God In Heaven Research Articles

A Comparative Study of Mythology about the Advent of the God of Heaven

A Comparative Study of Mythology about the Advent of the God of Heaven

A Comparative Study of Mythology about the Advent of the God of Heaven

A Comparative Study of Mythology about the Advent of the God of Heaven

The concept of religious authority and power of the monarch in Shang Dynasty

The Shang Dynasty people practiced theocentrism, Valuing Sacrifices and serving ghosts,and everything had to be predicted through divination. There are many deities in the Shang Dynasty, including three major systems: heavenly gods, earthly spirits, and human ghosts. Di has the greatest authority and is the ruler of nature. He has the characteristics of being extraordinary, not being influenced by human will, and is the supreme god in the belief world of the Shang Dynasty people. He is integrated with the ancestors of the Shang kings. The original meaning of Di was the ancestor and the god of reproduction of all things in the universe, which was very similar to the Western concept of 'God' as the creator. In the religious belief system of the Shang Dynasty, people did not directly offer sacrifices to the heavenly gods, and every request must be achieved through the intermediary of the ancestral ghosts. After the death of the Shang kings, they were all honored as Di, which led to the formation of the "combination of sorcerers and kings" and the "the unification of politics and religion" system in the late Shang Dynasty. In the late Shang Dynasty, a trinity structure of Di, Ancestral Spirit, and Kings was formed,which dominated the heavens and earth jointly, completed the integration of theocracy and kingship, and the combination of supreme god and extreme authoritarianism, formed a political ideological system of Religious indoctrination, had an important impact on later Chinese history and is worthy of our in-depth study.

고구려의 <주몽> 서사시와 야쿠트족의 <에르 소고토흐> 서사시 비교연구

The Korean people and the Yakut people have many cultural commonalities, including shamanism, the idea of a heavenly god, sun worship, archery culture, and the belief in the crow as the messenger of God. These commonalities are also fused in the myths or epics of the heroes (national founders or founding founders) of the two peoples. In the founding or national origin myth (or epic), which explains how the progenitor of a nation or tribe (or nation) was born and formed a nation or tribe, the nation's worldview is strongly expressed, and along with it, historicity and literary value can be discovered.
 In this paper, through a study of Goguryeo's <Jumong> epic and the Yakut people's <Er Sogotokh> epic, we examine not only the worldviews of the two peoples, but also similarities and differences between the two myths by comparing and analyzing what elements are used to express the divinity of the hero, what thoughts they have about the origins of their peoples, and how the heroic feats of the protagonist are reproduced. Based on this, I think we can understand the characteristics of the nation.
 The two stories indicate a high degree of similarity in structure, with the following structure: birth-growth-deficiency-departure-trials, overcoming -arrival-fight, and victory-achievement-after-story. And the two heroes are similar in that they are both descendants of heavenly gods, have mysterious anecdotes related to their birth, and possess extraordinary archery skills. However, while the <Er Sogotoch> epic has a story structure that focuses on the protagonist defeating the antagonist, getting married, and starting a family; the <Jumong> epic focuses on the protagonist defeating the antagonist and securing territory to establish a nation. This seems to be due to the difference between the folk tale about the founder of a nation and the founder of a country. In addition, the Yakutian worldview is well illustrated in <Er Sogotoch>, where the protagonist and antagonist freely move between the heavenly world, the middle (terrestrial) world, and the lower world. It shows that these worlds are not disconnected and independent from each other, but are organically connected, and thus a complete world is formed. In contrast, <Jumong> shows communication with the gods by asking for help from heavenly gods and gods of river, but the connection between humans and gods is weakened in that the protagonist cannot move to the world of the gods. In addition, <Er Sogotoch> shows that the role of a sacred tree that tells the secret of birth, the water of life gifted by the sacred tree, and a horse with mysterious abilities appear as important elements in composing the story, indicating that the mythical concept is more strongly reflected than <Jumong>.
 This denotes that the epic <Er Sogotoch> was formed earlier than the epic <Jumong>. It is impossible to reveal the internalized unconscious form and culture of the two peoples through comparative analysis of only two hero narratives and has clear limitations. In the future, we hope that these limitations will be overcome through more extensive research of the heroic epics, legends, and myths of northern peoples.

