Download or read book Aseneth s Transformation written by Kirsten Marie Hartvigsen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Joseph and Aseneth is a fascinating expansion of the narrative in Genesis of Joseph in Egypt, and in particular, of his marriage to the daughter of an Egyptian priest. This study examines the portrayal of Aseneth’s transformation in the text, focusing on three perspectives. How did Aseneth’s encounter with Joseph and her subsequent transformation affect various aspects of her identity in the narrative? In what ways do the portrayals of Aseneth, her transformation, and her abode relate to select metaphors and other symbolic features depicted in the Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible, and the Pseudepigrapha? And, how do the ritualized components through which Aseneth’s transformation occurred function in the narrative, and why are they perceived as effective? In order to shed light on these facets of Joseph and Aseneth, the author draws on the contemporary approaches of intersectionality, conceptual blending, intertextual blending, and the cognitive theory of rituals, using these theoretical frameworks to explore and illuminate the complexity of Aseneth’s transformation.
Download or read book Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature written by Meredith J. C. Warren and published by SBL Press. This book was released on 2019-05-03 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New research that transforms how to understand food and eating in literature Meredith J. C. Warren identifies and defines a new genre in ancient texts that she terms hierophagy, a specific type of transformational eating where otherworldly things are consumed. Multiple ancient Mediterranean, Jewish, and Christian texts represent the ramifications of consuming otherworldly food, ramifications that were understood across religious boundaries. Reading ancient texts through the lens of hierophagy helps scholars and students interpret difficult passages in Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, Revelation 10, and the Persephone myths, among others. Features: Exploration of how ancient literature relies on bending, challenging, inverting, and parodying cultural norms in order to make meaning out of genres Analysis of hierophagy as social action that articulates how patterns of communication across texts and cultures emerge and diverge A new understanding of previously confounding scenes of literary eating
Download or read book The Greatest Mirror written by Andrei A. Orlov and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging analysis of heavenly twin imagery in early Jewish extrabiblical texts. The idea of a heavenly double—an angelic twin of an earthbound human—can be found in Christian, Manichaean, Islamic, and Kabbalistic traditions. Scholars have long traced the lineage of these ideas to Greco-Roman and Iranian sources. In The Greatest Mirror, Andrei A. Orlov shows that heavenly twin imagery drew in large part from early Jewish writings. The Jewish pseudepigrapha—books from the Second Temple period that were attributed to biblical figures but excluded from the Hebrew Bible—contain accounts of heavenly twins in the form of spirits, images, faces, children, mirrors, and angels of the Presence. Orlov provides a comprehensive analysis of these traditions in their full historical and interpretive complexity. He focuses on heavenly alter egos of Enoch, Moses, Jacob, Joseph, and Aseneth in often neglected books, including Animal Apocalypse, Book of the Watchers, 2 Enoch, Ladder of Jacob, and Joseph and Aseneth, some of which are preserved solely in the Slavonic language. Andrei A. Orlov is Professor of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity at Marquette University. He is the author of Dark Mirrors: Azazel and Satanael in Early Jewish Demonology and Divine Scapegoats: Demonic Mimesis in Early Jewish Mysticism, both also published by SUNY Press.
Download or read book The Holy Spirit and Ethics in Paul written by Volker Rabens and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2013 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volker Rabens answers the question of how, according to the apostle Paul, the Holy Spirit enables religious-ethical life. In the first part of the book, the author discusses the established view that the Spirit is a material substance which transforms people ontologically by virtue of its physical nature. In order to assess this "Stoic" reading of Paul, the author examines all the passages from the Hebrew Bible, early Judaism, Hellenism and Paul that have been put forward in support of this concept of ethical enabling. He concludes that there is no textual evidence in early Judaism or Paul that the Spirit was conceived as a material substance. Furthermore, none of these or any of the Graeco-Roman writings show that ethical living derives from the transformation of the "substance" of the person that is imbued with a physical Spirit. The second part of the study offers a fresh approach to the ethical work of the Spirit which is based on a relational concept of Paul's theology. Rabens argues that it is primarily through initiating and sustaining an intimate relationship with God the Father, Jesus Christ, and with the community of faith that the Spirit transforms and empowers people for ethical living. The author establishes this thesis on the basis of an exegetical study of a variety of passages from the Pauline corpus. In addition, he demonstrates that Paul lived in a context in which this dynamic of ethical empowering was part of the religious framework of various Jewish groups.
Download or read book Recycling Biblical Figures written by Athalya Brenner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: STAR - Studies in Theology and Religion, 1 This collection of essays presented by senior international scholars and junior biblical scholars during a colloquium and two master classes of the Netherlands School for Advanced Studies in Theology and Religion (NOSTER) discusses the processes by which biblical entities are appropriated, updated, rewritten, reinterpreted and transmitted in subsequent written sources. The contributions focus on textual figures as well as the recycling of concepts, entities, ideologies and theologies. The contributors include, among others, J. Barr, J.C. de Moor, H.A. McKay, P. Beentjes, R.S. Kraemer, and J. Tromp.
Download or read book Arguing with Aseneth written by Jill Hicks-Keeton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing with Aseneth shows how the ancient Jewish romance known as Joseph and Aseneth moves a minor character in Genesis from obscurity to renown, weaving a new story whose main purpose was to intervene in ancient Jewish debates surrounding gentile access to Israel's God. Written in Greco-Roman Egypt around the turn of the era, Joseph and Aseneth combines the genre of the ancient Greek novel with scriptural characters from the story of Joseph as it retells Israel's mythic past to negotiate communal boundaries in its own present. With attention to the ways in which Aseneth's tale "remixes" Genesis, wrestles with Deuteronomic theology, and adopts prophetic visions of the future, Arguing with Aseneth demonstrates that this ancient novel inscribes into Israel's sacred narrative a precedent for gentile inclusion in the people belonging to Israel's God. Aseneth is transformed from material mother of the sons of Joseph to a mediator of God's mercy and life to future penitents, Jew and gentile alike. Yet not all Jewish thinkers in antiquity drew boundary lines the same way or in the same place. Arguing with Aseneth traces, then, not only the way in which Joseph and Aseneth affirms the possibility of gentile incorporation but also ways in which other ancient Jewish thinkers, including the apostle Paul, would have argued back, contesting Joseph and Aseneth's very conclusions or offering alternative, competing strategies of inclusion. With its use of a female protagonist, Joseph and Aseneth offers a distinctive model of gentile incorporation--one that eschews lines of patrilineal descent and undermines ethnicity and genealogy as necessary markers of belonging. Such a reading of this narrative shows us that we need to rethink our accounts of how ancient Jewish thinkers, including our earliest example from the Jesus Movement, negotiated who was in and who was out when it came to the people of Israel's God.
Download or read book Surprised by God written by Kindalee Pfremmer De Long and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Scholars have long noted the prevalence of praise of God in Luke-Acts. This monograph offers the first comprehensive analysis of this important feature of Luke's narrative. It focuses on twenty-six scenes in which praise occurs, studied in light of ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman discourse about praise of deity and in comparison with how praise appears in the narratives of Tobit and Joseph and Aseneth. The book argues that praise of God functions as a literary motif in all three narratives, serving to mark important moments in each plot, particularly in relation to the themes of healing, conversion, and revelation. In Luke-Acts specifically, the plot presents the long-expected visitation of God, which arrives in the person of Jesus, bringing glory to the people of Israel and revelation to the Gentiles. The motif of praise of God aligns closely with the plot's structure, communicating to the reader that varied (and often surprising) events in the story - such as healings in Luke and conversions in Acts - together comprise the plan of God. The praise motif thus demonstrates the author's efforts to combine disparate source material into carefully constructed historiography."--Publisher's website.
Download or read book Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism written by Ari Mermelstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Ari Mermelstein examines the mutually-reinforcing relationship between power and emotion in ancient Judaism. Ancient Jewish writers in both Palestine and the diaspora contended that Jewish identity entails not simply allegiance to God and performance of the commandments but also the acquisition of specific emotional norms. These rules regarding feeling were both shaped by and responses to networks of power - God, the foreign empire, and other groups of Jews - which threatened Jews' sense of agency. According to these writers, emotional communities that felt Jewish would succeed in neutralizing the power wielded over them by others and, depending on the circumstances, restore their power to acculturate, maintain their Jewish identity, and achieve redemption. An important contribution to the history of emotions, this book argues that power relations are the basis for historical changes in emotion discourse.
Download or read book Joseph and Aseneth written by Edith M. Humphrey and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2000-07-01 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a comprehensive but accessible guide to the major questions raised by the Hellenistic Jewish work, Joseph and Aseneth. Joseph and Aseneth is an excellent example of the controverted issues of text, dating and Sitz im Leben, when such decisions must be largely based on internal evidence. It provides an entre into the vexed question of genre, given the numerous literary links that have been suggested for it. Its mysterious but engaging plot, and its female protagonist, evoke ongoing sociological and feminist debate. It is thus strongly commended for careful study to students and scholars of Judaism, New Testament, sociology and narratology. Intended as a sound basis for such exploration, this guide also offers a fresh narrative reading in which the revelatory character of Joseph and Aseneth is brought to the forefront.
Download or read book Goy written by Adi Ophir and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goy: Israel's Others and the Birth of the Gentile traces the development of the term and category of the goy from the Bible to rabbinic literature. Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi show that the category of the goy was born much later than scholars assume; in fact not before the first century CE. They explain that the abstract concept of the gentile first appeared in Paul's Letters. However, it was only in rabbinic literature that this category became the center of a stable and long standing structure that involved God, the Halakha, history, and salvation. The authors narrate this development through chronological analyses of the various biblical and post biblical texts (including the Dead Sea scrolls, the New Testament and early patristics, the Mishnah, and rabbinic Midrash) and synchronic analyses of several discursive structures. Looking at some of the goy's instantiations in contemporary Jewish culture in Israel and the United States, the study concludes with an examination of the extraordinary resilience of the Jew/goy division and asks how would Judaism look like without the gentile as its binary contrast.
Download or read book A Feminist Companion to Wisdom and Psalms written by Athalya Brenner and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1998-11-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides feminist approaches to the Psalms and Wisdom Literature from leading scholars of the Hebrew Bible and feminist hermeneutics.
Download or read book When Aseneth Met Joseph written by Ross Shepard Kraemer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the study of an anonymous ancient work, usually called Joseph and Aseneth, which narrates the transformation of the daughter of an Egyptian priest into an acceptable spouse for the biblical Joseph, whose marriage to Aseneth is given brief notice in Genesis. Kraemer takes issue with the scholarly consensus that the tale is a Jewish conversion story composed no later than the early second century C.E. Instead, she dates it to the third or fourth century C.E., and argues that, although no definitive answer is presently possible, it may well be a Christian account. This critique also raises larger issues about the dating and identification of many similar writings, known as pseudepigrapha. Kraemer reads its account of Aseneth's interactions with an angelic double of Joseph in the context of ancient accounts of encounters with powerful divine beings, including the sun god Helios, and of Neoplatonic ideas about the fate of souls. When Aseneth Met Joseph demonstrates the centrality of ideas about gender in the representation of Aseneth and, by extension, offers implications for broader concerns about gender in Late Antiquity.
Download or read book The Ladies and the Cities written by Edith M. Humphrey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transcendence in general and transformation in particular have long been established as key motifs in apocalypses. The transformation of a seer during a heavenly journey is found commonly in such esoteric apocalypses as I Enoch. No heavenly journey occurs in the apocalypses treated here. Rather, symbolic women figures--"ladies" in the classical sense--who are associated with God's city or Tower, undergo transformation at key points in the action. The surface structures of Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse and The Shepherd of Hermas are traced, and the crucial transformation episodes are located within each structure. Transformation of figures which represent God's people points to the significance of identitiy within the apocalyptic perspective. Earlier analyses have demonstrated that the apocalyptic perspective urges the reader to consider life from a different stance in time and in space ("temporal" and "spatial" axes). The present analysis suggests that the apocalypse also charts its revelations along an "axis of identity" so that the reader is invited to become, as it were, someone more in tune with the mysteries he or she is viewing. Of special interest is the treatment of the increasingly well-known romance Joseph and Aseneth alongside apocalypses, a parallel which is fruitful because of the curious visionary sequence, closely related to apocalypse in content and form, which is found in the inner centre of that work.
Download or read book The Ancient Novel and Early Christian and Jewish Narrative Fictional Intersections written by Marília Futre Pinheiro and published by Barkhuis. This book was released on 2013-01-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collection explores the vital role played by fictional narratives in Christian and Jewish self-fashioning in the early Roman imperial period. Employing a diversity of approaches, including cultural studies, feminist, philological, and narratological, expert scholars from six countries offer twelve essays on Christian fictions or fictionalized texts and one essay on Aseneth. All the papers were originally presented at the Fourth International Conference on the Ancient Novel in Lisbon Portugal in 2008. The papers emphasize historical contextualization and comparative methodologies and will appeal to all those interested in early Christianity, the Ancient novel, Roman imperial history, feminist studies, and canonization processes.
Download or read book Experientia written by Frances Flannery and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2008 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of religious experience in early Judaism and early Christianity.
Download or read book The Invention of Judaism written by John J. Collins and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Judaism is often understood as the way of life defined by the Torah of Moses, but it was not always so. This book identifies key moments in the rise of the Torah, beginning with the formation of Deuteronomy, advancing through the reform of Ezra, the impact of the suppression of the Torah by Antiochus Epiphanes and the consequent Maccabean revolt, and the rise of Jewish sectarianism. It also discusses variant forms of Judaism, some of which are not Torah-centered and others which construe the Torah through the lenses of Hellenistic culture or through higher, apocalyptic, revelation. It concludes with the critique of the Torah in the writings of Paul"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Media Matrix of Early Jewish and Christian Narrative written by Nicholas Elder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generically, theologically, and concerning content, Mark and Joseph and Aseneth are quite different. The former is a product of the nascent Jesus movement and influenced by the Greco-Roman Bioi (“Lives”). It details the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of a wandering Galilean. The latter is a Hellenistic Jewish narrative influenced by Greek romances and Jewish novellas. It expands the laconic account of Joseph's marriage to Aseneth in Genesis 41 into a full-fledged love and adventure story. Despite these differences, Elder finds remarkable similarities that the texts share. Elder uses both texts to examine media and modes of composition in antiquity, arguing that they were both composed via dictation from their antecedent oral traditions. Elder's volume offers a fresh approach to the composition of both Joseph and Aseneth and Mark as well as to many of their respective interpretive debates.
