From Babylon to Eternity
From Babylon to Eternity

Author: Bob Becking

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1134903863

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First Published in 2014. Generally, readers have a negative idea of the Exile. Psalm 137 has fuelled the idea that this was a time of sorrow and despair. This image of the Exile influenced, for instance, Luther’s ideas on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. The four essays in this volume deconstruct and reconstruct this image. Bob Becking tries to recreate a history of the Exile. On the basis of the available evidence, this could be no more than a fragmented history, nevertheless showing that the fate of the exiles was not as bad as often supposed. Anne-Mareike Wetter reveals that the biblical image of exile is multi-faceted. She shows how a tradition of a people tied to their God-given land was challenged by the reality of foreign occupation. And how that people eventually succeeded in translating this experience, appropriating it through a transformation into a counter-tradition that enabled them to cope with the new situation, without breaking entirely with their cultural and religious heritage. Jewish ideas on exile are discussed by Wilfred van de Poll. He concentrates on the use of the concept of galut, which refers to the paradigmatic and identity-shaping function of the dispersion of the people of Israel and showed that the Exile in Jewish thinking had become a permanent reality up until the present day. From the perspective of intertextual reading, Alex Cannegieter discusses four texts of varying ages and background – Augustine, Petrarch, Luther, and a Dutch sermon held after the end of the Second World War. She explores the ways authors chose biblical texts to appropriate them a new context, thereby changing the meaning of the new, as well as the source texts.

By the Rivers of Babylon
By the Rivers of Babylon

Author: Nelson DeMille

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Published: 2003-06-01

Total Pages: 537

ISBN-13: 0759528322

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Lod Airport, Israel: Two Concorde jets take off for a U.N. conference that will finally bring peace to the Middle East. Covered by F-14 fighters, accompanied by security men, the planes carry warriors, pacifists, lovers, enemies, dignitaries -- and a bomb planted by a terrorist mastermind. Suddenly they're forced to crash-land at an ancient desert site. Here, with only a handful of weapons, the men and women of the peace mission must make a desperate stand against an army of crack Palestinian commandos -- while the Israeli authorities desperately attempt a rescue mission. In a land of blood and tears, in a windswept place called Babylon, it will be a battle of bullets and courage, and a war to the last death.

From Babylon to Eternity
From Babylon to Eternity

Author: Bob Becking

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 127

ISBN-13: 1134903936

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First Published in 2014. Generally, readers have a negative idea of the Exile. Psalm 137 has fuelled the idea that this was a time of sorrow and despair. This image of the Exile influenced, for instance, Luther’s ideas on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. The four essays in this volume deconstruct and reconstruct this image. Bob Becking tries to recreate a history of the Exile. On the basis of the available evidence, this could be no more than a fragmented history, nevertheless showing that the fate of the exiles was not as bad as often supposed. Anne-Mareike Wetter reveals that the biblical image of exile is multi-faceted. She shows how a tradition of a people tied to their God-given land was challenged by the reality of foreign occupation. And how that people eventually succeeded in translating this experience, appropriating it through a transformation into a counter-tradition that enabled them to cope with the new situation, without breaking entirely with their cultural and religious heritage. Jewish ideas on exile are discussed by Wilfred van de Poll. He concentrates on the use of the concept of galut, which refers to the paradigmatic and identity-shaping function of the dispersion of the people of Israel and showed that the Exile in Jewish thinking had become a permanent reality up until the present day. From the perspective of intertextual reading, Alex Cannegieter discusses four texts of varying ages and background – Augustine, Petrarch, Luther, and a Dutch sermon held after the end of the Second World War. She explores the ways authors chose biblical texts to appropriate them a new context, thereby changing the meaning of the new, as well as the source texts.

