Haggai, Zechariah 1-8

1987 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol L. Meyers ◽  
Eric M. Meyers

Haggai and Zechariah 1-8 - Volume 25B in the acclaimed Anchor Yale Bible part of the Scripture known as the Minor Prophets - were written during a critical period in Israel's history, the momentous return of the Jews from Babylonian exile. Following the conquest of Babylon by the Persian Empire, the Israelites sought to reestablish their ethnic and religious legacy in Judah. This was a time of profound turmoil and uncertainty, and Haggai and Zechariah provided a crucial measure of support and inspiration. They rallied Israel's energies and exhorted their fellow countrymen to heed the word of God. under their guidance the Jews restored the Temple at Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar. Together the two prophets guided Israel through an important transitional epoch and reconciled the influences of Persia's dominion with the sacred traditions of the Hebrew people. In this illuminating new translation and commentary, Carol and Eric Meyers consider the Book of Haggai and the first eight chapters of the Book of Zechariah in a linguistic, social, and historical context. They underscore the literary artistry, the political acumen, and the prophetic authority of these fascination volumes that proved so vital to the survival of Israel and the preservation of the Jewish faith.

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 203-226
Author(s):  
Daniella Talmon-Heller ◽  
Miriam Frenkel

Abstract This paper describes religious innovations introduced by Muslims in the (arguably) holy month of Rajab, and by Jews on the High Holidays of the month of Tishrei, in eleventh-century Jerusalem. Using a comparative perspective, and grounding analysis in the particular historical context of Fatimid rule, it demonstrates how the convergence of sacred space and sacred time was conducive to “religious creativity.” The Muslim rites (conducted on al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf / the Temple Mount) and the Jewish rites (on the Mount of Olives) shared a particular concern with the remission of sins and supplication on behalf of others, and a cosmological world view that envisioned Jerusalem as axis mundi. The Jewish rite was initiated “from above” by the political-spiritual leadership of the community, was dependent on Fatimid backing, and was inextricably tied to specific sites. The Muslim rite sprang “from below” and spread far, to be practiced in later periods all over the Middle East.


Author(s):  
Emma Simone

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 327-334
Author(s):  
Inga V. Zheltikova ◽  
Elena I. Khokhlova

The article considers the dependence of the images of future on the socio-cultural context of their formation. Comparison of the images of the future found in A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s works of various years reveals his generally pessimistic attitude to the future in the situation of social stability and moderate optimism in times of society destabilization. At the same time, the author's images of the future both in the seventies and the nineties of the last century demonstrate the mismatch of social expectations and reality that was generally typical for the images of the future. According to the authors of the present article, Solzhenitsyn’s ideas that the revival of spirituality could serve as the basis for the development of economy, that the influence of the Church on the process of socio-economic development would grow, and that the political situation strongly depends on the personal qualities of the leader, are unjustified. Nevertheless, such ideas are still present in many images of the future of Russia, including contemporary ones.


Author(s):  
Vered Noam

This chapter examines the story of the internecine struggle between the two Hasmonean brothers, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, which brought the Hasmonean commonwealth to its end. Only in Josephus is the story of the murder of a righteous man, Onias, juxtaposed to the central tradition regarding the siege of the temple during this war, although this too was clearly an early Jewish tradition. In the rabbinic sources, the story of the siege and the sacrificial animals underwent multiple reworkings, and it is the Babylonian Talmud that reflects the more original version and message of the story. If in Chapter 2, we saw the “rabbinization” of the figure of John Hyrcanus, here the story itself underwent this process and its original moral message was replaced by multiple halakhic implications. In both corpora, this dissension between brothers is seen as the leading cause of the downfall of the Hasmonean dynasty. This was in contradistinction to the political stance represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which interpreted the Roman occupation as proof of the sinfulness of the Hasmonean state from its very inception.


2021 ◽  
pp. 263300242110244
Author(s):  
Alice M. Greenwald ◽  
Clifford Chanin ◽  
Henry Rousso ◽  
Michel Wieviorka ◽  
Mohamed-Ali Adraoui

How do societies and states represent the historical, moral, and political weight of the terrorist attacks they have had to face? Having suffered in recent years from numerous terrorist attacks on their soil originating from jihadist movements, and often led by actors who were also their own citizens, France and the United States have set up—or seek to do so—places of memory whose functions, conditions of creation, modes of operation, and nature of the messages sent may vary. Three of the main protagonists and initiators of two museum-memorial projects linked to terrorist attacks have agreed to deliver their visions of the role and of the political, social, and historical context in which these projects have emerged. Allowing to observe similarities and differences between the American and French approach, this interview sheds light on the place of memory and feeling in societies struck by tragic events and seeking to cure their ills through memory and commemoration.


