Biblical Performance Criticism, among other things, relies on how a biblical story is embodied and, as a result, viscerally experienced by the performer as a means for gaining a better understanding of how to more fully comprehend and appreciate, and then potentially interpret with more accurate integrity, the biblical narratives. This process goes way beyond the left-brain intellect, permeating the very physiology of the teller in a way that provides a more multidimensional grasp of scripture, giving insights that perhaps could not be gleaned in any other way. This article, written by a woman, specifically focuses on how the stories of certain biblical women took on more profound meaning when embodied, experienced, and understood through the unique reality of females throughout the past few millennia.
One of the most crucial sources for divulging knowledge about the nature of God and his relationship with his creation are the various names by which God is identified throughout the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic corpus. This chapter examines those names, especially the Tetragrammaton, based on God’s revelation to Moses recorded in Exodus of the name “I will be who I will be.” Close readings of the biblical narratives as interpreted by all the Jewish intellectual traditions, including rabbinic/midrashic, rationalist/philosophical, and kabbalistic/mystical, reveal a God of “becoming” rather than the philosophical God of “being.” The encounter and dialogue, between Moses and God, out of which the name emerges is the moment that transformatively envisages all future divine–human encounters.
This chapter examines biblical narratives to illuminate the role of Christ’s passion and death in bringing a person to a life in grace. Reflection on the narratives shows that Christ’s passion and death are a most promising way for God to help a human person to the surrender which is the necessary condition for spiritual and moral regeneration. The stories of the temptations of Christ show the way in which Christ’s suffering and death are connected to justification and sanctification. A person’s ceasing to resist the grace of God and surrendering to God’s love is the pinnacle on which her salvation has to stand. If we focus on this necessary condition for salvation, we can see the reason for Christ’s suffering. What can be gained by weakness that could not be gotten through power is the melting of a heart accustomed to willed loneliness and hardened against joy.
Origen mentions Philo by name only three times in his surviving works. More often, he refers to Philo obliquely as “one of our predecessors” or, more literally, “one of those who came before us.” An analysis of Origen’s references to Philo in light of his usage of the terms Jew, Hebrew, Israel, and Ebionite in Contra Celsum and the Commentary on Matthew reveals Origen’s approval of Philo’s allegorical interpretations of biblical narratives. Yet on one occasion, Origen criticizes Philo for failing to interpret the commandments of the Jewish law “according to the spirit” rather than “according to the letter.” Origen charges Philo with committing the same error that he charges against Jews in general, namely, the failure to interpret and observe the commandments of the Mosaic law spiritually rather than literally.
Biblical narratives about ostensibly “local” barter (Abraham’s purchase of the cave at Machpelah), protection of battle spoils (Achan’s theft and subsequent execution), and commodification of labor and bodies (Ruth gleaning for hours and offering herself to Boaz) reveal much about ideologies of economic control operative in ancient Israel. The materialist analysis of Roland Boer provides a richly detailed study of Israelite agrarian and tributary practices, offering a salutary corrective to naïve views of Israelite economic relations. Highlighting labor as the most ruthlessly exploited resource in the ancient Near East, Boer examines the class-specific benefits and sustained violence of economic formations from kinship-household relations to militarized extraction. Boer’s erudite study will compel readers to look afresh at the subjugation of the poor and plundering of the powerless as constitutive features of diverse economic practices throughout the history of ancient Israel.
This chapter maintains that child characters have been long overlooked in biblical scholarship and calls attention to their critical roles in shaping the texts of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. After a summarizing overview of recent scholarship, the chapter briefly discusses Hebrew and Greek terms that indicate children and youth. It proposes a new methodology, calledchildist interpretation, which offers tools for discovering the role and importance of young characters in biblical narratives. This six-step process then serves as a vehicle for analyzing the stories of Naaman’s slave girl (2 Kings 5:1–14) and Herodias’s daughter (Mark 16:7–29). By questioning traditional hegemonic interpretive assumptions from a fresh perspective, childist interpretation heralds an innovative and significant development in biblical narrative analysis.
The article contends that Dr King makes an other-typological illustrative use of the Exodus story in his preaching – one of the most significant biblical narratives that the Black church in the US holds dear. This peculiar use of the Exodus story differentiates itself from the conventional typological understanding and use of the same story in the Black church’s history. While in the latter the Exodus story has a symbolic meaning of the irreconcilable conflict between the oppressed and the oppressing reality, in the former the same story contains a spiritual lesson that what is really hoped for in the midst of the seemingly irreconcilable racial and social conflict is compassion, liberation, and reconciliation for both parties involved. This article, by examining a representative sermon of Dr King on the Exodus story, shows that his other-typological illustrative approach originates from his fundamental theological ideal of universal reconciliation.
This chapter takes its starting point from the African experience, across a range of African contexts, of Africa as both the subject and object of biblical narrative. When the Bible came to Africa, it came with well-established colonial metanarratives, constructed in part from biblical narratives. These colonial metanarratives were in turn partly reconstructed by the engagement with African others, from both a European and an African perspective along two diverging trajectories, with biblical narrative making a contribution to both. This chapter focuses on the capacity of biblical narrative, biblical story, to be both incorporated into “local” metanarratives and to shape these metanarratives. The contexts that are the focus of this chapter are largely “third world” contexts, across which there are significant family resemblances and important contextual differences.
An other-typological illustration of the Exodus story according to Dr King’s perception of universal reconciliation in his sermon on Exodus 14:30