Download or read book Creation and the Persistence of Evil written by Jon D. Levenson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1994-12-19 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paperback edition brings to a wide audience one of the most innovative and meaningful models of God for this post-Auschwitz era. In a thought-provoking return to the original Hebrew conception of God, which questions accepted conceptions of divine omnipotence, Jon Levenson defines God's authorship of the world as a consequence of his victory in his struggle with evil. He traces a flexible conception of God to the earliest Hebrew sources, arguing, for example, that Genesis 1 does not describe the banishment of evil but the attempt to contain the menace of evil in the world, a struggle that continues today.

Download or read book Creation and the Persistence of Evil written by Jon D. Levenson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paperback edition of Creation and the Persistence of Evil brings to a wide audience one of the most innovative and meaningful models of God for this post-Auschwitz era. In a thought-provoking return to the original Hebrew conception of God, which questions accepted conceptions of divine omnipotence, Jon Levenson defines God's authorship of the world as a consequence of his victory in his struggle with evil. Classic doctrines of God's creation of the universe from the void do not do justice to the complexity of that hard-fought battle, which is uncertain in its outcome. Levenson traces this more flexible conception of God to the earliest Hebrew sources. He argues that Genesis 1 does not describe the banishment of evil but the attempt to contain the menace of evil in the world, a struggle that continues today.

Download or read book Creation and the Persistence of Evil written by Jon Douglas Levenson and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel written by Jon Douglas Levenson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many famous antique texts are misunderstood and many others have been completely dismissed, all because the literary style in which they were written is unfamiliar today. So argues Mary Douglas in this controversial study of ring composition, a technique which places the meaning of a text in the middle, framed by a beginning and ending in parallel. To read a ring composition in the modern linear fashion is to misinterpret it, Douglas contends, and today's scholars must reevaluate important antique texts from around the world. Found in the Bible and in writings from as far a field as Egypt, China, Indonesia, Greece, and Russia, ring composition is too widespread to have come from a single source. Does it perhaps derive from the way the brain works? What is its function in social contexts? The author examines ring composition, its principles and functions, in a cross-cultural way. She focuses on ring composition in Homer's Iliad, the Bible's book of Numbers, and, for a challenging modern example, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, developing a persuasive argument for reconstruing famous books and rereading neglected ones.

Download or read book Inheriting Abraham written by Jon Douglas Levenson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Levenson provides a masterful reading of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinking that yielded three different portraits of Abraham. He sets the record straight about the biblical patriarch."---Sidney H. Griffith, author of The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam --Book Jacket.

Download or read book The Hebrew Bible the Old Testament and Historical Criticism written by Jon Douglas Levenson and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing from a Jewish perspective, Jon Levenson reviews many often neglected theoretical questions. He focuses on the relationship between two interpretive communities--the community of scholars who are committed to the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation and the community responsible for the canonization and preservation of the Bible.

Download or read book The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son written by Jon D. Levenson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The near sacrifice and miraculous restoration of a beloved son is a central but largely overlooked theme in both Judaism and Christianity. This book explores how this notion of child sacrifice constitutes an overlooked bond between the two religions."--

Download or read book Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton written by Hermann Gunkel and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2006-10-10 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreword by Peter Machinist Hermann Gunkel's groundbreaking Schöpfung und Chaos, originally published in German in 1895, is here translated in its entirety into English for the first time. Even though available only in German, this work by Gunkel has had a profound influence on modern biblical scholarship. Discovering a number of parallels between the biblical creation accounts and a Babylonian creation account, the Enuma Elish, Gunkel argues that ancient Babylonian traditions shaped the Hebrew people's perceptions both of God's creative activity at the beginning of time and of God's re-creative activity at the end of time. Including illuminating introductory pieces by eminent scholar Peter Machinist and by translator K. William Whitney, Gunkel's Creation and Chaos will appeal to serious students and scholars in the area of biblical studies.

Download or read book Preaching Creation written by John C. Holbert and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2012-01-06 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human race, along with the animals and plants that make up the creation of God, face a difficult future due to the multiple ways that the ecosystem on which they all depend is currently under stress. Temperatures are rising along with the oceans. Rain forests are falling along with the polar ice caps. Questions of the environment are now front and center in any catalog of concerns. Those who are called to preach need to include in the subjects of their sermons these environmental issues. Our Bible contains significant resources, often overlooked, as bases on which powerful environmental sermons can be preached. This book introduces the subject of preaching and the environment, offering close looks at important biblical passages that address the cosmos of God, and presenting sample sermons founded on those passages. The book calls for preachers both to name the vast problems we face and to offer the hope of the gospel of God to address them.