2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-352
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY SCOTT BROWN

‘In Search of Space’ explores the history of Krautrock, a futuristic musical genre that began in Germany in the late 1960s and flowered in the 1970s. Not usually explicitly political, Krautrock bore the unmistakable imprint of the revolt of 1968. Groups arose out of the same milieux and shared many of the same concerns as anti-authoritarian radicals. Their rebellion expressed, in an artistic way, key themes of the broader countercultural moment of which they were a part. A central theme, the article argues, was escape – escape from the situation of Germany in the 1960s in general, and from the specific conditions of the anti-authoritarian revolt in the Federal Republic in the wake of 1968. Mapping Krautrock's relationship to key locations and routes (both real and imaginary), the article situates Krautrock in relationship to the political and cultural upheavals of its historical context.


1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-77
Author(s):  
Adeniyi S. Basiru

The president and the network of offices that are linked to him, in modern presidential democracies, symbolize a neutral state that does not meddle in order-threatening political struggles. It however seems that this liberal ideal is hardly the case in many illiberal democracies. Against this background, this article examines the presidential roots of public disorder in post-military Nigeria. Drawing on documentary data source and deploying neo-patrimonial theory as theoretical framework, it argues that the presidency in Nigeria, given the historical context under which it has emerged as well as the political economy of neo-patrimonialism and prebendalism that has nurtured it, is a central participant in the whole architecture of public disorder. The paper recommends, among others, the fundamental restructuring of the Nigerian neo-colonial state and the political economy that undergird it.Keywords: Imperial Presidency; Neo-patrimonialism; Disorder; Authoritarianism; Nigeria.


Corpora ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-416
Author(s):  
Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe

This paper considers the role of historical context in initiating shifts in word meaning. The study focusses on two words – the translation equivalents separatist and separatism – in the discourses of Russian and Ukrainian parliamentary debates before and during the Russian–Ukrainian conflict which emerged at the beginning of 2014. The paper employs a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse analysis to investigate the way wider socio-political context affects word usage and meaning. To allow a comparison of discourses around separatism between two parliaments, four corpora were compiled covering the debates in both parliaments before and during the conflict. Keywords, collocations and n-grams were studied and compared, and this was followed by qualitative analysis of concordance lines, co-text and the larger context in which these words occurred. The results show how originally close meanings of translation equivalents began to diverge and manifest noticeable changes in their connotative, affective and, to an extent, denotative meanings at a time of conflict in line with the dominant ideologies of the parliaments as well as the political affiliations of individuals.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 123-151
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Trzeciak ◽  
Jakob Ziguras

The goal of this essay is twofold: firstly, it is a description a post-critical tendency within the contemporary, Anglo-American humanities; secondly, it presents propositions which broaden the boundaries current in the post-critical current, which lead to the replacement of critical sci-entificity with an affirmation of everyday readerly affects. The claims regarding the rejection of a criticism based on suspicion, formulated by, among others, Rita Felski, accentuate the elite character of reading, the goal of which is the unveiling of the economico- political entan-glement of the text as a product of historical reality. The distrust towards the surface of the text and the illusion of aesthetic autonomy, central for cultural studies, raised the critical atti-tude to the rank of an activity that is revelatory and privileged. The opponents of an unmask-ing criticism underline its limitations—unmasking reveals the ultimate source of every cultural production, the logic of capitalism, the total character of which leaves no chance for change. In defense of change, and in the hope of restoring to literature a widespread interest, there appear tendencies which bring back the individual experience of reading, the basis of which is to be aesthetic pleasure, freed from the historical context and its determinants. In the article, examples of such tendencies will be pointed out, as also will be their consequences caused by the elevation and universalisation of non-professional reading. The rejection of the political task of criticism leads to the questioning of its anti-systemic potential; in turn, the apotheosis of suspicion paralyses the postulative dimension of criticism. For this reason, in the last part of the essay, I propose going beyond oppositional con ceptualisations in the direction of a criti-cism that is situated and material, and whose model, in my rendering, is subordi nated knowledge.


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