Biblical Rhetoric Research Articles

«Благая весть» Венедикта Ерофеева и модель библейской риторики

This paper analyzes one of the earliest works by Venedikt Erofeev — the tale Blagaja vest’ (The Good news, 1962). This early and unfinished work, which vanished sometime after being read by a small group of Erofeev’s acquaintances and which has only partially survived, relies on the Bible as its most significant intertext, both on an aesthetic and linguistic level: Erofeev uses not only biblical allusions, motifs, references or quotations but also stylistic and rhetorical devices, typically employed by biblical authors. The aim of this article is to explore how and why Erofeev employs these strategies. The purpose is to apply to such a postmodern text a method known as rhetorical analysis. Particular attention is devoted to the essential characteristics of biblical rhetoric (binarity and parataxis) and to compositional figures, such as parallelism and chiasmus. Intertextual and intratextual relations and linguistic or stylistic phenomena will be considered as well. The analysis will note that the composition of Erofeev’s work clearly obeys the same principles of biblical rhetoric. Nevertheless in Blagaja vest’ these formal devises are used in an unexpected and unusual way. The author of this paper also emphasizes the important role that Blagaja vest’ plays in Erofeev’s entire œuvre: although it is an early work, it already prefigures the major qualities of Erofeev’s unique prose.

Influence: On Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation

Abstract The influence of the Bible in human history is staggering. Biblical texts have inspired grand social advancements, intellectual inquiries, and aesthetic achievements. Yet, the Bible has also given rise to hatred, violence, and oppression—often with deadly consequences. How does the Bible exert such extraordinary influence? The short answer is rhetoric. In Influence: On Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation, Michal Beth Dinkler demonstrates that, contrary to popular opinion, rhetoric is not inherently “empty” or disingenuous. Rhetoric refers to the art of persuasion. Dinkler argues that the Bible is by nature rhetorical, and that understanding the art of persuasion is therefore vital for navigating biblical literature and its interpretation. Influence invites readers to think critically about biblical rhetoric and the rhetoric of biblical interpretation, and offers a clear and compelling guide for how to do so.

Biblical Rhetoric of Separatism and Universalism and Its Intolerant Consequences

The long history of the Jewish and Christian use of separatist rhetoric and universal ideals reveals their negative consequences. The Hebrew Bible’s rhetoric about Israel as a people separated from the Egyptians and Canaanites is connected to Israel’s purity practices in Leviticus 18 and 20. Later communities wielding greater political power, however, employed this same anti-Canaanite pollution rhetoric in their efforts to colonize many different parts of the world. Separatist rhetoric was used to protect small Jewish communities in the early Second Temple period. The Christian New Testament rejected many of these purity practices in order to makes its mission more inclusive and universal. However, its denigration of concerns for purification as typically “Jewish” fueled intolerance of Jews in the form of Christian anti-Semitism. The violent history of both separatist and universalist rhetoric provides a cautionary tale about the consequences of using cultural and religious comparisons for community formation.

Ambiguities of Prophecy: Old Testament Rhetoric in the American Founding Era

AbstractScholars have long recognized the impact of Hebrew prophecy on the rhetoric of the American Founding era, but they have assumed it is all of one type, the American Jeremiad, a clarion call for political action. In fact, biblical rhetoric during this era mirrors three types of Old Testament prophecy formulated at three distinct moments in ancient Biblical history: before, during, and after the Babylonian Exile of 587 BCE. I refer to these as repentance, Jeremiad, and disappointment. I interpret sermons by three leading Protestant ministers in order to demonstrate that all three types of Hebraic prophecy were prevalent during this era, but only one of them, the Jeremiad, seeks to inspire political action; second, the Jeremiad was prominent only during the Revolutionary War. Before the war, and after the ratification of the Constitution, the two quietistic modes of prophecy, repentance, and disappointment, are more prevalent. I conclude by speculating about what the American founders might think of the contemporary rhetorical landscape, where the Jeremiad has become dominant, drowning out more moderate forms of biblical discourse.

