Engendering Judaism

Engendering Judaism
Author: Rachel Adler
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 1999-09-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780807036198

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for 1998. How can women's full participation transform Jewish law, prayer, sexuality, and marriage? What does it mean to "engender" Jewish tradition? Pioneering theologian Rachel Adler gives this timely and powerful question its first thorough study in a book that bristles with humor, passion, intelligence, and deep knowledge of traditional biblical and rabbinic texts.

Prophetie in Israel

Prophetie in Israel
Author: Reinhard Gregor Kratz
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9783825854584

Biblical Metaphor Reconsidered

Biblical Metaphor Reconsidered
Author: Job Y. Jindo
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2018-07-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004368183

How do we understand the characteristically extensive presence of imagery in biblical prophecy? Poetic metaphor in prophetic writings has commonly been understood solely as an artistic flourish intended to create certain rhetorical effects. It thus appears expendable and unrelated to the core content of the composition—however engaging it may be, aesthetically or otherwise. Job Jindo invites us to reconsider this convention. Applying recent studies in cognitive science, he explores how we can view metaphor as the very essence of poetic prophecy—namely, metaphor as an indispensable mode to communicate prophetic insight. Through a cognitive reading of Jeremiah 1-24, Jindo amply demonstrates the advantage and heuristic ramifications of this approach in biblical studies.

Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible

Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible
Author: Eve Levavi Feinstein
Publisher:
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2014
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199395543

Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible examines the Hebrew Bible's use of pollution language to characterize sexual relationships. Eve Feinstein argues that descriptions of female pollution reflect a view of women as sexual property, while descriptions of male pollution relate to Israel's holiness. The book enables a more thorough understanding of sexual pollution, its particular characteristics, and the role that it plays in biblical literature.

Sexual and Marital Metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel

Sexual and Marital Metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel
Author: Sharon Moughtin
Publisher: Oxford Theology and Religion M
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2008-06-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199239088

Sharon Moughtin-Mumby explores the complex, and potentially subversive, power of metaphor as a tool of persuasion in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. Often such language is used to speak of the worship of gods other than Yhwh, of undesirable cultic practices, or of political alliances with foreign nations. Evaluating several schools of language and biblical criticism, including a Traditional approach, a Feminist critique and a Literary-historical investigation, Moughtin-Mumby brings lucid new readings with a fresh perspective to these dramatic texts. The study emphasises the importance of context for understanding metaphorical meaning and challenges previous scholarship which has read such language in terms of the traditional concept of 'the marriage metaphor' and the hypothetical background of cultic prostitution.

The Apocalypse of Isaiah Metaphorically Speaking

The Apocalypse of Isaiah Metaphorically Speaking
Author: Brian Doyle
Publisher: Peeters Publishers
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2000
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9789042908888

The analysis of metaphors constitutes an ideal point of entry into the exegesis of Biblical Hebrew poetic texts because it forces the exegete to examine the said text from a variety of perspectives. How can one discern the presence of metaphorical speech? What are the various types of metaphorical speech available to and employed by the biblical poet? How does the structure of a piece of Hebrew poetry carry its metaphorical dimensions? How did the biblical poet make use of the various types of metaphor and to what end? Can we ultimately gain access to the poet's meaning? The present study endeavours to provide at least a partial answer to these questions. In maintaining focus on the biblical text, moreover, the author hopes to anchor some of the abstractions of metaphorical theory with chosen examples taken from the so-called 'Apocalypse of Isaiah'. The Hebrew prophets constitute fertile ground in their use of metaphorical language for speaking the unspeakable, especially concerning the relationship between the people and God.

Marital Imagery in the Bible

Marital Imagery in the Bible
Author: Colin Hamer
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2019-01-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1532669208

Marital Imagery in the Bible. It can only be imagined that when the New Testament writers made their (albeit brief) comments on divorce and remarriage that they assumed they would be understood. So what has gone wrong? In the years after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, when Graeco-Roman culture was at its height, the Jewish perspective of marriage and divorce, and thus the context of those brief New Testament comments was lost. The Christian church of that era was influenced by the neoplatonic ideas of the day, and an idealised concept of marriage developed from on Adam and Eve’s marriage recorded in Genesis 2:23—it was love at first sight, a marriage made in heaven. These concepts frame an understanding of marriage in much of Western culture even today. However, that was never the understanding of ancient Israel. Instead they looked to Genesis 2:24: ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’—so a naturally born man chooses a wife for himself, and their union was based on a ‘covenant’—in other words an agreement. The Old Testament makes it clear what the basis of that agreement was. Furthermore, it is clear, if that agreement was broken, there could be a divorce and a remarriage. All the Bible’s marital imagery (where the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures imagine that God is married to his people) is based on that understanding of human marriage. But so strong is our concept of marriage, that when Genesis 2:24 is referred to in the New Testament, it is thought that the reference is to Adam and Eve’s marriage. It is a paradigmatic marriage that for many excludes (or greatly restricts) the possibility of divorce and remarriage. This study looks to challenge that paradigm—and to suggest that the New Testament writers would not have employed an imagery which had at its center divorce and remarriage, only to deny the possibility of such in their own human marriage teaching. Colin Hamer’s thesis represents the only recent work on metaphor theory in biblical scholarship. It challenges centuries of academic scholarship and ecclesiastical assumptions about divorce. Hamer’s detailed and well researched analysis challenges the consensus view that the marriage of Adam and Eve in Gen 2:24 represents an ontological unity, suggesting important implications for contemporary Christian teaching on marriage and divorce.

