Genesis Story Research Articles

Joanna Picciotto Labors of Innocence in Early Modern EnglandLabors of Innocence in Early Modern England. Joanna Picciotto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. viii+863.

The most important of all the ideas that link these various experimentalist worlds together is “a shared Adamic epistemology.” What this means is that the century as a whole shifted the emphasis from Eve’s act of punishable curiosity to Adam’s naming of the creatures (Gen. 2:19) as the primal scene of discovery. Bacon and the rest of his army thus redeemed curiosity from its association with original sin. Instead, it was linked with investigative labor. As Picciotto well puts it, “The first sin became the first virtue” (3). This radical rewriting of the Genesis story took some doing, and the book leaves nothing out in its own act of productive labor to recount how it happened. As we read on, engaging in what the author apparently thinks of, shamelessly, as our own necessary labor, we hear about the image of the intellectual as a public worker as well as, in a more directly Adamic sense, an ideal laborer, the precursor of the delvers and diggers. The ideal of this special work can be carried out in the laboratory or in the field, beyond class barriers and creating the idea of an English public “as a result of England’s revolutionary moment” (24). Another conventional distinction is also transcended, that between active and contemplative pursuits. The scientist recovers the theologically innocent eye of Adam. Eden is no longer a hortus conclusus. It can be reentered.

The Mark Twain and Robert Ingersoll Connection: Freethought, Borrowed Thought, Stolen Thought

The Mark Twain and Robert Ingersoll Connection: Freethought, Borrowed Thought, Stolen Thought

THE DIALECTIC OF HUMAN DIGNITY AND HUMAN FINITUDE IN THE PSALMS AND THE WISDOM LITERATURE

The creation stories in Genesis, when read together, suggest that humans are marked by both dignity and finitude or frailty. This same dialectic appears paradigmatically in Psalm 8 and, it is argued, also in the rest of the Psalter. In spite of the major difference in perspective, the same anthropology is presupposed in Proverbs. In a section of Job and in Qoheleth, however, there are attempts to dissolve the dialectic. In the culmination of his argument, Job speaks of a form of human dignity that stands apart from human frailty; in Qoheleth human frailty eclipses human dignity. It is argued that the main line in the Old Testament maintains the dialectical tension and that Christian theologians should do likewise. Theologically one should indeed go further and speak of human queenship and sinfulness. The paper ends by suggesting than room should also be left for forms of human indignity that stand apart from finitude and sinfulness.

Genesis and the Chemical Philosophy: True Christian Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The creation story in Genesis is a crucial datum in Western thought. From late antiquity to the early modern era, scripture was understood to contain sufficient knowledge about all subjects, from morality to the secrets of nature, making the creation story in Genesis a source for ideas about natural processes and matter. Michael T. Walton's study concentrates on the rise, maturation, and decline of the Genesis-inspired chemical philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The chemical philosophy was a spiritualised approach to nature developed by Paracelsus, Gerhard Dorn, Oswald Croll, Thomas Tymme, Heinrich Khunrath, Robert Fludd, Jean Baptiste van Helmont, and others who undertook a Christian reformulation of chemistry for the purpose of producing useful results, especially efficacious medications. Paracelsus and his heirs believed that observation and laboratory work, if undertaken by true Christians, would reveal God in nature. Although scholars and historians of science will find the book of interest, it is also designed for a general audience. Many readers are aware of the relationship of the Bible and science only through modern controversies about evolution and creationism. Walton provides a timely historical perspective on the formation of science in a religious context. An epilogue reflects on the phenomenon of the late-twentieth-century revival of biblical science.

DERRIDA AND THE TEST OF SECRECY

Jacques Derrida reads the biblical story of Genesis 22, in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, as a test of secrecy. Derrida follows Kierkegaard in presuming that Abraham not only does not but also cannot tell anyone about what God has commanded him to do. For Derrida, moreover, Abraham comes to embody the absolute right to non-response or secrecy constituting the modern institution of literature. In this essay, I criticize Derrida's highly Kierkegaardian account of Genesis 22 for underplaying the involvement of Isaac and the ram in the sacrifice. By seeing how Derrida ignores the two victims of the sacrifice, we can see how both Genesis 22 and literature are inadequately described as tests of secrecy.

