CODEX B 19A: STAGES OF LEGITIMATION OF THE MASORET BIBLE ANCIENT EXAMPLE

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-42
Author(s):  
Sergey V. GRIGORISHIN ◽  
Ekaterina V. NOVOKRESHCHENNYKH
Keyword(s):  
Research Methodology ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Philosophical Hermeneutics ◽  
Effect Relationship ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Status ◽  
Rabbinical Literature ◽  
Single Standard ◽  
The Moment

This article examines the cultural and historical circumstances of the appearance and introduction into the scientific circulation of the oldest manuscript code of the Hebrew Bible — the Leningrad Code B 19A. The authors of the article make an attempt to restore the contextual connections of the Code with Jewish philosophy and biblical textology. The concept of the research is built on the basis of genealogical analysis, which opened up the opportunity to first analyze the stages of legitimation of Codex B 19A that are closest to the present, and then move into the depth of chronology, right up to the moment of creation of the studied text. The result of the study was the identification and explication of internal links between the Codex B 19A, Masoretic schools, Rabbanites, Karaites and, finally, medieval critics of the biblical text. The research methodology is based on the principles of philosophical hermeneutics, the comparative historical approach of the genealogical method as applied to textual criticism. Revealing the cause-and-effect relationship in the legitimization of the Masoretic Bible showed that the need to create a single standard for the sacred text arose already by the middle of the 8th century, the time of the emergence of the Karaite movement. The refusal of the Karaites to submit to the authority of classical rabbinical literature led to a rethinking of the biblical text. Together with the status of the main sacred book, the Bible turned out to be a text around which philological, philosophical and theological discussions became possible. Awareness of the fact that the biblical text has different interpretations led the Rabbanites and Karaites to the conclusion that it was necessary to create a philological standard for the Bible. For this reason, the authority of the Masoretes as specialists in the vocalization of the text, the direct creators of the vocalization system, has sharply increased. The Ben Asher family of Tiberias emerged as the main Masoretic school, and its last representative, Aaron Ben Asher, became the most authoritative Masoretic. Aaron Ben Asher owns the Masorah system introduced in the Aleppo Codex and copied in the Leningrad Codex B 19A. Maimonides was the first among Jewish philosophers to appreciate the textual achievements of Aaron Ben Asher, which significantly raised the authority of the Masoret in rabbinic and Karaite intellectual circles.

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.

Defamiliarizing the popular image of the bible in some contemporary rewritings in english

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Ewa Rychter
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Status ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Popular Image ◽  
Fervent Believer

Abstract This paper focuses on the ways some recent British and Irish rewritings of the Bible estrange what has become the publicly accepted and dominant image of the biblical text. Recently, the Bible has been given the status of “home scripture” (Sherwood, Yvonne. 2012. Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age. Cambridge: CUP) and become a domesticated and conservative text, a rather placid cultural/literary monument, an important foundation of democracy, a venerable religious document judged more tolerant and liberal than other scriptures. Though the Bible used to be perceived as an explosive text, peppered with potentially offensive passages, today its enmity is neutralised either by linking the Bible with ancient times or by relating it to people’s religious beliefs and by entrenching its more scandalous parts within the discourse of tolerance. It is such an anodyne image of the Bible that the biblical rewritings of Roberts, Winterson, Barnes, Crace, Pullman, Tóibin, Alderman, Diski defamiliarize. By showing biblical events through the eyes of various non-standard focalizers, those novels disrupt the formulaic patterns of the contemporary perception of the Bible. It is through these strange perspectives that we observe the critical moment when the overall meaning and the role of the biblical text is established and the biblical story is actually written down. Importantly, it is also the moment when somebody moulds the scripture according to their ideas and glosses over all the complexities, violence and immorality related to the events the biblical text describes. Also, contemporary biblical rewritings defamiliarize the currently popular image of the Bible – that of a whitewashed text which inculcates morality, conserves social order and teaches love and tolerance, by employing images of disintegration, dirt and contagion as well as by constructing a figure of a fervent believer in the Bible and its ideas.

Laudian Foxe-hunting? William Laud and the status of John Foxe in the 1630s

1997 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 329-342
Author(s):  
Damian Nussbaum
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Close Association ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Status ◽  
Important Position ◽  
Acts And Monuments

When the prosecutors of William Laud were seeking damning evidence against the Archbishop, they seized upon the fate of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments in the 1630s. They produced a catalogue of abuses, occasions on which Laud had attacked, impugned, or banned the volumes. In his report of the trial, Prynne gave these cases of Foxe-hunting an important position, directly after the accusation that Laud had hindered the distribution of Bibles. The prominence given to Foxe, and the close association with the Bible, were typical of the ways the martyrologist was handled in the early seventeenth century, and tell us much about the regard in which he was held within the English Church. His Book of Martyrs had attained the status of a quasi-biblical text. His works, invoked with an almost scriptural reverence, were appealed to as an unquestionable authority on matters of ecclesiastical history and Protestant tradition.

