Biblical Patterns Research Articles

Texts To Be Read

The regicide of 30 January 1649 combined event and text in a rhetorical manner, for the events of the trial and execution could be ‘read’ in a variety of ways, from a second crucifixion to a victory over popery and arbitrary govenment. This essay argues that, in Eikon Basilike, contemporaries were provided with the record of a man and a king struggling to reconcile the demands of his conscience with the hard facts of the political events surrounding him. Here they could read of a man who had tried to discern the truth and act upon it, and in this they were presented with a pattern and example for their own discernment of right action and the achieving of a quiet conscience. In other words, the Eikon and its author were casuistical texts – teachers of holy living and holy dying – striking a deep chord with people struggling to make sense of their duty and follow their consciences in extraordinary times. In a society steeped in biblical and classical imagery and patterns of thought, the Eikon Basilike combines a number of familiar rhetorical and generic traditions in a manner that helps to account for the text's success throughout the period of the Long Restoration.

“And a Small Boy Leading Them”:

Each of the three childhood stories, S. Y. Agnon's “Bayaעar ūvaעir” [In the Forest and in the Town] (1939), Amos Oz's Panter bamartef [Panther in the Basement] (1995), and Aharon Appelfeld's Layish (1994), offers a child protagonist who inhabits two parallel landscapes: his own environment and the biblical universe. These child protagonists relive a biblical experience, but the degree to which the respective writers make them participants in evoking the biblical sphere is different in each story. These stories exhibit distinctly different paradigms of the art of embedding the biblical text in a modern, secular narrative and of the status it is given within it. In Agnon's tale, the scriptural intertext is inseparable from a dense network of Judaic master texts, discoursing with and commenting on each other. In Oz's novella, the biblical arena is the ancient parallel of present-day reality, the admired yet challenged national epic that mirrors and informs current political and territorial aspirations. In Appelfeld's novella, the biblical pattern is a remote, foreboding myth, not fully recognized by the actors in the modern tale yet powerful enough to hover over them and determine their destiny.

Relationships between God and People in the Bible, Part II: The New Testament, with Comparisons with the Torah

In an earlier study on the first five books of the Bible, the Torah or Pentateuch, relationships between God and people were assessed with the use of a clinical-quantitative method, the core conflictual relationship theme (CCRT) method. Here, the study is extended to God or Jesus's relationships with people in the New Testament, to obtain the first description of those relationships based on an established measure of relationships. In the New Testament, many different kinds of relationship themes were observed, with benevolent and positive themes as the most frequent. Other results included that: (a) relationships in the New Testament often appeared more positive than in the Torah; (b) New Testament relationships between Jesus and people were less positive than between God and people; and (c) God's relationship with Jesus was more positive than God's relationship with Moses. Relationships with Paul, Peter, and women were also assessed. Relationship patterns were considered within the context of attachment theory, and biblical CCRT patterns were consistent with depiction of both secure and anxious attachments. Biblical relationships portray a variety of models for interpersonal relationships, ranging from the very positive to the very negative.

Aphra Behn's English Feminism: Wit and Satire by Dolors Altaba-Artal (review)

