Proceeding by means of intensive readings of passages from the early midrash on Exodus The Mekilta, Boyarin proposes a new theory of midrash that rests in part on an understanding of the heterogeneity of the biblical text and the constraining force of rabbinic ideology on the production of midrash. In a forceful combination of theory and reading, Boyarin raises profound questions concerning the interplay between history, ideology, and interpretation.
Even before the biblical canon became fixed, writers have revisited and reworked its stories. The author of Joshua takes the haphazard settlement of Israel recorded in the Book of Judges and retells it as an orderly military conquest. The writer of Chronicles expurgates the David cycle in Samuel I and II, offering an upright and virtuous king devoid of baser instincts. This literary phenomenon is not contained to inner-biblical exegesis. Once the telling becomes known, the retellings begin: through the New Testament, rabbinic midrash, medieval mystery plays, medieval and Renaissance poetry, nineteenth century novels, and contemporary literature, writers of the Western world have continued to occupy themselves with the biblical canon. However, there exists no adequate vocabulary-academic or popular, religious or secular, literary or theological-to describe the recurring appearances of canonical figures and motifs in later literature. Literary critics, bible scholars and book reviewers alike seek recourse in words like adaptation, allusion, echo, imitation and influence to describe what the author, for lack of better terms, has come to call retellings or recastings. Although none of these designations rings false, none approaches precision. They do not tell us what the author of a novel or poem has done with a biblical figure, do not signal how this newly recast figure is different from other recastings of it, and do not offer any indication of why these transformations have occurred. Sustaining Fictions sets out to redress this problem, considering the viability of the vocabularies of literary, midrashic, and translation theory for speaking about retelling.
This work covers the typological relation of rabbinic Judaism to Christianity, and provides a re-examination, by going back to the roots, of a rabbinic Judaism that would not manifest some of the deleterious social ideologies and practices that modern orthodox Judaism generally does.
In Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer: Structure, Coherence, Intertextuality Katharina E. Keim offers a description of the literary character of Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer, an enigmatic work of the late-eighth-to-early-ninth centuries CE. Katharina E. Keim explores the work’s distinctive literary features through an analysis of its structure and coherence. These literary features, when taken together with the work’s intertextual relationships with antecedent and contemporaneous Christian and Jewish (rabbinic and non-rabbinic) texts, reveal Pirqei deRabbi Eliezer to be an innovative work, and throw light on a new turn in Jewish literature following the rise of Islam.
The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female, as Daniel Boyarin makes clear, is not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he recovers the studious and gentle rabbi as the male ideal and the prime object of the female desire in traditional Jewish society. Challenging those who view the "feminized Jew" as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud. The book provides an unrelenting critique of the oppression of women in rabbinic society, while also arguing that later European bourgeois society disempowered women even further. Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.). Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today.
The contributions compiled in this volume comprise studies of Jewish texts - biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern - as well as of patristic and medieval Christian texts, and in one case, a passage of the Muslim text par excellence, the Quran. The authors, scholars in the fields of Jewish Studies, Catholic and Protestant Theology, Islamic Studies, German philology etc., invited to reflect on texts of their respective disciplines in context-sensitive interpretations, taking into account the link connecting Midrash, hermeneutics, and narrative, provide illuminating narratological and/or hermeneutical insights into the texts in question. The interdisciplinary dialogue that characterized the conference "Narratology, Hermeneutics, and Midrash" that gave rise to the volume proves to be rich and full of potential for further research in the direction proposed by the Series Poetics, Exegesis and Narrative. Studies in Jewish literature and art.
Rhetoric, Scripture and Theology aptly describe the contents of this collection of essays from the 1994 Pretoria Rhetoric Conference. The conference marked a significant dialogue among scholars gathered from many nations to consider how rhetoric engages with the study of scripture and theology. South Africa provided a suitable context for such discussion. Although the contributors are not only from South Africa, the addressing of issues pertinent to a South African context shows through in many of the essays. Those that do not address particularly South African issues raise equally important issues regarding the topic of rhetoric and its relation to contemporary theological discourse.
The methodological approach employed in this research utilizes the hermeneutics of comparative midrash combined with aspects of Bakhtinian dialogism and intertextuality. The purpose of this enterprise is to discern the function of scripture in Joel and its New Testament Nachleben. The terms 'appropriation' and 'resignification' are descriptive of the process through which an antecedent text is transformed by its displacement, condensation, and recontextualization. These methodologies assist in giving an account of the intertextual dialogism involved in a text’s unrecorded hermeneutics. The scope of the work looks at the use of scriptural traditions within the book of Joel during the Second Temple period. There is an introduction to the hermeneutical methods employed, followed by a general introduction to the book of Joel in chapter one. Chapters two and three concern the function of scripture in Joel. Finally, the last chapter deals with Joel’s New Testament Nachleben. Each chapter has an introduction and conclusion. This work does not eschew the importance of diachronic issues. The diachronic method pays attention to the context of an antecedent’s voice, while the synchronic methodological approach pays attention to the function and purpose in which the receptor text resignifies the appropriated motifs and allusions. The diachronic becomes fused with the synchronic in the process of an allusion’s recontextualization. This study, in a heuristic manner, focuses on the way that each allusion is appropriated and resignified for the needs of both Joel’s community and those of the later NT, in order to understand the function of canonical hermeneutics.
Litwak challenges previous studies of the use of the Old Testament in Luke-Acts as inadequate. In contrast to previous studies that consider only quotations or obvious allusions, he examines intertextual echoes of the Old Testament at strategic points in Luke-Acts, as well as quotations and allusions and echoed traditions. Thus, this study's database is larger. Previous studies generally argue that Luke's use of the Scriptures is in the service of christology. This leads to the exclusion of scriptural citations, such as those of the temptation (Luke 4.1-13) which have different emphases. Litwak views ecclesiology as the overall purpose behind Luke's use of the Old Testament, but he does not skip or avoid intertextual references that may lie outside an ecclesiological function. Whilst other studies contend that Luke uses the Old Testament according to a promise-fulfillment/proof-form-prophecy hermeneutic, Litwak argues that this fails to account for many of the intertextual references. Other studies often subsume all of Luke's use of the Scriptures of Israel under one theme, such as the 'New Exodus', but this study does not require that every intertextual echo maps to a specific theme. Rather, the many intertextual references in strategic texts at the beginning, middle and end of Luke-Acts, and Luke's use of the texts, are allowed to dictate the 'themes' to which they relate. JSNTS 282
Melchizedek is a mysterious figure to many people. Adopting discourse analysis and text-linguistic approaches, Chan attempts to tackle the Melchizedek texts in Genesis 14, Psalm 110, and Hebrews 5-7. This seminal study illustrates how the mysterious figure is understood and interpreted by later biblical writers, "... Using the “blessing” motif as a framework, Chan also argues that Numbers 22-24, 2 Samuel 7 and the Psalter: Books I-V (especially Psalms 1-2) provide a reading paradigm of interpreting Psalm 110. In addition, the structure of Hebrews provides a clue to how the author interprets the Old Testament texts.
