Historical Precedents and Contexts

2015 ◽  
pp. 57-79
Author(s):  
Ada Rapoport-Albert
Keyword(s):  
Rabbinic Literature ◽  
Moral Integrity ◽  
Public Activity ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Status

This chapter analyses the rabbinic traditions that were inherited from four women who were called by the title of prophetess: Miriam, Deborah, Huldah, and Noadiah. It discusses how the Bible recognizes the phenomenon of the prophetess without pondering its validity and how rabbinic literature views it as problematic. It also explores the status of the Bible's prophetesses that conflicts with the Sages' fundamental exclusion of women from public activity and from positions of ritual, spiritual, or scholarly leadership. The chapter describes the classical rabbinic sources that increased with the number of biblical prophetesses known by name and who were acknowledged by the authenticity of their prophetic powers. It explains how prophetesses tend to deprecate their character by means of an exegesis that cast aspersions on their moral integrity or put them in the shadow of their husbands.

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.

The Question of God’s Perfection

2021 ◽  
pp. 014610792110306
Author(s):  
Cornell Collin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Biblical Theology ◽  
The State ◽  
Rabbinic Literature ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Theological Interpretation ◽  
World Religions ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Present Essay

Is God perfect? The recent volume entitled The Question of God’s Perfection stages a conversation on that topic between mostly Jewish philosophers, theologians, and scholars of rabbinic literature. Although it is neither a work of biblical theology nor a contribution to the theological interpretation of scripture, The Question of God’s Perfection yields stimulating results for these other, intersecting projects. After briefly describing the volume’s central question and contents, the present essay situates the volume’s offerings within the state of the biblical-theological and theological-interpretive fields. In its next section, it considers—and compares— The Question of God’s Perfection with one twentieth-century theological antecedent, the Dutch theologian K.H. Miskotte. In closing, it poses questions for ongoing discussion. The Question of God’s Perfection: Jewish and Christian Essays on the God of the Bible and Talmud, edited by Yoram Hazony & Dru Johnson. Philosophy of Religion – World Religions 8. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2019. ISBN 9789004387959

The Bible and Israeli Identity

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Shapira
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Holy Trinity ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
The People ◽  
The Status ◽  
National Life ◽  
National Romanticism ◽  
Land Of Israel

ldquo;In our two thousand years of exile, we have not totally lost our creativity, but the sheen of the Bible dulled in exile, as did the sheen of the Jewish people. Only with the renewal of the homeland and Hebrew independence have we been able to reassess the Bible in its true, full light,” Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1953. This statement illustrates several core attitudes of the Jewish national renaissance movement towards the Bible. Ben-Gurion depicted a direct relationship between the state of the Jewish people and the status of the Bible: The two rose and fell together. His words are reminiscent of philosopher Martin Buber, Revisionist leader Zeءev Jabotinsky, and others, all of whom postulated a symbiotic relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel: “Just as the Jewish people need the land to live a full life, so the land needs the Jewish people to be complete” wrote Buber. The Bible, according to Ben-Gurion, was the third component of the Jewish “holy trinity” of people, land, and book. It served as testimony of Jewish national life in the land of Israel in former times, as a blueprint for reestablishing this way of life, as proof of a glorious past and promise for the future. It nurtured a national romanticism and both inspired and buttressed universal ideas; it was the bedrock of myth and epos, of earthliness and valor, and also of a system of ethics and faith that rein in and restrain muscle and brawn. It was paradoxical proof of both Jewish uniqueness and Jewish similitude, “like all the nations” (I Samuel 8:5); “materialism” and “spirituality”; historical continuity and historical severance between the people and the land.

Desert Society

2018 ◽  
pp. 69-106
Author(s):  
Clinton Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Law Enforcement Agencies ◽  
Common Descent ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Status

Dwelling in dispersion and far from any governmental law enforcement agencies that could provide them security, nomadic desert dwellers needed ways to protect themselves from violations such as murder, assault, insult, and theft. They achieved this security mainly by forming groups based on blood kin, or people of common descent, people whom they believed would honor claims of common loyalty and cooperation when problems with others arose. Each group they organized had a specific security function. The tribal structure of the Israelites as randomly noted in the Bible bears several similarities to that of the Bedouin. This chapter explores these similarities as well as their impact on the status and roles of the genders and on the institution of matrimony in both societies.

