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 Succession Narrative in Twenty-first-century Research

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-234
Author(s):  
Andrew Knapp
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Traditional Theory ◽  
Kings 1 ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Narrative Scholarship ◽  
The Many ◽  
1 Kings ◽  
Succession Narrative

Although research on the Succession Narrative has proliferated in recent decades, no comprehensive surveys of secondary literature have appeared since the mid-1990s. In this article, I survey the many disparate works of Succession Narrative scholarship that have been published since that time. I focus on recent conclusions about the boundaries, unity, date, intention, and theme of the traditionally delineated Succession Narrative (2 Samuel 9–20; 1 Kings 1–2). While the traditional theory of the text, as formulated by Leonhard Rost, dominated scholarship of the twentieth century, in the twenty-first, nothing approaching a consensus can be claimed for any aspect of the Succession Narrative.

The Conquest of Memory in the Book of Joshua

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ovidiu Creangă
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Sensitivity ◽  
Spatial Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Land Acquisition ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Narrative Studies ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literary Methods ◽  
Reading Approaches

This chapter tracks the shift in reading approaches to the book of Joshua, from the more traditional criticisms of source and form during the twentieth century to the “new” literary methods that have characterized the transition to the twenty-first century in biblical scholarship. The poetics stance that gradually emerged within the field of Joshua scholarship opened up the book to constructivist as well as deconstructivist readings. The narrative studies mentioned in the chapter exhibit not only remarkable literary depth, but also a strong social and cultural sensitivity that trouble the book’s colonial and androcentric outlook. Using the lens of postmodern spatial theory (“Thirdspace”), the reading of Joshua’s conquest at the end of the chapter decenters the book’s core construction of Israel’s identity around violence, land acquisition, and memorialization of the conquest. The critique “from the margin” gives way to a more compassionate “center.”

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
Background Information ◽  
Racial Categorization ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Us ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Biblical Texts

This chapter discusses the aims of Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible. The key research questions for this book are: (1) How did Hagar become Black? and (2) What purpose did or does that serve? It situates this project at the intersection of African American biblical scholarship and reception history within biblical scholarship. This chapter introduces terminology related to race and ethnicity and provides background information on issues of color within the ancient world and within biblical texts. It explores the persistence of racial categorization within US society and the US literary imagination despite the lack of biological or genetic basis for contemporary notions of race. It discusses the importance of African American vernacular traditions and the ongoing and dynamic social and cultural interactions between African Americans and biblical texts. It provides an overview of each chapter within the book.

Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 357-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Cultural Turn

After highlighting the substantial gains made by the reception historical approach, this article proceeds to point out some of its inherent limitations, particularly when applied to biblical texts. In attending to the material-aesthetic dimensions of biblical texts, media, and ideas of the Bible, especially in dialogue with anthropological, material-historical, and media-historical approaches, these limitations become acute and call for a harder cultural turn than is possible from a strictly reception-historical approach. This article proposes to move beyond reception history to cultural history, from research into how biblical texts and the Bible itself are received to how they are culturally produced as discursive objects. Such a move would involve a double turn in the focus of biblical scholarship and interpretation: from hermeneutical reception to cultural production, and from interpreting scripture via culture to interpreting culture, especially religious culture, via its productions of scripture. As such, it would bring biblical research into fuller and more significant dialogue with other fields of comparative scriptural studies, religious studies, and the academic humanities and social sciences in general.

scholarly journals Receiving the Word in Image: Federico Zuccaro’s the Annunciation Broadcast by Prophets (1565) and the Reception History of the Bible in the Counter-Reformation

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloe Church
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Visual Exegesis ◽  
Church Tradition

Abstract The Annunciation Broadcast by Prophets (1565) was an altarpiece created by Federico Zuccaro (1541–1609) for the Church of the Annunciation, Rome. It was the first image commissioned by the Order of the Jesuits, a movement involved in propagating the objectives of the Counter-Reformation Church. Altarpieces were particularly effective points of communication between the Catholic Church and the lay beholder, and used visual exegesis as a means to communicate appropriated receptions of biblical texts. The intimate connection that these objects have to their theological and political context marks them as significant moments of biblical reception, that have, up to this point, been overlooked by historians in the field. This article identifies the broader lacuna in scholarship surrounding the reception history of the Bible during the Counter-Reformation. Whilst this is due to a preference for studies of the Bible in the Protestant Reformation, the lack of scholarly investment poorly reflects the relevance of the Counter-Reformation period to the reception-historical methodology. The context prioritized the interpretation of the Bible through the lens of Church tradition, or in other words, the history of the Bible’s reception. This affinity is echoed in the reception-historical approach found in contemporary biblical scholarship, creating a hermeneutical link between the two contexts. Visual culture was a valuable expression of Counter-Reformation rhetoric and visualized the mediation of biblical texts through Church tradition. This article uses Zuccaro’s altarpiece as a tool to argue this hypothesis and postulate the intimate relationship maintained between texts and their reception in Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

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