Download or read book Heretics written by Jonathan Wright and published by HMH. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively examination of the heretics who helped Christianity become the world’s most powerful religion. From Arius, a fourth-century Libyan cleric who doubted the very divinity of Christ, to more successful heretics like Martin Luther and John Calvin, this book charts the history of dissent in the Christian Church. As the author traces the Church’s attempts at enforcing orthodoxy, from the days of Constantine to the modern Catholic Church’s lingering conflicts, he argues that heresy—by forcing the Church to continually refine and impose its beliefs—actually helped Christianity to blossom into one of the world’s most formidable religions. Today, all believers owe it to themselves to grapple with the questions raised by heresy. Can you be a Christian without denouncing heretics? Is it possible that new ideas challenging Church doctrine are destined to become as popular as Luther’s once-outrageous suggestions of clerical marriage and a priesthood of all believers? A delightfully readable and deeply learned new history, Heretics overturns our assumptions about the role of heresy in a faith that still shapes the world. “Wright emphasizes the ‘extraordinarily creative role’ that heresy has played in the evolution of Christianity by helping to ‘define, enliven, and complicate’ it in dialectical fashion. Among the world’s great religions, Christianity has been uniquely rich in dissent, Wright argues—especially in its early days, when there was so little agreement among its adherents that one critic compared them to a marsh full of frogs croaking in discord.” —The New Yorker

Download or read book The Love of God written by Jon D. Levenson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The love of God is perhaps the most essential element in Judaism--but also one of the most confounding. In biblical and rabbinic literature, the obligation to love God appears as a formal commandment. Yet most people today think of love as a feeling. How can an emotion be commanded? How could one ever fulfill such a requirement? The Love of God places these scholarly and existential questions in a new light. Jon Levenson traces the origins of the concept to the ancient institution of covenant, showing how covenantal love is a matter neither of sentiment nor of dry legalism. The love of God is instead a deeply personal two-way relationship that finds expression in God's mysterious love for the people of Israel, who in turn observe God's laws out of profound gratitude for his acts of deliverance. Levenson explores how this bond has survived episodes in which God's love appears to be painfully absent--as in the brutal persecutions of Talmudic times--and describes the intensely erotic portrayals of the relationship by biblical prophets and rabbinic interpreters of the Song of Songs. He examines the love of God as a spiritual discipline in the Middle Ages as well as efforts by two influential modern Jewish thinkers--Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig--to recover this vital but endangered aspect of their tradition. A breathtaking work of scholarship and spirituality alike that is certain to provoke debate, The Love of God develops fascinating insights into the foundations of religious life in the classical Jewish tradition. (Publisher).

Download or read book Sinai and Zion written by Jon D. Levenson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A treasury of religious thought and faith--places the symbolic world of the Bible in its original context.

Download or read book Stories from Ancient Canaan written by Michael David Coogan and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 1978-01-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contained on fifteen of the cuneiform tables uncovered at the ancient Canaanite city of Ugarit are the four major oral Ugartic myths of Aqhat, The Healers, Kirta and Baal. Stories from Ancient Canaan is the first to offer a one-volume translation of all four. This accessible book teaches the principal Canaanite religious literature, and will be useful to students of the history of religion, of the Bible, and of comparative literature.

Download or read book If God Why Evil written by Norman L. Geisler and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author and apologist takes on one of the most difficult questions Christians face. How can an omnipotent, loving God preside over a world filled with evil and suffering? The author's approach is concise, systematic, and clearly communicated, just what Geisler fans have grown to expect. In addition to relying on time-tested solutions to the problem of evil, the author also presents a compelling new way to think about this puzzle.

Download or read book Esther written by Jon D. Levenson and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book of Esther has been preserved in ancient texts that diverge greatly from each other; as a result, Jews and Protestants usually read a version which is shorter than that of most Catholic or Orthodox Bibles. Jon Levenson capably guides readers through both versions, demonstrating their coherence and their differences. The Old Testament Library provides fresh and authoritative treatments of important aspects of Old Testament study through commentaries and general surveys. The contributors are scholars of international standing.

Download or read book Meeting Evil written by Thomas Berger and published by Diversion Publishing Corp.. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the Pulitzer Prize–finalist The Feud blurs reality in this breakneck thriller following one man’s encounter with pure evil in high tops. John Felton is a creature of habit. His job in real estate comes with no surprises; it’s respectable work he can be proud of. Routine has been kind to him, but when a normal Monday of looking after the kids gets interrupted by a ringing of his doorbell, John may have to kiss his uneventful life goodbye . . . Richie’s car is stalled just at the bottom of the hill and he needs a push start. John agrees to help and then accepts a ride, though he’s not entire sure why. After stepping into Richie’s car, John is driven far away from the reality he once knew and dragged into Richie’s frightening world—one event at a time. To make matters worse, the longer he spends in Richie’s company the harder it is for the people around him to distinguish John from this curly-haired devil in a baseball cap. John must put an end to Richie’s mad and murderous adventure before it reaches the most terrifying place of all—John’s very own home. “The plot gets nicely complicated . . . and the entire contraption claps together in a great, unpredictable, satisfying calamity.” —The New York Times Book Review “Spare, meticulous prose . . . Sharply evocative of human weakness and rage.” —The Washington Post

Download or read book Middle Eastern Mythology written by S. H. Hooke and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of mythology in ritual and its place in the origins of customs, cults, and hero worship are the areas covered by this survey. Based on firsthand sources, this book recounts the legends of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, and Canaanites, in addition to discussing the mythological elements of the Jewish apocalyptic literature and the New Testament. The author's well-documented commentary highlights the similarities between various Middle Eastern legends and offers revealing citations from documents, tablets, and inscriptions recovered by archaeological excavations. It contains 16 black-and-white illustrations.