Abstract This article demonstrates that Get Out , rather than being Peele’s only film that does not invoke or cite the Hebrew Bible, is the film that engages it most extensively. I argue that the final cut of Get Out is consistent with Peele’s two subsequent films, Us and Nope , through its extensive engagement with the biblical legacy it inherits from earlier literary works. The article begins by exploring the use of biblical texts, themes, and imagery within Peele’s larger canon. This article then proceeds to locate Get Out within a longer creative trajectory that includes Milton’s Paradise Lost and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . By examining Get Out alongside its predecessors, we can see that Peele builds on and overturns earlier engagements with Genesis 2–3. In so doing, the film remains consistent with Peele’s otherwise prominent uses of biblical citation within his films, and also strategically departs from the creative lineage in which it participates by exploiting the generative features of the horror genre as a rhetorical device capable of countering cultural hegemony.

Rogerius of Apulia and Biblical Citation. Steps towards a Theological Biography)The present paper aims to analyze Rogerius of Apulia's work Epistola in miserabile, focusing on its biblical dimension.The goal of this study is to broaden the understanding of Rogerius' personality and his work by conducting a detailed analysis of his biblical citations.The current state of knowledge on the proposed topic indicates that Rogerius' work is relatively known nationally and well-known internationally.However, it is noted that theological analyses of his work are entirely lacking.Our paper seeks to contribute to the development of Rogerius' biography by adding the theological segment to the existing historical and philological segments in national and international literature.This study will propose several conclusions regarding biblical citation in Epistola in miserabile carmen, including conclusions on the overall selection of biblical books cited, conclusions on the functional role of biblical quotations within the discourse, and conclusions on Rogerius' historical-theological perspective on the events narrated through the prism of correlated citations.By presenting the results of this analysis, we believe we will be able to outline Rogerius' theological profile, thus contributing to the development of his intelectual biography.Moreover, such an analysis will also serve as a relevant case study for the field of biblical studies by examining the hermeneutical principles applied by the author in Scripture citation.

Threads of Gold: Reclaiming the Textile in the Metaphors for Biblical Citations in Medieval Hebrew Literature

This paper examines Christian responses to Emperor Julian’s attempt to build a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem (ca. 363 CE) and compares these reactions to those elicited by early Islamic construction on the Temple Mount, especially ʿAbd al-Malik’s construction of the Dome of the Rock (ca. 692 CE). Both projects sparked Christian rhetoric that was often “apocalyptic,” combining a potent mix of biblical citations with a deep-seated fear of a Jewish alliance with a pagan tyrant. But how should we read this apocalyptic rhetoric? Was the late antique religious environment, as many have recently suggested, one of particular eschatological foment? This essay suggests otherwise. An analysis of contemporary responses to Julian and ʿAbd al-Malik reveals that Christian reactions to these highly charged architectural endeavors were often classical invective clothed in biblical garb. This scripturalized polemic was flexible and self-consciously contingent on the successes and failures of historical actors. Rather than arguing about the end of the age, Christians were arguing about how best to interpret contemporary history. They were arguing, moreover, how best to position religious competitors—Jewish or Muslim—within this shifting story.

In 1816 the Friends Tract Association published an excerpt from John Woolman’s first antislavery essay Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes with every reference to slavery edited out. The editors wanted to highlight Woolman’s ‘general’ message, that those who maintained their health, lived humbly and served God were rewarded with true happiness. In the excerpt, using biblical citations and an invocation of the early Quaker colonisation of the Delaware Valley, Woolman asserted that God rewards his servants. The excerpt successfully highlights this easily overlooked feature of Woolman’s lifelong ministry, but by omitting Woolman’s discussion of slavery it violated his original intention. The excerpt appeared in the last year of Quaker consensus on the issue of slavery. The editors believed they could set the issue aside because they thought the Quakers were in agreement on it, but shortly after their excerpt appeared the Quaker consensus on slavery fell apart. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

