The Origins of the Noahide Laws

2011 ◽  
pp. 11-35
Author(s):  
David Novak
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Moral Standard ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Demographic

This chapter traces the origins of the Noahide laws in the history of Judaism. Earlier scholars located its origins variously: in the Bible, among Hittite legal scholars, and during the Maccabean era. The chapter maintains, contrary to prior scholarship, that the concept of the Noahide is absent until the first century CE; that is, it is a rabbinic creation. While theology can discover the beginnings of the Noahide laws in the Torah, their historical starting point can only be established following the social, demographic, and religious dislocations of the Second Temple's destruction in 70 CE. For the rabbis, these laws originated prior to the Sinaitic revelation; they were the moral standard for the entire gentile world, and that world of course included the ancestors of those who would later accept the covenant at Sinai. Israelites before Sinai, then, were Noahides. The Noahide laws were also considered obligatory for all time, and would be the measure by which gentiles would be judged.

Chapter Summaries

2011 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Matthew Lagrone
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Moral Standard ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Demographic

This chapter begins with reflections on some previously proposed historical timeframes for the formation of Noahide law. Earlier scholars located its origins variously: in the Bible, among Hittite legal scholars and during the Maccabean era. This chapter maintains, contrary to prior scholarship, that the concept of the Noahide is absent until the first century CE; that is, it is a rabbinic creation. While theology can discover the beginnings of the Noahide laws in the Torah, their historical starting point can only be established following the social, demographic and religious dislocations of the Second Temple’s destruction in 70 CE. For the rabbis, these laws originated prior to the Sinaitic revelation; they were the moral standard for the entire gentile world, and that world of course included the ancestors of those who would later accept the covenant at Sinai. Israelites before Sinai, then, were Noahides....

The Property Species

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart J. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Symbolic Thought ◽  
Core Property ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? The Property Species explores how Homo sapiens acquires, perceives, and knows the custom of property, and why it might be relevant for understanding how property works in the twenty-first century. Arguing from some hard-to-dispute facts that neither the natural sciences nor the humanities—nor the social sciences squarely in the middle—are synthesizing a full account of property, this book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: All human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the origins of property lie not in food, mates, territory, or land, but in the very human act of creating, with symbolic thought, something new that did not previously exist. Integrating cognitive linguistics with the philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, this book makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. The provocative implications are that property—not property rights—is an inherent fundamental principle of economics, and that legal realists and the bundle-of-sticks metaphor are wrong about the facts regarding property. Written by an economist who marvels at the natural history of humankind, the book is essential reading for experts and any reader who has wondered why people claim things as “Mine!,” and what that means for our humanity.

The first century of English protestantism and the growth of national identity

1982 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 309-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
First Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Zeal

Their sense of national identity is not something that men have been in the habit of directly recording. Its strength or weakness, in relation to commitment to international causes or to localist sentiment, can often only be inferred by examining political and religious attitudes and personal behaviour. So far as the early modern period is concerned, the subject is hazardous because groups and individuals must have varied enormously in the extent to which national identity meant something to them or influenced their lives. The temptation to generalise must be resisted. It is all too easy to suppose that national identity became well established in England in the Tudor century, when a national culture, based on widespread literacy among gentry, yeomen and townsmen, flowered as it had never done before, when the bible was first generally available in English, when John Foxe produced his celebrated Acts and Monuments, better known as the Book of Martyrs. Recent work reassessing the significance of Foxe’s account of the English reformation and other Elizabethan polemical writings provdes a convenient starting point for this brief investigation of some of the connections between religious zeal and national consciousness between 1558 and 1642.

scholarly journals Palaeohispanic Languages and Epigraphies

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multidisciplinary Perspective ◽  
Do So

At least four writing systems—in addition to the Phoenician, Greek, and Latin ones—were used between the fifth century BCE and the first century CE to write the indigenous languages of the Iberian peninsula (the so-called Palaeohispanic languages): Tartessian, Iberian, Celtiberian, and Lusitanian. In total over three thousand inscriptions are preserved in what is certainly the largest corpus of epigraphic expression in the western Mediterranean world with the exception of the Italian peninsula. The aim of this book is to present a state of the question that includes the latest cutting-edge scholarship on these epigraphies and the languages that they transmit. To do so, the editors have put together a volume that from a multidisciplinary perspective brings together linguistic, philological, epigraphic, numismatic, historical, and archaeological aspects of the surviving inscriptions. The study of these languages is essential to achieve a better understanding of the social, economic, and cultural history of Hispania and the ancient western Mediterranean. They are also the key to our understanding of colonial Phoenician and Greek literacy, which lies at the root of the spread of these languages and also of the diffusion of Roman literacy, which played an important role in the final expansion of the so-called Palaeohispanic languages.