“Further Up and Further In”: Roads, Pilgrim’s Regress and Sehnsucht on Earth and in Heaven

First, in his 1933 allegory The Pilgrim’s Regress and, later, in his 1955 autobiography Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis described his conversion to Christianity as a journey guided by the search for what he called “Joy.” In the 1943 foreword to Regress, Lewis defines this feeling as an “intense longing” that “pierces us like a rapier”; later in Surprised by Joy, he calls it a desire of “almost sickening intensity,” best captured by the German word Sehnsucht. David Downing offers a helpful formulation of this “Sweet Desire” as “the blissful ache for some paradise out of reach,” which acts as the central thread of Lewis’s conversion story in both its allegorical and biographical forms. By reading Regress’s glimpse of the afterlife alongside similar visions in Lewis’s other works of fiction and alongside variant productions of the allegory itself, we can begin to fill in this gap in our understanding of how Lewis envisions Sweet Desire after union with God in Heaven. Such comparisons reveal that death, for Lewis, brings not a consummation but a continuation of Sehnsucht, which leads the Christian infinitely closer to God even as he remains far enough displaced to take part in relationship with Him.

“There Is No God in Heaven”: Black Religion, Resistance, and the Police Power in Jim Crow New Orleans

In late October 1907, members of an African American religious order called the Council of God killed a White police officer outside their house of worship in New Orleans. This article recovers and analyzes the radical theology of the Council of God, situating it in the vibrant intellectual world of turn-of-the-century Black spirituality. The Council of God’s belief system was structured around resistance to white supremacy in general and resistance to police violence in particular. If the violence of Jim Crow policing shaped the Council of God’s theology, however, the reverse was equally true, as the New Orleans Police Department consistently used the specter of Black religious radicalism to call for increased funding and popular support. This article probes the relationship between religion, race, violence, and policing, offering new perspectives on the police power, Black religion, and African American armed self-defense in the era of Jim Crow.

Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God by J. Richard Middleton

Reviewed by: Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God by J. Richard Middleton Paul K.-K. Cho j. richard middleton, Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). Pp. xv + 272. Paper $26.99. J. Richard Middleton wrote Abraham’s Silence “to help people of faith recover the value of lament prayer as a way to process our pain (and the pain of the world) with the God of heaven and earth” (p. 9). M. does more. At the topical level, he maps lament prayer onto “the very pattern of biblical story” (p. 36) and “the paradigm of Moses’s intercession” (p. 42) to argue that lament is “the hinge—even the fulcrum—between bondage and deliverance” (p. 36). That is, M. emphasizes the value of lament as a response to suffering and as a means of overcoming it. At the hermeneutical level, M. commits to “an intrinsic reading” of the biblical text in arguing for the bold thesis that Abraham fails God’s test in Genesis 22 (p. 191). Middleton frames the book with two chapters on lament (chap. 1 and conclusion). In these chapters, M. argues that engaging in lament can reawaken and deepen one’s own faith (p. 4), lead “to a fresh discernment of the character of God” (pp. 237–38), and “be the beginning of a journey of ethical transformation” that steers us clear of both the Scylla of ethical paralysis and despair and the Charybdis of anger and violence (p. 239). The much-appreciated claim is that lament in itself has psychological, theological, and ethical value. In addition to underlining the importance of lament in itself, M. connects lament— which he loosely understands as honest speech in the face of suffering, such as “complaint,” “protests,” and “honest, abrasive prayers” (p. 28)—to other genres and patterns of speech: [End Page 138] supplication (p. 35), lament psalms (p. 28), “the very pattern of the biblical story” (p. 36), and the paradigm of “prophetic intercession” (p. 42). The interweaving of these speech types makes clear that M. is interested in the general question of “how to talk back to God” and not only in lament. Accordingly, M. celebrates Moses, who intercedes for Israel against God’s judgment in the aftermath of the golden calf incident, and Job, who protests and complains to God about his innocent suffering, on the one hand, and, on the other, critiques Abraham, who does neither when God commands him to sacrifice Isaac. Framing the larger discussion about “how to talk back to God” within a discourse about lament, however, results in a confusing conflation of categories that unfortunately leads to the narrativization of lament as “the hinge—even the fulcrum” in a plot that moves from bondage to deliverance, suffering to healing. Clearer distinctions would have been helpful. In chap. 2, M. praises Moses for interceding for Israel and argues that his example establishes a pattern in which God’s love both makes possible and invites a “bold challenge [against God] rooted in faithfulness.” Middleton helpfully discusses reflections of this pattern in biblical and postbiblical Jewish traditions. In two chapters on Job (chaps. 3 and 4), M. argues that the Book of Job explores several ways of talking about and to God in light of innocent suffering, that Job honestly complains about his suffering and audaciously protests to God, and that, in the divine speeches, God praises Job for “his honest, abrasive, unsubdued speech” (p. 128) and seeks to make of Job “a worthy conversation partner” (p. 121). According to M., Job demonstrates that, “between the extremes of blessing God explicitly and cursing God, there is the viable option of honest, forthright challenge to God in prayer, which God (as Creator) both wants and expects of those made in the divine image” (p. 128). Middleton’s flat position that God praises Job is an overstatement of one among several possible readings of a dynamic relation requiring more nuance. In three chapters on the Aqedah (Genesis 22) (chaps. 5–7), M. argues that the close reading...