Religion occupies a prominent place in people’s daily lives and is made explicit to the public or the faithful through preaching or exposition of their sacred texts. The Holy Bible is the religious literature of Christianity, and its text has a unique nature of interpretation and knowledge extraction, that is, through the reading done by specialists (theologians). However, an automated knowledge extraction or that involves some automatic mechanism intelligence to support the interpretation (hermeneutics) of the Biblical text is not observed in the literature. Probably this gap in the literature is caused by the complexity of the biblical textual corpus and the multiplicity of genres it has, being an interpretative challenge even for human specialists. Therefore, this article primarily seeks to build an automated way through artificial intelligence (AI) to provide contextual biblical quotations from the four gospels of the New Testament for the construction of sermons or development of homiletics, which is the art of producing religious sermons for teaching and interpretation of the Biblical message. The methodology used in this article seeks to employ artificial intelligence techniques to implement the proposed solution, that is, a hybrid recommendation system to quote texts from Biblical passages. The AI techniques involved are text mining, natural language processing and supervised learning. Secondarily, this work aims to verify whether the combination of natural language processing techniques and machine learning can provide subsidies for the recovery or extraction of knowledge from complex textual corpus analogous to the biblical corpus. The results show that the proposed hybrid recommendation system is capable of extracting semantic and contextual meaning from the Biblical text, fundamental in the construction of homiletics. The performance evaluation metrics indicate the robustness of the results and consequently validate the findings of this research. Therefore, the combination of these techniques can be extrapolated by the scientific community to aid in the interpretive recovery of complex textual corpus.

A Cotton Mather Reader

Abstract While it is easy to interpret the first and second of the Matthean Antitheses (5.21–30) as intensifications of the Mosaic law, it is difficult to interpret the remaining Antitheses (5.31–48) in this manner. In the history of interpretation, two main strategies have been adopted for dealing with these later Antitheses, the ‘rejected interpretation’ hypothesis and the revocation hypothesis. The ‘rejected interpretation’ hypothesis, however, is only plausible for the last Antithesis (5.43–8), which appends ‘and hate your enemy’ to the Levitical exhortation to love one's neighbour; in all other instances, the ‘thesis’ statement is either a biblical citation or a close paraphrase of one or more biblical passages. Although the revocation hypothesis has often been deployed in an anti-Jewish way, there is nothing intrinsically anti-Jewish about it; indeed, both biblical authors, such as the Deuteronomist and Ezekiel, on the one hand, and some rabbis, on the other, explicitly revise prior biblical laws while at the same time claiming to be changing nothing. Matthew does something similar when he introduces the revisionist Antitheses with a programmatic statement about the unchangeableness of the Law (5.17–20). The Matthean Jesus, then, is not ‘seconding Sinai’ but correcting it.

In several cases, the function of colloquial speech, English biblicism, does not cause common associations with their former meanings or the original context in the speaker’s mind. The absence of corresponding marks in phraseological dictionaries confirms the fact that biblicisms, possessing a particular source, lose their connection with it. This research aims to trace the original and transformed semantic content of English phraseological units of biblical origin and provide the correct interpretation of the semantic peculiarities of biblical citation both in colloquial speech and literary text. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to identify a number of specific tasks: to define the universal features of biblicism; classify English biblicisms according to their origin and structure; study the semantics of phraseological units of biblical origin and establish the relationship between the original meaning of English biblicism and their transformed meaning in colloquial speech and literary text; to explore semantic and stylistic peculiarities of English biblicism and to identify the main thematic groups of the units under analysis in colloquial speech and literary text.

In the frame of the poetic works of Tadeusz Różewicz has been observed and widely studied his inclination to avoid the closed form of his poems, changing and proposing them in different volumes in order to renew their meanings. What is still to be studied in depth, however, is the creative process regarding his unpublished works, such as the preparatory drafts kept in his archive. Genetic studies are a precious key to discover Różewicz’s creative process as well as some aspects of his poetics, which in the published works remain rather clouded. In this paper I would like to analyse the manuscripts of one poem from Płaskorzeźba [Bas-Relief, 1991], that is Do Piotra [To Piotr]. Among the most important features of this drafts take placed numerous biblical citations which disclose a religious way of reading the poem, that completely disappears in the published form of To Piotr. From the analysis of these drafts some interesting interconnections with other poems of Bas-Relief are also to be found, exposing a much deeper level of interpretation of the entire volume.