Song of Exile
Song of Exile

Author: David W. Stowe

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0190466847

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Oft-referenced and frequently set to music, Psalm 137 - which begins "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion" - has become something of a cultural touchstone for music and Christianity across the Atlantic world. It has been a top single more than once in the 20th century, from Don McLean's haunting Anglo-American folk cover to Boney M's West Indian disco mix. In Song of Exile, David Stowe uses a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach that combines personal interviews, historical overview, and textual analysis to demonstrate the psalm's enduring place in popular culture. The line that begins Psalm 137 - one of the most lyrical of the Hebrew Bible - has been used since its genesis to evoke the grief and protest of exiled, displaced, or marginalized communities. Despite the psalm's popularity, little has been written about its reception during the more than 2,500 years since the Babylonian exile. Stowe locates its use in the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement, and internationally by anti-colonial Jamaican Rastafari and immigrants from Ireland, Korea, and Cuba. He studies musical references ranging from the Melodians' Rivers of Babylon to the score in Kazakh film Tulpan. Stowe concludes by exploring the presence and absence in modern culture of the often-ignored final words: "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." Usually excised from liturgy and forgotten by scholars, Stowe finds these words echoed in modern occurrences of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and more generally in the culture of vengeance that has existed in North America from the earliest conflicts with Native Americans. Based on numerous interviews with musicians, theologians, and writers, Stowe reconstructs the rich and varied reception history of this widely used, yet mysterious, text.

Measuring Eternity
Measuring Eternity

Author: Martin Gorst

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2002-03-26

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0767910982

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The untold story of the religious figures, philosophers, astronomers, geologists, physicists, and mathematicians who, for more than four hundred years, have pursued the answer to a fundamental question at the intersection of science and religion: When did the universe begin? The moment of the universe's conception is one of science's Holy Grails, investigated by some of the most brilliant and inquisitive minds across the ages. Few were more committed than Bishop James Ussher, who lost his sight during the fifty years it took him to compose his Annals of all known history, now famous only for one date: 4004 b.c. Ussher's date for the creation of the world was spectacularly inaccurate, but that didn't stop it from being so widely accepted that it was printed in early twentieth-century Bibles. As writer and documentary filmmaker Martin Gorst vividly illustrates in this captivating, character-driven narrative, theology let Ussher down just as it had thwarted Theophilus of Antioch and many before him. Geology was next to fail the test of time. In the eighteenth century, naturalist Comte de Buffon, working out the rate at which the earth was supposed to have cooled, came up with an age of 74,832 years, even though he suspected this was far too low. Biology then had a go in the hands of fossil hunter Johann Scheuchzer, who alleged to have found a specimen of a man drowned at the time of Noah's flood. Regrettably it was only the imprint of a large salamander. And so science inched forward via Darwinism, thermodynamics, radioactivity, and, most recently, the astronomers at the controls of the Hubble space telescope, who put the beginning of time at 13.4 billion years ago (give or take a billion). Taking the reader into the laboratories and salons of scholars and scientists, visionaries and eccentrics, Measuring Eternity is an engagingly written account of an epic, often quixotic quest, of how individuals who dedicated their lives to solving an enduring mystery advanced our knowledge of the universe.

Empires of the Plain
Empires of the Plain

Author: Lesley Adkins

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2004-12-13

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 1466838388

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"Well-told story of a life dedicated to scholarship, with great adventures and derring-do an unexpected bonus." - Kirkus Reviews From 1827 Henry Rawlinson, fearless soldier, sportsman and imperial adventurer of the first rank, spent twenty-five years in India, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan in the service of the East India Company. During this time he survived the dangers of disease and warfare, including the disastrous First Anglo-Afghan War. A gifted linguist, fascinated by history and exploration, he became obsessed with cuneiform, the world's earliest writing. An immense inscription high on a sheer rock face at Bisitun in the mountains of western Iran, carved on the orders of King Darius the Great of Persia over 2,000 years ago, was the key to understanding the many cuneiform scripts and languages. Only Rawlinson had the physical and intellectual skills, courage, self-motivation and opportunity to make the perilous ascent and copy the monument. Here, Lesley Adkins relates the story of Rawlinson's life and how he triumphed in deciphering the lost languages of Persia and Babylonia, overcoming his brilliant but bitter rival, Edward Hincks. While based in Baghdad, Rawlinson became involved in the very first excavations of the ancient mounds of Mesopotamia, from Nineveh to Babylon, an area that had been fought over by so many powerful empires. His decipherment of the inscriptions resurrected unsuspected civilizations, revealing intriguing details of everyday life and forgotten historical events. By proving to the astonished Victorian public that people and places in the Old Testament really existed (and, furthermore, that documents and chronicles had survived from well before the writing of the Bible), Rawlinson became a celebrity and assured his own place in history.