Homer's Odyssey and the Near East by Bruce Louden (review)

Reviewed by: Homer's Odyssey and the Near East by Bruce Louden Carolina López-Ruiz Bruce Louden . Homer's Odyssey and the Near East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii, 356. $99.00 ISBN 978-0-521-76820-7. The study of the densely woven fabric that holds together Aegean and Near Eastern cultures since the Bronze Age continues to fascinate researchers and readers. This book is a welcome addition to recent studies, which are advancing this field by moving past the rather impressionistic and cataloguing approach that prevailed in previous decades. Louden's book advances in this direction in two central ways: First, its focus is narrow enough to allow for in-depth comparison, chiefly between the Odyssey and the Hebrew Bible, especially Genesis. Ad hoc treatments of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Ugaritic epics provide broader, though not exhaustive, Near Eastern contextualization. Second, Louden steadily follows a methodology and focuses on materials that reflect his expertise (as shown in his 2006 book on the Iliad), tracking narrative patterns and their thematic connections as variants of common "mythic genres" from which composers drew to meet their specific goals. Louden shows that the stories in Genesis and the Odyssey share narrative motifs belonging to the subgenre of romance, understood as an idealistic narrative (good characters are ultimately favored by the gods and evil ones punished), and typically involve separation, adventure, and return to the homeland, climaxing with recognition scenes. Biblical and Homeric convergence is also evident in hospitality scenes, especially the subtype of theoxeny, where a god, appearing as a mortal, is hosted with positive or negative consequences. An example of positive theoxeny is Athena's visit to Nestor as a companion of Telemachus in Od. 1 and Abraham's reception of the angels in Genesis 18; of negative, the visit of the angels to Sodom and Gomorrah in Gen. 19 and Athena's guiding and helping of Odysseus against the suitors in Od. 17-22 (a "virtual theoxeny," since the goddess is not physically present, but acts through a disguised Odysseus). Divine councils and the destructions often resulting from them are another running theme, with a tripartite distinction between full-degree destructions (floods and such), middle-degree apocalypses or "contained apocalypses" (Troy, Sodom, the suitors, etc.), and "postponed apocalypse" (as in the New Testament). Louden complements his thematic and comparative dissection of the Odyssey with other important motifs, such as the katabasis and "vision" theme, broadening the scope of the comparison to Gilgamesh, Vergil, Plato, and Christian myth; fantastic sea voyages (cf. Jonah); and battles with monsters (Polyphemus, Humbaba in Gilgamesh), among others. The chapter on the Argonautic themes is methodologically weaker, as it mostly focuses on the points in common between the Jason-and-Medea and Jacob-and-Rachel stories, while the biblical connection [End Page 531] with the Odyssey proper is indirect and dependent on the premise that the tenuous similarities between the Odysseus-Nausicaa and the Jason-Medea romances justify the further link with the biblical material. Although not the main goal of this literary study, Louden does not hesitate to discuss the thorny issue of transmission in some detail. He sees these interconnections as dialogic and diachronic and points to the Northwest Semites, namely the Ugaritic and Phoenician cultures, as the main partners in the Greek and Near Eastern cultural encounter, with the Israelites as an offshoot of this axis (a word on how Mesopotamian material fits in would have rounded off the picture). Louden thus adds his voice to the already powerful chorus of scholars challenging the traditional perspective that the Indo-European inheritance best explains the essence of Greek culture (as opposed to the Greek language). More specifically, with his work, the Northwest Semitic realm continues gaining favor as the closest referent for many of Greece's developments (in the case of the Odyssey this was already explored in Les Phéniciens et Odyssée by Victor Bérard, in 1927). Most importantly, this study highlights the impact of the Greek heroic tradition on the Levant, informing narrative patterns in the book of Genesis. This west-to-east influence mostly followed the success of the Homeric poems, but was possible...