The problem of biblical citation posed in this article relates to a well-known field of research in Dostoevsky studies, in which there are outstanding achievements. A peculiar approach to the proposed topic is offered within the framework of this paper. The subject of the study is the epigraph to the novel “The Brothers Karamazov”. The first special feature of the interpretation of its biblical intertextuality is connected with the clarification of the multidimensional function of Dostoevsky’s introduction to the said novel. The three key “hermeneutic” motifs of “The Grand Inquisitor”, namely, Mistery, Miracle and Authority, are revealed in the author’s preface. They allow to see the complexity of the “prophecy,” a premonition that concerns the future of the novel, its main character and the reader's reception. The semanticization of time within the limits of “pre-” and “post-” determines the interpretation of the biblical intertextuality of the epigraph, the idea of which in its first discursive appearance is integrated with the author’s preface, rather than with the novel in its entirety. The “pre-word” and “post-word” in the epigraph also act as metatextual motifs, due to the fact that not only certain passages from the New Testament are parallelized in the biblical intertextual space, but they are also linked with the Old Testament. The second characteristic feature of understanding the epigraph’s biblical citation is the unification of different components of the created intertextual space. The main object of study is the motif of word; a wide range of its semantics is examined, i.e., in the context of adoring praise and glorification, in the light of successive mutual transformations of auditory and visual elements of communication, perception of the world and shifts of subjects, in the perspective of the chronotopic systematicity of prophecy, in the projection of the word on the time axis as the first and repeated word (in the “pre” and “post” positions). The aspects of initiation, mediation and continuation of the word, as well as the problem of changing the status of primacy and secondariness, are emphasized in the interpretation of time. As a result, the biblical intertextuality in the epigraph, together with the author’s preface, lead to the ontologization of time both in the personal plot (a person’s inner growth) and in the metaphysical (faith-related) meaning, and, not least, in Dostoevsky’s conceptualization of textual self-reflexivity in the Bible.

The paper explores twenty-one Old Testament names found in the text of the translated monument of early Slavic writing, the Ladder of John Climacus. These personal names are a special kind of biblical quotations referring to the events of the Holy History. The study builds on a comparative analysis of the Greek text of the Ladder according to the publication in Patrologia Graeca (Vol. 88) and the text of the oldest Russian manuscript of the 12th century. The author looks to identify various strategies of delivering biblical citations used by the author, translator and scribe of the book, which is explained by the absence of the canonical text of the Holy Scriptures and the long history of existence of the Ladder in Byzantine and Slavic book literature. The article follows research on the collective church memory of medieval scribes which manifests itself in the commonality of topics, images, plots, ideas, and expressions that go back to the text of the Bible. The novelty of the work lies in incorporating new linguistic material extracted both from the text published in Patrologia Graeca and from the texts of unpublished Byzantine and Slavic codes. Personal names found in the Greek text of the Ladder (Jacob, Moses, David, Job, Lot, Adam) allude to key symbolic images and reveal several functions of the Old Testament anthroponyms in the Ladder texts: referential, symbolic, emphatic and indexical. Observations on the text of the translation evidenced to the high skill and erudition of the author of the first Slavic translation but at the same time revealed a translation error (new Adam), which was obviously caused by illegible or incorrect reading in the Greek version used as a source text for the translation. Contrastingly, the Russian manuscript under study showcases spelling inconsistencies in relation to Old Testament names as well as multiple errors and omissions of the names of characters. These are the result of multiple copies of the book made by inattentive and inexperienced scribes, one of whom was the scribe of the oldest surviving manuscript of the Ladder, created two centuries after the first translation appeared.

Studies on the Intersection of Text, Paratext, and Reception: A Festschrift in Honor of Charles E. Hill

Promoted by Nathan of Gaza—a reputable figure—Sabbatai Tzvi was hailed as the messiah across the Jewish communities of the medieval world, thousands flocking to his side. One of his prominent detractors was R. Jacob Sasportas, who wrote numerous letters to his peers—rabbis of the western Sephardi diaspora—in order to dissuade them from giving Sabbatai their support and prove Nathan to be a false prophet. Much of Tzitzat novel Tzvi consists of his extensive correspondence on the subject, together with the responses he received. The rich language in which it is couched reflects the biblical citations on which all the parties drew in order to clarify their position and substantiate their arguments. Herein, I examine this significant but relatively neglected phenomenon, focusing primarily on Sasportas’ exegesis of Scripture and the peculiar meanings the biblical text assumed within the context of the polemic.