YES, 32, 2002 YES, 32, 2002 would have been deemed 'hypocrisy'by Bunyan.His most famousworkwas written under a creative resentment against the worldly necessity of 'metaphor' to which, to the edification of millions, he was reduced in order to expound his pilgrim'sprogress.With his nostalgia for monasticism, and his Pauline sense of the limits appropriatefor female participationin worship, he is not yet ripe forfeminist appropriation. And (even after Christopher Hill) there remains doubt as to how available for mundane purposes is a tradition of 'rebellion' rooted merely in permanentopposition to theworld. LikePenelope, thisgroupof scholarskeepsalive the reputationof theirbold itineranttill a fullerreturnto the canon (wherehe surely belongs) becomes feasible. Without quarrellingwith their circumspection, or with the mainlyvery firmlyarguedinsightsthat they bringto bear, it is possibleto regret Bunyan's currentstatus(sharedwith others of the wise and good) as the 'property' of a single-authorsociety. Meanwhile, the routeis throughpatient reconstructionof context: GreavesindicatesMichael A. Mullett'sJohnBunyan inContext (Keele: Keele UniversityPress, 1996)as exemplary. N. H. Keeble sets the scene for Bunyan's 'inescapable experience of repression and persecution', followed by a meditation from John R. Nott that raises the problem, for modern readers, of 'an episode from the second part of Pilgrim's Progress', in which Mercy's delightin the torment of God's enemies seems to imply a jarring 'shift from the metaphorical to the literal' (p. 52). I am not sure Bunyan would accept the distinction, or care (any more than Dante) to pity the damned. Sharon Achinstein arguesvaliantly,yet with commendable reticence, for Bunyan's allegory as a 'practicethat can do political work'.W. R. Owens compares TheHoly City with other contemporary approaches to millennarianism. Michael Davies movingly suggestsdistinctionsbetween Bunyan'spoetic way of prayerfulimagination and the delusive 'maze' of mere theological disputation. Ken Simpson shows how the Nonconformist 'liturgy of the word was enacted each time the Spirit revealed a biblical pattern'in corporate or individuallife. T. L. Underwood charts Bunyan's attempt to keep a bible-based balance between the (to him) degrading extremes of Ranters and Quakers. PatriciaDemers gives an interestingaccount of 'Bunyan'sSisters':women nearer to him than he acknowledgedin their seeking of 'wholeness'.The collection ends with Aileen Ross's tactfulaccount of'Misogyny' in Bunyan, Melissa A. Aaron's validation of Christiana'sjourney as emblematic of 'Corporate Christianity [which] had to be represented by women'; and Susan Cook'scollageoflate-seventeenth-centuryprosefictiontexts,derivingfromBunyan, and servingto highlighta sharedpriority:never 'originalityof composition', always the recoveryof'original truth'. UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK MALCOLM HARDMAN AphraBehn'sEnglishFeminism:Wit andSatire. By DOLORS ALTABA-ARTAL. Cranbury, NJ: Susquehanna University Press; London: Associated University Presses. I999. 231 PP. ?32. Aphra Behn's recent installationin the Englishliterarycanon has produced curious critical consequences. In the past generation, she has passed in reverse order through the processes normally applied to Great Writers:at firstthe emphasis fell on theorizing her, then on establishing her historical context, and now, in Aphra Behn'sEnglishFeminism, Dolors Altaba-Artal has produced the first 'exhaustive comparison of her production with texts from the Spanish siglo de oro' (p. 9). Although previousstudieshave made valuable contributionsto the subject,AltabaArtalis the firstto deal comprehensively,exclusively, and even-handedlyboth with would have been deemed 'hypocrisy'by Bunyan.His most famousworkwas written under a creative resentment against the worldly necessity of 'metaphor' to which, to the edification of millions, he was reduced in order to expound his pilgrim'sprogress.With his nostalgia for monasticism, and his Pauline sense of the limits appropriatefor female participationin worship, he is not yet ripe forfeminist appropriation. And (even after Christopher Hill) there remains doubt as to how available for mundane purposes is a tradition of 'rebellion' rooted merely in permanentopposition to theworld. LikePenelope, thisgroupof scholarskeepsalive the reputationof theirbold itineranttill a fullerreturnto the canon (wherehe surely belongs) becomes feasible. Without quarrellingwith their circumspection, or with the mainlyvery firmlyarguedinsightsthat they bringto bear, it is possibleto regret Bunyan's currentstatus(sharedwith others of the wise and good) as the 'property' of a single-authorsociety. Meanwhile, the routeis throughpatient reconstructionof context: GreavesindicatesMichael A. Mullett'sJohnBunyan inContext (Keele: Keele UniversityPress, 1996)as exemplary. N. H. Keeble sets the scene for Bunyan's 'inescapable experience of repression and persecution', followed by a meditation from John R. Nott that raises the...

Reviews: The Study of History: A Bibliographical Guide, the English Idea of History from Coleridge to Collingwood, the Changing Face of English Local History, Arthur and the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature, Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, Shakespeare's Feminine Endings, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660, New Stories for Old:

‘The conviviality of the narrative premise’ is Steven Earnshaw’s felicitous phrase for the theme that suffuses this book. It is ‘a crawl through the drinking places of English literary history,’ in the company of Chaucer, Langland, Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson, Pepys, Ned Ward (author of The London Spy), Goldsmith, Gray, Fielding, Cowper, Crabbe, Dickens, Eliot (G.), Hardy, Eliot (T. S.), Coppard, Hampson, Hamilton, Orwell and Amis (M.). It also ‘attempts to weave a pattern out of the strands of “pub”, English literature and England’. It is a labour of love, the product of years of hoarded references and inspired cups and we must be grateful. It will become a standard resort for literary scholars seeking quotable material on pubs (Piers Plowman ‘pissed a pottel in a pater-noster while’), and for anyone who likes to savour ‘the pub moment’ through the medium of print.

