Jewish Background Research Articles

Milk and ashes poets Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs confront the trauma of the shoah

Both Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs were survivors of the Shoah who emerged deeply traumatized by the phenomenon. Both poets were thus displaced from their country of origin and linguistic environment. Their poetic strategies post-Holocaust were defined by the unspeakable enormity of the crime of genocide and the (contradictory) need to bear witness. In Celan’s famous poem “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue) the poet adopts the voice of a prisoner in a German death camp. Celan subsequently abandoned traditional formal poetic devices. His poetry became increasingly hermetic. The title of Celan’s poem contains the word “death,” as does that of Sachs’s first post-Shoah cycle “In den Wohnungen des Todes.” it is the unspoken thread in their work. Sachs turned to her Jewish background to construct a historical vision of the people of Israel and applied the notion of metamorphosis (Verwandlung) to articulate her status as a survivor. In his poem “Und mit dem Buch aus Tarussa” Celan links his fate to that of Marina Tsvetaeva, adumbrating his future suicide. Sachs survived the trauma, by embracing a solid set of religious values. Keywords: Celan; Sachs; Shoah; trauma; suicide

Alan J. Thompson. Colossians and Philemon: An Introduction and Commentary

The Tyndale New Testament Commentary series is being revised for a third time, showing that these volumes have stood the test of time, having been read now for generations. Alan Thompson’s volume on Colossians and Philemon fits admirably with the purpose and rationale for the series as a whole, as he has written a lucid commentary on these letters, one that is familiar with scholarship but focuses on unpacking the text for pastors, teachers, and lay readers. The commentary is exegetically insightful, theologically rich, and practically applicable, and I can imagine many passing on Thompson’s insights in all kinds of venues. Thompson is relentless in unpacking the text, effectively and repeatedly drawing attention to how different parts of the letters relate to one another. He also draws connections between Colossians and Philemon in quite a few places in a way that is illuminating and instructive.The commentary centers on explaining the text and not introductory questions. Still, such questions are addressed. The authenticity of Colossians has sometimes been questioned, but Thompson presents a number of arguments in support of Pauline authorship. Some scholars have said that Colossae was an insignificant city, but evidence for this assertion isn’t decisive. The place from which Paul wrote both Colossians and Philemon is also disputed, and Thompson argues for the traditional view that they both hailed from Rome. The nature of the Colossian false teaching has been the subject of controversy for years. Thompson rejects the notion that the false teaching can be traced fundamentally to a gentile or Greek background. The false teachers have some kind of Jewish background mixed with local practices and beliefs that were legalistic in nature and ascetic in character. He identifies the stoicheia as elementary principles and regulations instead of seeing them as spiritual powers. Perhaps Thompson underestimates the role of angels and spiritual powers in contrast to other commentators. In any case, Paul responds to the alien teachers by emphasizing the sufficiency of Christ, rejecting any notion of Jesus plus theology. The Colossian believers have everything they need in Jesus Christ by whose death they have been reconciled to God.A number of different theories have also been promulgated about the situation informing Philemon. Thompson opts for a traditional reading where Onesimus fled from Philemon for some kind of malfeasance. Still, Onesimus was converted when he encountered Paul, and Onesimus’s conversion and his interaction with Paul bring us to the purpose for the letter. Paul’s main concern in writing was to encourage Philemon to welcome Onesimus just as he would welcome Paul. His main aim wasn’t to ask Philemon to send Onesimus back for ministry, nor was his purpose to request Onesimus’s freedom, although it is possible, according to Thompson, that Paul hints that such a release would be fitting. Thompson doesn’t proffer new theories in interpreting Colossians and Philemon, but I was reminded in reading this excellent commentary that the first task is always careful exegesis. We can be grateful to Thompson, then, for an excellent exposition of these two letters where we are reminded of Christ’s preeminence and sufficiency and also of the love that should characterize the relationships of believers.

