Download or read book The Social Meanings of Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible written by David Janzen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-08-09 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work uses anthropological theory and field studies to investigate the social function and meaning of sacrifice. All rituals, including sacrifice, communicate social beliefs and morality, but these cannot be determined outside of a study of the social context. Thus, there is no single explanation for sacrifice - such as those advanced by René Girard or Walter Burkert or late-19th and early-20th century scholars. The book then examines four different writings in the Hebrew Bible - the Priestly Writing, the Deuteronomistic History, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles - to demonstrate how different social origins result in different social meanings of sacrifice.
Download or read book Sacrifice in Judaism Christianity and Islam written by David L. Weddle and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the practice and philosophy of sacrifice in three religious traditions In the book of Genesis, God tests the faith of the Hebrew patriarch Abraham by demanding that he sacrifice the life of his beloved son, Isaac. Bound by common admiration for Abraham, the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam also promote the practice of giving up human and natural goods to attain religious ideals. Each tradition negotiates the moral dilemmas posed by Abraham’s story in different ways, while retaining the willingness to perform sacrifice as an identifying mark of religious commitment. This book considers the way in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims refer to “sacrifice”—not only as ritual offerings, but also as the donation of goods, discipline, suffering, and martyrdom. Weddle highlights objections to sacrifice within these traditions as well, presenting voices of dissent and protest in the name of ethical duty. Sacrifice forfeits concrete goods for abstract benefits, a utopian vision of human community, thereby sparking conflict with those who do not share the same ideals. Weddle places sacrifice in the larger context of the worldviews of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, using this nearly universal religious act as a means of examining similarities of practice and differences of meaning among these important world religions. This book takes the concept of sacrifice across these three religions, and offers a cross-cultural approach to understanding its place in history and deep-rooted traditions.
Download or read book Blood Ritual in the Hebrew Bible written by William K. Gilders and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description
Download or read book Human Sacrifice in Jewish and Christian Tradition written by Karin Finsterbusch and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume asks to which extent ancient practices and traditions of human sacrifice are reflected in medieval and modern Judeo-Christian times and also includes contributions concerned with the Ancient Near East and Ancient Greece.
Download or read book Oxford Bibliographies written by Ilan Stavans and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An emerging field of study that explores the Hispanic minority in the United States, Latino Studies is enriched by an interdisciplinary perspective. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, demographers, linguists, as well as religion, ethnicity, and culture scholars, among others, bring a varied, multifaceted approach to the understanding of a people whose roots are all over the Americas and whose permanent home is north of the Rio Grande. Oxford Bibliographies in Latino Studies offers an authoritative, trustworthy, and up-to-date intellectual map to this ever-changing discipline."--Editorial page.
Download or read book Who Is to Blame for Judges 19 written by Grace Kwan Sik Tsoi and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-06-29 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The horrific text of Judges 19 is puzzling, especially to Chinese Christians who read the Chinese Union Version. This dominant translation of the Bible seems to place the blame for the tragedy on the concubine, which in turns legitimizes violence against women. Using tools of narrative, intertextual, and ideological criticism, Tsoi reveals an anti-Levite rhetoric in the text that has been neglected by translators. An examination of the translation context suggests that an anti-concubinage agenda in the social context of Republican China might have contributed to the bias in the translation, resulting in more than a century of misinterpretation among Chinese Christians.
Download or read book The Hebrew Bible written by Frederick E. Greenspahn and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April of 2001, the headline in the Los Angeles Times read, “Doubting the Story of the Exodus.” It covered a sermon that had been delivered by the rabbi of a prominent local congregation over the holiday of Passover. In it, he said, “The truth is that virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.” This seeming challenge to the biblical story captivated the local public. Yet as the rabbi himself acknowledged, his sermon contained nothing new. The theories that he described had been common knowledge among biblical scholars for over thirty years, though few people outside of the profession know their relevance. New understandings concerning the Bible have not filtered down beyond specialists in university settings. There is a need to communicate this research to a wider public of students and educated readers outside of the academy. This volume seeks to meet this need, with accessible and engaging chapters describing how archeology, theology, ancient studies, literary studies, feminist studies, and other disciplines now understand the Bible.