“The Name of YHWH Comes from Afar” (Isa 30:27) in the Light of Rhetorical Analysis of Isa 30:27–33: an Attempt at Identification

The aim of the article is to clarify the meaning of the opening phrase of the prophecy of Isa 30:27–33: הנה שם־יהוה בא ממרחק. Interpretative difficulties arise primarily from the noun שם and the adverb ממרחק appearing here. The article presents previous attempts to understand the entire expression, and then proposes a new reading of it, which unambiguously links “the name of YHWH” with the Assyrian empire. Such identification results both from the exegesis and the analysis of the context of the prophecy, and is also supported by the latest achievements of Hebrew biblical rhetoric. The message of the prophecy reveals the person of Isaiah as an attentive observer of political events, and at the same time as a high-class theologian sensitive to the subtlety of God’s message. The prophecy of Isa 30:27–33, which is part of the most mature statements of the prophet from the last stage of his activity (705–701 BC), is thus inscribed in the idea of those oracles in which understatements and ambiguous phrases play a fundamental role.

The Four Speeches Every Youth Leader Has to Know

This article outlines a public rhetoric for youth ministry in an era of ecclesial agoraphobia. The article draws on the findings of a larger research project titled The Four Speeches Every Leader Has to Know. With the use of rhetorical theory, analysis of actual speeches, and a phenomenological and narrative approach to leadership and speaking, this research project has developed a four speeches-typology – the opening speech, the executioner speech, the consolation speech, and the farewell speech. The article uses this typology within the framework of a biblical rhetoric, looking at the speeches of Jesus, to analyse how the four speeches of Jesus may help the youth leader to address the transitory lives of young people in a credible way.

Herr Zebaoth and the German nation: bible and nationalism in the anti-Napoleonic wars

ABSTRACT The article discusses the Hebraist political rhetoric of the German national movement in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, focusing on the cult of the ‘national god’ [Nationalgott] – an extreme manifestation of the national shift in German Christianity. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, preachers and propagandists active in the German principalities adopted a distinctive biblical rhetoric. In the period approaching Napoleon’s defeat, a new Christian political rhetoric took shape in Prussia that combined Old Testament ideas of chosenness, New Testament sacrifice mysticism, and the political components of patriotism and nationalism. By examining religious sermons, political tracts and patriotic hymns, I demonstrate how Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860) and others created a novel theological terminology during the Anti-Napoleonic wars – a synthesis between Old Testament images of the fighting God, Gospel-like metaphors of sacrifice, and nationalist political rhetoric.

Milton’s Ethos, English Nationhood, and the Fast-Day Tradition in Areopagitica

During the English Revolution, Westminster divines Cornelius Burges and Stephen Marshall resurrected the practice of preaching in Parliament in an attempt to articulate, without repair to kingship or Catholicism, what it meant to be free, godly, and English. Though scholars have acknowledged Areopagitica’s debt to the nation-forming biblical rhetoric of these sermons, in this study I argue that Milton commandeers that rhetoric—especially the application of the figure of Israel to the would-be commonwealth—in order to renovate his own public image, such that he and the nation cannot be thought apart. Milton projects an ethos that is at once representative and apostolic, Isocratean and Pauline. At the same time, he reworks the sermons’ figural depictions of England’s divine election, covenant, and religious conformity such that his nation could not exist without him. This imbrication of persona and patria reconciles contrasting theories about Milton’s self-understanding and extends our understanding of Milton’s nationalism in a time of revolution and religious upheaval.