Reviewed by: Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivity by Andrew Newman Yael Ben-Zvi (bio) Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivity andrew newman Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press, 2019 236 pp. Many former captives wrote Indian captivity narratives to assert their belonging to the settler societies into which they were trying to re-integrate themselves. Andrew Newman’s Allegories of Encounter shows that reading played a similar social role during captivity, allowing captives to reconstruct discursive communal ties that approximated those their captors had severed. By reading books and other texts in captivity, captives could anticipate the reunification that writing would eventually confirm. [End Page 227] Newman analyzes a broad range of “literacy practices” in numerous captivity narratives, extending literacy’s centrality to settler colonialism beyond its familiar uses in land acquisition and the civilizing mission. If settler colonialism reproduces metropolitan sociopolitical settings, literacy bolstered captives’ faith in this reproduction as captivity threatened to frustrate it. Captors unversed in alphabetic literacy recognized and often respected its significance for captive settlers to whom they gave books and whose engagements in literacy practices they often accepted. By contrast, captives utilized literacy as the major means for distinguishing their historical positions and sociopolitical affiliations from those into which captivity had forced them. The book revises conventional treatments of literary allusions and intertextual references in Indian captivity narratives as extradiegetic afterthoughts or merely decorative tropes. It develops an intertextual history in which reading and the meanings with which readers invest texts become constitutive elements of captivity narratives’ plots rather than sources of stylistic rhetorical effects. Drawing on sociolinguistics and academic literacy studies, Allegories of Encounter explores various “literacy events” that enabled captives to perform “their participation in [the] discourse communities” from which their captors had separated them (3). The book’s “mode of inquiry” is deliberately “inductive, speculative, associative, [and] slow” as Newman traces what literacy might have meant for captives, its significance within its various discursive, cultural, and historical contexts, and its functions in shaping captivity experiences (194, original emphasis). The book expands the range of activities and capabilities included under the term literacy as well as Indian captivity narratives’ social investments and functions. This book history study reconstructs the discursive communities that settlers have created with literacy’s aid, analyzing the texts they read and sometimes wrote in captivity, and imaginatively re-creating the worlds that literacy brought into being. The first chapter, “Rowlandson’s Captivity, Interpreted by God,” analyzes the Bible’s role in the genre’s hypercanonized text, Mary Rowland-son’s The Soveraignty and Goodness of God (1682). Scholars have distinguished Rowlandson’s narrated experiences from the numerous biblical citations in her book, at times crediting Increase Mather’s editorial intervention for these allusions. Newman argues that multiple intimacies and [End Page 228] dependencies tie these biblical allusions inextricably to Rowlandson’s experiences. In “Rowlandson’s rendering,” he states, “the provision of a Bible” by one of her captors “was an experience” that “enabled” a “series of literacy events” that were as experiential even though they were anchored in specific biblical verses rather than in the particular geographic places she traveled (20–21). The dynamic interactions that settlers created to link textual passages to captivity’s locales subordinated the latter to the former. Chapter 2, “Psalm 137 as a Site of Encounter,” extends this analysis to various authors who used this seminal representation of the Israelites’ Babylonian exile as the definitive experiential axis of their own captivities. Newman argues that “[h]istorically, culturally, geographically, the circumstances of Christian captives in the Eastern Woodlands correspond to the language of the psalm so closely as to entail a partial collapse in the structure of the allegory between the biblical narrative and their own experience” (51). Rather than keeping those levels distinct, Newman suggests that Christian captives had to collapse them because the “first three verses of Psalm 137 conformed so closely to the circumstances of American captivity narratives” (60). The recurring adverbial phrase “so closely” emphasizes literacy’s potent ability to blur these boundaries. Newman subtly critiques settlers’ typological identification with biblical Israelites by acknowledging that “perhaps no...

ОТКУДУ ТАКОВЫЙ И ВЕ ЛИКЫЙ В ПОСЛѢДНЯЯ СИЯ ВРѢМЕНА СВѢТИЛНИК ВЪСИА , Е ДА ОТ ИЕРУСА ЛИМА ИЛИ ОТ СИНАА?» Резюме Фраза, вынесенная в заглавие статьи, -один из распространенных топосов древнерусских житий.Статья посвящена его истории в средневековой русской литературной традиции.Появившись впервые в сочинениях Пахомия Логофета (Похвальном слове Варлааму Хутынскому и Житии Сергия Радонежского), он прошел через ряд агиографических памятников, перемещаясь из произведения в произведение исключительно путем заимствования из письменного текста.В данном случае не может идти речи ни о его воспроизведении по памяти, ни о его устной передаче, поскольку заимствование топоса всегда производилось в рамках большого фрагмента текста