The Outsider as insider

The architects Louis Kahn (1901-1974) and Chloethiel Woodard Smith (1910-1992) were near contemporaries whose networks overlapped in multiple ways. Kahn’s best buildings offer transcendent experiences of community; Smith’s remain cherished, if far more ordinary, places to live and work. Although the level of fame the profession bestowed upon him eluded her, in the 1960s and early 1970s her singularity as a female architect working on a national scale led her to be frequently profiled in the popular press. Kahn began as an outsider because of his working-class Jewish background; Smith remained one because she was a woman, although she was highly ambivalent about, and -- when well enough established -- outrightly dismissive of being labeled a woman or – worse yet – lady architect. Each also benefited from their status as relatively privileged white Americans, while building for African Americans and in the Global South. Tracing the arc of their careers captures the opportunities for upward mobility that the postwar boom created in the United States, as well as ones that the Cold War bestowed upon its best-connected architects, even as it illuminates the obstacles that continued to hinder the progression of women in the profession.

Trauma in the Apocryphon of Jeremiah C: Cultural Trauma as Forgetful Remembrance of Divine-Human Relations in Qumran Jeremianic Traditions

Abstract The Qumran Apocryphon of Jeremiah C (4QApocrJer Ca-d; 4Q390) provides reflections on the trauma of devastation, dislocation, and captivity at the time of the Babylonian exile as narrated in the book of Jeremiah. Yet, just as the Damascus Document (CD/4QD), its apocalyptic review of periods goes well beyond the biblical era. This article analyses the narrative discourses of the Apocryphon in comparison with the Damascus Document with the aid of modern theory about cultural trauma, cultural analysis of remembering and forgetting, and recent insights about theodical discourse in the Hebrew Bible. It analyses the recurrent trope of “God hiding his face” in Qumran Jeremianic traditions against broader biblical and early Jewish backgrounds. The article investigates the understanding of reciprocity in human-divine relations and explores how theodicy relates to forgetful remembrance of covenantal relationships. It contends that the Qumran Jeremianic traditions deal with cultural trauma in terms of lament, admonition, theodical discourse, and divisive memory against the historical background of the late Second Temple period, in particular the era of the Maccabean crisis.

Refiguring Abraham: On the Prophetological Reframing of the Biblical Patriarch in Sūrat al-Anbiyāʾ

ABSTRACT This essay illustrates the Qur’an’s theologically creative conversation with Late Antique literature through an analysis of the text’s depiction of Abraham in Sura 21. After a short overview of modern scholarly engagement with the Qur’an’s ‘biblical subtext’ and some subsequent methodological remarks, I examine the ancient and Late Antique Jewish background to the qur’anic story of Abraham in Terah’s idol shop. Here, I elucidate the theological and exegetical concerns prompting these haggadic speculations about the patriarch’s life. In a word, Jewish exegetes employed this story as a way of demonstrating the distinct righteousness of Israel’s lineal forebear. Then, through comparative analysis, I show that the Qur’an takes up and redeploys this motif in the service of articulating its own prophetology, thereby subverting the earlier genealogical framing of this story. Notably, this repackaging of the Abraham-Terah narrative serves a polemical goal. In the last resort, the Qur’an is keen to show that its own followers – not Jews or Christians – are the true heirs of Abraham.

Queer Angels in Post-1945 American Literature and Culture: Bad Beatitudes

Queer Angels in Post-1945 American Literature and Culture: Bad Beatitudes

El misterio de Edith Stein

Edith Stein, an outstanding representative of the Catholic intellectual renaissance of the first half of the last century, was a “charter” member of the phenomenological school around Edmund Husserl and made key contributions to the renewed study of St. Thomas Aquinas. From a Jewish background, she entered the Catholic church and then the Carmelite order; when asked why she became a Catholic she would reply in Latin “secretum meum mihi”. I suggest, using her characteristic concepts such as “being objective” and “undergoing”, why she wished to “fuse” phenomenology and Thomism as well as how she defined the moral “weight” of daily circumstances and how she combined epistemology with Carmelite mysticism. Then with the help of St. John of the Cross, I offer an explanation of her “secret”. Finally I describe her history of recent philosophy.

The Jewish background of the oneness language in John’s Gospel

Interest in the oneness language of John’s Gospel started in the 1970s. Many scholarly contributions have been offered ever since. Recent studies show that the oneness language in the Gospel closely related to how the Jews had utilised it. This study attempted to sketch the Jewish background of the oneness language useful to understand the similar language usage in John’s Gospel. It employs the narrative approach associated with N.T. Wright. The focus is on the common Judaism of the Second Temple Period, as presented by E.P. Sanders. The structure of the article follows the framework offered by N.T. Wright, namely monotheism (the oneness of God), covenant (the oneness of God’s people) and eschatology (the one future of God’s people). It also explores the impact of the destruction of the Temple on the oneness language of the time. The article concludes by confirming that the oneness language usages in common Judaism illuminate a reading of the similar language found in the John’s Gospel.Contribution: This study further applies N.T. Wright’s narrative approach to reading the oneness language in John’s Gospel. It also provides readers with a framework to read the oneness language in the Gospel based on the Jewish monotheism as the language’s narrative substructure.