Speaking in the Devil’s Tongue? The True Jesus Church’s Uneasy Rhetorical Accommodation to Maoism, 1948–1958

During the 1950s, the universal ideology of Chinese Christian churches clashed with the universal ideology of the Maoist party-state. Since Christian churches were autonomous moral communities (ideologically self-contained, with members collectively claiming authority to define and cultivate moral norms), they hindered the party-state’s ambitions for control. Christians, especially Christian leaders, experienced intense pressure to adopt the new code of Maoist speech. Documents from archives in Shanghai, Nanjing, and Wuhan and oral history interviews with members of the True Jesus Church in south China show how, despite the True Jesus Church’s native inclinations to resist, between 1948 and 1958 Maoist rhetoric and discursive patterns replaced biblical rhetoric and discursive patterns in the public life of the church. The contest between religious communities and the state to control the terms of public moral discourse demonstrates the significance of such discourse in demarcating and legitimating community authority.

Jewish Poetics in Saul Bellow's <em>Henderson the Rain King</em> (1959)

Of all the novels in Saul Bellow's oeuvre, Henderson the Rain King (1959) seems to be the only one that is unrelated to Jewish life. Its plot revolves around an Anglo-Saxon millionaire, Eugene Henderson, who travels to Africa in search of answers to his existential crisis. This article shows that the novel is actually replete with Jewish themes and it positions the book alongside other postwar texts that disguised Jewish modes of expression within seemingly universal narratives. Henderson is framed in Yiddish and biblical rhetoric and reflects the ideas that Bellow developed in response to the Holocaust. It is also full of contradictions and ambiguities characteristic of this postwar genre; for instance, Henderson is exaggeratedly goyish at the same time he features many quintessential Jewish traits. By bringing attention to these aspects of the novel, this reading engages with critical and theoretical debates around how to demarcate the parameters that define Jewish American literature. It encourages the reader to reconsider those postwar texts that have been misinterpreted as diverging from Jewishness. And it directs them beyond the obvious hallmarks of Jewishness toward subtler cues that account for the ambivalences of postwar Jewish American identification.

RHETORICAL CRITICISM AND THE AFFECTIVE DIMENSION OF THE BIBLICAL TEXT

In the years since James Muilenburg challenged biblical scholars to move beyond form criticism, rhetorical criticism has become an accepted method within Old Testament studies. Biblical scholars, however, have been hesitant to examine the affective argument of biblical rhetoric, what Aristotle called pathos. This article suggests that the biblical documents advocate for certain agendas, and they use both logical and affective proofs to form their arguments. Therefore, what is offered here is a critical approach to examining the affective content of the biblical text, not as a new method, but as one part of the larger hermeneutical strategy

‘O London, London’: Mid-Tudor Literature and the City

This article explores the ways in which mid-Tudor writing addressed and imagined the city of London. Scholarly reactions to mid-Tudor writing have been mixed: where nineteenth-century editors were drawn to the anti-urban aspect of these texts, later criticism has tended to denigrate it on ethical or aesthetic grounds. This article joins recent efforts to reassess the qualities of Tudor writing by focusing on its highly emotive imagining of the city. It focuses on a ‘cross-section’ of mid-Tudor literature, including poetry, prose, and sermons, all produced in the period c.1542–c.1550. These number works by Robert Crowley, Henry Brinklow, Hugh Latimer, Henry Howard, Thomas Lever and John Bale. I argue that mid-Tudor writing was persistently drawn to represent England’s capital in particular ways. The imagined urban landscapes of this writing are strongly biblical in nature, partly because of the continued significance of biblical rhetoric and figures in the religious landscape of the time. However, mid-Tudor writing can also be seen to focus consistently on images of the urban poor, and use a rhetorical technique of satire by listing which blurs distinctions between forms of religious and commercial invective. This sub-genre of Tudor writing also needs to be understood in terms of its rich literary debts to earlier, particularly medieval, forms of urban writing. The latter part of the essay focuses on two such debts: those of Henry Howard to Petrarch’s ‘Babylonion Sonnets’ in the Canzoniere, and of Robert Crowley to William Langland’s Piers Plowman.