Сайтинские боги в шаманизме бурят: семантика образов и функции

The article examines the semantics and functions of the deities known in the Buryat shaman pantheon of the Baikal region as “Saitani Burhad” (Saitin gods). The chronological framework of the study covers the period from the last quarter of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century. The research is based on historical, ethnographic, ethnolinguistic, folkloristic, mythological and archaeological materials. Structural-functional and cultural-semantic analyses used to identify the semantics of the image of each Saitin deity in the pantheon showed their conditionality by the process of personification, which correlates with one of the structural components of the white shamanism of the Buryats, defined by its origin as female shamanism. They include shamanic trance, silver as a sacred metal in the sphere of white shamanism, the process of invoking gods and ancestral spirits with the help of chants, the ritual attire of the shaman, as well as the rite of sacrifice and its attributes. The study of the image and functions of the mythological ancestors of the Buryats of the Hori tribe, represented in the pantheon of the Saitin gods with the functions of intermediary spirits between earthly people and the White heavenly gods of the “Western Tengri”, reveals their commonality with the worldview, cosmogonic myths and cosmological representations of the Turkic-Mongolian peoples of Southern Siberia, Central Asia and the Yakuts. The origins of this community go back to the culture of the Iranian-speaking peoples of the Eurasian steppes of the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, who revered the creator God, whose name is formed from the root aar/aya. The analysis of the ethnogonic myth of the Khori-Buryats as the plot of the cosmogonic myth correlated with the seasonal rituals of the Turkic-Mongolian peoples showed that historically the bearers of these beliefs were a social community with the totemic cult of the Scythian Deer-Sun and Swan-Sun Bird. Taking into account the correlation of images and events in the Khori myth with petroglyphs in the Sagan-Zaba Bay and Aya Bay on the northern shore of Lake Baikal, the origin of the Saitin gods among the population of the Baikal region can be correlated with the tile graves on Olkhon Island and the northern coast of Lake Baikal.

Humility, Courage, Magnanimity: a Thomistic Account

In these brief remarks, I sketch Aquinas’s account of humility, courage, and magnanimity. The nature of humility for Aquinas emerges nicely from his account of pride, and it also illuminates Aquinas’s view of magnanimity. For Aquinas, pride is the worst of the vices, and it comes in four kinds. The opposite of all these kinds of pride in a person is his disposition to accept that the excellences he has are all gifts from a good God and are all meant to be given back by being shared with others. Aquinas believes that all the virtues come together as a set. Consequently, a person who has humility also has courage. Aquinas takes the deepest kind of courage as a gift of the Holy Spirit. On his view, taken as a gift, courage manifests itself in a disposition to act on the settled conviction that one will be united to God in heaven when one dies. It is not easy to see how magnanimity could be a virtue if humility is. The solution is to see that for Aquinas the honor for the Christian virtue of magnanimity is not honor from human beings but honor from God. A person can have the virtue of humility and still strive for the greatest honors, as Aquinas sees it. The conclusion of Aquinas’s account of humility, courage, and magnanimity is this: it is morally obligatory to go for glory, because glory is a matter of being honored by God as faithful.

The story of King Etana and its reflection in Zagros art and literaturee

Abstract The literature and art of Mesopotamia and the Zagros are the oldest known examples of presenting stories, epics, and myths and spreading them in the Near East. One of the Sumerian folk literature examples repeatedly recorded in the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian cuneiform records is the epic poem of the Sumerian king Etana, who had no children to inherit his throne, so he flew to heaven on the back of an eagle to ask the heaven god Anu to have a son. This paper addresses a number of research questions such as: Is there a cuneiform version of the epic in the Zagros? Did the events of the epic relate to the geography of the Zagros? How are the characters of the epic portrayed in the art of Zagros? What are the differences between the characters of the epic depicted in the Zagros and the Mesopotamian examples? This paper deals with searching for academic answers to a number of research questions, such as: is there any cuneiform record version of the epic in the Zagros? Did the events of the epic relate to the geography of the Zagros? In which way are the characters of the epic depicted in the Zagros arts? Is there any difference between imagining the characters of the epic in the Zagros and comparing them with Mesopotamian examples?

