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Category Archives: Hebrew Bible

Happy Birthday, Rolf Rendtorff!

10 Monday May 2010

Posted by Deane in Academics, Hebrew Bible, Historical Criticism

≈ 1 Comment

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Rolf Rendtorff

Rolf Rendtorff

Old Testament scholar, Rolf Rendtorff turns 85 today, Wednesday 10 May. Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Herr Professor!!

Rolf Rendtorff is probably most well known for his book Das überlieferungsgeschichtliche Problem des Pentateuch , 1977 (translated into English as The Problem of the Process of Transmission in the Pentateuch). In this book, Rendtorff demonstrated that the traditio-historical approach of Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth which had been developed in the early twentieth century (which examined large complexes of tradition stretching throughout the first five or six books of the Hebew Bible, such as the Exodus tradition, the Desert wandering tradition, the Sinai tradition, and the Patriarchal tradition) was fundamentally inconsistent with the documentary source critical method championed by Julius Wellhausen in the previous century – even though in practice von Rad and Noth had continued to pursue a form of documentary source analysis side-by-side with their new traditio-historical criticism. Rendtorff’s finding that the various traditio-historical complexes of tradition were largely independent at a late stage before their integration ruled out the documentary hypothesis in its classical form, requiring, as it would, continuous sources interweaving each of the traditions. Together with other challenges to the documentary hypothesis which emerged in the same decade, Rendtorff’s book opened up the way for a closer study of the development of the narrative traditions, unrestrained by the assumptions of the documentary hypothesis. To a large extent, and here lies the challenge, the necessarily radical project which he outlined remains to be carried out by subsequent scholars.

Rolf Rendtorff shares a birthday with Barth and Bono.

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Lingering Questions about God’s Providence (1): Destroying Illicit Cult Places

03 Wednesday Feb 2010

Posted by Deane in Hebrew Bible, Historical Criticism

≈ 1 Comment

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Assyria, Babylon, Hezekiah, Israel, Josiah, Judah, Persia

The Bible reliably informs us that all of the great empires of antiquity – such as the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, and the Persian Empire – only really existed to do God’s bidding. And what God’s bidding typically involved was giving Israel, or Judah, a comprehensive pants-down spanking. As a historical explanation, what such an account lacks in socio-economic realism it certainly makes up for in bold imagination.

But one thing, especially, puzzles me: why would God bother getting Kings Hezekiah and Josiah to destroy all the illicit cult places in the land, given that the Assyrian and Babylonian armies which he was controlling were doing just that, at much the same time?

“[King Hezekiah] removed the high places, broke down the pillars, and cut down the sacred pole … “

” … In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, King Sennacherib of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them.”

(2 Kings 18:4, 13)

“[King Josiah] … commanded [the priests] to bring out of the temple of Yahweh all the vessels made for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven; he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron, and carried their ashes to Bethel. He deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem; those also who made offerings to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations, and all the host of the heavens … He brought all the priests out of the towns of Judah, and defiled the high places where the priests had made offerings, from Geba to Beer-sheba; he broke down the high places of the gates that were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city, which were on the left at the gate of the city … The king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem … He broke the pillars in pieces, cut down the sacred poles, and covered the sites with human bones. Moreover, the altar at Bethel … he pulled down that altar along with the high place. … Moreover, Josiah removed all the shrines of the high places that were in the towns of Samaria … He slaughtered on the altars all the priests of the high places who were there … “

” … [But 3 years after Josiah’s death and 2 kings later] … Yahweh sent against him bands of the Chaldeans, bands of the Arameans, bands of the Moabites, and bands of the Ammonites; he sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the word of Yahweh that he spoke by his servants the prophets. Surely this came upon Judah at the command of Yahweh… “

(2 Kings 23:4-20; 24:2-3)

A puzzling divine redundancy? A coincidence that might provoke a more economic and mundane explanation? Well… so it might justifiably appear to our admittedly finite minds.