”Mustan miehen musiikkia”

”Black Man’s Music”: Name Changes and Identity Negotiation among Finnish Jewish Jazz Musicians during 1920s – 1940s 
 Many name changes of Jewish performing artists in Finland during the 1920s–1940s raise questions about the status of musicians from ethnic minorities and the boundaries of entertainment industry. In this article, I examine, on the one hand, the creating of an image of a ”Finnish” or ”American” jazz musician by name changes, and on the other hand, the concealing of one’s own ethnic origins in an occasionally xenophobic and antisemitic atmosphere. I also analyse how they have negotiated their musician identity in terms of Finnishness, Finnish Swedishness, Jewishness and African American jazz. As examples I use the five siblings of the Manulkin family and Jaakko Furman in Helsinki because of their prominent position and because in their cases the discussed phenomena are clearly visible.
 The Manulkin siblings took American-style names on their own initiative and Furman a Finnish name at his employer’s requirement. In the Manulkin case the name changes allowed them to create a musician image in harmony with the genre they represented. Their name changes also illustrate how Jewish musicians tried to adapt to the pressure of the time, at the same time wanting to preserve the integrity of their ethnic and cultural identity.
 When negotiating his identity in interviews, Furman does not bring up his Jewish background as he does with his identity as a Finnish Swedish speaker. His ethnic background is only reflected on the interviewers’ initiative when discussing the prominent role of Jewish musicians in the field of jazz and the xenophobic atmosphere of the Second World War. In interviews, Furman identifies himself more with Swedish speaking swing musicians than as a representative of Jewish jazz musicians in Finland or as a member of the Jewish community. He emphasises how jazz music provided Finnish Jewish musicians with a more tolerant community and atmosphere that rose above discrimination.

The Prophets

The Prophets Atilla Bodor and Christopher T. Begg Atilla Bodor The Biblicum Christopher T. Begg Catholic University of America 1751. [Peshitta of Isaiah] Attila Bodor, The Theological Profile of the Peshitta of Isaiah (Supplements to the Textual History of the Bible 5; Leiden: Brill, 2021). Pp. xvi + 245. €108. ISBN 978-90-04-46903-7. B.'s monograph explores theological elements in the Book of Isaiah as represented in the Peshitta translation. After a review of previous research and a description of his own research method, B. analyzes sixty-three interpretative renderings in Peshitta Isaiah involving a particular theological view of God, the Messiah, and the people of God. The book discusses both the origin and theological implications of these interpretative renderings, showing that the Peshitta's divergences from the Hebrew text often have an impact on its interpretation and reception of these main Isaianic themes. The book concludes with a brief [End Page 639] excursus addressing the question of the origin of the Peshitta of Isaiah. Here B. argues that the translation originated in a Jewish background, but the interpretative renderings studied do not reveal any details about the translator's religious tradition. The book includes three indexes (modern authors; ancient sources; and passages analyzed).—A.B. Google Scholar 1752. [Isaiah 29] Boris Lazzaro, Isaia l'oscuro. Forme dell'oscurità linguistica isaiana e storia della loro recezione nell'attestazione di Is 29 (Analecta Biblica 231; Rome: G&B Press, 2020). Pp. 370. Paper €36. ISBN 978-88-7653-733-2. The style of Isaiah often lends itself to paradox, irony, and ambiguity. It is an obscure style which might well condemn ancient and modern recipients to incomprehension and hardening (see Isa 6:10 and 29:9-12). Integrating synchronic and diachronic considerations, L.'s study, his Biblicum doctorate directed by Peter Dubovský, S.J., and defended by him June 2018, investigates this aspect of Isaiah's language, exploring its concrete forms of expression as well as the impact it may have had on later tradition that crystallized in the scriptural corpus. While not ignoring the multiple marks of obscurity in the whole of Isaiah 1–39, L. focuses on a segment of this material where the above feature is especially marked, i.e., chap. 29, a passage which is, in fact, often cited for its enigmatic, contradictory, and ambiguous character. As a whole, chap. 29 thus represents a paradigmatic case of Isaianic obscurity in terms of factors that generated this, the forms in which it finds expression, the marks it left in the later tradition, and finally in the sense of strangeness which it continues to produce on readers. L.'s investigation highlights the controverted reception of the prophet's poetic expressivity, alternating as it does between acceptance and transcendence of the paradoxes of its mode of communication. At the same time, the study presents a comprehensive picture of the phenomenon of Isaianic obscurity, and in so doing calls attention to the poetic function of the prophet's ambiguity, irony, and peculiar use of metaphor. [Translated and adapted from published abstract] L.'s study consists of an introduction, followed by three main parts entitled respectively: (1) "prolegomena," with its two chapters, the obscurity of a prophet: bases of the phenomenon and history of research, and Isaiah 29: text and structure; (2) the sealed book (Isa 29:11-12) also made up of two chapters (an ancient scribal dispute and ambiguity and irony of a metaphor [Isa 29:11-12]); and (3) the obscurity of Isaiah 29 (featuring two chapters as well: coefficients and factors of obscurity in Isaiah 29 and the obscurity of Isaiah in diachronic perspective). Following a conclusion, the volume is rounded off by an appendix that deals with the treatment of Isaiah 29 by Jerome, Thomas Aquinas, and Cornelius a Lapide, C. Vitringa, and R. Lowth, a multi-segment bibliography, and three indexes: authors, passages, and general.—C.T.B. Google Scholar Copyright © 2022 The Catholic Biblical Association of America

