Wisdom in Dialogue with Greek Civilization

2021 ◽  
pp. 154-172
Author(s):  
Michael C. Legaspi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Greek Thought ◽  
Greek Civilization

This article surveys attempts to explore the relation of the so-called Wisdom Literature of the Hebrew Bible—the books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes—to figures and texts within Greek civilization. “Classical” and “biblical” texts have furnished a two-sided wisdom discourse within Western culture throughout the late antique, medieval, and early modern periods. Nevertheless, focused, comparative examinations of Wisdom texts in the two streams of tradition have not featured prominently in modern critical treatments of Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible. This article provides a brief review of essential backgrounds: the old dialectic between “Athens” and “Jerusalem” as well as modern attempts to distinguish “Hebrew thought” from “Greek thought.” The final section of the article turns to more recent examinations of specific parallels between the book of Ecclesiastes and Greek skepticism, the book of Job and Greek tragedy, and the book of Proverbs and virtue ethics.

Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern Egypt ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Point Of Departure

This volume deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the people who actually produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. Breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as ‘free’ or indicative of ‘corruption’, this volume reconceptualizes scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and sociocultural environments. This volume comprises a set of studies of scribal variation, beginning from the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English as a methodological point of departure, and proceeding to studies of scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from Pharaonic to Late Antique and Islamic Egypt. This volume introduces to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, and applies them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format.

The Power of the Cross and Cruciform Devices in the Carolingian World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Early Byzantine

This chapter shows the unquestionable role of the sign of the cross as the primary sign of divine authority in Carolingian material and manuscript culture, a role partly achieved at the expense of the diminishing symbolic importance of the late antique christograms. It also analyses the appearance of new cruciform devices in the ninth century as well as the adaptation of the early Byzantine tradition of cruciform invocational monograms in Carolingian manuscript culture, as exemplified in the Bible of San Paolo fuori le mura and several other religious manuscripts. The final section examines some Carolingian carmina figurata and, most importantly, Hrabanus Maurus’ In honorem sanctae crucis, as a window into Carolingian graphicacy and the paramount importance of the sign of the cross as its ultimate organizing principle.

The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography provides a comprehensive overview of the development of Latin scripts from Antiquity to the Early Modern period, of codicology, and of the cultural setting of the mediaeval manuscript. The opening section, on Latin Palaeography, treats a full range of Latin book hands, beginning with Square and Rustic Capitals and finishing with Humanistic minuscule. The Handbook is groundbreaking in giving extensive treatment to such scripts as Old Roman Cursive, New Roman Cursive, and Visigothic. Each article is written by a leading expert in the field and is copiously illustrated with figures and plates. Examples of each script with full transcription of selected plates are frequently provided for the benefit of newcomers to the field. The second section, on Codicology, contains essays on the design and physical make-up of the manuscript book, and it includes as well articles in newly-created disciplines, such as comparative codicology. The third and final section, Manuscript Setting, places the mediaeval manuscript within its cultural and intellectual setting, with extended essays on the mediaeval library, particular genres and types of manuscript production, the book trade in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and manuscript cataloguing. All articles are in English. The Handbook will be an indispensable guide to all those working in the various fields concerned with the literary and cultural dynamics of book production in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period.

fall and rise of King Oedipus

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khegan Delport
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Oedipus At Colonus

This essay is placed within a continuing debate on the appropriateness of a Christian deployment of tragedy. According David Bentley Hart, tragedy legitimates a sacrificial and scapegoating logic that is in contradiction with the Christian gospel. It promotes exclusion and therefore is imaginatively and metaphysically conservative in its import. In the ensuing argument, I hope to show through one example how even Greek tragedy can resist some of these claims. Drawing on the seminal work of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, I argue that Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle, firstly, demonstrates the inability of nomos to grasp the exception of Oedipus, and that this might constitute a critique rather than a simple legitimation of the civic order. Secondly, the narrative arc of Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus at Colonus point towards incorporation rather than final exclusion, and that his apotheosis could be read as resisting deleterious tropes of a final holocaust of the tragic figure. In the final section, drawing on Rowan Williams, I discuss the problems associated with literary Christologies in general, and whether it could be theologically feasible to talk about the Theban cycle as exhibiting a ‘proto-Christology’.

Judaism and Violence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Eisen
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Social Identity Theory ◽  
Identity Theory ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Middle East Conflict ◽  
Modern Judaism

This Element explores the potential in Judaism to incite Jews to engage in violence against non-Jews. The analysis proceeds in historical fashion, with sections devoted to the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic Judaism, medieval and early modern Judaism, and modern Zionism. The last topic is given special attention because of its relevance to the current Middle East conflict. This Element also draws on insights from social psychology to explain Jewish violence - particularly Social Identity Theory.

The Chronological Development of Wisdom Literature

2021 ◽  
pp. 372-388
Author(s):  
Markus Saur
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Short History ◽  
Ben Sira ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

In this article, the historical localization of Hebrew Bible Wisdom Literature is discussed firstly with regard to the literary development of the books of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. By examining these books one can make several observations that help to reconstruct the history not only of the individual books, but also the history of Wisdom Literature as a whole. Wisdom Literature is understood in this context as the result of a process of discussion, interaction, and interdependence, and thus the documentation of a broader discourse surrounding Wisdom topics. This discourse is reflected in the whole of Wisdom Literature of the Hebrew Bible. From this point of view, the differentiation between the Wisdom books and some other Wisdom texts, such as the Wisdom Psalms or the book of Ben Sira, is finally placed within an era overview, and thus a short history of Wisdom Literature is presented.

Concerning Altered Pasts: Reflections of an Early Modern Historian

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 413-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Woolf
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Counterfactual History ◽  
The Impact

This essay provides an extended commentary on Richard Evans’ book Altered Pasts from the perspective of a historian of a much earlier period, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essay considers much of the literature discussed by Evans, explores the “scope” and “range” of counterfactual arguments, and offers suggestions as to how and when legitimate counterfactual historical thinking itself came into being. The essay also argues that the problems inherent in counterfactual history lie less in the logic of their arguments than in the use that is made of them: specifically that a device useful, heuristically, in evaluating the impact of certain factors (or their absence) on events has been stretched by some historians beyond the weight it will bear. In the final section, the relation between fictional and nonfictional counterfactuals is explored.

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