Socrates and the Fat Rabbis

26 Tuesday Jan 2010

Posted by Deane in Dialogic, Greek, Hebrew Bible, Rabbinics

≈ 1 Comment

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Daniel Boyarin, Greek dialogues, Michael Bakhtin, Plato, Socrates, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, Talmud, Yigael Tumarkin

This looks innovative:

“What kind of literature is the Talmud? To answer this question, Daniel Boyarin looks to an unlikely source: the dialogues of Plato. In these ancient texts he finds similarities, both in their unique combination of various genres and topics and in their dialogic structure. But Boyarin goes beyond the typological parallelism between the texts, arguing also for a cultural relationship. In Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, Boyarin suggests that these dialogues are not dialogic at all. Using Michael Bakhtin’s notion of represented dialogue and real dialogism, Boyarin demonstrates, through multiple close readings, that the give-and-take in these texts is actually monologic in spirit… “

– blurb for Daniel Boyarin’s Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Yigael Tumarkin (יגאל תומרקין) - 'Abava Doheket et Habbasar'

Yigael Tumarkin (יגאל תומרקין) - 'Abava Doheket et Habbasar' (frontispiece to Daniel Boyarin's _Socrates and the Fat Rabbis_)

I don’t know what’s inside, but the great title and striking talmudic frontispiece – not to mention the author’s name – are enough to put it on my reading list. I expect it will provide an explication if not a complication on the relationship between Greek and Hebrew literature, and of the nature of dialogical and monological texts. But who knows what really lies inside? Exciting, isn’t it?

God for Clods

20 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by Deane in Hebrew Bible, Reception, Slang

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Aaron's rod, Chambers Slang Dictionary, comparative religion, Eve's curse, God for clods, Jonathon Green, zounds!

I noticed this while reading the Chambers Slang Dictionary (2008), by Jonathon “Mr Slang” Green. The slang phrase “God for clods” was allegedly used on U.S. campuses in the 1970s to describe “a course in basic comparative religion”.

Now that offers some groovy rebranding possibilities for RELS 101.

The Chambers Slang Dictionary provides more than a few entries with biblical allusions, most of them sharing a markedly Rabelaisian flavour. It all begins on the very first page, with “Aaron’s rod” (i.e. the penis, a term derived from Aaron’s blooming woody in Num 17.8) and extends through to the archaic “zounds!” (defined as “a euph. excl. lit. ‘God’s wounds'”).

One of the more visceral and memorable slang phrases containing a biblical allusion – of the ones I noticed in this engrossing dictionary – plays on the common and misogynist “menstrual interpretation” of Genesis 3:16, i.e. “the curse” of Eve. Here’s the delightful phrase:

“close as God’s curse to a whore’s arse [late 18C–early 19C] very close”

… yes, very close, indeed.

Tissot - God's Curse

James Jacques Joseph Tissot - 'God's Curse'

Uchronia’s Cock-Shaped Jerusalem Temple

13 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by Deane in Gender Studies, Hebrew Bible, Queer

≈ 3 Comments

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Anne Sexton, Charles Renouvier, Chronicles, cock, Joseph Gelfer, Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality, phallus, Roland Boer, temple, The Fury of Cocks, Uchronia

Thanks to Roland Boer, who introduces me to this term: Uchronia (think u-topia, but in terms of time, not place: Merry Arthurian England, The Early Church, Solomonic Enlightenment, Primitive Communism, post-Revolution but pre-Terror, etc, etc…). Apparently, according to one fairly reliable source, “It was coined by Charles Renouvier as the title of his 1876 novel Uchronie (L’Utopie dans l’histoire). Esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être.”

“Uchronia” has great applicability in the study of the Hebrew Bible, and Dr Boer makes use of it in “Of Fine Wine, Incense and Spices: The Unstable Masculine Hegemony of the Books of Chronicles,” Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality 4.1 (2010): 19-31 (that is, in Australian-based Joseph Gelfer’s spectacularly successful journal).

Phallic TempleAt the (spatial) centre of Chronicles’ uchronic vision stands “the priapic temple” itself:

“It is a massive phallic tower, a high-rise temple for Solomon, like some angular cock raised to the heavens with its balls on the ground. Commentators on Chronicles are keen to cut down this phallus: the unanimous agreement is that 2 Chronicles 3.4a is—of course!—corrupt. It could not possibly mean a massive tower of 120 cubits. However, I suggest that this text is a telltale sign of the text’s masculine economy, for it is the image par excellence of the overwhelming if desperate effort to assert a male-only world.”

But flaccidity accompanies this “stiff” male hegemony. Have a read. It’s historical criticism at its finest. And read Anne Sexton, who also understood the limits of cock-temple power:

The Fury Of Cocks

There they are
drooping over the breakfast plates,
angel-like,
folding in their sad wing,
animal sad,
and only the night before
there they were
playing the banjo.
Once more the day’s light comes
with its immense sun,
its mother trucks,
its engines of amputation.
Whereas last night
the cock knew its way home,
as stiff as a hammer,
battering in with all
its awful power.
That theater.
Today it is tender,
a small bird,
as soft as a baby’s hand.
She is the house.
He is the steeple.
When they fuck they are God.
When they break away they are God.
When they snore they are God.
In the morning they butter the toast.
They don’t say much.
They are still God.
All the cocks of the world are God,
blooming, blooming, blooming
into the sweet blood of woman.

New Articles from The Dunedin School: Job; Aqedah; Achsah

27 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by The Dunedin School in Continental Philosophy, Hebrew Bible, Postcolonialism, Reception, Violence

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9/11, Achsah, aqedah, differend, divine violence, hybridity, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Job, suicide bombing, symbolic exchange, tangata whenua

Rounding up some recent articles emanating from The Dunedin School:

LyotardDeane Galbraith examines the book of Job through the lens of Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the differend, uncovering a further dimension of injustice in the book resulting from God’s appeal to universalising and transcendent standards of divine justice which serve to deny justice to Job in the specific facts of Job’s dispute. He describes the book of Job as “the Bible’s most anti-Christian text”.
‘”Would you condemn me that you may be justified?”: Job as differend.’ Bible and Critical Theory 5.3 (October 2009)

BaudrillardEric Repphun explores the aqedah and divine violence in general, with reference to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of symbolic exchange. He questions whether suicide bombing, including 9/11 horrifies us, in part, not only because of its transgressing of the boundaries between the human and the inhuman, but also because “it violates the conventional logics of exchange rooted in capitalist ideas of exchange and use value”.
‘Anything in Exchange for the World: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and the Aqedah.’ International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 7.2 (July 2009)

Come Home (The Gift of Achsah)Judith McKinlay fleshes out the elliptical story of Achsah, a hybrid biblical character, in whose person and genealogy is an uncomfortable reminder of the tangata whenua (indigenous people) still in the land. “Forever located in Scripture, she is the pawn of an imperial hegemony…”
‘Meeting Achsah on Achsah’s land.’ Bible and Critical Theory 5.3 (October 2009)

How the more spiritually minded obsess about the body

11 Friday Dec 2009

Posted by Deane in Hebrew Bible, Jesus, Purification, Symbol

≈ 6 Comments

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cannibalism, copulation, Eucharist, excretion, idolatry, John Milton, Maggie Kilgour, On Christian Doctrine, scatophagy, spiritualisation

In a well-known twist, what usually results from the illusory attempt to lead a pure and spiritual existence, free from material baseness, is an obsessive fantasizing about excreting, copulating, and other “lower” bodily functions.

For example, the more puritanical among the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Protestants were carrying on a long tradition of iconoclasm, one found in the biblical books, when they attempted to purify Christian rites of any material significance. The way they saw things, the Eucharist must be viewed as a spiritual remembrance which rendered the material bread and wine merely accidental or it would inevitably descend into gross and base literalism: the cannibalistic eating of the body of Christ. The nuanced Catholic conception of the symbol as something both present and physical, and yet absent and transcendent, got caricatured as gross materialism, via a fervant literalism that itself was responsible for creating the idol which it was criticising.

So John Milton, in On Christian Doctrine, warns that the Eucharist must be no more than an analogy for a spiritual process. The alternative, in Milton’s fantasy (although never conceived as such by his real rather than imaginary Catholic opponents), was idolatry and scatological obsession:

“if we eat his flesh it will not remain in us, but to speak candidly, after being digested in the stomach it will be at length excluded.”

(On Christian Doctine, 1.28; tr. in Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism)

Or, as Milton later caricatures the Catholic view, shuddering (with a secret delight?) to even think about it:

“when [Christ’s body] has been driven through all the stomach’s filthy channels it shoots it out – one shudders even to mention it – into the latrine.”

(On Christian Doctine, 6.560; tr. in Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism)

We’ve got both sides of the debate here, so it’s fairly easy to work out that Milton is misrepresenting the symbolic Catholic view. Perversely, it is Milton himself who is grossly obsessing on the materiality of the Eucharist. As Maggie Kilgour comments:

“in his attack on Catholic materialism he cannot resist the temptation of dwelling obsessively on bodily images, especially those related to the ‘lowest’ functions of eating and excretion. His own dualistic definition of communion enables him to indulge in the materialist fantasies he is suppose to be denouncing by projecting them outside of himself onto another group that he then attacks.”

(From Communion to Cannibalism, 84)

By contrast, in Isaiah 44, we don’t get both sides of the depiction of Babylonian worship, but just the Jewish caricature of the foolishness of idol-worship. But as George Soares-Prabhu questions in his article, “Laughing at Idols”: might there actually have been in Babylonian religion, behind this base caricature of idols,  “visual theologies of great depth and power”?