Lucretia Mott Essay Award 2021, Winner

This essay calls for a more careful evaluation of the legacy of Quakerism at Haverford College by paying close attention to Isaac Sharpless, his redefinition of the college’s religious mission and the practical implications of his vision on the student body. It argues that Sharpless redefined Haverford’s Quaker character in a way that allowed the college to expand its religious mission to include the sons of the white Protestant elite while largely excluding young men from less socially desirable Catholic, Black, and Jewish backgrounds. Haverford gained prestige as a result of this redefinition. At the same time, however, the student body gradually became more patrician and less Friendly, so that Episcopalians and Presbyterians outnumbered Quakers by the early 1920s, if not earlier. Based on this observation, the essay calls for a more robust discussion of the extent to which it is accurate to describe Haverford as a Quaker college.

The offering of incense make : Jewish mystical perspectives on disease and healing*

AbstractAn examination of a passage from the Zohar on Exodus (2:218b‐219b) provides Jewish mystical perspectives on disease, which may help inform a Christian response of solace and healing to illness and suffering in general, and to the COVID‐19 pandemic in particular. The aforementioned passage in the Zohar describes the preparation of incense. The primary purpose of the portion maintains that incense has special healing powers that even relieve people from severe diseases. The relating Midrash Ha‐Ne'lam explains the passage further by referring to the 4th century Palestinian Rabbi Aha arriving at a town that struggles with an epidemic. It describes how R. Aha initiates a ritual containing a study of the Talmud on incense, after which the village is healed from the epidemic. The Jewish theological background and reception of the passage may shed new light on how ritual and sensory experience can alleviate the experience of disease and suffering.

Conscience and Controversy

Conscience and Controversy

O historii nie dla idiotów: Rozmowy i przypadki [History not for idiots: Interviews and cases

<i>O historii nie dla idiotów: Rozmowy i przypadki</i> [History not for idiots: Interviews and cases

Racism, Activism, and Integrity in College Football: The Bates Must Play Movement

