Larangan Intermarriage dalam Nehemia 13: 23-27: Suatu Upaya Hermeneutis Post-Modern melalui Pendekatan Sosial-Antropologis

This article is a post-modern hermeneutic study of Nehemiah 13: 23-27 with a socio anthropologicalapproach. This text talks about the prohibition of intermarriage between the Jewish community and foreign nations in the post-exilic era. This prohibition still alive now, not only in the Jewish community but also in other Abrahamic religions. Liquidity of cultural and religious identities today does not mean denying those people who still keep their tradition, culture, and group identities. The latest socio-anthropological and archeologicalstudies of the Bible show the text as Nehemiah and text editor effort to bequeath cultural memories to build the purity of Jewish identity. With intertextual studies, I will show that Old Testament Books is not ‘one voice’ about intermarriages. This ambiguity challenges us to rethink the prohibition on intermarriage without discrimination and segregation to the Other. Abstrak Artikel ini adalah upaya hermeneu􀆟 s post-modern terhadap teks Nehemia 13:23-27 dengan pendekatan sosio-antropologis. Teks ini berbicara tentang larangan kawin campur (intermarriage) antara komunitas Yahudi pasca-pembuangan dengan bangsa-bangsa asing. Larangan ini nyatanya masih terjadi hingga saat ini, bukan hanya di tengah-tengah komunitas Yahudi masa kini, namun juga agama-agama Abrahamik lainnya. Cairnyaidentitas budaya dan agama saat ini tidak berarti menafikan mereka yang masih memegang teguh tradisi, budaya dan pelestarian identitas kelompoknya. Studi sosio-antropologis dan arkeologi Alkitab terbaru memperlihatkan teks sebagai upaya Nehemia maupun redaktur teks mewariskan ingatan budaya dalam rangka membangun kemurnian identitas bangsa Yahudi pasca-pembuangan. Penulis juga memanfaatkan studi intertekstual dalam rangka memperlihatkan bahwa kitab Perjanjian Pertama (PP) tidak unisono dalam memperlihatkan larangan intermarriage. Ambiguitas ini menjadi tantangan bagi kita untuk memikirkan ulanglarangan intermarriage tanpa diskriminasi dan segregasi terhadap mereka yang berbeda.

Bees in the Medieval Maghreb: Wax, Honey and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Western Mediterranean

Believed to originate in Paradise and set apart in their chastity, bees were potent religious symbols in medieval Christianity and Islam. This article explores how these beliefs drove an extensive trade in wax and honey, and examines the role of Jews, conversos, Christians, and Muslims in this trade. Further, it considers the environmental context and the extent to which religious prohibitions against trade between Christians and Muslims may have provided economic opportunities for Jewish merchants, while examining the economic and cultural relationships between members of the three Abrahamic religions.

The Impact of Covid-19 on Abrahamic Fundamentalist Groups

This contribution discusses the question whether there is a general interlinking between the fundamentalist perception and practice of Abrahamic religions by some believers or groups and their (in-)ability to cope with pandemics such as Covid-19, or if this assumption is misleading. With the help of selected examples from fundamentalist groups of the Abrahamic religions, it will be shown that some fundamentalist actors see Covid-19 as a divine punishment and make use of the pandemic for radical mobilization of their members, while other religious groups and leaders concentrate on the resilience and healing aspects of their followers during the pandemic. The different responses of coping lead to the question whether monotheistic religions might be more susceptible to fundamentalist reactions to pandemics than other religions.

Role of religion in American politics: An analysis of the influence of Evangelical Church in Israeli Palestinian conflict

The politics of the Holy land is of crucial importance to the followers of the three Abrahamic religions in terms of religious beliefs, which metamorphosed into military and political significance in the 20th Century. The United States (U.S) support for Israel is especially visible during the republican presidencies. The U.S had five republican presidents from 1980 to 2020, and their evangelical beliefs shaped American foreign policy toward this region, a policy that may loosely be termed as affected by Christian Zionism, which was originally a 16th Century religious Puritan movement, who latter shaped into Christian political movement. U.S Christian Zionism reiterates favourable images of Jews and is pessimistic about peace in Holy land. Christian Zionists believe Lord has bestowed the land of Palestine to Jews and have held up this claim since the turn of the 20th Century. This paper first describes the fundamental nature of Christian Zionism, their view of the modern Israel and resultant political and military policies. This also focuses Christian Zionists support of republican presidents and specially President Trump relationship with Christian Zionism. The shifting of U.S embassy to Jerusalem, the formal approval to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel by President Trump are studied.

The Challenge of Evil in Islamic Thought: A Brief Survey

The challenge of evil to rational Abrahamic religions has clearly been articulated in modern philosophy of religion predicated on the incompatibility of the omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience of God with the existence of evils. Even within the Islamic theological and philosophical traditions, there is a venerable history of theodicies and defences of a good God and the efficacy of human free will. That is the context in which we wish to locate the contributions in this special issue that examine the ways in which evil is considered in Islamic philosophical accounts (particularly of the Šiʿi traditions) from the classical period to the present.

Overview of Architecture and Religion Since 1500

The architecture of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam during the historically significant period of the 16th through 20th centuries reveals many similarities and differences. Particularly important are the architectural languages each employed to materialize, facilitate, and communicate their religion, and how they changed over time. Additionally, the ontological and symbolic roles of architecture and the key theoretical approaches to the subject are relevant contexts. These include typological taxonomies of organizations, path sequences, and historical, conceptual, or symbolic characteristics. Lastly, seven primary roles of religious architecture—historical, authoritative, commemorative, theocentric, cosmological, prestige, and community places–can effectively situate and contextualize particular examples. During the pivotal 16th century, popes remade St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican and transformed Rome into the ecclesiastical and political center of Christianity; Jews built substantial synagogues that reflected their status during the Golden Age of Jews in Poland; and the Ottoman Empire built some of its most significant mosque complexes that expressed the hegemony of the theocratic state. Subsequent periods of the architecture of the Abrahamic religions illustrate particular themes, and explicate the variety of roles, and relative importance, of the architecture at particular periods. Modernism, in particular, produced significant changes in the architecture, where complexity, ambiguity, inventiveness, and oscillations between tradition and innovation reflected the impacts of new technologies, liturgical reforms, and global architectural cultures. Throughout, the capacity of architecture to materialize and communicate ontological, historical, religious, and sociopolitical content and accommodate communal rituals cannot be overstated.

Creencia y pertenencia: El laberinto de las sociedades posotomanas

Post-colonial coagulation is the dilemma of many societies in endless formation due to the aftermath of colonialism and the dominance of coloniality, and even more so when this aftermath has been converted into a never-ending labyrinth for political-Islamic anthropology, particularly in the Arab case. The present study primarily aims to analyze the emergence of Abrahamic religions among Arab tribes and their role in supplanting the canon of identity and belonging, forming a universal standard for legal identity substantially different from the European one, and overturning the ancient tribal concept. The study then shifts to analyz-ing the formation of Islamic ideology as positive law by means of an empirical parallelism with Roman law, thus introducing the Latin concept of interpolare. We therefore arrive at the conclusion of how foreign-colonial interference played the main role in diluting the identity canon and that of belonging, creating a false identity, shaped to conform to colonial compromises, wrapping religious epistemology in a forced normative system to have caused schizophrenia and cognitive resistance to power and normative disobe-dience, even prompting schizophrenia and an aversion to reality.