Download or read book Festive Meals in Ancient Israel written by Peter Altmann and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The festive meal texts of Deuteronomy 12-26 depict Israel as a unified people participating in cultic banquets- a powerful and earthy image for both preexilic Judahite and later audiences. Comparison of Deuteronomy 12:13-27, 14:22-29, 16:1-17, and 26:1-15 with pentateuchal texts like Exodus 20-23 is broadened to highlight the rhetorical potential of the Deuteronomic meal texts in relation to the religious and political circumstances in Israel during the Neo-Assyrian and later periods. The texts employ the concrete and rich image of festive banquets, which the monograph investigates in relation to comparative ancient Near Eastern texts and iconography, the zooarchaeological remains of the ancient Levant, and the findings of cultural anthropology with regard to meals.
Download or read book The Temple of Jesus written by Bruce Chilton and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study to develop a theory of sacrifice and then apply it to the sources of early Judaism as well as Jesus's activity. Ritual sacrifice was one of the greatest concerns and most widely shared activities among Jews prior to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. There is therefore a pressing need for systematic understanding of sacrifice, both as an element of Judaic religion and a context for Jesus's activity. The Temple of Jesus provides a theoretical model of sacrifice and develops that model to analyze classic texts from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Jewish War of Josephus, and it argues that Jesus can only be appreciated as driven by a program to enact his own conception of Israel's purity in sacrifice in order to occasion the disclosure of God's kingdom. Chilton contends that sacrifice is construed as a fundamentally social, "pre-civilized" activity involving pragmata as defined as pure, an emotional affect for participants, and an ideology according to which sacrifice occasions a change of life in the community, thus rejecting current anthropological studies that attempt to explain sacrifice genetically. He shows that texts from Ezekiel, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy share a conviction that the covenant with Israel ensures the validity of sacrifice, even as they define purity in various ways and emphasize differing affects of sacrifice. Finally, Chilton provides a new approach to Jesus, comparing and contrasting his occupation of the Temple with the cultic activities of prominent Pharisees of his period.
Download or read book Ethical Dimension of Cult in the Book of Isaiah written by Bohdan Hrobon and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the relationship between cult and ethics in the book of Isaiah. Part I attempts to revise some of the common Old Testament views on prophets and cult. After inspecting cultic concepts such as sacrifice, purity and impurity, holiness, and the Promised Land, it suggests that the priestly and prophetic understandings of the role of the Ancient Israelite cult were essentially the same. This general proposition is then tested on the book of Isaiah in Part II: each chapter there analyses the key passage on cult and ethics in the three main parts of the book, namely, Isa 1:10-17; 43:22-28; and 58:1-14 and concludes that, even though the role of cult and ethics in each part of the book varies significantly, the underlying principles behind the teaching about ritual and social justice in the various parts of the book of Isaiah are the same. Furthermore, these principles are cultic in nature, and in accord with priestly teaching. Far from being anti-ritualistic, the studied texts are concerned with what can be labelled The Ethical Dimension of Cult. The reason behind the variations of the role of cult and ethics in the book called Isaiah seems to be cultic as well, namely the purity or impurity of the people and the land before, during, and after the Babylonian exile.
Download or read book Sacrifice and Gender in Biblical Law written by Nicole J. Ruane and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the Hebrew Bible's numerous laws about sacrificial procedure to understand the significance of gender in sacrificial rituals and the reasons that gender distinctions are so vital in these acts. Gender selection of both victims and participants is an intrinsic aspect of the nature and purpose of each rite, affecting its form and function, as well as its legitimacy. Sacrifice and Gender in Biblical Law considers the laws of the firstborn, the rite of the red cow, laws of slaughter, rituals of purification, and other offerings. It shows that these laws regulate material wealth and contribute to the construction of social roles.
