The Old Testament

Author(s):  
James Barr

This chapter discusses and presents a survey of the Old Testament, beginning with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and its ancient versions. It examines the rise of traditional biblical criticism and considers a study of the Hebrew language and its cognate Semitic languages. Finally, a survey of various topics and their historical perspectives is provided, along with some recent developments. The main focus of the chapter is to describe the dominant position of the mid-twentieth century.

Naharaim ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Stern

Abstract The study addresses the issue of the Christian scholarly interest in the Hebrew language since the rise of Humanism. Though the main focus of that interest in Hebrew grammar and vocabulary was to get a better understanding of the “Old Testament”, the subsequent reformation fostered the notion that a better knowledge of both the Hebrew language and the Jewish culture, can promote the conversion of Jews to Christianity. The article inspects possible other underlying motives and discourses behind the translation of Hebrew and Old Yiddish blessings into Latin as the most important lingua sacra, taking into account twentieth century theories about power and hegemony by Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. The study examines the chapter about Jewish greetings and blessings in the original dictionary Šemot Devarim – Nomenclatura Hebraica Autore Helia Levita (Isny, 1542) and the revised translation as Nomenclator Eliae Levitae Germani by Johannes Drusius and son (Franeker, 1652). Also included are transliterated editions of both texts, with translations.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-487
Author(s):  
T. Twining

This article presents a new interpretation of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678). It argues that the initial prohibition of Simon’s work in 1678 has separated it from the debates and arguments that chiefly shaped its contents. It gives an account of the developments in seventeenth-century biblical criticism that preceded Simon’s work before offering a new account of the genesis and composition of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. Following this, it presents an examination--based in part on previously unexamined material drawn from Simon’s library--of three of the central and most innovative parts of Simon’s project: his definition of his approach as a ‘critical history’, his new history of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, and his novel use of manuscript material. The study concludes with a reconsideration of Simon’s work immediately following the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament’s prohibition, arguing that in a series of Latin works Simon attempted to use the methods and shared assumptions of seventeenth-century biblical criticism to justify his work to his contemporary scholars.


Author(s):  
Jetze Touber

This book investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focusses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, its language, and the historical context in which it originated. The book charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism, to determine whether Spinoza’s work on the Bible had any bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should engage with Scripture. Spinoza has received massive attention, both inside and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly over the decades. So has that of fellow ‘radicals’ (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. This book inverts this perspective and looks at how the Dutch Republic digested biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. It takes into account the highly neglected area of the Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The result is that Dutch ecclesiastical history, up until now the preserve of the partisan scholarship of confessionalized church historians, is brought into dialogue with Early Modern intellectual currents. This book concludes that Spinoza, rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity, acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates in Dutch society, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly, at all times, on all levels.


Author(s):  
Aaron Shaheen

Drawing on rehabilitation publications, novels by both famous and lesser-known American writers, and even the prosthetic masks of a classically trained sculptor, Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture addresses the ways in which prosthetic devices were designed, promoted, and depicted in America in the years during and after the First World War. The war’s mechanized weaponry ushered in an entirely new relationship between organic bodies and the technology that could both cause and attempt to remedy hideous injuries. This relationship was evident in the realm of prosthetic development, which by the second decade of the twentieth century promoted the belief that a prosthesis should be a spiritual extension of the person who possessed it. This spiritualized vision of prostheses held a particular resonance in American postwar culture. Relying on some of the most recent developments in literary and disability studies, the book’s six chapters explain how a prosthesis’s spiritual promise was largely dependent on its ability to nullify an injury and help an amputee renew (or even improve upon) his prewar life. But if it proved too cumbersome, obtrusive, or painful, the device had the long-lasting power to efface or distort his “spirit” or personality.


2008 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAN van den BERG

The work of the English Deist Thomas Morgan (d. 1743), a Marcion in his time, received much negative criticism in England and abroad, especially in Germany. His views aroused comments in books, dissertations and journals. Only in the first half of the twentieth century was he to be praised by theologians such as Adolf von Harnack and Emanuel Hirsch, who likewise disparaged the Old Testament.


2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1764-1808 ◽  
Author(s):  
MITCH NUMARK

AbstractThis paper is a study of cultural interaction and diffusion in colonial Bombay. Focusing on Hebrew language instruction, it examines the encounter between India's little-known Bene Israel Jewish community and Protestant missionaries. Whilst eighteenth and nineteenth-century Cochin Jews were responsible for teaching the Bene Israel Jewish liturgy and forms of worship, the Bene Israel acquired Hebrew and Biblical knowledge primarily from nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Bene Israel community was a Konkan jati with limited knowledge of Judaism. However, by the end of the century the community had become an Indian-Jewish community roughly analogous to other Jewish communities. This paper explores how this transformation occurred, detailing the content, motivation, and means by which British and American missionaries and, to a lesser extent, Cochin Jews instructed the Bene Israel in Jewish knowledge. Through a critical examination of neglected English and Marathi sources, it reconstructs the Bene Israel perspective in these encounters and their attitude towards the Christian missionaries who laboured amongst them. It demonstrates that the Bene Israel were active participants and selective consumers in their interaction with the missionaries, taking what they wanted most from the encounter: knowledge of the Old Testament and the Hebrew language. Ultimately, the instruction the Bene Israel received from Protestant missionaries did not convert them to Christianity but strengthened and transformed their Judaism.


2005 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rein Bos

Of whom does the prophet say this? A single question and a multifaceted answerTheologians seeking to preach Old Testament texts meaningful way in Christian congregations face a great challenge. On the one hand, very little has been written in homiletical textbooks about hermeneutical problems facing those who wish to read the Old Testament from the perspective of Christ’s life and death. On the other hand, advances in biblical criticism seemed to have made any such attempt problematic to begin with. In this article, the author attempts to provide a practical-theological contribution to this hermeneutical challenge by reconsidering the heuristic value of mediaeval fourfold interpretation of scriptural passages. By focussing on the servant song of deutero-Isaiah (53) in light of its reinterpretation in Acts 8, this paper aims to provide some suggestions on how Christological interpretation of the Old Testament can be done in a way that takes the original context seriously and is able to read the text from a Christian perspective without the one reading infringing on the other.


Author(s):  
Marthin Steven Lumingkewas ◽  
Firman Panjaitan

In the Old Testament Yahweh is frequently called El. The question is raised whether Yahweh was a form of the god El from the beginning or whether they were separate deities who only became equated later. They whom uphold theory Yahweh and El were conceived as separate deities holds that Yahweh was a southern storm god from Seir and so on, which was brought by the Israelites and conflated with the Jerusalem patriarchal deity.On the other side there are scholars who hold and conceived Yahweh and El as one single deity. These scholars defend this position most commonly on the grounds that no distinction between the two can be clearly found in the Hebrew Bible. The methodology used in this paper is literary – historical and social interpretations, with the main method being the "diachronic and dialectical theology of Hegel". The simple Hegelian method is: A (thesis) versus B (anti-thesis) equals C (synthesis). The author analyzes (thesis) by collecting instruments related to ancient Semitic religions; it includes data on El and Yahweh assembly obtained from Hebrew text sources and extra-biblical manuscripts which are then processed in depth. The antithesis is to analyze El's assembly development in Israel – especially in Psalm 82. While the synthesis appears in the nuances of the El’s assembly believe in ancient Israel. The focus of this paper's research is to prove 2 things: first, is Psalm 82: 1, is an Israeli Psalm that uses the patterns and forms of the Canaanite Psalms; especially regarding religious systems that use the terminology of the divine council. Second, to prove that El and Yahweh in the context of this Psalm are two different gods, of which this view contradicts several ANET experts such as Michael S, Heisser who sets El and Yahweh in this text as identical gods. The results of this study attempt to prove that Israel and the Canaan contextually share the same religious system, and are seen to be separated in the Deuteronomist era with their Yahwistic reforms.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Hardy

This chapter considers the confessional and institutional factors that shaped the development of biblical criticism in seventeenth-century Rome. It concentrates on the German convert and noted scholar of Greek manuscripts, Lucas Holstenius, and his efforts to encourage the study of the ancient Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. These efforts were variously helped and hindered by Holstenius’s patrons and the Roman ecclesiastical authorities, depending on the extent to which they suited their religio-political ambitions. The same ambitions also had a bearing on the genres, publication formats and other modes of dissemination which Roman scholars used for their research, driving them to adopt habits of anonymity, discretion and dissimulation which were out of keeping with the practices of other participants in the contemporary republic of letters, and which differentiated them from later generations of Catholic scholars who advanced their intellectual agenda more openly and aggressively.


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