Ten Reasons for Dating Deuteronomy to the Late Persian or Hellenistic Periods

27 Friday Nov 2009

Posted by Deane in Biblical Studies, Hebrew Bible

≈ 21 Comments

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Deuteronomy, Elephantine, Josiah, Judah, Juha Pakkala, Urdeuteronomium

Juha Pakkala has a fine article in the latest ZAW outlining his ten reasons why Urdeuteronomium – the earliest edition of the book of Deuteronomy – dates later than Josiah and the Judean Kingdom, that is after 586 BCE. In fact, his reasons point to a period no earlier than the 300s BCE.

It’s a splendid thing having exactly ten reasons: everyone likes such a fine round number. Do have a read of the article, if you are interested in his more detailed reasoning. But here is a quick run-down of the Pakkala’s ten reasons for dating the earliest edition of Deuteronomy after 586 BCE:

1. The monarch plays no role in the Urdeuteronomium, which would be “exceptional” for any lawcode expected to be enforced (as apparently narrated in 2 Kings 22-23).

2. Connected with (1), the laws do not imply “any state infrastructure and organization”, but instead “are written as if the author were implying a stateless religious community.”

3. There are no references to Judah in Urdeuteronomium, and in fact the status of Judah is challenged by the reference to “Israel”, by which is meant “a religious community rather than… the inhabitants of a state”.

4. There is no reference to the Temple in any core law of the Urdeuteronomium, even though many of the laws are concerned with the centralization of the sacrificial cult – suggesting that the context was one in which “there was no temple” and the author “was not sure if there ever would be one”.

5. Connected with (4), there is no reference to Jerusalem, the reference to “this place” in Deut 12 suggesting a context “when the future of Jerusalem as a center of the cult would have been uncertain” leading the author “to use a more vague formulation and leave many options open.”

6. Connected with (4) and (5), the “place” of Deut 12 is vaguely connected with “one of your tribes”, such vagueness being unlikely “if the setting was the kingdom of Judah during monarchic times.” Furthermore, the reference to 12 tribes, as pointed out by many scholars, likely reflects a later development.

7. The implementation of the law is set in a time in the future, using the imperfect (Deut 12.14) and referring to “the place that Yahweh will choose”. But this future timeframe, within the Urdeuteronomium (which does not yet have the Mosaic context of the final form of Deuteronomy), does not suit the kingdom of Josiah . Furthermore, the very setting of this temple foundation myth – in the middle of the desert, rather than at the temple – reflects a non-monarchic setting.

8. The shem (name) theology in Deut 12.21, the core idea of which is that Yahweh’s name rather than physical presence or cult image (ark) dwells in the temple, “points to a situation where the temple had ceased to be the actual dwelling place of Yahweh, his cult image or his Presence”.

9. The external evidence indicates that there was no cult centralization at Jerusalem at least before 400 BCE. The Elephantine papyri shows that the Egyptian Jewish community was unaware of cult centralization and that their requests of the governors of Jerusalem and Samaria to build a temple at Elephantine (ca 407 BCE) and to sacrifice on the altar were asked without any such awareness, and were approved without the issue being raised. “This suggests that even as late as the late fifth century BCE the political elite in Jerusalem and Samaria was not influenced, restricted or even aware of a prohibition to sacrifice outside Jerusalem (or Mt. Gerizim),” contrary to Deut 12. Furthermore, the so-called Passover Letter (ca 419 BCE) provides instructions for celebrating Passover at Elephantine that appear to contradict Deut 16.

10. The laws of Urdeuteronomium are not realistic, but idealistic laws that were unlikely ever to have been followed. The laws suit the ideals of a community “visioning a new society should the state be reestablished.” In particular, the idea that the people had to attend Jerusalem for sacrifice (Deut 12.13-14) and offer a whole tenth of the agricultural products and livestock (14.22-26) are “completely unrealistic”.

Juha Pakkala, ‘The Date of the Oldest Edition of Deuteronomy.’ Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 121.3 (Sep 2009): 388–401.

Here is Juha!

Here is Juha!

Bialik ביאליק – Reading the Bible in Hebrew

25 Wednesday Nov 2009

Posted by Deane in Hebrew Bible, Translation

≈ 27 Comments

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Bialik, Hebrew, ביאליק

“Reading the Bible in translation is like kissing your new bride through a veil.”

– חיים נחמן ביאליק (Haim Nachman Bialik, 9 January 1873 – 4 July 1934)

How do the instructions Al Qaeda gave to the 9/11 bombers compare with the Holy War instructions God gave to Israel?