Editor’s Note

7 Editor’s Note Bruce R. Burningham W e have now fully entered the season of Cervantine commemorations , a season that initially began in 2005 with the 400th anniversary of the publication of part one of Don Quixote. Now, well into 2013, we take note of the fourth centennial of the publication of the Novelas ejemplares. Two years from now, in 2015, we will commemorate the 400th anniversary of the publication of the second part of Don Quixote. (Which is not to mention—at least not outside this particular set of parentheses—next year’s recognition of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s 1614 publication of his own preemptive and unauthorized “second part.”) Soon it will be 2016, the year we mark the fourth centennial of Cervantes’s passing, which will be followed in 2017 by the 400th anniversary of the posthumous appearance of Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. In celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Novelas ejemplares, we begin this Spring 2013 issue with two articles on the topic. Brian Brewer examines “El celoso extremeño” and argues that Cervantes’s representation of Carrizales, whose jealousy, he says, corresponds to early modern notions of commercial ethics, transcends that of the traditional “jealous husband” in order to create a more nuanced character study involving an economic discourse that links jealousy and avarice. Eduardo Olid Guerrero, for his part, examines “La española inglesa” and upacks the various ways in which Cervantes’s representation of Queen Elizabeth I reflects ongoing early modern social and political debates about Machiavelli’s Prince. Following these two articles on the Novelas ejemplares, we offer two essays involving the representation of Islam—and, in particular, the concept of taqiyya (the permissible dissimulation of Christianity by a devout Muslim)—in Cervantes’s work. Robert Stone focuses his attention on 8 Cervantes Bruce R. Burningham Don Quixote itself and argues that the novel’s Morisco episodes should be read as a subtle form of literary taqiyya. Charles Patterson, meanwhile , focuses on Los tratos de Argel and argues that the play’s romance between Aurelio and Zahara is inspired by the Genesis story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, but only after this Biblical motif has been inflected through a series of Morisco legends. Continuing the theme of early modern Christian-Muslim geoplitical relations, Aaron Kahn revisits La conquista de Jerusalén por Godofre de Bullón (which, readers will remember, was also examined in the Fall 2012 issue by Moisés Castillo) and provides further arguments in favor of ascribing authorship of this anonymous play to Cervantes. The Spring 2013 issue’s collection of essays rounds out with two articles on government and the Panza family. Montserrat Pérez Toribio examines Teresa Panza’s administration of her household during Sancho’s absence and argues that Teresa’s theories of government are ultimately both Machiavellian and Tacitean. Ana Fernández Cebrián and Víctor Pueyo, for their part, examine the philosophical and political function of Don Quixote, and particularly its representation of Sancho, during the time of Primo de Rivera’s early twentieth-century dictatorship. Finally, we offer two book reviews. Paul Michael Johnson reviews Georgina Dopico Black and Francisco Layna Ranz’s monumental collection of essays USA Cervantes: 39 cervantistas en Estados Unidos, while Michael J. McGrath reviews Anthony J. Cascardi’s Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics. Many thanks, as always, to our peer reviewers and Associate Editors for their invaluable contribution to the journal. And thanks again to my editorial assistants, Kelsey Kuzniewski and Esteban Touma, for all their hard work in helping me produce this issue. BRB ...

On Knowing and Not Knowing: In the Garden of Eden with Bertie Wooster

Bertie Wooster, star of P.G. Wodehouse's series of comic novels, considers himself an expert on the Bible, and, as such, is an appropriate companion with whom to engage in biblical interpretation. In this essay, I read the Eden story of Genesis 2-3 with Bertie's help. Although Bertie never references Genesis 2-3 directly, questions relating to knowledge are central to both Wodehouse's novels and Genesis 2-3. The same questions—What do the characters know? How do they know what they know? What is the value of their knowledge?—can be asked of both Genesis 2-3 and Wodehouse's novels, and the way in which these questions are answered in the novels raises interesting interpretive possibilities for the Eden story. Reading Genesis 2-3 in this way highlights scholarly tendencies to overestimate what the story's characters know and the value of the knowledge they possess and reveals the bind in which readers of the story find themselves. As heirs to the knowledge which the story's characters come to possess in the course of the narrative, we know, from the outset, far more than they do, and our possession of this knowledge blinds us to how little they know. To understand what the story says about knowledge, we must simultaneously occupy a position of knowing and not-knowing, for, although the story cannot be told except by one who already possesses knowledge, it cannot be entered into except by shedding that knowledge, and, in so doing, recognizing its limitations.

Civil Society and Democracy in the EU: The Paradox of the European Citizens’ Initiative

the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) is hailed as an important tool for civic involvement in EU policy-making. Paradoxically, the legislative proposal introducing the ECI succeeded not because of large-scale public involvement, but due to strategic lobbying of policy-makers by civil society organisations (CSOs). This paper demonstrates that not all CSOs engaged in EU policy debates strive to foster broad civic participation. We can distinguish between two different models of organisations: issue-specific professionalised organisations that engage directly with decision-makers and broader-based citizen organisations, and social movements that seek to mobilise a wide section of society in order to voice their concerns in a public debate. The story of the ECI's genesis illustrates that structural problems inhibit CSOs in mobilising broad sections of the public in EU policy-making. Since CSOs are likely to be at the core of efforts to mobilise the necessary one million signatures for an ECI, this is likely to have implications for operationalising the ECI.

