The World of ancient Israel: sociological, anthropological and political perspectives: essays by members of the Society for Old Testament Study

1990 ◽  
Vol 28 (01) ◽  
pp. 28-0265-28-0265
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The World

scholarly journals Humans created God in their image? An anthropomorphic projectionism in the Old Testament

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ndikho Mtshiselwa ◽  
Lerato Mokoena
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The World ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
History Of ◽  
Old Testament Studies

The Old Testament projects not only a Deity that created the world and human beings but also one that is violent and male. The debate on the depiction of the God of Israel that is violent and male is far from being exhausted in Old Testament studies. Thus, the main question posed in this article is: If re-read as ‘Humans created God in their image’, would Genesis 1:27 account for the portrayal of a Deity that is male and violent? Feuerbach’s idea of anthropomorphic projectionism and Guthrie’s view of religion as anthropomorphism come to mind here. This article therefore examines, firstly, human conceptualisation of a divine being within the framework of the theory of anthropomorphic projectionism. Because many a theologian and philosopher would deny that God is a being at all, we further investigate whether the God of Israel was a theological and social construction during the history of ancient Israel. In the end, we conclude, based on the theory of anthropomorphic projectionism, that the idea that the God of Israel was a theological and social construct accounts for the depiction of a Deity that is male and violent in the Old Testament.

The Use of Animal Imagery in the Psalms and Wisdom Literature of Ancient Israel

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine J. Dell
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Animal Behaviour ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Animal Sacrifice ◽  
Simple Observation ◽  
Animal Imagery ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The World ◽  
Work Done

The Old Testament is rich in animal imagery. There has been a considerable amount of work done on the imagery connected with animal sacrifice and on the theological significance of this, but little work done on the wider use of animal imagery in the Old Testament. To attempt to document and review this for the whole Old Testament is beyond the scope of this article, but what I wish to do is to focus on a particularly neglected area—the use of animal imagery in the psalms and wisdom literature of ancient Israel. I have divided the material mentioning animals in the books of Psalms, Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes into seven categories, which I believe are helpful for defining the material but necessarily involve some overlap. The first three categories are concerned with animals as seen from a human viewpoint. They involve humans looking at the world and attempting to illuminate and prescribe human behaviour on the basis of what is observed of animal behaviour. The last three categories involve God and his relationship with the created world, with humanity and with animals. Again this is expressed from a human standpoint, but very often the limitations of the human quest for understanding is stressed. The middle and bridging category is the simple observation of animal behaviour which seems to me to go some way towards counterbalancing the others which are inevitably humanocentric and theocentric respectively.

Narrative Contexts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Andrew Dearman
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The World

Modern discussion of social issues provides an analogy to the historical and cultural analysis of Old Testament narratives by contemporary readers. Implied and expressed tensions regarding multiethnic marriage in the books of Ruth, Ezra, and Nehemiah are discussed as ways to understand the social contexts influencing these three books and how various generations in ancient Israel might have responded to the accounts, given these tensions. Interpreters have proposed that the book of Ruth originated as a story to counter the rejection of marriage to foreign women presented in the books of Ezra and that proposal is examined for its strengths and weaknesses and as an example of exploring the world behind a text.

The Concept of Hebel in the Book of Ecclesiastes

1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. McKenna
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Community Of Faith ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The World ◽  
Wisdom Tradition ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Today scholars still struggle to apprehend the meaning of hebel (vanity) in the Book of Ecclesiastes. It has become recognized that Old Testament theologians like Walter Eichrodt, Gerhard von Rad, and Ronald Clements did not essentially integrate the Wisdom Tradition of ancient Israel into the development of their theologies. In his Tyndale lecture on the Old Testament of 1965, David Hubbard argued for a new sensitivity to the relationship that must exist between covenant and wisdom in the community of faith. A. Graeme Auld has insisted that the alienation of wisdom from covenant traditions has caused such acute problems in understanding the Old Testament that we are in danger of not grasping at all the relation between the Word of God and the Word of Man. These problems may be linked not only to the question about why the Book of Ecclesiastes was allowed into the Canon of Israel, but also to the very hearing we claim to possess of the revelation of the Word of God in the world and the way the world has actually been made to be. All this should tell us that the significance of the concept of hebel in the Book of Ecclesiastes requires a real clarification of profound consequence for our knowledge of God in the world.

