“Deciphering the Shema: Staircase Parallelism and the Syntax of Deuteronomy 6:4”

2011 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 582-602
Author(s):  
Judah Kraut
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Sentence Construction ◽  
Widespread Acceptance ◽  
Basic Sentence ◽  
The Many

Abstract The unusual syntax of Deut 6:4 has long puzzled expositors of the Hebrew Bible. None of the many solutions posed by commentators has ever gained widespread acceptance. The continuing, increasingly strained, efforts to unravel the verse’s syntax testify to the desirability of a new approach. In this essay, I show that the key to understanding Deut 6:4 lies in the recognition that Moses’s exhortation is couched in the AB//AC structure known as “staircase parallelism”. This pattern yields a meaning of ABC—in this case, “YHWH our God is one!” I defend this proposal in three ways, establishing that Deuteronomy is a suitable context for staircase parallelism, that at least two solid biblical precedents share the same basic sentence construction, and that staircase parallelism is literarily apropos in Deut 6.

Samson in Reception History

2020 ◽  
pp. 465-482
Author(s):  
Kelly J. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
King David ◽  
The Many

As one of the most famous figures from the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible, rivaled perhaps only by King David, the reception histories of Samson and the women of Judges 13–16 are extensive. The major events in the narrative found in Judges 13–16 involve not only Samson but also the women of the story: an unnamed mother, an unnamed Philistine wife, an unnamed prostitute, and, perhaps most illustrious of all, the named Delilah. This essay briefly outlines some of the major questions and concerns voiced by the many later readers and interpreters of Samson, revealing how the story of Samson, both in and outside the biblical text, is also a story about the women who appear in this account.

Components of Project Management Maturity Impacting Project, Program, Portfolio, and Organizational Success

2018 ◽  
pp. 128-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Chee Choong Gan ◽  
Christina May May Chin
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Performance ◽  
Project Success ◽  
Organizational Success ◽  
Direct Impact ◽  
Project Implementation ◽  
Maturity Models ◽  
New Approach ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Many ◽  
Definition Of

Due to alarmingly high failure rates attributed to either a lack of project implementation or if implemented, poor results in organizations, many PM consulting organizations have begun developing their own PM maturity models (PM3) to assess organization maturity level, to identify their clients' PM maturity gap, and to provide a pathway by which their clients could move up the maturity scale and performance. Despite the many claims of PM3 assessment capabilities, the lack of success in market adoption of PM3 models suggests the need for more studies to identify if these are due to the many definition of project success, the lack of consensus of what the components of PM3 should be, or the increasing expectations of the PM community. Thus, this chapter aims to identify the reasons behind differing organizations' views on the dimension of project success, components of PM3's direct impact on organizational performance, and how PM maturity can be measured and correlated to the various level of organizational success with a new approach known as DPM3.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Rhiannon Graybill
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
New Approach

The Hebrew Bible contains many accounts of rape and sexual violence. Feminist approaches to these stories remain dominated by Phyllis Trible’s 1984 book Texts of Terror. This chapter and book offer a new approach, drawing on feminist, queer, and affect theory and offering new readings of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen 34), Tamar (2 Sam 13), Lot’s daughters (Gen 19), Bathsheba (2 Sam 11), Hagar (Gen 16 and 21), Daughter Zion (Lam 1 and 2), and the Levite’s concubine (Judg 19). In place of “texts of terror,” this chapter opens the possibility of reading after terror. The approach offered here also engages contemporary activism against sexual violence and rape culture, bringing them to bear on biblical studies.

Everything is included in such a calculation, everything can be summed up to that result; we find in it the effects of the chemical, mechanical, physical process, the advan­ tages of activity and workforce discipline, and finally the effect of every resource, of all sorts of economic means, particularly that of a lower capital producing as much or more. The evaluation of each Company, that is to say its contribution to the association, will result from that cost, or return, combined with the number of squarefoot pro­ duced, and with the effective selling price, including of course the quality or the degree of perfection of products. What happened meanwhile in the economic field? Which fac­ tors were strong enough to lead to such a systematic calculation? The conditions of production had slightly evolved in that period, but the main change came from outside the firm. Between 1793 and 1829, the dates of the two preceding quotations, the Company's Privilege disappeared and something new emerged: competition. The upheavals resulting from the Industrial Revolution seemed to have led to the widespread acceptance of cost calcula­ tions as the only efficient means to compare the activities of com­ peting firms. This is particularly true for firms that did not have any competition before 1790. Moreover, one can observe that in­ dustrial accounting and cost accounting books appeared in France from 1817 onwards, and can find several authors of that period saying: “I am the very first to find a new approach to the prob­ lem."6 THE SETTING UP OF THE NEW ACCOUNTING SYSTEM (1820-1834) The proceedings of the Board of Director’s meetings have been preserved; from these it is apparent that a new accounting system began in 1820. However, the actual accounting records from before 1825 have not survived. From the 1825 accounting records, it is clear that there is a new system of reporting which was long in being developed; a Profit and Loss Account was pre-

2014 ◽  
pp. 254-254
Keyword(s):  
Physical Process ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Cost Accounting ◽  
Selling Price ◽  
Accounting System ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Systematic Calculation ◽  
Widespread Acceptance ◽  
New System ◽  
Main Change

Archaeology, Material Worlds, and the Arab Revolt

2020 ◽  
pp. 12-31
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
World War ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Conflict Archaeology ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Many ◽  
First World