This book focuses on the massive student protest at New York University (NYU) in 1940–41 against the administration's refusal to allow the football team's African American star, Leonard Bates, to accompany it to play at the University of Missouri, which did not admit Blacks. It was standard practice for northern universities to withdraw their Black athletes from competitions at southern schools. If the southern school requested the withdrawal when they were the visiting team up north, their northern opponent often complied. In this case study, Donald Spivey provides insight into racist practices in college sports and how a student movement challenged them in the period and emerged as a potent force.Spivey's interviews with Bates, conducted in the 1980s, and later with six members of the “Bates 7,” the NYU students who initiated the challenge to the administration's decision to comply with southern/border state Jim Crow requirements, are an important feature of his work. Bates discusses his youth in Depression-era Harlem, supporting his siblings and mother by toiling on the docks, and his adjustment to college life and sports. The Bates 7 activists explain how they waged a grassroots campaign against racism in a period before the rise of a mass civil rights movement. The initiator was African American; most of the other six appear to have been Jewish or of Jewish background. The university imposed severe punishment on the seven activists, suspending them for the remaining three months of the spring 1941 semester.The student protestors used a wide range of innovative tactics, many of which were adopted by campus activists a quarter of a century later. These included mass leafleting; petitions with vast numbers of signatures; rallies attended by as many as 3,000 persons; picketing; and a sit-in at a dean's office. Buttons with the slogan “Bates Must Play” were distributed. Protesters coined poignant slogans, such as “No Missouri Compromise,” drawing a parallel between the NYU administration's complicity in maintaining the color line and Congress's unwillingness to acknowledge the immorality of slavery in 1820. The protestors emphasized that northern universities helped solidify Jim Crow by scheduling games with segregated southern and border state universities. The “Bates Must Play” movement persisted for several months after the November 2, 1940, NYU-Missouri game, focusing attention on the administration's withdrawal of its African American athletes from track meets and basketball games below the Mason-Dixon line.Spivey demonstrates the larger impact of the protestors’ campaign by noting the support it received from prominent Americans. These included Eleanor Roosevelt; Paul Robeson, Black activist and world-renowned singer and actor; esteemed Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas; Bayard Rustin, an organizer of the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation; labor leaders Mike Quill and Joe Curran; and Jewish football star Benny Friedman.Spivey emphasizes that the African American press provided considerably more coverage of the protests than mainstream newspapers. He does report that New York Mirror sportswriter Dan Parker was an exception in backing the protests. Spivey should also credit Jesse Abramson of the New York Herald Tribune, who during the Bates campaign blasted the NYU administration for “being dictated to by Southern schools” for more than a decade.The author could contextualize this work by giving attention to the bitter conflicts between students and administrators at New York colleges and universities in the 1930s, which doubtless energized many of NYU's protestors. For example, Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler expelled undergraduate Robert Burke in 1936 for leading a picket line challenging his decision to send a delegate to celebrate the 550th anniversary of Nazi Germany's Heidelberg University, a carefully orchestrated Hitler regime propaganda festival. The expulsion precipitated a wave of student demonstrations and rallies at Columbia the next semester. Boas was active in the unsuccessful campaign to have Burke's expulsion rescinded. In 1934, Butler also fired instructor Jerome Klein for circulating a petition protesting Columbia's invitation to Nazi Germany's ambassador to deliver a speech extolling Hitler's policies. The academic careers of both men were permanently destroyed. To this day, Columbia's administration refuses to issue an apology, despite repeated appeals for it to do so.Moreover, Spivey might have compared NYU students’ fierce challenge to their administration's capitulation to Jim Crow with the lack of response from students at Boston College. The Jesuit institution barred its African American player, Lou Montgomery, from participating in the 1941 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans against Tennessee and even from games against southern schools in Boston. The Sugar Bowl took place just two months after the NYU-Missouri contest.Nevertheless, Spivey should be congratulated for bringing to light an important but neglected episode in civil rights history and for locating and interviewing nearly all the Bates 7 and Bates himself. He describes this process in the book, which finally led to the NYU administration acknowledging wrongdoing in 2001.

Psychoanalysis, Jews and History

The early accounts of Freud’s life and the history of psychoanalysis tended to marginalise Jewishness and antisemitism. It is not that Ernest Jones, Henri F. Ellenberger and Richard Wollheim excluded them altogether. There were passing references to Freud’s Jewish background in Moravia, antisemitism in late nineteenth-century Vienna, his largely Jewish circle, his fascination with Moses and the psychoanalytic exodus after the Anschluss in 1938. However, there was a big shift after the 1980s and ’90s in the historiography of psychoanalysis. First, there was a growing interest in the culture and politics of fin-de-siècle Vienna and in Budapest and Prague. Second, there was a growing interest in the world of Jewish Orthodoxy in central and east Europe and its influence on Freud’s generation, and a new concern with antisemitism and race in nineteenth-century medical science and how psychoanalysis can be seen as a response to these new discourses.