Biblical Rhetoric as Illustrated by Judah's Speech in Genesis 44.18–34

Although persuasive speech takes an important place in the biblical corpus, the method for analyzing persuasive texts remains underdeveloped. What distinguishes this literary genre is the way it acts upon the pragmatic speech situation: while narration transfers the audience to a far-away reality, and poetry creates its own world, rhetoric interacts directly with the situation at hand. Important tools of analysis are provided by ancient Greco-Roman theories of rhetoric in which this distinctive characteristic is central. Yet biblical rhetoric is rather different from its classical counterpart. In this article Judah's speech in Gen. 44.18–34 is first analysed according to the rules of classical rhetoric. The approach throws light on the inner working of the text, but at the same time it indicates a few features for which the classical theory is unable to account. The most important of these are explored and compared to similar features in other persuasive texts in the Bible.

Reconstructing Subversive Moral Discourses in the Spiritual Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Preaching Women

Using the spiritual autobiographies of selected nineteenth-century African American women, this inquiry reveals how these women constructed subversive discourses as moral actors and social reformers, even in the midst of religious, racial and gender oppression. Cuffee argues that their discursive self-assertion involved them in transformative acts that moved them from the status of marginalized survivors of white supremacy and chattel slavery to empowered, moral subjects at the intersection of religion, race, gender, and identity ideologies. This article examines how these women appropriated biblical rhetoric, abolitionist ideals, and the Protestant evangelical conversion and sanctification doctrine to realign themselves in opposition to and in disruption of dominant stereotypes and negative perceptions about their race and gender to liberate themselves from hegemonic structures, as well as to sustain them in their preaching missions and gender-justice protests.

A polissemia (social) do deserto: uma história do tópos histórico e historiográfico da solidão monástica no contexto latino medieval

O que seria dos monges sem o isolamento? Se as formas de vida monásticas são diversas ao longo do tempo, a presença de um ideal penitencial de separação, de abandono e mesmo de desprezo do mundo é marca constante entre os monges do mundo latino medieval. Essa pluralidade de modalidades de isolamento levou parte da historiografia a compreender a solidão monástica exclusivamente como um desejo religioso de relação direta e solitária do monge com Deus. Ainda que apareça na documentação, essa vontade representa apenas o aspecto mais superficial da definição medieval de solidão. O presente artigo visa demonstrar que esta visão historiográfica parcial é tributária da revalorização medieval de alguns lugares comuns da retórica clássica e bíblica. Constatação não sem importância, uma vez que ela nos abre um novo horizonte analítico ainda não explorado pelos estudos monásticos: a função social da solidão medieval. Metodologicamente, o artigo propõe o exame das relações lexicais dinâmicas presentes no campo semântico da solidão medieval. Ao final de nosso percurso teremos demonstrado que o deserto latino é, antes de tudo, o resultado da transferência da noção oriental para o ocidente. Uma transferência que coloca a solidão sob o controle de especialistas do isolamento cristão, tais como eremitas e monges. Esses reivindicam para si o monopólio da ocupação de um espaço de solidão: o <em>eremus</em>. Por fim, o presente artigo defende que a noção latinizada de solidão, bem como a polissemia do <em>desertum</em> bíblico, implica uma concepção “territorializada” do espaço na medida em que os agentes sociais em questão pretendem exercer sua influência de forma exclusiva sobre este espaço.

Rhétorique biblique, rhétorique de l'énigme

The aim of classical rhetoric is to convince and persuade. Being essentially enigmatic, biblical rhetoric invites the reader to reflect by himself to find the solution, respecting his freedom, his dignity and responsibility.