The Decline of Human Longevity in the Book of Jubilees

This article examines the decline in human longevity in the book of Jubilees, arguing that this motif's importance has been somewhat underappreciated by scholars. It examines three varied genres in Jubilees—death notices, an apocalypse, and an extended narrative—and demonstrates that an emphasis on declining human longevity thematically unifies these diverse additions to the stories of Genesis on which they are based. The decline in lifespan is connected both with the book's chronological system and its concern with covenantal obedience, specifically with respect to the commandment to honor one's parents.

The 19th Century German Diary of a New Jersey Geologist

Chute explores a diary of a young New Jersey scientist William Kitchell held in the Library concering a trrip to Germany that began in the fall of 1852. The purpose of the trip was to acquire the advanced training which would prepare him for his position as professor of geology at the Newark Wesleyan Institute. The diary contains the personal sketches of world famous men of science, the prevalence of soldiers in Berlin, the horrible climate, the slowness of transportation, and his questioning of the authenticity of the Genesis story of the great flood.

Adam and Eve - The Story of Two Adolescents

In this introductory address to the the Congress of the Interntional Society for Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology (ISAPP) in Berlin September 14-18, 2011, incoming ISAPP President Annette Streeck-Fischer interprets the Adam and Eve story of Genesis in the Bible as a myth depicting adolescent development. Elements of sexual maturation, risk-taking, and separation from parents, are present in the story. We are reminded of the many challenges todays adolescents face. Keywords: Adolescents, myths, Adam and Eve, Bible, development, sexuality

The Structure of Genesis 38: A Thematic Reading

Abstract The relationship of the Judah-Tamar story in Genesis 38 to the so-called Joseph story in Genesis 37-50 has been much discussed. In this article, I am attempting to suggest a new perspective on the structure of Genesis 38. Through a narrative approach, I argue that this chapter can be understood according to Binary Thematic-Symmetrical Patterns and posit what I call the Bucket-Shaped Structure of the Judah-Tamar Story. The story consists of two main episodes (Episode I, vv. 1-19; Episode II, vv. 20-30), which are divided into six smaller sections (vv. 1-5, 6-11, 12-19, 20-23, 24-26, 27-30). It presents two leading characters: Judah and Tamar. Together they experience three common themes; these are, building up a family, shame and deceit. To the reader, the first theme looks positive (+), but the second and the third appear negative (-). In both Episode I and Episode II, the character of Judah enters early in the scenes (vv. 1-5, 20-23) and Tamar’s character occupies the ends of the episodes (vv. 12-19, 27-30). The narrator presents Tamar’s shame in section two (vv. 6-11) and her deceit in section three (vv. 12-19). Judah’s character is also shown in the same way (deceit, vv. 20-23, shame, vv. 24-26). These two episodes can be read as reflecting a dialectic process and could be represented as: Thesis (Episode I) + Antithesis (Episode II) = Synthesis (Establishing a Family). This symmetrical structure in the story of Genesis 38 highlights the significance of childbirth to both Judah and Tamar for securing the next generation within the larger Primary Narrative (Genesis—2 Kings).

The Transformation of the Torah in Second Temple Judaism

Abstract While the Torah enjoys central importance in the sectarian scrolls, it is not nearly so central in the Aramaic texts found at Qumran. These texts show familiarity with the stories of Genesis and Exodus, but they treat them as sources for stories and wisdom instruction rather than for prescriptive law. The same is true of Ben Sira. Ancestral laws were very important in the Hellenistic world, but their importance was largely symbolic. Even Ezra seems to have focused primarily on a few issues of symbolic importance. Only after the Maccabean revolt do we begin to get sustained halakic discussion in such books as the Temple Scroll and Jubilees. The increased prominence of halakic disputes went hand in hand with the rise of sectarianism.

