeit radical trend in the contemporary attempted return of philosophy to Hebrew Bible interpretation and vice-versa. These new developments are labelled “philosophical maximalism”, involving as they do the classification of the entire corpus of the Hebrew Bible as philosophical literature, in one sense or another

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