scholarly journals “Wir Arme Leut”: Undignified Death and Madness in Berg’s Wozzeck

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meaghan Parker
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Tragic Hero ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Death Experience ◽  
History Of

Images in Western art of the tragic hero meeting his end typically conjure Romantic topics of honour, stoicism, and transcendence, yet it is questionable whether these projections of artistic death translate to the lived experiences of the dying. The titular protagonist of Alban Berg’s 1922 opera, Wozzeck, experiences death in a way that starkly contrasts Romantic ideals. Wozzeck does not die the honourable, ‘masculine’ death that might be expected from a tragic hero; rather, he capitulates to madness, misery, and poverty. Spurned by those who socially outrank him, Wozzeck is condemned to a shameful death, his fate sealed by his destitution and the sanctimonious prejudice against his ‘immoral’ life. These considerations provide a fascinating starting point for an examination of Berg’s poignant representation of Wozzeck’s death — a death that reflects early twentieth century attitudes that shaped and stigmatized the death experience. In this article I will frame my discussion of Wozzeck by considering the history of death in Western society, particularly the stigmas surrounding the gender and class of the dying individual. This history will inform my analysis of the symbolism in Berg’s music. Detailed analysis of Wozzeck sheds a critical light on the social stigma and class structure mapped onto the suffering, madness, and death of Wozzeck and his lover Marie.

Materials for the Study of Labor and Working Class History in Italy

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Kenneth Kirkland
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The subject suggested in the title is so broad as to make it rather difficult to decide what boundaries to draw around the study of various resources available to the historian or other social scientist who sets out to study labor history, the social history of Italian workers and peasants, and the political and intellectual history of socialism and other radical movements. Keeping in mind that the following discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an indication of the necessary starting point to begin an investigation is probably the best way to understand this note.

scholarly journals Competition: A Critical History of a Concept

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-59
Author(s):  
Nicholas Gane
Keyword(s):  
Market Equilibrium ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

This article expands Michel Foucault's genealogy of liberalism and neoliberalism by analysing the concept of competition. It addresses four key liberal conceptions of competition in turn: the idea of competition as a destructive but progressive and thus necessary force (roughly 1830–90); economic theories of market equilibrium that theorize competition mathematically (1870 onwards); socio-biological ideas of competition as something natural (1850–1900); and sociological arguments that see competition as adding value to the social (1900–20). From this starting point, the article considers the ways in which three main trajectories of neoliberal thought that emerged from the early 1920s onwards – Austrian, German and American – developed and responded to these conceptualizations of competition. In conclusion, it is argued that this history of the concept of competition leads to a new understanding of the tensions that lie at the heart of neoliberal thought, and which are largely missing from Foucault's account.

IV. Big-Business Pressure Groups and Bismarck's Turn to Protectionism, 1873–79

1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helmut Böhme
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
The United States ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Pressure Groups ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Short Period ◽  
History Of

Although the first decade of the German Empire has long been a central topic of historical research, the question with which this essay is concerned—Bismarck's relationship to the pressure groups at this time—cannot be answered satisfactorily on the basis of the material known hitherto. This is due to the fact that until very recently historians have concentrated on the diplomatic-political occurrences. Bismarck's eastern policy, the Livadia affair, the ‘war-in-sight crisis’, the Berlin Congress, and the change from the Three Emperors' Alliance to the ‘Eternal’ Treaty with the Danube monarchy—these are the events always used to demonstrate Bismarck's ‘genius’ in the field of foreign policy. On the problem of the ‘Kulturkampf’ much less effort has been expended. Here Bismarck's outstanding political skill was not as apparent as it was in his judgement of international relations. Moreover, this question was bound up from the very beginning with a strong ideological bias which only slightly weakened after World War II for the first time. Even less attention has been paid to the problems of domestic and social policy and economic developments have been almost totally neglected. It is true that these items have recently obtained new historical relevance from the new socio-political point of view, but up to the present day they have not been clarified. The chief general contributions of this kind have been published by non-German historians (e.g. Rosenberg, Lambi, and Pflanze) in the United States or in Canada. These studies, however, give inadequate answers to specific questions, as do the detailed essays of Karl-Erich Born and Wolfgang Zorn with their systematizing way of reflexion. They do not deal with our formulation of the question: the relationship between economic development and political events in a comparatively short period. Nevertheless, the essays of Born and Zorn will serve as a starting-point for our own investigation. Born in particular realizes the urgent need for more detailed research in the social and economic sphere, and pleads for a ‘supplementary’ approach (Ergänzungsgeschichte). He states thatthe history of the aristocracy during the industrial age has to be completed by studies dealing with the history of the trade unions; by dissertations on the history of industrial branches, commercial centres, and companies; and last but not least by works on the disintegration of the old bourgeoisie. Then we shall be able to extend the political history of the German Empire, which is largely clarified, to a comprehensive view of a German historical epoch by adding the social and economic history of the late nineteeth century.