Gender Reversal and Cosmic Chaos

Gender Reversal and Cosmic Chaos
Author: S. Tamar Kamionkowski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2003-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567137872

This book is about both the fear of gender reversal and its expression in the prophet Ezekiel's reworking of the marital metaphor. Kamionkowski argues that the abomination of "wife Jerusalem" is that she is attempting to pass for a male, thereby crossing gender boundaries and upsetting the world order. This story is therefore one of confused gender scripts, ensuing chaos and a re-ordering through the reinforcement of these strictly defined prescriptions of gendered behaviour.Using socio-historical evidence and the existence of the literary motif of "men turning into women" as a framework, this book argues that Ezekiel 16, in particular, reflects the gender chaos which arises as an aftermath of social and theological crises.

Covenant and the Metaphor of Divine Marriage in Biblical Thought

Covenant and the Metaphor of Divine Marriage in Biblical Thought
Author: Sebastian R. Smolarz
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2010-10-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725245507

In his commentary on Hosea, H. W. Wolff proposed that the divine marriage metaphor is the central metaphor of the entire OT. In Hebrew prophetic books, the metaphor reflected the covenantal relationship between Yahweh and his people. No other metaphor reached as deeply into the heart of this relationship or better described the tragedy of a broken relationship between Yahweh and his people. No other metaphor expressed more fully the abundance of God's grace shown in the promise of covenant restoration and renewal in the eschaton. In this volume, Polish Reformed academic Sebastian Smolarz demonstrates that the divine marriage metaphor is also one of the leading NT metaphors used to describe God's restored covenant relationship with his people, especially in the Book of Revelation. Smolarz argues for continuity between OT and NT concepts and theologies in general, and for continuity between the Apocalypse and OT material in particular, showing that the Apocalypse has much in common with other parts of the NT. In doing so, he focuses on some Gospel parables and reads them against their OT background. He also examines instances of the divine marriage metaphor in Paul's theological reflections. The focus of Smolarz' volume is a covenantal reading of the Apocalypse. He argues that the metaphor helps to establish the Apocalypse's Sitz im Leben, which he relates to the main conflict between the faithful and the unfaithful within the people of God in the first century CE. His work establishes that the Apocalypse contains not only explicit instances, but also implicit references and many echoes of this covenantal metaphor.

The Vanishing Hebrew Harlot

The Vanishing Hebrew Harlot
Author: Irene E. Riegner
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2009
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 9780820472768

The Vanishing Hebrew Harlot is written with two objectives: First, to recover the core meaning of the Hebrew stem ZNH as a complex of non-Yahwist rituals, deities, institutions and beliefs prevalent in ancient Israel and Judah. With this understanding, the author assigns the translation value «participate in non-Yahwist religious praxis» to ZNH. The second objective is to understand how this core meaning came to be encrusted with promiscuity, prostitution, and detestable things, and, above all, with adultery, a capital offense, as well as with religious contamination and its destructive consequences. In the biblical texts, the stem ZNH, which encompasses a complex of non-Yahwist religious practices, operates in a powerful, adversarial relationship to the Yahwist complex of religious practices. Since non-Yahwist sacrifices signify the repudiation of Yahweh, non-Yahwist sacrifices arouse fierce opposition. The prophets Hosea and Jeremiah grasp this adversarial relationship and in their advocacy for Yahweh infuse non-Yahwist praxis with images of illicit sexual encounters and with the production of religious contamination that will lead to the devastation of Israel and Judah and to the exile of their inhabitants. The new structure of ZNH that emerges with Hosea and Jeremiah is one that re-visions ZNH activities by incorporating repugnant sexual imagery and devastating theological contamination into the core of non-Yahwist praxis. However, ZNH also has a sexual signification in contexts that are independent of and distinct from cultic contexts. The stem ZNH is examined in its Ancient Near Eastern environment, but the thrust of this research is the analysis of ZNH in its Hebrew textual environment using concepts from cognitive linguistics: network of associations, associated commonplaces, and blending.