19 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by Deane in Hebrew Bible, Islam, Violence

≈ 13 Comments

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9/11, Al Qaeda, Bruce Lincoln, holy war, killing, Mohamed Atta, purity, Yahweh

World Trade CenterLet’s compare the biblical instructions concerning Holy War in the Old Testament with the instructions given to Mohamed Atta, the leader of the  attacks of 11 September 2001. The instructions can be found in biblical passages such as Num 21:1-3; Deut 2:30-35; 3:3-7; 7:1-2; Josh 6:17-21; 10:28; 11:10-11; 1 Sam 15:1-33 and in the Observer.

There are a number of significant comparisons between the instructions Al Qaeda gave to the 9/11 bombers and the instructions Yahweh gave to Israel. Here are some of the main points of comparison which struck me as I compared the two:

1. Both Yahweh and Al Qaeda stir up their warriors by telling them that there is no need for fear, and that the only ones who should be afraid are God’s enemies:

“’The people are stronger and taller than we; the cities are large and fortified up to heaven! We actually saw there the offspring of the Anakim!'” I said to you, “Have no dread or fear of them. Yahweh your God, who goes before you, is the one who will fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your very eyes” (Deut 1:28-30)

“All of their [U.S.] equipment and gates and technology will not prevent, nor harm, except by God’s will. The believers do not fear such things. The only ones that fear it are the allies of Satan, who are the brothers of the devil.” (Al Qaeda instructions, §21)

2. Both Yahweh and Al Qaeda try to inspire their people by saying that the few can defeat the many, with the help of God:

“When Yahweh your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you–the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you–and when Yahweh your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must devote them to destruction… It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that Yahweh set his heart on you and chose you–for you were the fewest of all peoples.” (Deut 7:1-3, 7)

“Remember: How many small groups beat big groups by the will of God… If you see the enemy as strong, remember the groups that fought the prophet Muhammad. They were 10,000. Remember how God gave victory to his faithful servants.” (§§12, 37)

3. In the case of both biblical Israel and Al Qaeda, the warriors are told to prepare with acts of washing and purification – because their mass-murders have a pure religious significance:

“Camp outside the camp seven days; whoever of you has killed any person or touched a corpse, purify yourselves and your captives on the third and on the seventh day. You shall purify every garment, every article of skin, everything made of goats’ hair, and every article of wood.” (Num 31:19-20)

“Shave excess hair from the body and wear cologne. Shower.” (§3)

4. Both Yahweh and Al Qaeda advise that the warriors should be free fom sin, before their divinely sanctioned mission:

“Therefore, observe diligently the commandment–the statutes, and the ordinances–that I am commanding you today. If you heed these ordinances, by diligently observing them, Yahweh your God will maintain with you the covenant loyalty that he swore to your ancestors… You shall devour all the peoples that Yahweh your God is giving over to you, showing them no pity” (Deut 7:11-12, 16)

“Purify your soul from all unclean things. Completely forget something called ‘this world’. The time for play is over and the serious time is upon us.” (§9)

5. Both Yahweh and Al Qaeda admonish that, even though they face possible death in battle, the warriors should be happy and courageous, sure in the knowledge that they are doing God’s will, and confident of their reward:

“From the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, to the Great Sea in the west shall be your territory. No one shall be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will not fail you or forsake you. Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to act in accordance with all the law that my servant Moses commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, so that you may be successful wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:5-7)

“Do not seem confused or show signs of nervous tension. Be happy, optimistic, calm, because you are heading for a deed that God loves and will accept. It will be the day, God willing, you spend with the women of paradise.” (§24)

6. Both Yahweh and Al Qaeda describe the mass-murders as a higher calling. Killing is not to be done with any thought of revenge or anger – but is a rational process, done for God’s sake:

“you shall inquire and make a thorough investigation. If the charge is established that such an abhorrent thing has been done among you, you shall put the inhabitants of that town to the sword, devoting it to destruction and everything in it–even putting its livestock to the sword.” (Deut 14:15)

“Do not seek revenge for yourself. Strike for God’s sake… before you do anything, make sure your soul is prepared to do everything you do for God only.” (§32)

7. Both Yahweh and Al Qaeda warn that nobody is to be spared; no prisoners are to be taken; and no plunder is to be taken:

“No human beings who have been devoted to destruction can be ransomed; they shall be put to death.” (Lev 27:29);  “Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.” (Deut 7:3); “keep away from the things devoted to destruction, so as not to covet and take any of the things devoted to destruction” (Josh 6:18) 

“implement the way of the prophet in taking prisoners. Take prisoners and kill them. As Almighty God said: ‘No prophet should have prisoners until he has soaked the land with blood. You want the bounties of this world in exchange for prisoners and God wants the other world for you, and God is all-powerful, all-wise.” (§33)