Reviewed by: Bible Culture & Authority in the Early United States by Seth Perry John Fea (bio) Bible Culture & Authority in the Early United States. By Seth Perry. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xv, 195. Cloth, $35.00.) Seth Perry joins scholars such as Peter Thuesen, Paul Gutjahr, Mark Noll, Lincoln Mullen, Timothy Beal, Candy Brown, David Nord, and John Fea in examining the centrality of the Christian scriptures to American politics, civil society, public discourse, and lived religion. Perry's monograph is deeply theoretical and perhaps unnecessarily dense. The fascinating stories he has uncovered in the archives and elsewhere often take a backseat to his methodological musings. But scholars willing to wade through the academic jargon will be challenged to think differently about the use of the Bible by ordinary Americans in the early republic. Some of the earliest Bible societies in the United States, including the American Bible Society (ABS), claimed to publish the scriptures "without note or comment." In 1824, Jeremiah Day, president of Yale College and a trustee of the ABS, asked, "Should not the Scriptures … be accompanied with notes and comments? So far as commentators enable us to understand what we read, we may be grateful for his aid. But we [End Page 572] are not to look for improvements on a revelation from heaven."1 Comments like Day's are representative of the way American Protestants have understood the Bible for more than three centuries, but as Perry notes, this "Bible alone" mentality does not represent the way most Protestants engaged the scriptures. As Perry reminds us, "the Bible was never, ever alone" (dust jacket). Perry examines the Bible not as "source" of religious authority in the early republic, but as a "site" of authority, "a cultural space for editors, commentators, publishers, preachers, and readers to cultivate authoritative relationships" (dust jacket). His book draws heavily on what religious-studies scholar Vincent Wimbush has called "scripturalization" in his book White Men's Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (Oxford, UK, 2012). According to Wimbush, the study of sacred texts should focus "not upon texts per se (that is, upon content-meanings), but upon textures, gestures, and power—namely the signs, material products, ritual practices and performances, expressivities, orientations, ethics, and politics associated with the phenomenon of the invention and uses of 'scriptures.'" Scripturalization, according to Perry, implies an "ongoing, dialogic process, replacing 'scripture' and its connotations of fixity" (5–6). Perry applies this theory of scripturalization to five different moments in the religious history of the early republic. In Chapter 1, he introduces us to what printers believed to be the ideal American Bible reader. This reader was white and Protestant but also "some combination of marginally literate, lower-class, and often female." She read the Bible in the context of family prayer. While printers often hoped that their Bibles would contribute to a white Christian nation, readers often made their own meaning of the text, suggesting that "real and imagined readers exist always in dialogic relationships" (39). Chapter 2 deals with "paratexts," the commentaries, cross-references, illustrations, concordances, and children's Bibles that "carried scholarly, ecclesiastical, social and state authority into the text itself" (41). These texts, what the ABS used to refer to as "helps," allowed readers to assert their own authority of the scriptures. In the process, they were creating new texts and "refracting the scripturalized status of the Bible in new directions" (62). In his last three chapters, Perry examines forms of biblical citation in [End Page 573] the early republic that "expanded upon rather than referred specifically back to the Bible itself." For example, when Denmark Vesey led his famous slave rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina, he employed a Bible-based rhetoric of resistance and violence that Perry calls "performed biblicism" (xx). Evangelical itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow often performed in the role of "apostle" to "cultivate relationships of authority with audiences" (77). His wife Peggy expanded the scriptures for her audiences by publishing a memoir that built upon biblical models for women such as Martha and Mary. Visions, Perry writes, were another way the scriptural text was extended beyond the printed word. Published accounts of spiritual visions—Perry calls them "visionary...

Biblical and Manichaean Citations in Titus of Bostra’s Against the Manichaeans: An Annotated Inventory, written by Paul-Hubert Poirier & Timothy Pettipiece

This article describes a set of community regulations (taqqana) instituted in Tetouan in 1822, the purpose of which was to establish standards of modesty and sanctions against excess in clothing and jewelry. Our document is of interest to the historian, the folklorist and the sociologist. The profusion of prohibitions and restrictions offer a fairly detailed picture of women’s clothing, traditional festivities, and social rivalry. For the linguist, the text presents an introduction and a conclusion in Hebrew, rich in biblical citations and rabbinic allusions; the central section is written in a Judeo-Spanish variety strewn with Arabic and Hebrew words and expressions. All these may contribute to a better understanding of sociolinguistic phenomena, such as code-switching and the hybrid character of Jewish languages. The document is offered here fully translated into French, followed by the Judeo-Spanish passages transcribed and where necessary interpreted literally. The article ends in a sociolinguistic analysis dealing mainly with the functions of Hebrew in this text. Finally, the entire document is given in its original Hebrew script, followed by a photocopy of it.

Progressive liturgists seek to introduce gender parity into the first paragraph of the Amidah by adding the names of the Matriarchs immediately after those of the Patriarchs. I argue that this misrepresents their marriages and the role played by the concubines. A more balanced understanding is made possible by distancing the names of the Matriarchs from those of their husbands, and inserting them in the form of a brief piyyut, composed of biblical citations, just before the concluding blessing formula. The proposed insertion reflects the agency displayed by the Matriarchs and alludes obliquely to the concubines. Account is taken of the appropriateness of the piyyut for use in traditional settings.