Biblical Philology in the Long Seventeenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henk Nellen ◽  
Piet Steenbakkers
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Impact

Textual criticism and historical research played a pivotal role in the controversies about the divine status of the Bible. This introductory chapter attempts to sketch the main context of the debates, historical as well as historiographical, for the single chapters that follow. The chapter gives an explanation of the nature of early modern biblical philology, addresses the conservatism in the practice of biblical philology that arose from psychological, socio-cultural, and theological impediments, highlights the impact of inter-confessional strife on the status of the Bible, and pays special attention to intellectual eccentrics, Thomas Hobbes, Lodewijk Meyer, and Benedict Spinoza in particular, who availed themselves of innovative exegesis for the dismantling of the divine status of the Bible.

Migration imaginations of residents of the Khabarovsk territory: experience of the pilot sociological research

2020 ◽  
Vol 93 (4) ◽  
pp. 215-226
Author(s):  
V. V. Zubkov ◽  
◽  
P.G. Sidorov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Research Methodology ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Target Groups ◽  
Permanent Residence ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
The Status ◽  
Personal Attitudes ◽  
The Stability

The article presents the results of a pilot sociological study of migration perceptions of the population, the reasons for their formation, as well as the factors and conditions under which the willingness to live and work in the Khabarovsk Territory is realized. The analysis of the results of the survey, which according to the research methodology was conducted in two target groups ("residents of the region" and "student youth"), indicates the stability and reproduction of migration intentions as a determined willingness and desire to leave the place of permanent residence in the Khabarovsk territory. The sociological approach to the study of migration perceptions of the target groups under study consists in determining the target attitudes, guidelines and expectations from moving, due to the status-role set and personal attitudes of respondents.

Scripturalizing and the Second Amendment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosamond C. Rodman
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
White Children ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Second Amendment ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
Half Decade

Expanding beyond the text of the Bible, this chapter explores instead a piece of political scripture, namely the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. Over the last half-decade, the Second Amendment has come to enjoy the status of a kind of scripture-within-scripture. Vaulted to a much more prominent status than it had held in the first 150 years or so of its existence, and having undergone a remarkable shift in what most Americans think it means, the Second Amendment provides an opportunity to examine the linguistic, racial, and gendered modes by which these changes were effected, paying particular attention to the ways in which white children and white women were conscripted into the role of the masculine, frontier-defending US citizen.

Bayle, the Bible, and the Remonstrant Tradition at the Time of the Commentaire philosophique

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria-Cristina Pitassi
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reason ◽  
Natural Light ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Absolute Norm ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Status

Bayle’s equivocal relationship to Arminianism is here examined from the perspective of the status of the Bible. Though rejecting the doctrine that every word was to be considered divinely inspired, Bayle did defend the divinity of Scripture in his polemic with Jean Le Clerc. For Le Clerc, biblical criticism could solve theological conflicts by discovering the authentic meaning of Scripture, but Bayle insisted that natural light precedes exegesis, and revelation is limited to those matters that do not conflict with reason. He dissociates himself from Socinianism by distinguishing moral from speculative reason. Only moral reason offers an absolute norm. Bayle disregards the Arminian distinction between what is against reason and what is beyond reason. His Commentaire philosophique juxtaposes the natural light that can identify divine elements in the Bible with our historical reality that frustrates its capacity for apprehending religious truths. Thus Bayle inevitably clashes with the Arminian tradition.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk van Miert
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
The Bible ◽  
External Pressures ◽  
History Of

In the conclusion, the intrinsic deconstructive power of philology is contrasted with external pressures moving philology in different political and religious directions. The positions of the main protagonists differed widely, but they show that the less they were institutionalized, the more freedom they had to present unorthodox theories. As in the case of natural science, biblical philology was a handmaiden of theology, but it could also be used against certain theologies. In the end, the accumulation of evidence regarding the history of the Bible and the transmission of its texts, could not fail to impinge on the authority of Scripture. The problems in the transmission of the biblical text were widely discussed in the decade leading up to the publication of the Theological-political Treatise. Readers of Spinoza were already familiar with the type of reasoning which Spinoza employed in the central chapters of his notorious work.

Reception History and the Interpretation of Revelation

2020 ◽  
pp. 375-393
Author(s):  
Ian Boxall
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
History Of Interpretation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts

The chapter describes the discipline of reception history as the study of the ongoing use, interpretation, and impact of a biblical text. If the history of interpretation has often focused on the ways biblical texts are understood in commentaries and theological writings, reception history also considers how a book was received in spirituality and worship, in music, drama, literature, visual art, and textual criticism. Criteria for selecting and organizing materials useful for reception history are discussed, and there is a review of recent attempts to provide broad overviews of Revelation’s reception history, along with specific examples of the value of the discipline for interpreting Revelation.

Reading from Worlds under the Text: Oceanic Women in the missio Dei

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-51
Author(s):  
Rosemary Dewerse ◽  
Cathy Hine
Keyword(s):  
Global South ◽  
Missio Dei ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Women

Abstract Missional hermeneutics is a relatively recent development in the field of biblical hermeneutics, emerging from several decades of scholarly engagement with the concept and frame of missio Dei. In a key recent publication in the field, Reading the Bible Missionally, edited by Michael Goheen, the voices of the Global South and of women – and certainly of women from Oceania – do not feature. In this article the authors, both Oceanic women, interrupt the discourse to read biblical text from their twice-under perspective. The Beatitudes provide the frame and the lens for a spiralling discussion of the missio Dei as, to borrow from Letty M. Russell, “calculated inefficiency.” Stories of faithful Oceanic women interweave with those of God and of biblical women, offering their complexities to challenge assumptions and simplicities.

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