Download or read book Sacrifices and Offerings in Ancient Israel written by Gary A. Anderson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Actuality of Sacrifice written by Alberdina Houtman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-11-27 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacrifice is a well known form of ritual in many world religions. Although the actual practice of animal sacrifice was largely abolished in the later history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, it is still recalled through biblical stories, the ritual calendar and community events. The essays in this volume discuss the various positions regarding the value of sacrifice in a wide variety of disciplines such as history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, art and gender and post-colonial studies. In this context they examine a wide array of questions pertaining to the 'actuality of sacrifice' in various social, historical and intellectual contexts ranging from the pre-historical to the post-Holocaust, and present new understandings of some of the most sensitive topics of our time.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible written by Samuel E. Balentine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-16 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ritual has a primal connection to the idea that a transcendent order - numinous and mysterious, supranatural and elusive, divine and wholly other - gives meaning and purpose to life. The construction of rites and rituals enables humans to conceive and apprehend this transcendent order, to symbolize it and interact with it, to postulate its truths in the face of contradicting realities and to repair them when they have been breached or diminished. This Handbook provides a compendium of the information essential for constructing a comprehensive and integrated account of ritual and worship in the ancient world. Its focus on ritual and worship from the perspective of biblical studies, as opposed to religious studies, highlights that the world of ritual and worship was a topic of central concern for the people of the Ancient Near East, including the world of the Bible. Given the scarcity of the material in the Bible itself, the authors in this collection use materials from the ancient Near East to provide a larger context for the practices of the biblical world, giving due attention to historical, anthropological, and social scientific methods that inform the context of biblical worship. The specifics of ritual and worship life-the sacred spaces, times, and actors in worship-are examined in detail, with essays covering both the divine and human aspects of the sacred dimension. The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible considers several underlying concepts of ritual practice and closes with a theological outlook on worship and ritual from a variety of perspectives, demonstrating a fruitful exchange between biblical studies, ritual theory, and social science research.
Download or read book War in the Hebrew Bible written by Susan Niditch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-29 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texts about war pervade the Hebrew Bible, raising challenging questions in religious and political ethics. The war passages that readers find most disquieting are those in which God demands the total annihilation of the enemy without regard to gender, age, or military status. The ideology of the "ban," however, is only one among a range of attitudes towards war preserved in the ancient Israelite literary tradition. Applying insights from anthropology, comparative literature, and feminist studies, Niditch considers a wide spectrum of war ideologies in the Hebrew Bible, seeking in each case to discover why and how these views might have made sense to biblical writers, who themselves can be seen to wrestle with the ethics of violence. The study of war thus also illuminates the social and cultural history of Israel, as war texts are found to map the world views of biblical writers from various periods and settings. Reviewing ways in which modern scholars have interpreted this controversial material, Niditch sheds further light on the normative assumptions that shape our understanding of ancient Israel. More widely, this work explores how human beings attempt to justify killing and violence while concentrating on the tones, textures, meanings, and messages of a particular corpus in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Download or read book On Her Account written by Anne-Mareike Wetter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anne-Mareike Wetter investigates how the books of Ruth, Esther and Judith contribute to the discussion about Israel's ethnic and religious identity in the formative period following the Babylonian Exile. Although each of these narratives deals with variations of the theme of survival in a hostile world, the question underlying them is a different one: “Who are we, and who is our 'other'?” The narratives are presented as sequels to Israel's history as put forward in other (now biblical) texts, and presuppose God's continuing involvement with his people. However, they subtly modify the way in which Israel can or should relate to her God by suggesting alternatives for official Temple worship or bypassing the latter altogether. While older prophetic texts make use of metaphoric language portraying Israel as YHWH's unfaithful wife, grieving widow, or ravaged virgin, Ruth, Esther and Judith can be construed as embodiments of Israel of a different kind. Wetter argues for a revisioning of Israel in and through the bodies of the three female characters, as a community which is simultaneously vulnerable and inviolable, marginalized and empowered. Their tricksterism, in all its comicality, underlines the precarious situation in which the women and the community they represent are caught. Yet it also has the power to both defeat threats from outside and amend Israel's self-perception on the inside. Israel no longer has to perceive of itself as a battered wife but as one who can deploy her qualities – seductive and otherwise – for the survival of the community.
Download or read book A Faith Embracing All Creatures written by Tripp York and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2012-11-09 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the purpose of animals? Didn't God give humans dominion over other creatures? Didn't Jesus eat lamb? These are the kinds of questions that Christians who advocate compassion toward other animals regularly face. Yet Christians who have a faith-based commitment to care for other animals through what they eat, what they wear, and how they live with other creatures are often unsure how to address these biblically and theologically based challenges. In A Faith Embracing All Creatures, authors from various denominational, national, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds wrestle with the text, theology, and tradition to explain the roots of their desire to live peaceably with their nonhuman kin. Together, they show that there are no easy answers on "what the Bible says about animals." Instead, there are nuances and complexities, which even those asking these questions may be unaware of. Editors Andy Alexis-Baker and Tripp York have gathered a collection of essays that wrestle with these nuances and tensions in Scripture around nonhuman animals. In so doing, they expand the discussion of nonviolence, peacemaking, and reconciliation to include the oft-forgotten other members of God's good creation.