New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel

Preface PART ONE: INTRODUCTORY Dialogue and Repetition PART TWO: BIBLICAL REALISM AND THE ENGLISH NOVEL Robinson's Biblical Island 'Imitation' in Joseph Andrews Natural Piety in Silas Marner PART THREE: JOB IN MODERN FICTION Kafka's Debate with Job Being Possessed by Job Biblical Patterns for Sale: The Fixer PART FOUR: ISAAC UNBOUND Saul Bellow and Philip Roth The Akedah in A.B. Yehoshua The Day before Yesterday Index

New stories for old: biblical patterns in the novel

New stories for old: biblical patterns in the novel

Yahweh the Patriarch: Ancient Images of God and Feminist Theology (review)

102 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 Greek novels and early Christian novels; these comparative works are mentioned but described very briefly, probably too briefly, for the reader who has little familiarity with this body of literature. In addition to a traditional form-critical approach, Wills also asks the more sociologically oriented question ofwhy this particular geme ofliterature developed and became popular at this particular time. If"it is possible that Jewish novels were read by more Jews than any other type ofliterature" (p. 3), they provide a window into popular culture, a separate avenue ofentry from the more halakhic and theological literature of the "religious elite" that is often our basis of study. There is not space here to give a detailed comment on Wills' discussion of each individual book. Each chapter stands relatively independently and can serve as a helpful general introduction to the work under discussion. As might be expected, there is an emphasis on those features that are distinctive to the geme as Wills has defmed it, and a deemphasis on other elements that do not fit quite so neatly. Thus it seemed to me that Wills sometimes undervalued the didactic and religious elements of this literature, especially the significant prayer and hymnic passages in many of these works. In the first sentence ofhis introduction, Wills reminded us ofthe pioneering book of Elias Bickerman (1967) in which he explored Four Strange Books of the Bible, including Esther and Daniel. Wills has included even "stranger" books while at the same time demonstrating that none of this literature is so "strange" when it is placed within the broader context of literary developments in the Greco-Roman world. Eileen Schuller Department of Religious Studies McMaster University Yahweh the Patriarch: Ancient Images of God and Feminist Theology, by Erhard S. Gerstenberger, translated by Frederick J. Gaiser. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. 168 pp. $16.00. The prominence ofYahweh, the name for God in the Hebrew Bible, in the title does not mean that this book focuses solely or primarily on biblical images of God. Rather, its major concern is for contemporary theological problems, particularly among Protestant Christians in Germany. A distinguished professor of Old Testament and Theology at Marburg, Gerstenberger is acutely aware of gender and class inequality in church and society, and he argues valiantly for egalitarian structures in contemporary religious and political institutions. Nearly 40 percent of the book addresses itself to such issues. Yet Gerstenberger is fully aware of how contemporary sexism is grounded in western cultural history, going back to biblical times. Hence his scholarly approach to Book Reviews 103 the flaws in contemporary institutions is to ferret out the biblical patterns of sexism, particularly in the gendered attributes of the single god Yahweh worshiped in ancient Israel. At the same time, his diligence in assessing the time-bound and historically contingent nature ofbiblical images for God frees him to reject the authority ofIsraelite ideas about God that do not serve contemporary theological needs and also allows him to value as meaningful for today the ways in which both women and men experienced religious life at certain epochs in Israelite society. An importailt and widely accepted premise of Yahweh the Patriarch is that biblical monotheism almost certainly did not emerge until the exilic period (sixth century BCE), even though postexilic biblical writers and redactors attempt to project monotheism back into the earliest periods of proto-Israelite and Israelite history. Archaeological data, extra-biblical sources, and biblical texts together reveal that female and male deities-including Baal, EI, Milcom, Asherah, Astarte, and the Queen of Heaven (Ishtar)-were worshiped by many Israelites, including even members of the royal family. Furthermore, women apparently participated fully in the cultic activities associated with those deities and probably were in control ofthe rituals for at least one of them, namely Ishtar. Concomitant with multiple deities of both genders and with women' roles in religious life were several instances ofpublic female leadership as well as ofdomestic female importance in preexilic Israel. But, according to Gerstenberger, the emergence of Yahweh as a sole deity, represented almost exclusively by male language drawn in large part from military images of divine power and victory, while...