A Study on the Existential Meaning and Value of Modern People through The Fixer

초록·키워드 목차 오류제보하기 This study intends to discuss the process by which individual persecution and oppression based on a Jewish background in Bernard Malamud"s The Fixer is extended to all modern problems. Malamud"s The Fixer effectively presents the problem of injustice and persecution experienced by Jews based on actual events. The Jewish protagonist in The Fixer realizes that attempts to evade Jewish traditions and identities, which are not properly recognized in Russian society, are a situation in which they are imprisoned in a mental prison. Malamud extends the problem of isolation and alienation experienced by Jews to the problem of humanity as a whole. In conclusion, Malamud reminds readers that in situations of pain and oppression, rather than sinking into frustration and helplessness, they should realize the meaning and value of pain. #Bernard Malamud #The Fixer #Identity #Jews #Isolation #Value of Pain #버나드 맬러머드 #『수선공』 #정체성 #유태인 #고립 #고통의 가치 Ⅰ. IntroductionⅡ. Possibility of self-recovery through identity recognitionⅢ. ConclusionReferencesAbstract

Hidden Davidic and Solomonic Legends in The Hundred and One Nights: Backgrounds in Muslim Tradition Echoing the Bible and Midrash

Abstract This paper focuses on what can be identified as ancient Davidic and Solomonic biblical and midrashic narratives, echoed in some of the core stories of The Hundred and One Nights, a story collection in Arabic that took shape among lower strata of medieval society in western part of the Muslim world. We do not identify any specific written Jewish sources as having had a direct influence on the collection. Rather, we would like to reveal some of the contents of an ancient well of themes that were available, mostly through Muslim tradition, to those involved in the formation of the work in question. We would also like to point out some of the transformations that such contents have undergone in their shifting between religious, historical and literary levels. The existence of Jewish backgrounds in medieval Arabic literature in general is well-known. However, a more complete picture of this existence requires a comprehensive study of popular literature. As the theme of The Hundred and One Nights and its Jewish background has been overlooked by research until very recently, our study strives to address this lacuna.

НАСЛЕДИЕ А.Б. РАНОВИЧА В КОНТЕКСТЕ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ ГОСУДАРСТВА ХАСМОНЕЕВ

This article examines the views of A.B. Ranovich, a prominent Soviet historian of antique civilizations, on the Hasmonean state by analyzing his works through the lens of the epoch and, simultaneously, as opposing Soviet and “bourgeois” history. This approach opens up new perspectives for the interpretation of how the scholar turned his attention from Christianity to Hellenism. A possible explanation may be that the first scholarly quest for the historical Jesus and the Christ myth theory, promoted by A.B. Ranovich in particular, led their adherents to a deadlock. They finally broke through it with the discovery of the Qumran Caves Scrolls (1948) and the development of new methods of studying the early Christian texts, i.e., after the death of A.B. Ranovich. It is of peculiar interest to get an insight into what thoughts A.B. Ranovich had about E. Bickerman and V. Cherikover’s works because they all had a similar pre-revolutionary experience (Jewish background, traditional Jewish lifestyle in families, secular education, and membership in the academic community). The analysis shows that A.B. Ranovich was critical of “bourgeois” historians and refused their approach to studying Jewish history. However, this made him focus on the socio-economic features of the Hasmonean state and thus he proved that the Hellenistic states encouraged slavery. A.B. Ranovich’s work “Hellenism and Its Historical Role” testifies to his unique concern about the history of the Jews, although it was outwardly shunned. The conclusion is made that A.B. Ranovich preferred not to publicly identify and portray himself as a Jewish historian, but his reasoning, regardless of the numerous ideological clichés and constructs, was built on the Jewish traditions that he knew.

He Died for Our Sins (in a Contextually-Sensitive Way)

How does Jesus’s death atone for human sin? Traditional answers to this question face a challenge: explain how Jesus’s death plays an important and distinctive role in atoning for human sin without employing problematic philosophical or moral assumptions. I present a new answer that meets the challenge. In the context of the Jewish sacrificial background, the blood of a pure victim can communicate the washing away of sins. Jesus’s death atones because through it his blood, and then his resurrection, can communicate the washing away of sins and thus that God has accepted his work of atonement.