In both cases, the instructions were given to divinely ordained warriors, preparing them for their upcoming religious slaughters. True and genuine religious slaughters, that is. The idea that such violence is untrue to religion is an idea frequently imposed on Islam by Western liberal humanism. It is also adopted by a small minority of Western Islamic scholars, most of them operating in the West, and wishing to impose a liberal, humanistic conception of Islam on every form of Islam. It is also held by many groups of Muslims who do not share a belief in this violent type of Islam. Islam should not be characterized as either a monolithically violent or a monolithically peaceful religion. Mohammed Atta’s views cannot be generalised to “Islam”, yet also it should not be denied that his were genuinely religious and deeply held Islamic actions. Similarly, the Holy War described in the Bible – whether it in fact occurred or is a fiction – reflects genuine religious beliefs, even if they are rejected today by many Christians and many Jews.

Bruce Lincoln comments, in Holy Terrors (2003):

“It is tempting, in the face of such horror, to regard the authors of these deeds as evil incarnate: persons bereft of reason, decency or human compassion. Their motives, however—as revealed by the instructions that guided their final days—were intensely and profoundly religious.”

Al Qaeda’s beliefs are genuinely religious beliefs, and beliefs which have a precedent in the violence which is an integral part of many varieties of “true” religious practice – not least, the Holy War traditions in the Old Testament.

Uncovering the Bible’s Crumbitude: Reviews of R. Crumb’s Genesis

19 Thursday Nov 2009

Posted by Deane in Comics, Hebrew Bible

≈ 2 Comments

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crumbitude, Genesis, Naomi Seidman, R. Crumb, Robert Alter

Here are two good reviews of R. Crumb’s Genesis comic, from two of Berkeley’s Jewish Studies professors. The first review is by Robert Alter, on whose translation of Genesis Crumb largely bases his own text.

“Crumb has always been an artist with a single style, a distinctive and emphatic one–in this regard as in others he is certainly no Picasso; and so it should neither surprise nor disappoint us that he has used his style to interpret the Bible. His women have always been broad-shouldered, big-breasted, thick-lipped, erotically energetic figures with the physiques of NFL linebackers, and that is how his biblical women, from Eve to Rebekah to Rachel, appear. The Crumb brand is certainly here; but in this signature visual idiom he has produced a frequently arresting interpretation of Genesis. I stress that it is an interpretation, because the extremely concise biblical narrative, abounding in hints and gaps and ellipses, famously demands interpretation… The Midrash, produced in late antiquity, is often an interpretive fleshing-out of the spare biblical narratives, an attempt to fill in the narrative gaps and read closely and imaginatively between the lines. And this is essentially what Crumb does graphically, with a special emphasis on the element of flesh.”

(‘Scripture Picture’, by Robert Alter, The New Republic, 19 October 2009)

“What seems to have surprised many of the reviewers, including this one, is not only how “straight” Crumb played the Bible, but also how far from jolting even the most striking of these illustrations are, as if he were not imposing an alien and coarse modern sensibility on an exalted ancient text but rather uncovering a certain Crumbitude that had always been inhabiting it. There was, it seemed to me, an affinity between whatever it was Crumb stood for (sexual lewdness as well as emotional honesty, a fascination with the unbeautiful body, the interconnections between desire and vulnerability or beauty and power) and whatever Genesis had on offer.”

(‘Sex, the Body, the World: It’s R. Crumb’s Bible Now’ by Naomi Seidman, Religion Dispatches, 10 November 2009)

Crumb' s Genesis

The Minds Which Seduce Us: On First Reading E. M. Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist

11 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by Eric Repphun in Biblical Studies, Continental Philosophy, Death, Ethics, Evil, God, Hebrew Bible, History, Language, Philosophy, Reference, Religion, Rhetoric, Texts, Theory

≈ 2 Comments

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America, Confession, E. M. Cioran, Exile, Job, Judaism, The Temptation to Exist

One of the most palpable pleasures of the academic life is to find a new thinker, a new author who challenges, excites, infuriates, or simply makes one prick up one’s ears.  So much the better to stumble upon a thinker who has a long list of books just waiting to be explored, deconstructed, and enjoyed.  My recent encounter with Emil Cioran’s collection of essays, The Temptation to Exist[1], is the intellectual equivalent to my first listen to Tom Wait’s Closing Time as an undergraduate, where the joy of discovery is only deepened with the knowledge that there are – in the case of Waits – albums like Rain Dogs and Bone Machine waiting in the wings.  Unlike Waits, Cioran is no longer living and working among us, so his body of work is bounded in time, but there is still a lifetime of writing to anticipate reading.  I’ve got two more of his books waiting for me at home already.  I’ve come to Cioran by recommendation of Deane, who is, according to one commenter, The Dunedin School’s ‘archblogger’, who has yet to recommend to me a bad book, which is in itself rather remarkable.