Angels and Saints

Medieval theologians may not have agonized over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—though the question does arise in the anonymous mystical dialogue Schwester Katrei—but on other matters angels provoked them to endless speculation. How many are there? Perhaps 34,720,000,000, but that was not the only calculation. Without bodies, how do they speak or sing? Do they have names, or even personal identities? How and why and when did some of them rebel? How do they flit back and forth between praising God in heaven and tending to people on earth? The Bible says much about angels, but they remain abstract and good to speculate about. They are ranked in a hierarchy of orders, but the theologians have different ways of organizing them. James Collins used to say that angels, rational beings like us, show what we would be without our bodies. Even disembodied, however, we would be less mysterious to ourselves than angels are. Saints, being less abstract than angels, lend themselves far more to storytelling—which is precisely what Weinberger does when he shifts from angels to saints. Having guided the reader through issue after speculative issue in the field of angelology, he tells story after story from the treasure trove of hagiography. Are there no issues to be explored? Might the reader be interested in the tug-of-war between action and contemplation, or the role of conversion and penitence, or the gender dynamics of sainthood, or for that matter the tendency of saints to wrestle with demons, bidden or unbidden? Saints are paradoxically both imitable and utterly beyond imitation: they feed the hungry, but they also (some of them) levitate, or starve themselves to death, or produce fire from their fingertips. Unlike angels, they are firmly grounded in history, which means they change over time: modern saints differ from ancient ones, at least in context. Weinberger gives ample material for reflection about saints—at one point, a catalog of ten Hyacinths and a Hyacintha. In approaching the angels, he gives questions with multiple answers; in dealing with saints, he gives answers and leaves it for us to ask the right questions.

Repräsentation und Reenactment. Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit verstehen by Volker Leppin

Reviewed by: Repräsentation und Reenactment. Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit verstehen by Volker Leppin Robert Kolb Repräsentation und Reenactment. Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit verstehen. By Volker Leppin. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021. x + 272 pp. Volker Leppin recently moved from the University of Tübingen to Yale Divinity School and is shifting his research focus from Reformation studies to the Middle Ages, reversing both the [End Page 196] geographical and thematic journeys of Heiko Oberman (who, of course, left Harvard for Tübingen, then later returned to the U.S.) a generation ago. Leppin has been one of the most sensitive advocates for accenting the continuities of medieval church life and thought with the Reformation while at the same time identifying what made Luther Luther and not just one more late medieval professor. In this volume he lays the groundwork for further assessment of an oft-neglected aspect integral to Luther's understanding of history and time although this study analyzes only late medieval ecclesiastical life. This book focuses on late medieval thought at both the theological and the popular levels. It examines thinking on the relationship of the past and the present within the framework of the presence of the Transcendent in the midst of life on earth. Recent discussions of representation and reenactment provide a fresh angle for the interpretation that Leppin and Berndt Hamm have pursued concerning attempts to bring the distant God of heaven nearer to the daily life of fifteenth-century German believers struggling with the challenges of their world. Various modes of representation of God's past actions transmitted his presence into the lives of the faithful, and reenactment of key elements in the story of salvation drew these believers into God's past actions as those actions affected them in their own day. The relationship between heaven and earth in ancient and in present contexts was mediated and actualized through the dramatic reenactment of Christ's suffering and death in passion plays and through altar pieces and their relics that sought to cross the divide between the historical then of the lives of Christ or the saints and the contemporary now. Pious exercises of many kinds also heightened the sense that the suffering Christ shared the miseries of medieval believers and provided relief. Pilgrimages ushered the faithful into spaces distinct from everyday life and into a variety of sacred realms. Such holy spaces provided ways of remembering the past and appropriating the benefits of holy people gone before. Especially the signs of the sacraments provided liturgical reenactment that aimed to re-present events of the past and abolish the distance between the original event and the contemporary participants who were drawn [End Page 197] into it through this re-presentation. For example, the sacrament of penance associated penitents with the sinners, Adam and Eve, just as these primeval parents embodied the penance performed by the pious of the fifteenth century. Its practice featured ever-increasing use of indulgences; the church responded to its crisis of pastoral care with ever more imaginative presentation and pricing of the satisfactions that delivered relief from purgatory. Above all, the Mass functioned as a reenactment of the crucifixion of Jesus. The allegorical method of biblical interpretation facilitated this bridging of past and present (17–19). Leppin demonstrates that concepts of God's presence in daily life played an essential role in the piety of the period, and he shows how artistic and liturgical vehicles (from altarpieces, relics, and shrines, to sacramental actions) transported believers back to events fifteen hundred years earlier. Such objects and activities conveyed those events into the village church, into the interactions of Christian folk with the sacred places and practices of their own environment and way of life. With incense for the nose, bread for the tongue, liturgical garments and drama for the eye, and the chanting of the liturgy as well as the reading of texts from Scripture and the lives of the saints for the ear, the presence of God invaded the individual believer's consciousness and suspended the actual historical gap of a millennium and a half, drawing Christians into participation in the sacred activities of the Savior and the...

Историко-культурные истоки космологических представлений балаганских бурят племени булагатов (конец XIX – начало ХХ в.)

Cosmological representations associated with cosmogonic plots belong to the little-studied problems of the traditional culture of the Buryats. The purpose of this article is to identify the historical and cultural origins of cosmological representations of the Balagan Buryats of the Bulagat tribe, personified in the images of celestial deities with the common name “Kings of Waters” (Bur. Ukhan-khat). The relevance of the study is because the images of these deities in the plots of cosmogonic myths and shamanic iconography of the Balagan Bulagats differ from the traditions of all other Buryats groups of the Baikal region. The methods of comparative analysis of the specifics of their cult in the local traditions of the Buryats used in the study, historical and comparative analysis of their leading elements in the language, mythology, folklore, cosmography, and calendar of the Indo-European and historical Indo-Iranian peoples of Eurasia presented their images as a personification of cosmological classifiers. Thus, the images of anthropomorphic figures with three rays on their heads in the iconography of the Kings of the Waters at the Balagan Bulagats go back to the images of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian thunder gods with the functions of defenders of light and servants of their cult, who performed their rituals through singing and dancing. The Buryats' ideas about the origin of the shaman from the eagle and his ability to “travel” in different worlds go back to their images. The views of the Balagan Bulagats about a three-part vertical picture of the world have commonality with Hindu cosmography with the idea of the Polar Star as the top of the sky and the beginning of the process of creation of time in the evening, spatially correlated with the direction “northwest”. The name of the head of the heavenly gods with the functions of the creators of the “Kings of waters” reveals a lexical and semantic commonality with the Scythian term ‘Ud’, reflecting the concept of the soul as a substance bestowed by heaven, which, after the death of a person, separates from the form-body and ascends to heaven again. The study revealed the historical and cultural origins of the cosmological representations of the Balagan Buryats of the Bulagat tribe in the motifs of Indo-European mythology and related worldviews of the peoples of the Scythian cultural circle

The Road to Wherever by John Ed Bradley

Reviewed by: The Road to Wherever by John Ed Bradley Elizabeth Bush Bradley, John Ed The Road to Wherever. Farrar, 2021 [272p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780374314057 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780374314064 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 4-7 The Ball brothers, Cornell and Larry, leave their auto repair business in the hands of their staff and take off on their annual soul-satisfying mission: “God in heaven created them to keep classic Fords running, and so each summer, they hit the road in search of heaps to fulfill the task.” This year they’re accompanied by Henry Ball, Jr. (nicknamed June), their eleven-year-old first cousin once removed, whose father has taken off, leaving his mother unable to supervise him. Cornell and Larry are genuinely happy to have June along, teaching him basic maintenance skills, sharing the pleasures of meeting strangers and old friends, and hopefully turning him into a next generation genuine Ford Man. For middle graders new to the road trip genre, there are few better routes to travel than Bradley’s. Each tidily crafted episode gets just the space it needs: a brief, dream-feverish encounter with an abhorrent “bow tie” (Chevy man) at a rest area; a few hours spent sprucing up both a Ranchero and the fading off-highway diner of its owner; an overnight for an aging former Miss Arkansas preparing her neglected vehicle for a reprise ride in a local parade; several heart-tugging days getting a vintage T-Bird to run barely well enough to take a dying woman on one last joyride. The Ball brothers are the stars here, and Bradley makes them quirky enough to keep the tone light and big-hearted enough to demonstrate that any job done with skill and passion deserves—and gets—respect. Through the unexpected assistance of an Army Ranger vet, Dad is waiting when [End Page 328] June gets home—PTSD from his own Middle East missions now under better control—and June looks forward to helping out at the Ball garage and hitting the road again next year. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

YHW the God of Heaven: An interpretatio persica et aegyptiaca of YHW in Elephantine

Abstract The article discusses the background and implications of the title “the God of Heaven” used as an epithet for YHW in Elephantine. It argues that one should look for the background in the winged symbol used in both Achaemenid and Egyptian iconography. In the Achaemenid–Egyptian context, the title “the God of Heaven” worked as a transmedial, textual reference to the winged symbol that was common to both Achaemenid and Egyptian iconography. In Egypt during the Achaemenid period, the reference of the winged symbol and the title “the God of Heaven” was ultimately the Achaemenid dynasty god Ahura Mazda and perhaps the Egyptian king-protector Horus-Behdety. In the identification of YHW with “the God of Heaven,” we witness an interpretatio persica et aegyptiaca of YHW into the supreme gods of the Achaemenids and the Egyptians.

The Many Perceptions of Reality in Search of the Self: Reading Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride

In this article I will read Yangsze Choo’s speculative fiction novel The Ghost Bride (2013), which not only refers to the ancient Chinese tradition of “ghost-marriage” or “spirit-weddings” but also traverses the phantasmic world of the Chinese afterlife and an imaginary land conceived as the “Plains of the Dead”. I will examine how Choo effectively utilizes Chinese myths and folklore in order to construct the parallel worlds of the living and the dead. I will particularly focus on the fictional character, the mysterious guardian spirit, Er Lang, who evokes the myth of Er Lang Shen, the great Chinese warrior God of Heaven who possesses an esoteric Third-Eye of Enlightenment on his forehead. In the course of my analysis, I will explore the problematics of the concept of reality in relation to the genre of speculative fiction, which stereotypically embodies elements of fantasy. However, I will argue, through my reading of The Ghost Bride, that human perceptions of reality should not be constrained by what can only be seen with mortal eyes, but what can also be discerned through the eyes of the inner mind.

황해도굿 일월맞이 사례 비교 연구: 무당의 신령 체험과 의례적 연행의 상호관련성

황해도굿 일월맞이 사례 비교 연구: 무당의 신령 체험과 의례적 연행의 상호관련성

ЗИРОАТЧИЛИК ҲОМИЙСИ -БОБОДЕҲҚОН БИЛАН БОҒЛИҚ УРФ-ОДАТ ВА МАРОСИМЛАР(Бухоро воҳаси мисолида)

The people of Bukhara have been following the traditions, ceremonies and customs inherited by their ancestors for many centuries. In these ceremonies, which played a major role in social daily life, the rituals and ceremonies associated primarily with agriculture had their roots in the deification of pre-Islamic natural phenomena, the worship of the godsof heaven and earth. It is also a transformation of the harmony that blends Islamic views with religious beliefs from many crop traditions and ceremonies

고대인들의 황천인식과 소망성취방식

고대인들의 황천인식과 소망성취방식

There Is a God in Heaven Who Reveals Mysteries: Failed Divination and Divine Revelation in Daniel 2 and Genesis 41

Abstract This article examines accounts of dream interpretation in the Joseph story and the court tales of Daniel as theological critiques of divinatory methods that relied upon the skill and knowledge of the diviner, such as the various forms of deductive divination practiced in the royal courts of the ancient Near East. Building upon studies of dream/vision divination by Susan Niditch, Jean-Marie Husser, and A. Leo Oppenheim, it utilizes historical-critical and comparative/contextual methodologies to read Dan 2 and Gen 41 in light of dream divination as it was commonly practiced in the royal courts of the ancient Near East. It finds that, in both of these texts, as the protagonist successfully interprets a dream that his Egyptian or Babylonian counterparts cannot, the inability of human diviners to uncover divine secrets is highlighted, along with the explicit confession of the Israelite protagonist that he interprets not due to his superior intelligence or ability but by divine inspiration. This suggests that both Gen 41 and Dan 2 hold up dream interpretation that relies upon divine inspiration by the true God of heaven, rather than technical knowledge, as a method superior to divination. Finally, these texts provide evidence for the use of an apocalyptic-style revelation motif in literary contexts that suggests a wisdom setting and background, particularly in the Jewish diaspora, where they championed the Jewish God as the sole true revealer of mysteries.