Paradigmenwechsel ‐ welches Paradigma? : Die Pentateuchkrise als Krise der Literarkritik

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-151
Author(s):  
Siegbert Riecker
Keyword(s):  
Historical Background ◽  
Current Crisis ◽  
Source Criticism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Empirical Perspective ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Summary It would be too simple to attribute the current crisis in research on the Pentateuch to the demise of the Wellhausen paradigm (the documentary hypothesis) and the resulting diversity of methods. Rather, these are merely symptoms of a fundamental crisis in the source critical paradigm as a whole. The difficulties with the nature of sources, their literary scope and the criteria for their division are only part of the wider problem. The introduction of non-verifiable ‘redactors’ and ‘Fortschreibung’ (updating) to cope with anomalies of a hypothesis seems methodologically just as questionable as the reconstruction of the social-historical background of individual literary strata (‘pseudo historicism’). The increasingly complex diachronic overall models are lacking plausibility and credibility, especially since the reconstruction of several stages in the development of the text is practically impossible from an empirical perspective. The alternative to the classic paradigm of source criticism is a literary paradigm that returns to the starting point of the testimony of the biblical texts themselves. Of course, literary tensions and sources must not be ignored. However, systems of interpretation to explain inconsistencies should not be based on methods developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but on the ancient literary conventions of the Bible and its environment.

Sprachwandel und Etymologie in Der Spanischen Sprachwissenschaft Des Siglo De Oro

1984 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Werner Bahner
Keyword(s):  
National Language ◽  
Siglo De Oro ◽  
Good Opportunity ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of Linguistics ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
First Time

Summary The Renaissance constitutes a new phase in the history of linguistics. The study of modern languages in particular contributed to enlarge the scope of philological concern as scholars try to promote and to codify a young national language. During this time philologists give particular attention to the origin of these vernaculars, distinguishing the different stages in their evolution and developing an especial awareness of chronology. For the representatives of a national philology, Latin is the starting point, the mould according to which the vernaculars are described and classified. Soon, however, more and more traits are recognized which are particular to these living languages, and which do not agree with the traditions of Latin grammar. On the one hand, modifications on the theoretical level are called for, and, on the other, there is a good opportunity to demonstrate the particularity of a given vernacular. All these tendencies can be found for the first time in the writings on Cas-tillian by the great philologist Antonio de Nebrija (1444–1522). Nebrija recognized a series of phonetic correspondences which, much later in the 19th century, are transformed into ‘phonetic laws’ by a rigorous methodology. In so doing the elaboration of orthographic principles had been for him a stimulus for his explications. In his “Diálogo de la lengua”, Juan de Valdés (devoted himself more extensively to the social aspects of Castillian, to linguistic changes, and to the historical causes for the distribution of Romance languages on the Iberian peninsula, stressing expecially the role of the ‘Reconquista’. The work of Bernardo José de Aldrete (1560–1641) offers a synthesis of all these efforts concerning the evolution of Castillian. He discusses all the substrata and superstrata of the language, sketches the different stages of development of his native tongue, examines Old Castillian with the help of medieval texts, and exploits what Nebrija had noted about the phonetic correspondences. In terms of scholarship, Aldrete’s work constitutes the culmination point in the movement engaged in supporting the rights of the Castillian language et in documenting its sovereignity vis-à-vis the Latin tradition.

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