Planting gardens: Mesopotamian influence on a Hebrew trope in Jeremiah 29

The version of the ‘building and planting’ conceptual pair found in Jeremiah 29:5 differs from the standard trope used elsewhere within the Hebrew Bible; it is the only example in which the object to be planted is a garden (גנה‎). Awareness of the exilic community’s Mesopotamian context potentially illuminates this alteration, as two mutually inclusive historical factors could have influenced the change. Jeremiah’s exhortation could account for the community’s agricultural context. By planting gardens, the exiles participated in the shift toward horticulture during the long 6th century and contributed to the שלום‎ of the region. Alternatively, Jeremiah 29:5 shares language with royal inscriptions of Esarhaddon. This proposed connection builds upon previous explorations of references to a 70-year exile elsewhere in both texts. The plausibility of the latter option would lend support to the literary coherence of Jeremiah 29:5–14, while the former suggests a 6th century provenance for the passage.

Personal Ideals as Metaphors

ABSTRACT:What is it to have and act on a personal ideal? Someone who aspires to be a philosopher might imaginatively think ‘I am a philosopher’ by way of motivating herself to think hard about a philosophical question. But doing so seems to require her to act on an inaccurate self-description, given that she is not yet what she regards herself as being. J. David Velleman develops the thought that action-by-ideal involves a kind of fictional self-conception. My aim is to expand our thinking about personal ideals by developing another way of understanding them. On this view action-by-ideal involves a kind of metaphorical self-conception. I investigate some salient differences between these views with the aim of understanding the different perspectives they take on the rationality of action-by-ideal. Where the fiction view runs into problems of literary coherence, the metaphor view exploits the richness of poetic invention. But action-by-ideal is a complex phenomenon about which there may be no tidy story to be told. This paper is an attempt to clarify and understand more of this messy terrain.

TRANSLATING SICILY

This article sketches a theoretical strategy for approaching the literary history of Norman Sicily (centuries XI-XII). Because of its linguistic complexity—during the Norman era, Sicilians wrote in Arabic, Greek, and Latin—literary historians have resisted treating Siculo-Norman literature as a literary-historical category. Rather, the literature has been divided into three discrete, linguistically defined traditions, understood as colonial extensions of mainland literary traditions. Using a reading of Sicilian coins with multilingual inscriptions in order to examine the parallel use of multiple languages in a single "text," this article argues for a reconsideration of Sicilian literature of the era, one that looks at multilingualism not as a challenge to literary coherence but as constitutive of a literary culture.