Adam and Eve - The Story of Two Adolescents

In this introductory address to the the Congress of the Interntional Society for Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology (ISAPP) in Berlin September 14-18, 2011, incoming ISAPP President Annette Streeck-Fischer interprets the Adam and Eve story of Genesis in the Bible as a myth depicting adolescent development. Elements of sexual maturation, risk-taking, and separation from parents, are present in the story. We are reminded of the many challenges todays adolescents face.

Her Dark Materials: John Milton, Toni Morrison, and Concepts of “Dominion” in A Mercy

Her Dark Materials: John Milton, Toni Morrison, and Concepts of “Dominion” in A Mercy Tessa Roynon (bio) Introduction In Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel, A Mercy, the mistress Rebekka Vaark gives the journeying Florens an authenticating letter that twice describes their domicile as “Milton” (110). Appearing two-thirds of the way through the novel, this detail strongly suggests what has been only hinted at until this point: that the writings of John Milton (1608–74) are an important presence herein. My aim in this article is to explore A Mercy’s subtle and complex engagement with the work of the seventeenth-century poet, statesman and political activist. I argue that Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) significantly informs Morrison’s representation of life in Virginia, Maryland and New England in the 1680s and ’90s. The novelist’s engagement both with that poem and with its status in that specific time and locale is key to A Mercy’s central concerns: the nature of freedom and oppression, of power and powerlessness, and of good and evil. In his keynote address at the Toni Morrison Society Conference of July 2008, Marc Conner declared that “the context of the seventeenth century, of Descartes and Milton . . . opens all sorts of doors into Morrison’s worlds, particularly her relation to Modernity” (5). In the same speech he suggested that Adam and Eve’s banishment “at the end of Paradise Lost . . . has been a meditation for Morrison,” pointing out that “her novel Paradise . . . is hardly her first investigation into the concept of Paradise and its loss” (4). Several scholars have analyzed the ways that Tar Baby and Jazz as well as Paradise—in their portrayals of flawed and/or lost utopias—engage with the Genesis stories of the Creation, and of Adam and Eve’s temptation and fall.1 Yet (with the exception of Conner’s remarks) there has been a regrettable critical silence on the subject of Morrison’s dialogue with Milton’s version of these events. To some extent, this is not surprising: from one perspective, no two authors writing in the same language could have less in common, and the stern-faced, Puritan-leaning, white Englishman does not immediately come to mind when we think of Jadine and Son, Joe Trace and Dorcas, or even Consolata and Deek. The interactions with Milton in A Mercy, however, are sufficiently charged that it would be an act of wilful scholarly oversight to ignore this intertextual relationship any longer.2 It is in A Mercy that Morrison most obviously shares Milton’s preoccupation with (if not his perspectives on) the conflicts between order and chaos, reason and sexual desire, and the divine and the human. His fascination with the nature of power and government, with the status of women, with the relationship between Puritanism and Roman Catholicism, with the limits of language and literature, and even with the viability (or otherwise) of binary oppositions, resonates significantly in the contemporary work. Morrison’s allusions to Paradise Lost at once unpack Miltonic certainties and exploit Miltonic uncertainties and ambivalences, and in so doing, contribute to the scrutiny of the nascent Enlightenment world-view and of the transition into constructions of “America” that A Mercy enacts. [End Page 593] Concepts of “Dominion” In contrast to the scant critical attention paid to the subject of Milton and Morrison, scholars have written extensively on the subject of Milton and America. This scholarship contextualizes what might be at stake, politically, in Morrison’s own engagement with Milton in the interventionist version of American history and identity that is A Mercy. In 1845, in his introduction to the first American edition of Milton’s prose works, the editor and critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold claimed that “Milton is more emphatically American than any author who has lived in the United States” (Stevens 789). In recent decades scholars have both reiterated and challenged the conventional wisdom that the poet’s republicanism, reforming brand of Protestantism, and stake in individual liberty have an exceptional resonance within dominant American ideologies, and they have explored the various and often conflicting uses to which his work has been put in American religious, political and literary discourses. For example, in his...

A Latter Day Eve: Reading Twilight through Paradise Lost

Abstract: Critics have demonstrated how Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga reinforces the notion that the appropriate roles for women are those of wife and mother. Viewed from a literary historical perspective, however, the Twilight saga can also be seen as reinterpretation of the Genesis story, told from a female point of view as a vampire narrative. Meyer's “New Eve” is part of a literary tradition that springs from Paradise Lost. Meyer's portrayal of the concept of free will and her connected depiction of the redemptive power of motherhood emphasizes elements in the Latter Day Saints tradition that present a more positive view of Eve, and by extension of “Woman,” than is common in traditional portrayals of Genesis.