Joseph Roth als Stilist: Annäherung durch Theorie und Übersetzung ed. by Nora Hoffmann and Natalia Shchyhlevska (review)

Reviewed by: Joseph Roth als Stilist: Annäherung durch Theorie und Übersetzung ed. by Nora Hoffmann and Natalia Shchyhlevska Pamela S. Saur Nora Hoffmann and Natalia Shchyhlevska, eds., Joseph Roth als Stilist: Annäherung durch Theorie und Übersetzung. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013. 270 pp. Occasionally collections of essays emerging from scholarly conferences suffer from lack of unity and central purpose, but this is far from true of the highly focused and organized volume Joseph Roth als Stilist: Annäherung durch Theorie und Übersetzung. In fact, if a reader finished the collection without knowing that it was the product of a workshop held at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz in 2011, he or she might be surprised to hear it. The book is tightly organized into three parts: The first, “Stilbezogene Analysen der deutschen Originaltexte,” focuses on stylistic elements of Joseph Roth’s fiction and journalistic writing, the second two on translations of his works. The essays in the first section and the second, “Stilbezogene Analysen der Übersetzungen,” are meticulous scholarly studies accompanied by abstracts. In addition to the careful analyses of Roth’s texts, several studies also present and analyze Roth’s own statements about style. The third, somewhat more personal section containing reflections of the translators themselves is titled “Stilbezogene Erfahrungsberichte der Übersetzer/innen.” Context and background are provided by a foreword by August Obermayer, an introduction by the book’s editors, Nora Hoffmann and Natalia Shchyhlevska, and an epilogue by Roth scholar Fritz Hackert. The book’s introduction begins thus, “Joseph Roth gilt als großer Stilist. Forschung und Kritik preisen seinen bildhaften, musikalischen und biblischen Stil.” Also often praised is his “magisch wirkende Sprache” (15). This passage identifies— and meets— a major challenge of analyzing “style”: evaluating such generalized statements and judgments and assessing their validity on the basis of actual language choices and their patterns. The results tell us that statements about “style,” on the surface subjective and impressionistic, become quite technical when they are backed up by evidence. A case in point is Shchyhlevska’s fascinating linguistic study “Biblische Spuren im Stil Joseph Roths.” It focuses on Roth’s novel Hiob, which a casual reader might call “biblical” because of its subject matter and a vague impression of its language and tone. The author confirms the validity of the term, not only demonstrating that Roth imitated Biblical rhetoric, particularly in references to light and sound, but also presenting a series of charts pairing a startling number of expressions in the novel with actual biblical passages. Similarly [End Page 144] specific and precise is a study of Roth’s “Phraseologische Modifikationen als Darstellungsmittel” by Nadija Tymostschuk. She analyzes techniques such as substitution, expansion, and ellipsis in Roth’s novels and identifies some of their purposes and results as “Bedeutungserweiterung, Intensivierung der Expressivität, Verstärkung der Bildhaftigkeit,” and “Veränderung der Bewertung” (111). The article thus addresses both technical and aesthetic aspects of literary style. The first section is rounded out with Erica Weitzman’s study of “documentary” humor (“dokumentarische Komik”) in Roth’s feuilletons and a piece on irony in his signature novel Radetzkymarsch by Katharina Krčal. Weitzman analyzes Roth’s fruitful combination of journalistic objectivity and subjective observation and interpretation, using such techniques as unexpected juxtapositions and apparent suspension of logic. Humor, satire, and the grotesque are often seen in Roth’s writing, but their importance is not always recognized. Weitzman finds these techniques significant to the genre and the times: “nicht nur für das Genre des Feuilletons selbst, sondern auch für eine Epoche maßgebend” (116). Krčal’s study of irony focuses on such pertinent topics as flexible narrative perspective, unreliable narrators, use of the impersonal pronoun man, and irony as related to fate. Many insights into the challenges of the art of translation are provided by both the second section of the volume, comprised of scholarly studies of translations, and the third, authored by translators themselves, representing a range of target languages. The analytical essays, all rich in specific examples to support their points, include Vera Viehöver’s analysis of the French, Italian, and English translations of Das falsche Gewicht, which is followed by two...

Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in the China and the West

Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in the China and the West

The Holy Book in a Holy War

The Holy Book in a Holy War Mark A. Noll (bio) James P. Byrd. Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xii + 243 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $27.95. When Charles Inglis, rector of Trinity Church, New York, delivered a sermon in September 1777 before a troop of Americans who had shortly before enlisted to fight for the British, his biblical text came from Luke chapter 3, verse 14: “And the Soldiers likewise demanded of him—And what shall we do? And he said to them, Do violence to no Man, neither accuse any falsly [sic], but be content with your Wages.” Inglis used this account of the early ministry of John the Baptist to encourage the recruits who were mobilizing for the King, but he also closed his sermon with a prayer that God “would remove the Delusion of our misguided [patriot] Brethren . . . that they may see the Evil and Error of their Ways, and know the Things which belong to their Peace, before it is too late.”1 This sermon is one of the few such utterances that James Byrd does not analyze, or at least record, in his marvelously researched and historically compelling Sacred Scripture, Sacred War. If Inglis’ message to the Loyalists was atypical, Byrd demonstrates convincingly that his turn to Scripture was entirely representative of the age. Many other historians have noted the importance of biblical rhetoric during America’s Revolutionary period, most notably Donald Lutz, whose careful empirical studies were carried out a generation ago, and Ellis Sandoz with his superb collection of Revolutionary-era sermons.2 Yet no one before Byrd has done such exhaustive research with such impressive results. Using a data base that he constructed of over 17,000 biblical citations from 543 individual sources—mostly published, but some also in manuscript—Byrd provides an extraordinary array of valuable information concerning the biblical content that informed the mental worlds of a large and influential portion of the American populace during the decades of Revolutionary crisis. If some of what Byrd has documented remains under-interpreted, the book still represents an achievement of the first order. Four significant findings are most significant. [End Page 611] The first confirms the strongly Protestant ethos of the Revolutionary era. After the Boston Tea Party, a New England separatist, Israel Holly, joined the chorus defending this action, but with a difference. As someone who had broken from New England’s established Congregational church, Holly was campaigning for the expansion of religious liberty at home even as he supported efforts to secure political liberty from Parliament. His word of warning to New England reflected the deeply engrained anti-Catholic biblicism that had become standard in the British Empire over the course of previous decades. If New England did not repent of its own tyrannies, Holly warned, the expansion of British despotism could soon lead to more “arbitrary government” and even “popery.” If that dreadful result eventuated, “away must go our bibles” only to be replaced by “the superstitions and damnable heresies and idolatries of the church of Rome” (quoted on p. 38). Throughout the colonies, but especially in New England, the political crisis encouraged such hyperbolic outcries, including an instinctive defense of Scripture as a bedrock of the colonies’ Christian civilization. Byrd, second, is entirely convincing that the main effect of widespread Bible usage was “to forge militant patriotism” (p. 164). He does record efforts by Loyalists to defend the British connection with scriptural injunctions, as when Charles Inglis, in a different sermon from 1780, demanded fidelity to George III on the basis of I Peter 2:17 (“Fear God. Honor the king”) and Romans 13:1–7 (including “”Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers”) (quotation on pp. 121–22). Byrd also discovered a few efforts by African Americans and their supporters to attack slavery as a violation of biblical norms. When, for example, in May 1775, a slave in Savannah preached that “God would send Deliverance to the Negroes, from the power of their Masters, as he freed the children of Israel from Egyptian bondage,” most of his white hearers were so incensed...

The Rhetoric of Precedent and Fulfillment in the Sermon on the Mount and the Common Law

The intertwined rhetoric of precedent and fulfillment underlies the biblical rhetoric of the Sermon on the Mount and the legal rhetoric of the common law. This article wants to draw a parallelism between how Jesus approaches the corpus of Mosaic law in the Sermon on the Mount and how judges approach the corpus of the common law in case after case. Both Jesus and common law judges are fulfillers, not followers, of precedents. The follower of precedent repeats the norms of the past in the present, while the fulfiller of precedent redeems the norms of the past in the present.