This chapter looks at how the timely development of an interdisciplinary archaeology (modern conflict archaeology) of the First World War from the late 1990s offered a comprehensive and nuanced way of investigating the many interlocking military and cultural aspects of the Arab Revolt and its aftermath. Ephemeral archaeological traces in the sands of southern Jordan, it was hoped, would speak to the origins of modern guerrilla warfare which itself contributed to the shaping of the Middle East after 1918. The new approach showed the power of objects to create and transmit impressions and evaluations of the Revolt and its personalities—not least by the catalysing effects of finding similar items during excavations of the original landscapes whence all such objects derived their historical significance. The desert, so apparently empty of information and insight, would prove to be full of both. The key to deciphering its archaeological message lay in understanding the landscape, its layers and its objects—a quest which began with the largest artefact of all, the Hejaz Railway.

The Meaning and Telos of Israel’s Election: An Interfaith Response to N.T. Wright’s Reading of Paul

2019 ◽  
Vol 112 (04) ◽  
pp. 421-446
Author(s):  
Joel Kaminsky ◽  
Mark Reasoner
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Pauline Theology ◽  
The Many

AbstractN. T. Wright offers a systematic and highly influential metanarrative to account for Paul’s theology of Israel. However, Wright overlooks or underemphasizes important dimensions of Paul’s thinking, leading to problematic distortions. Thus, Wright claims that God rejected the historic people of Israel due to their failure to missionize the gentile nations, an idea not easily found in the Hebrew Bible texts Paul utilizes or in Paul’s own statements concerning his fellow Jews. Wright relies heavily on the diatribe of Rom 2 to build a Pauline theology of Israel, but he downplays the many positive things Paul says elsewhere about Israel’s status. Particularly troubling is Wright’s use of Rom 5 to argue that Paul characterizes Torah as divinely intended to draw sin onto Israel, with the expected consequence that human sin would reach its zenith within Israel, a view that moves Wright toward the very supersessionism against which Paul cautioned his gentile followers. These exegetical decisions, which form a tightly structured messiah-oriented understanding of Israel’s election, ignore what the Hebrew Bible and Paul affirm: while God accomplishes certain larger aims through Israel, God’s election of Israel is ultimately grounded in God’s inalienable love for Israel and Israel’s ancestors.

Laws in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Greengus
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The People ◽  
Divine Origin ◽  
The Law ◽  
Criminal Behaviors ◽  
The Many

Biblical laws are found mainly in the Pentateuch (i.e., the first five books of the Hebrew Bible). The laws are linked to the figure of Moses, who is depicted as having received them directly from God in order to transmit them to the people of Israel during the years in the Wilderness after being released from slavery in Egypt. Biblical laws are thus presented as being of divine origin. Their authority was further bolstered by a tradition that they were included in covenants (i.e., formal agreements made between God and the people as recorded in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy). Similar claims of divine origin were not made for other ancient Near Eastern laws; their authority flowed from kings, who issued the laws, although these kings might also be seen as having been placed on their thrones through the favor of the gods. The biblical law collections are unlike other ancient Near Eastern “codes” in that they include sacral laws (i.e., governing cult, worship, and ritual, as well as secular laws: namely, governing civil, and criminal behaviors). This mingling of sacral and secular categories is the likely reason both for the many terms used to denote the laws, as well as for the unexpected number of formulations in which they are presented. The formulations used in biblical law can be classified as “casuistic” or “non-casuistic.” They are not equally distributed in the books of the Pentateuch nor are they equally used with secular and sacral laws. While there are similarities in content between secular laws found in the Hebrew Bible and laws found in the ancient Near Eastern law “codes,” the latter do not exhibit a comparable variety in the numbers of law terms and formulations. The Hebrew Bible tended to “blur” the differences between the law terms and their formulations, ultimately to the point of subsuming them all under the law term torah (“teaching”) to describe the totality of the divinely given laws in the Pentateuch. Biblical studies in general and Pentateuchal studies in particular are challenged by the fact that manuscripts contemporary with the events described have not survived the ravages the time. Scholars must therefore rely on looking for “clues” within the texts themselves (e.g., the laws cited by the prophets, the reform of Josiah, the teaching of torah by Ezra, and evidence for customs and customary laws found in books of the Hebrew Bible outside of the Pentateuch).

scholarly journals Reciprocity and the Risk of Rejection: Debate over Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 422
Author(s):  
Göran Eidevall
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Positive Attitude ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Book Of Jeremiah

Sacrifice is a central but contested topic in the prophetical literature in the Hebrew Bible. Whereas some texts criticize the sacrificial cult vehemently, other texts express strong support for such a cult. Interestingly, and somewhat paradoxically, a certain writing, such as the book of Jeremiah, may contain both cult-critical prophecies and passages that promote sacrifices. Divergent interpretations of this ancient debate have engendered an intense scholarly debate. Adopting a new approach, informed by sacrifice theories that emphasize the notion of reciprocity, this article refutes the view that prophets like Amos and Jeremiah rejected all sacrifices. Rather, they (that is, the authors of these books) addressed specific situations, or explained specific catastrophes in retrospect. Viewed from this perspective, the cult-critical prophecies, as well as other references to rejected sacrifice, are in fact compatible with a basically positive attitude towards the sacrificial cult.

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