La transposition profane de l’Exode dans Moïse fiction de Gilles Rozier

2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
French Writer ◽  
The World ◽  
Jewish Writers

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.

Reading the Bible from Below in the Era of Globalization

2020 ◽  
pp. 111-128
Author(s):  
Rainer Kessler
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Asynchronous Development ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
The World ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Globalized World

It is evident that the world of the Bible is pre-modern and thus distinct from the globalized civilization. This chronological gap challenges readers, whether they are feminist or not. Mainly three attitudes can be observed among scholarly and ordinary readers. For some readers, the Bible is a document of the losers of a historical process of modernization that already began in ancient Israel. For other readers, the Bible is outdated and of no use to confront the challenges of globalization. A third readerly position challenges both of these views. This essay offers four arguments to orient biblical readers in the contemporary globalized world. First, the essay posits that globalization is an asynchronous development. Thus, even today, most people living in the impoverished regions of the world face conditions similar to those dominant in the Bible. Second, the essay asserts that women are the first victims in biblical times and still nowadays. Third, the essay maintains that biblical texts display social relations that still unveil contemporary relations. Fourth, the essay suggests that intercultural Bible readings give hope, as they nurture biblical readings from “below” to strengthen people to overcome the fatal consequences of today’s globalization.

The Use of the Word as a Title in the Old Testament

1969 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
J.R. Bartlett
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
General Sense ◽  
Ancient Israel

AbstractMany societies have used the word "head" metaphorically to describe the position of the leading figure in a society or in some smaller group, and this title usually has a vague and imprecise meaning. To be intelligible it needs to be given some known context or some further definition. For example, if we are schoolmasters, we may among ourselves refer to "the Head", but outside school, unless we are speaking to people who know the context of our work, we have to refer to "the Headmaster" to be fully understood. And even when the context of the headship is known, the title "head" by itself tells us nothing definite about the position of the person so described. We know nothing, for example, about the means of his appointment, the tenure of his office, or the scope of his powers. Thus the word "head" can often be used in a general sense of some position or office for which there is in fact an official or more descriptive title. In the Old Testament, however, the title is not always so vaguely used. Although the word "head" in Hebrew as in English has a natural ambiguity on many occasions, we can at least show that in the Old Testament the word is used of a person's position only in certain well defined spheres. And because the title "head" in the Old Testament has a fairly limited reference, the details of appointment, tenure of office or position, and scope of powers, though sometimes unknown to us, may not have been so generally unknown in ancient Israel.

The Old Testament Conception of Miracle

1952 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-361
Author(s):  
Harold Knight
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Pure Science ◽  
Independent System ◽  
The World ◽  
Patterns And Processes ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
Modern Sense

The purpose of this study is to elucidate the significance underlying the concept of miracle in the world of Old Testament thought and theology, in the hope that the results attained may shed fresh light upon something which touches the very centre of religious life and is a frequent cause of genuine doubt and perplexity for modern man. Perhaps the word miracle itself is ambiguous in this connexion, for it has gathered around itself a penumbra of associations derived from its use in our modern scientifically determined modes of thought and speech. Broadly speaking the background which it implies is that of nature conceived as an independent system presupposing fixed laws or if, with the more modern scientific outlook we reject the notion of materialistic determinism and mechanism, then, at any rate, we must substitute for ‘laws’ the tendency for uniform patterns and processes to emerge. Against such large uniformities, miracle, in the modern sense, stands out somewhat sharply as an exception, mysterious and apparently inexplicable, repugnant in its arbitrariness to the spirit of pure science. Such presuppositions do not exist in the Old Testament World of ideas where we are confronted by a type of thought which is through and through theological rather than philosophical and scientific. The corner-stone of the Old Testament system of ideas is the primacy of God as self-existent Creator whose creative activity is unceasing, upholding and interpenetrating by His watchful redeeming care all that is.

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