E. M. Cioran

E. M. Cioran

Cioran, born in Romania in 1911 with a Romanian Orthodox priest for a father, took to philosophy early in life, travelling to Berlin in 1933, where he developed a certain sympathy for the Nazis and for the Romanian nationalistic organisation The Iron Guard, despite the fact that violence of any kind made him uncomfortable.  Cioran spent much of his adult life working and living largely as a hermit in France and he would eventually repudiate all of his ties to the political right, expressing his regret clearly in later interviews.  He died in 2005, leaving a mass of unpublished work that is still tied up in the French courts.   Reading Cioran is maddening, joyous, and difficult.  Understanding him is, if anything, even worse.  Writing in the aphoristic philosophical tradition that includes such diverse figures as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and Wittgenstein, Cioran is one to read and to ponder in mad, great lumps or in discrete bites.  I can’t pretend to have mined any of this with any thoroughness, but I’ve included some highlights, some things that caught my attention, that pricked up my ears.

Cioran, in ‘Thinking Against Oneself’, betraying his history of sympathy to fascism (which, though this is a troubling thought, does not mean that he is wrong):

Almost all our discoveries are due to our violence, to the exacerbation of our instability.  Even God, insofar as He [sic] interests us – it is not in our innermost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us (33).

In the same essay, on Christianity:

But the Christian virus torments us: heirs of the flagellants, it is by refining our excruciations that we become conscious of ourselves.  Is religion declining?  We perpetuate its extravagances, as we perpetuate the macerations and the cell-shrieks of old, our will to suffer equalling that of the monasteries in their heyday.  If the Church no longer enjoys a monopoly on hell, it has nonetheless riveted us to a chain of sighs, to the cult of the ordeal, of blasted joys and jubilant despair … No sage among our ancestors, but malcontents, triflers, fanatics whose disappointments or excesses we must continue (34-35).

Wherever there is suffering, it exhausts mystery or renders it luminous (39).

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning (45).

From ‘On a Winded Civilisation’ on the intellectual life (and this hits very close to home):

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices or a world adrift.  He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs.  Tyranny furnished that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome.  If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him.  To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths.  ‘Bind me with the chains of Illusion’, he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of Knowledge.  Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke (57-58).

The future belongs to the suburbs of the globe (64).

In ‘A Little Theory of Destiny’ and ‘Advantages of Exile’, Cioran explores the idea of exile and living as an expatriate, which is very much on my mind on as I am on a short trip back to my American hometown of Boulder, Colorado (the New Age capital of the universe), a place I love and hate in equal measure – and his writing captures some of the essence of my experience so well that is almost chilling:

The aspiration to ‘save’ the world is the morbid phenomenon of a people’s youth (66).

Hating my people, my country, its timeless peasants enamored of their own torpor and almost bursting with hebetude, I blushed to be descended from them, repudiated them, rejected their sub-eternity, their larval certainties, the geologic reverie.  No use scanning their features for their fidgets, the grimaces of revolt: the monkey, alas! was dying in them.  In truth, did they not sprout from the very rock?  Unable to rouse them, or to animate them, I came to the point of dreaming of an extermination.  One does not massacre stones.  The spectacle they offered me justified and baffled, nourished and disgusted my hysteria.  And I never stopped cursing the accident that caused me to be born among them (70).

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state.  On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence.  The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and our illusions become (74).

On poetry, an analysis that fits New Zealand, a decidedly minor nation that is very fond of poetry, like a glove:

Consider the production of any ‘minor’ nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic.  Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center.  Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbaric genius and a formless language (76).

In ‘A People of Solitaries’, which on occasion strays dangerously close to an unformed, casual anti-Semitism, Cioran offers as astute, troubling look at Judaism in European history:

To be a man is a drama; to be a Jew is another.  Hence, the Jew has the privilege of living our condition twice over.  He represents the alienated existence par excellence or, to utilize an expression by which the theologians describe God, the wholly other (80).

However grave its consequences may have been, the rejection of Christianity remains the Jews’ finest exploit, a no which does them honor.  If previously they had walked alone by necessity, they would henceforth do so by resolve, as outcasts armed with a great cynicism, the sole precaution they have taken against the future (85).