The Evolution of Creationism

Creationist campaigns have Increasingly confronted pluralistic democracies during the past three decades. The combination of biblical literalism, anti-evolutionary bias and radical diluvial theories had already influenced Christian fundamentalism for half a century, but the impact multiplied when leaders with advanced degrees asserted a scientific basis, established international organizations to market their views in all media, debated, lobbied, went to court. Their movement is a small minority, not only among those who have studied science, but among biblical believers: most of twenty three plaintiffs opposed to creationist legislation at Little Rock, Arkansas in 1981 represented churches and synagogues. Creationism developed in reaction to trends in religion, philosophy and science, and to the very diversity of perspectives. It adapted theories from past centuries, evolved despite denial of evolution; declared a simple dichotomy rather than a complex spectrum; used "creation" and "evolution" as shibboleths for a host of underlying issues. Concepts and alienation from mainstream science were nearly complete before Darwinian theory began: these roots, hidden by recent rhetoric, are examined here, together with the distinctive biblical interpretation pattern; the schism is traced to a dispute within diluvialism.

Chaos to Cosmos: Studies in Biblical Patterns of Creation

This is originally Published by Scholars Press. It is now Available from Duke University Press. It is a fresh look at Genesis 1-11 from the perspectives of comparative literature and cultural anthropology. Susan Niditch reveals how Hebrew narratives of chaos, creation, and cosmos structure a mythic-literary world and create an order for human existence. Both the scholar and the student will find Niditch's imaginative interpretation illuminating.

Review: Chaos to Cosmos: Studies in Biblical Patterns of Creation

Review: Chaos to Cosmos: Studies in Biblical Patterns of Creation

Book Reviews: Susan Niditch, Chaos to Cosmos: Studies in Biblical Patterns of Creation. Chico: Scholars Press. Pp. 114. Paper, $9.25

Book Reviews: Susan Niditch, Chaos to Cosmos: Studies in Biblical Patterns of Creation. Chico: Scholars Press. Pp. 114. Paper, $9.25

Biblical Patterns in Modern Hebrew Literature

Biblical Patterns in Modern Hebrew Literature

Chaos to Cosmos: Studies in Biblical Patterns of Creation. By Susan Niditch. Studies in the Humanities, 6. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985. 114 pages $13.95 (paper $9.25).

Chaos to Cosmos: Studies in Biblical Patterns of Creation. By Susan Niditch. Studies in the Humanities, 6. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985. 114 pages $13.95 (paper $9.25).

The Way and the Ways of Puritan Story: Biblical Patterns in Bunyan and his Contemporaries

Journal Article The Way and the Ways of Puritan Story: Biblical Patterns in Bunyan and his Contemporaries Get access N. H. Keeble N. H. Keeble Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 33, Issue 147, Autumn 1984, Pages 209–232, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/33.147.209 Published: 01 October 1984

Biblical Patterns for Mountain Living

Biblical Patterns for Mountain Living

Reaction

It is closer to the biblical pattern of worship to view it as first and preeminently an act directed toward God. But this vertical worship of God is to have horizontal effects in the lives of the worshipers.

New Imperative and Jussive Formations in Contemporary Hebrew

ONE OF THE MOST interesting developments in the domain of the jussive-imperative in contemporary Hebrew is the emergence of new jussive and imperative formations, composed of seand ?prefixed respectively to the regular future form,' at the beginning of an independent sentence.2 As stated by Gesenius-Kautzsch-Cowley,3 the jussive expresses a definite desire that something should or should not happen. In the affirmative it is used to express a command, a wish, advice, or request (i. e., it includes the optative, also the cohortatives, which usually refer to the first person). In the negative utterances, it expresses prohibition or dissuasion, a negative wish and a request. Apart from various deviations from the established Biblical patterns of jussive, noticeable in semiformal and even formal Hebrew speech, contemporary native speakers of Israeli Hebrew have been operating in their informal speech with certain new formulae for constructing jussives and imperatives. One should notice the following semantic-functional distinction in independent sentences beginning with 8seand s-: