Hebrew Scriptures Research Articles

"Fire from Hell," or "You are the Salt of the Earth." On the Interpretation of Matthew 5:13

This essay is an attempt to explore different contexts of the phrase “you are the salt of the earth” found in Matt 5:13, one of the most confusing expressions used in the whole of the New Testament. The author deals with its original meaning, exposing in the process the earliest layers of transmission of Jesus’ sayings. Versed in the Hebrew scriptures, Jesus combined the meanings of MLḤ in Exod 30:35 (incense salted is potent/good/pure/holy) with that in Isa 51:6 and Jer 38:11–12 (something MLḤ might vanish away/wax old/become rotten) and put it in a new context. Jesus’ pun – loaded with multiple layers of meanings and shades of meanings – was lost in translation as simply “salt.”

Divine Haecceity: Reclaiming the Literary Character of God in Hebrew Scripture with Rosenzweig and Miskotte

The present article first summarizes the results of literary scholarship on the character of God in Hebrew Scripture: authors such as Jack Miles, W. Lee Humphreys, and Avivah Zornberg discern a ‘round character’ in biblical texts, a divine persona who acts and reacts from out of particular desires, wants, and insecurities. The second section indicates a few factors explaining why constructive Christian theology typically finds this literary God-character unusable. The third section makes an argument for the usability of the God-character in Christian theology. The term haecceity—Latin for this-ness—epitomizes its proposal, which retrieves two twentieth-century thinkers, Franz Rosenzweig and K. H. Miskotte.

Paradigms of Mediated Translation in Armenian: An Exploration

This paper examines four discreet issues influencing the macro-context of mediated translations into Armenian from Late Antiquity to the modern period. The first treats religious scripture, reviewing the very different contexts for the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (5thcentury) and the Qur’ān (17th century). The second analyzes the Silk Route as a vehicle for exchange between peripheral cultures facilitating the Armenian reception of two works of Sanskrit literature. The third pursues evolving literary traditions and their textual diffusion via a case study of the Alexander Romance. Meanwhile, the fourth examines the nature of colonial experiments in the 18th-19th centuries in creating regionality within the wider process of globalization that impinged on the translation processes of communities in different parts of the Armenian oikoumene of the time with special attention to Mesrop Tałiadian’s novel Vēp Vardgisi of 1846.

“For He has Saved Daniel from the Power of the Lions”

This essay proposes that the Hebrew Scriptures’ “Book of Daniel” offers powerful spiritual resources for Queer and trans* folk in the contemporary world. First, this essay describes the four strands of Queer theology offered by Rev. Dr. Patrick Cheng. Second, this essay employs these strands as a liberatory hermeneutic to analyze Daniel’s transgressive text, ambiguous characters, folk stories, apocalyptic visions, and unifying theme. In doing so, this essay interrogates Daniel’s multivalent spirituality that resists empire while trusting in God. Finally, this essay suggests that Daniel reveals an embodied spirituality of resistance-and-faith for present-day Queer and trans* folk to unmask and resist necropolitical hegemony in ways that deepen hope and trust in God’s justice and coming reign.

Biblical Genealogy and Nationalism

The chronological/genealogical narrative structure of the Hebrew Bible points to an editorial aim: to give a history of Israel as a nation from Creation to the 6th century BCE Babylonian exile and the return to the land of Israel, and in so doing to bring to life and unite two dead Near Eastern kingdoms. This article considers the scribes and editors who created the structure of the Hebrew Bible as forerunners of modern cultural nationalists, especially of defeated or endangered peoples, who sought the survival and growth of the nation in literature. However, the monotheisms that derived from Judaism, and adopted Hebrew scripture as sacred, rarely accepted the Bible as the translation or adaptation of a Jewish work in the Jewish national language mostly on Jewish soil and under Jewish government in the 1st millennium BCE. Rather, anti-Semites taught a genealogy of Jewish guilt to the world, with extra charges based on supersessionist theology and anti-Jewish fantasies.

“You Shall Not Marry a Canaanite!” Endogamy, (Canaanite) Exogamy and Theology in Genesis 12–50

Abstract In Gen 12–50 the interactions between the patriarchs and the Canaanites are more positive than in the later Hebrew Scriptures, with the exception of the ban on marriage. This article examines the relevant passages in Genesis (24; 26:34–28:9; 34 and especially 38), reading them canonically, particularly in light of the patriarchal promises which form a key underlying theme of the patriarchal narratives. It is argued that while the passages discourage exogamy, the situation is more complex than a simple ban. This is particularly so in the case of Tamar (Gen 38). While (probably) Canaanite she is the hero of the story and the ancestor of both David and Jesus, becoming an important part of the fulfilment of the promises. A brief comparison with the conquest narratives suggest that this complexity is also evident there, and that the focus is not on ethnicity but on one’s attitude to YHWH.

The debt to wisdom

Learning from Dr. Gerald Keown about Hebrew language and Hebrew scriptures left this author in debt, specifically a debt to share the beauty of the messages that can be found in Hebrew scriptures and what they reveal about the nature of God.

Don’t beat the messengers

Gerald Keown taught Hebrew Scriptures as living documents, relevant to our lives and applicable to our issues. Issues of social justice, about which Dr. Keown wrote and spoke publicly, should be addressed using the principles available in scripture. In Numbers 22, the figure of Balaam and his beating of the donkey teaches that Christians should be ready to hear truth from those who have been oppressed and to engage that truth to be aware of white privilege and to participate in acts of reparation.

Two Questions about Judaism with Answers for Christians

Two issues often trouble people trying to understand traditional Judaism: (1) If the Torah explicitly mentions sacrifice as an element in attaining atonement for sin, how can Judaism provide atonement for sin when sacrifice has been unavailable since the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple? (2) How can rabbinic law be legitimate when it clearly expands and deviates from the plain meaning of the Torah's legal passages? I address the first question by showing that much of Hebrew Scripture does not relate to sacrifice as a necessary or central element in the achievement of atonement. Ritual sacrifice is barely mentioned in the narratives and poems relating to sin and atonement in Hebrew Scripture. Furthermore, biblical texts relating to the period following the destruction of the First Temple (when sacrifice was unavailable) express no concern that without sacrifices atonement is impossible. I address the second question by demonstrating that Scripture does not set out its laws in sufficient detail for their practical observance. These details must have been available in a body of unwritten interpretation and explication that accompanied the revelation of biblical law and which was eventually preserved in rabbinic law. Furthermore, Scripture authorizes judges to decide hard cases and describes the creation of new yet legitimate religious practices unmentioned in the Torah. More generally, rabbinic tradition views the explication and expansion of Torah law as a central project of the Jewish people that expresses true respect for Torah law as a living body of religious knowledge and practice.

The Self-Immolation; Insights from Hebrew Scriptures and Rabbinic Tradition

The Self-Immolation; Insights from Hebrew Scriptures and Rabbinic Tradition

Department of Religion and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria Department of Old Testament and Hebrew Scriptures, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Pretoria, Pretoria

No abstract available.

Mouth of the Donkey: Re-imagining Biblical Animals

Mouth of the Donkey: Re-imagining Biblical Animals

The Jews and the Reformation by Kenneth Austin

Reviewed by: The Jews and the Reformation by Kenneth Austin David H. Price Kenneth Austin. The Jews and the Reformation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 288 pp. Providing substantially more than the title promises, Kenneth Austin’s The Jews and the Reformation surveys Christian theological and political reflection on Judaism, Jews, and Hebrew Scripture from the late fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century. This is a long and complex period, one that marks the nadir of Jewish fortunes in western Europe (before the Holocaust) as well as the significant, if uneven, improvement in the conditions for Jewish life in many places, a turning point that began in the final decades of the sixteenth century. The great value of this new book is its simultaneous focus on Catholic and Protestant writers and governments across central and western Europe; its impressive scope encompasses the Iberian expulsions, the inquisitions (especially in Spain, Portugal, and Rome), the humanist movement (especially the Jewish book controversy and Christian Hebraism), Luther and his movement, the radical Reformation, Reformed Protestantism (especially Calvin and the biblical scholar Immanuel Tremellius), and the Tridentine Catholic response to Judaism as well as the early history of the new Jewish communities in the United Provinces and in England during the Commonwealth. Austin, admirably, is reluctant to draw general conclusions as to which Christian denominations were more or less favorably disposed to supporting legal toleration. Nonetheless, his inclination to strike a “balanced” position occasionally results in apologetic tendencies. For example, he claims that “Portugal proved a much more hospitable home for Jews” (125), just one sentence before mentioning the traumatic bloodshed of the 1506 Lisbon massacre (which cost ca. 1,000 to [End Page 188] 4,000 Jewish lives), as if it were an inconvenient historical detail. There is also a reluctance to fully acknowledge the harshness of the end of Sicut Judeis (the medieval protection of Jewish rights under canon law) initiated by Paul IV, a transformation that ultimately resulted in censorship, expulsions, strict ghettoization, and expanding papal support for inquisitional persecution. Austin does not mention the horrifying execution of twenty-four Jewish Marranos in papal Ancona in 1556 (nor the emergence of substantial, but temporary, Jewish resistance to the papacy organized by Gracia Mendes Nasi). The overall analysis adopts Kenneth Stow’s valuable but one-sided position that papal policy changed in order to promote conversion to Christianity, and also the commonly expressed view that Jewish culture was able to thrive to a limited degree under ghettoization in Italy, at least for a while and especially in Venice. Austin sees considerable impact from Christian Hebrew studies. This is an exceedingly difficult innovation to assess because Christian Hebraists used their expertise variously to create benevolent portrayals of Judaism and also to construct anti-Jewish polemics, sometimes of great severity. One of the harshest and most substantial anti-Jewish books ever published—Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judentum (1700; Judaism Uncovered)—goes unmentioned, even though the author was a major Calvinist Hebrew scholar and the text’s extreme hostility provoked intense theological and political controversy at the highest levels of power in the empire. Similarly, on the other side of the ledger, the strongly favorable and influential accounts of Judaism by the great Catholic biblical scholar Richard Simon (who also translated and promoted Leon Modena’s History of the Jewish Rituals) are not mentioned. In some cases, Austin’s optimistic portrayal of Christian Hebraism is not accurate. He claims, for instance, that Johannes Reuchlin, the founder of Christian Hebrew studies, “persuaded the emperor to reverse his position” (3) on the stunning policy initiative to confiscate and destroy all Hebrew books in the empire except the Bible. In fact, the emperor reversed his position under pressure from the Frankfurt Jewish community. Reuchlin’s defense of Jewish writings, which resulted in a heresy trial (he was convicted of being “impermissibly favorable to Jews”), galvanized Europe but ultimately contributed only modestly to a gradual shift in Maximilian’s policy of eradication of Jews back to a more traditional one of legal toleration in return for fiscal exploitation. The portrayal of imperial politics overall seems somewhat constrained. Austin does not comment on the...

Resilience and Return in Isaiah—Using Resilience Theory in Hebrew Scripture Theology

The article analyses the theology of homecoming in the book of Isaiah and makes a case for using resilience theory as a hermeneutical frame for the task of Hebrew Scripture theology. Defined as “positive adaptation despite adversity”, resilience builds on the crisis setting of wide parts of the Hebrew Scriptures and demonstrates that the formation of theology represents a resilience discourse. In the case of the Isaianic prophecies of return, three concepts of return are distinguished (return, gathering and homecoming, a second Exodus) that respond to the adversities of exile and diaspora. Thus, the prophecies offer a literary home that the different religious communities through time can inhabit.

Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith by Marvin R. Wilson

Reviewed by: Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith by Marvin R. Wilson Zev Garber marvin r. wilson, Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021). Pp. xxiii + 443. Paper $29.99. In the context of our time, Pope John Paul II challenged members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission to help Catholics understand that the Hebrew Scriptures are essential to their faith (1997). Similarly, Evangelical Protestant Marvin R. Wilson asserts that the branches of Christianity and Christendom extend deeply to Hebrew roots, unknown to multitudes of Christian believers, practitioners, and seekers; and this presents distinctive challenges to Jews and Christians in their visions of one another. For example, when Jewish and Christian scholars interweave the narrative and teachings of Jesus into the cultural and social life of first-century Judaism in the land of Israel under the rule of Caesar, they pinpoint the evolving christology of the Jesus-believers, which conflicts with the viewpoints of the rabbis and the jurisdiction of Rome. Nonetheless, W. strongly maintains that the link between Judaism and Christianity is the common ancestry of the two faiths traced back to the covenant of ʾabrāhām (“the father of a multitude of nations,” Gen 17:4). The volume is divided into six parts accompanied by multiple chapter questions, indexes (author, word, subject, biblical and rabbinic sources) and selected bibliography. Part 1 speaks of the nature of Abraham’s spiritual children, encompassing the election of Israel under the rubric of the root and branches (Romans 9 and 11): where and why they (root/Jews; branches/gentiles) are similar and different; and the recognition that the Hebrew Bible is Jewish revelation birthed in an ancient Near Eastern environment, which suggests that, in order to understand the beliefs and practices of evolving Christianity, today’s gentile Christians must follow first-century apostles, disciples, and God-fearers who were immersed [End Page 148] in Jewish culture, languages, and thought. This process of re-Judaization requires immersion and learning of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Septuagint, the Apocrypha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic sources and commentaries, Josephus, and more. Part 2 treats selectively the history of the relationship between church and synagogue. Of particular interest are examples of disagreement between rabbinic halakah and the Jewish Christian groups that led to heresy and theological conflicts on the Jewish side, and anti-Jewish supersessionist readings on the Christian side. Nevertheless, Christians and Jews today who are committed to reading Scripture together are deeply motivated by an academic and reverential disposition toward rabbinic Judaism and the desire to correct the maligned image of Jews and Judaism that emerges from erroneous readings of the Gospel sources. From my perspective, anti-Judaism biases happen when historicity (Pharisaic kinship of Jesus, Peter, and Paul) is conflated with apologetic (“Give unto Caesar”) and polemic depictions (Jews are a deicidal and misanthropic people), as well as theological innovation (Christ replaces Torah as the ultimate teaching and Testament). Wilson cites other biblical and nonbiblical data as evidence for the parting of the way and the emergence of the church as the New Israel, such as Jewish defeat in the wars against Rome (66–70 c.e., 133–135 c.e.), leading to the destruction of the Second Temple and the fall of Jerusalem, respectively. Hellenization of Jewish Christianity (severance of Jesus and Jewish Christianity from Pharisaic Torah belief, practice, and ritual) and the insertion of christological reading into Hebrew Scriptures paved the way for centuries of Christian anti-Jewish teaching and anti-Semitic behavior, from the birth of gentile Christianity to the Shoah and beyond. W.’s position on the centuries-old separation is neither extreme skepticism nor full-faith acceptance but rather a centrist position, somewhat contrary to an ecclesiastical tradition that teaches that truth is bound to NT and early Christian kerygma (preaching) and didachē (apologetics). Exploring the place of Jesus in Second Temple Judaism means to apply drash (insightful interpretation) to peshat (plain meaning of the text). Why so? From my Jewish view, it is because Jesus the historical being, that is to say, the Jesus before the oral and written traditions, is transformed and transfigured into a...

Urban Developments in Late Antique and Medieval Rome: Revisiting the Narrative of Renewal ed. by Gregor Kalas and Ann van Dijk

Reviewed by: Urban Developments in Late Antique and Medieval Rome: Revisiting the Narrative of Renewal ed. by Gregor Kalas and Ann van Dijk Douglas Boin Urban Developments in Late Antique and Medieval Rome: Revisiting the Narrative of Renewal. Edited by Gregor Kalas and Ann van Dijk. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2021. Pp. 342. €128,00. ISBN: 9789462989085.) In this model volume of collaborative scholarship, editors Gregor Kalas and Ann van Dijk have assembled an all-star list of scholars to address, in nine master-class case studies, one gradually emerging central question. As imperial Rome’s circle of influence diminished and other global centers of culture and commerce emerged in Asia and the Islamic worlds, with the Italian peninsula growing ever more insular by the minute, how did life in the city of Rome change over the third through twelfth centuries? Under the editors’ orchestration and jointly-authored introduction, the seemingly parochial theme reveals surprising insights into the legacy of Rome’s capacity for “creativity” (p. 26) in art, poetry, architecture, music, ritual and even financial matters, underscoring the city’s legacy of pursuing “productive responses to evolving circumstances” (p. 7). Rome as a symbol of apocalyptic disaster, this is not. Claims of liveliness across any city or community over a long stretch of nearly a thousand years, of course, can easily drain any analysis of historical specificity. The search for stability during a time of change becomes a sentiment just bland enough to keep all problematic or extenuating circumstances out of the scholar’s focus. Too sagacious to settle for trite and tired frameworks, however, editors Kalas and van Dijk have pushed their contributors toward precision, and what emerges here quite sharply is how important the seventh century was, in particular, in marking the gateway toward many of the new social and cultural realities that distinguished the classical city from the medieval one. The century that saw the last meeting of the Roman Senate (p. 28) would witness, as in Erik Thunø’s essay, the indisputable establishment of the popes as “martyr-saint impresarios” in church building, while Dennis Trout’s study of church inspirations under Pope Honorius, whose under-appreciated artistry is rendered by Trout in original verse translations, reveal a papal city “renewed and embarking on a novel course” (p. 162). In a city “deeply committed to curating its past for present purposes,” the seventh century, Trout writes in epigrammatic fashion marked “yet another renaissance” (p. 150). Where the contributors excel—Kristina Sessa on war, finance, and the clergy; Dale Kinney on the nuanced collaboration between lay and ecclesiastical stakeholders in illuminated manuscript production and architectural renovation; Luisa Nardini’s fascinating account of manuscript changes in musical notation, charting the “permeability” of Roman chant, replete with Frankish, Gallican, and Beneventan [End Page 173] influences—is to bring a radical or unorthodox way of seeing old material which asks scholars to consider it anew, to see even this later Rome still shaped by factors beyond its walls, and to study complex processes outside the traditional boundary divisions of time. Jacob Latham’s nod to the Jewish contexts for the study of early Christianity in his essay on public rituals, as well as William North’s discussion of Hebrew Scripture in the eleventh century, shows a welcome sensitivity to religious inclusion in an otherwise excellent volume that misses an opportunity to engage directly with the history and archaeology of Rome’s Jewish community on the eve of the Middle Ages. When the Roman Empire withdrew from its control of Dacia in the third century—a stunning retreat—foreigners threatened the empire’s borders, exposing what would become a lingering issue of who possessed citizenship and whether these rights and judicial protections might be acquired by outsiders. Kalas’s own study of the monuments of the fifth-century city reminds us that Romans frequently lived in a “denial of conflict” (p. 103). In his analysis of the medieval guidebook, the Mirabilia, John Osborne goes a step further. In Rome always lay a “wonderful blend of possible fact and utter fantasy” (p. 209). Douglas Boin Saint Louis University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...

Nathanael Vette. Writing with Scripture: Scripturalized Narrative in the Gospel of Mark

Nathanael Vette. <i>Writing with Scripture: Scripturalized Narrative in the Gospel of Mark</i>

Translation Techniques in the LXX Sabbath Commandments and their Possible Theological Message and Inspiration

"The Septuagint – the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures – offers valuable insights into the work and theology of Hellenistic Judaism. Keeping in mind that each translation is at the same time an interpretation, the translator(s) of the Septuagint provide a new (theological) interpretation or adaptation of the Hebrew Scriptures to the readers. Moreover, the translation may reflect the community’s understanding of certain issues, in this case the Sabbath. This paper aims at scrutinizing the possible theological and/or ideological understanding of the Sabbath commandment reflected by the process of translation, on the one hand. On the other hand, it explores whether the translator(s) noticed the literary and redactional relationship between these Sabbath commandments, undeniably present in the Hebrew texts. This investigations is carried out with the help of the “content related criteria” developed by Ausloos and Lemmelijn as well as the “theological(ly motivated) exegesis” proposed by Emmanuel Tov. Keywords: Septuagint, Sabbath commandment (Ex 20,8-11; 23,12; 34,21; 31,12-17; 35,2; Lev 23,3; Dt 5,12-15), translation techniques"

The Name as ‘Anti-pagan’ Monument

Abstract K.H. Miskotte’s Bijbels ABC, recently translated into English as Biblical ABC s, resources resistance by carefully reading the Hebrew scriptures. This article argues that the central, defining theme of the book is the focus on the Name YHWH as ‘anti-pagan monument par excellence.’ Paganism for Miskotte does not mean the absence of religion nor a particular, polytheistic religion or worldview, but the natural human inclination to declare the existing order sacred. Humanity is profoundly ‘occupied’ and needs the Word, the Name-in-action, in order to be liberated from pagan, religious occupying forces—whether these forces are political, spiritual, military, economical or linguistic. This focus on the ‘anti-pagan’ stance of the Name determines the entire structure of Biblical ABC s, its method and content.

Of Crowns, Pilgrims, and Non-Asinine Mules

John O’Malley, S.J.’s emphasis on rhetoric challenges students to reconsider not only the significance of the history of rhetoric in relation to St. Ignatius’ texts, but also the importance of rhetoric in their own discourses. In this essay, I focus on one specific event in Ignatius’ Acts, an event replete with rhetorical, textual, biblical (both the New Testament and Tanakh, the Hebrew scriptures), and historical considerations, but which, surprisingly, does not appear as a major focus in John O’Malley, S.J.’s voluminous books: Ignatius on a mule, encountering “the Moor” (un moro). I outline a method of guiding students through this event that emphasizes important intertextual resonances beyond Acts, Tanakh and the New Testament, to the Talmud, paintings, and even Greek and Western literary and theoretical history. This strategy invites students to bring their own interdisciplinary knowledge to reading this passage, to ask how an ostensibly small scene in Ignatius’ life can inspire us to craft clear intertextual understandings of mules throughout different religious traditions, and to engage with O’Malley’s emphasis on rhetorical and historical analysis, but in ways that encourage them to go beyond the explicit expositions of O’Malley to address their own unique interests and histories from a range of Jesuit pedagogical approaches.