The Presence of the Absent in Interpretation: Foucault on Velázquez, and Destéfanis and Celma on Borges

The Presence of the Absent in Interpretation:Foucault on Velázquez, and Destéfanis and Celma on Borges Jorge J. E. Gracia (bio) An interpretation is a kind of understanding that an interpreter has of something (call this something "interpretandum"). Instances of it occur when a student understands that the meaning of "2" is two, you understand that the earth is roughly a sphere, or I understand that I am currently composing this sentence.1 However, the interpretations of art or literature seem to involve much more than the examples suggest insofar as they go beyond the interpretandum in significant ways.2 The most common approaches used today in these interpretations tend to fall into three categories. Some seek to understand the interpretandum in terms of the intention of the author.3 Others seek to understand the interpretandum in terms of what particular audiences understand, whether the audiences are historical, contemporaneous with the author, or contemporary with the interpreter.4 And still others are not concerned with the understanding of the interpretandum at all, but rather of a relation between the interpretandum and something else the interpreter brings to the hermeneutic process (Gracia 1995; 2009). Let us refer [End Page 91] to the first kind of interpretation as authorial, the second as audiencial, and the third as relational. Authorial interpretations go beyond the understanding of the interpretandum insofar as the intention of the author of an interpretandum, in terms of which it is understood, is not present in it, even if the work as existing is in fact what the author intended. Although there are situations in which authors introduce characters in works of literature, or images in works of art, that are portraits of themselves, their intentions are never part of the works, but rather are located in the authors. According to those who favor authorial interpretation, a legitimate interpretation occurs only when the interpreter brings to the work the authorial intention in order to understand something about the work intended by the author. This happens, for example, when I understand that Cervantes intended Don Quixote to be a spoof on the adventure novels of the time. The author in question can be taken in a variety of ways, such as the historical author, a pseudo historical author, a composite figure, or even the interpreter.5 An audiencial interpretation goes beyond the interpretandum insofar as it involves an understanding of how the interpretandum is understood by a particular audience. In this sense the understanding is not of the interpretandum, but of what the pertinent audience understands. Such an interpretation takes place, for example, when I understand that Genesis was taken literally by first-century Christians. The audience in question can be any singled out by the interpreter, such as a group of people in a society at a chosen time, or even a particular person. It can be contemporary with the author of the interpretandum, contemporary with the interpreter, or neither.6 The way in which relational interpretations go beyond the understanding of the interpretandum is even more obvious, because in this case interpreters do not try to understand a work as such, but rather a relation of the work to something else that they bring into play, such as certain historical events, philosophical or social theories, and so on. A case in point is Gilles Deleuze's philosophical interpretations of Francis Bacon's works in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, or Michelangelo's artistic interpretation of the story of Genesis in the frescoes painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This "going beyond the interpretandum" suggests that interpretations [End Page 92] of literature and art introduce something in the interpretandum that is not present in it, or as put in the title of this essay, make present something that is absent. These interpretations are understandings of something that is not in the work, although it may be suggested or prompted by the consideration of the work or its components. As some prefer to put it, they make visible the invisible in a work (Carvalho 2010; 1993, 35-46).7 In the case of the artistic interpretation of literature, the interpretation presents an understanding of a literary...

Message from Mt. Moriah: The Non-Permutable Law of War & Conflict

A Non-traditional reading of the Genesis story of the Sacrifice of Isaac based on traditional sources and derived from primary sources that illustrates the limits of warfare or armed conflict waged in the name of religion.

Forgiveness in “My Brothers” of Matthew 28:10 and Its Significance for the Matthean Climax (28:16-20)

Matthew climaxes his Gospel (28:16—20) with the risen Lord, among other things, forgiving the Eleven and, subsequently through baptism, all who would come to believe in him, for their sins, (re)establishing fellowship or brotherhood with himself. Matthew signals this intention by Jesus expressing solidarity with his Eleven, referring to them as “my brothers” (28:10). Brothers alludes to the Genesis story of Joseph pardoning his Eleven brothers (45:1—15). This allusion is confirmed by the perfect correspondence between Genesis 45:1—15 and Matthew 28:16—20 in every element of their commissioning forms and material substance.