On Job, a frequent guest here at The Dunedin School (turn the pages and stop here and here):

The tragic hero rarely seeks an accounting from a blind, impersonal Fate: it is his pride to accept its decrees.  He will perish, then, he and his.  But a Job harasses his God, demands an accounting: a formal summons results, of a sublime bad taste, which would doubtless have repelled a Greek but which touches, which overwhelms us.  These outpourings, these vociferations of a plagued man who offers conditions to Heaven and submerges it with his imprecations – how can we remain insensitive to such a thing?  The closer we are to abdicating, the more these cries disturb us.  Job is indeed of his race: his sobs are a show of force, an assault.  ‘My bones are pierced in me in the night season’, he laments.  His lamentation culminates in a cry, and this cry rises through the vaults of Heaven and makes God tremble.  Insofar as, beyond our silences and our weaknesses, we dare lament our ordeals, we are all descendents of the great leper, heirs of his desolation and his moan.  But too often our voices fall silent; and though he shows us how to work ourselves to his accents, he does not manage to shake us out of our inertia.  Indeed, he has the best of it: he knew Whom to vilify or implore, Whom to attack or pray to.  But we – against whom are we to cry out?  Our own kind?  That seems to us absurd.  No sooner articulated than our rebellions expire on our lips … Job has transmitted his energy to his own people: thirsting like him for justice, they never yield before the evidence of an iniquitous world.  Revolutionaries by instinct, the notion of renunciation fails to occur to them: if Job, that Biblical Prometheus, struggled with God, they would struggle with men (99-100).

There is so much more that could be said about The Temptation to Exist, but it is late and I will leave you with a final note, from ‘Some Blind Alleys: A Letter’, in which Cioran, writing decades before the rise of the now dominant therapeutic ethos and the repellent spectacle of reality television, sees into the future with a striking clarity:

The confessional? a rape of conscience perpetrated in the name of heaven.  And that other rape, psychological analysis!  Secularized, prostituted, the confessional will soon be installed on our street corners: except for a couple of criminals, everyone aspires to have a public soul, a poster soul (109).

Never have I wanted more to be a criminal, and more ashamed to be working – with these very words – towards a public soul.


[1] E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, translated by Richard Howard, with an Introduction by Susan Sontag (London: Quartet Encounters, 1987).  All page numbers cited in parenthesis refer to this version of the text.

(Incidentally, The Dunedin School has been ranked #35 on the Biblioblog Top 50 list this month, which is kind of funny, as some of us aren’t even Biblical scholars, though we are constantly running into that damned thing.)

The Prosaic and Authoritative Parts of Job make it interesting

22 Tuesday Sep 2009

Posted by Deane in Ethics, Evil, God, Hebrew Bible

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

authority, divine retribution, Job, no reason whatsoever, prosaic, satan

The poetry between Job and his friends is just a nice distraction. The really interesting innovation in Job occurs in the prologue, divine speeches, and epilogue. For while Job protests against divine retribution as much as one can, he ultimately keeps within the system upheld by his friends. That’s why he’s still looking for a Redeemer in the god who is tormenting him. He doesn’t seriously consider any other option. For all its facade of dissent, Job 3-31 is, in the main, an argument carried out within the system of divine retribution, in the well-worn mode of other ancient Near Eastern conversations.

But compare satan’s point in Job 1:9-11 and 2:3-6. The satan is challenging the very system of divine retribution itself. Do people serve God for reward, or only for God’s own sake (for no reason at all)? Now this is true innovation. And then the divine speeches refuse to give any reason for obeying God. The ground for obeying God is moved to a whole new level. Retribution is not the whole story, and it isn’t the most important principle of divine ethics anymore. Now, this is interesting! It removes God’s actions from any possible human scrutiny, asks the question Job did not ask (and was ignorant of; 9:17 is still dominated by expectations that divine retribution is the norm), and makes the protests of Chs. 3-31 beside the point. Protest against God requires at least some guaranteed grounds of his ethical actions, but once he is free of any knowable principle for action, protest is futile – Job can only keep silent and withdraw. Divine retribution can be used to justify almost anything as ‘good’, from the fall of a proud man to the holocaust of an entire people. But the transcendence of God lets him do absolutely anything he wants. And with any such totalising move, this results in an endless supply of suppressed voices to recover. Submission to the discipline of absolute authority is so exciting to think about! The prose and the authoritative divine speeches provides the really interesting departure and development within the book of Job.

It’s now gone 5:00 a.m. I should really stop thinking about Job when I’m in bed (proof-text: 4:12-16).

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