person’s use of the Bible as the most important religious authority was implicitly to devalue the elaborate edifices protecting scriptural interpretation that prevailed in all the historic European churches, Protestant as well as Catholic. The institutions compromised by such logic included established churches defined as authoritative communicators of divine grace through word and sacrament, institutions of higher learning monopolized by the establishment in order to protect intellectual activity from religious as well as rational error, and the monarchy as the primary fount of godly social stabil-ity. British Protestant Dissent moved somewhat more cautiously in this direction. But even after the rise of Methodism and the reinvigoration of the older Dissenting traditions, the strength of evangelicalism among British establishmentarians never permitted the kind of thoroughly voluntaristic ecclesiology that prevailed in the United States. On questions of establishment, post-Revolutionary American evangeli-calism marked a distinct development from the colonial period when the most important evangelical leaders had spoken with opposing voices. Some, like Charles Wesley, whose hymns were being used in America from the 1740s, remained fervent defenders of the status quo. Some, like George Whitefield, gave up establishment in practice but without ever addressing the social implications of such a move and without being troubled by occa-sional relapses into establishmentarian behaviour. Some, like the Baptists in America from the 1750s, renounced establishment with a vengeance and became ardent proponents of disestablishment across the board. Some, like the American Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent, eagerly threw establishment away in the enthusiasm of revival, only later to attempt a partial recovery after enthusiasm cooled. Some, like John Wesley, gave up establishment instincts reluctantly, even while promoting religious practices that others regarded as intensely hostile to establishment. Some, like Francis Asbury, the leader of American Methodists, gave it up without apparent trauma. Many, like Jonathan Edwards and the leading evangelical laymen of the Revolutionary era – John Witherspoon, Patrick Henry and John Jay – never gave up the principle of establishment, even though they came to feel more spiritual kinship with evangelicals who attacked established churches (including their own) than they did with many of their fellow establishmen-tarian Protestant colleagues who did not embrace evangelicalism. By the late 1780s, except in New England, this mixed attitude towards formal church and state ties had been transformed into a nearly unanimous embrace of disestablishment. Even in Connecticut and Massachusetts, where evangelical support of the Congregational establishments could still be found, the tide was running strongly away from mere toleration towards full religious liberty. Methodism was an especially interesting variety of evangelicalism since its connectional system retained characteristics of an establishment (especially the human authority of Wesley, or the bishops who succeeded Wesley). But

2003 ◽  
pp. 160-161
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Partial Recovery ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Scriptural Interpretation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Learning ◽  
The Status ◽  
George Whitefield

Brought to Ruin

2021 ◽  
pp. 113-161
Author(s):  
Sarah C. Schaefer
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Scientific Investigations ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Archaeology ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Biblical Sources ◽  
Archaeological Excavations

Chapter 3 examines the impact of biblical archaeology on the production and reception of the Doré Bible, arguing that the recuperations of historical fragments are consistent with broader societal anxieties. Questions surrounding the Bible’s historical credibility (propelled by Enlightenment rationalism) prompted new, ostensibly scientific investigations of biblical sources and sites. Archaeological excavations in the Middle East and North Africa revealed fragments of ancient pasts that engendered new approaches to the representation of biblical subjects. These fragments, the often problematic manner in which they were appropriated into Doré’s illustrations, and the popular reception of the images reveal a distinct anxiety about the narratives of biblical civilizations and what they presage about the present and future. The illustrations speak to the circumstances of French interests and the status of the nation in an era wrought by repeated revolutions that seemed as potentially catastrophic as the events of the Bible.

The Development of the Matrilineal Principle in Ezra, Jubilees, and Acts

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-160
Author(s):  
Michael Gabizon
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Rabbinic Literature ◽  
The Status ◽  
Patrilineal Descent

Most modern-day forms of Judaism determine a child's genealogical identity through the status of his/her mother. The shift from a patrilineal descent in the pre-exilic narratives of the Hebrew Bible to the matrilineal principle found in rabbinic literature has led to much speculation about its inception. Following the first exile, it is apparent that the status of mothers began to play a significant role in determining the national/ethnic identity of their children. This article explores three pre-Mishnaic texts which may testify to the early development of the matrilineal principle. First, it examines the expulsion narrative in Ezra 9.1–10.4, which recounts the removal of foreign women and their children, thereby apparently linking the status of children with their mothers. Second, it focuses on the Shechemite narrative in Jub. 30.1–26 and considers the incorporation of Molech language in the prohibition against intermarriage. In turn, this article proposes that the association between intermarriage and idolatry may be rooted in the presumption that Dinah's progeny would be Jewish, yet raised as idolaters. Finally, it argues that the author of Luke-Acts portrayed Timothy as Jewish (Acts 16.1–3) in light of his mother's status and thus was required to undergo circumcision.

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