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Author: Elisabeth M. Cook
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000968391
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
Offering a reading of the intermarriage debate and expulsion of the foreign women in Ezra 9-10, this book engages with the production and performance of masculinities in this biblical text, shifting the focus away from the 'foreign women' to the men who are the primary actors in this work. This approach addresses the diversity of masculinities and the ways in which they are implicated in the production of power relations in the text. It explores the ‘feminized’ masculinity of the peoples-of-the-lands, the unstable masculinity of the golah, Ezra’s performance of penitential masculinity, and the rehabilitation of divine masculinity. The rejection of the marriages and the call for the expulsion of the women and children are addressed as sites on which masculinities and power relations are configured. In doing so, this book sheds light on how women and the traits and performances culturally ascribed to women, femininity and inferior masculinities, are appropriated to produce masculinities and negotiate power relations between men. It posits that the debate in Ezra 9-10 is not, ultimately, about the women themselves, but about bringing the masculinities, bodies and practices of dissenting men under the ‘management’ of those who wield the Torah in the narrative world of the text. Men, Masculinities and Intermarriage in Ezra-9-10 is of interest for scholars and students working on the Book of Ezra specifically, as well as the Hebrew Bible and its world more broadly. It is also a valuable study for those working on masculinities and gender in the biblical world and ancient Near East.
Author: Elisabeth M. Cook
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000968391
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173
Get Book
Book Description
Offering a reading of the intermarriage debate and expulsion of the foreign women in Ezra 9-10, this book engages with the production and performance of masculinities in this biblical text, shifting the focus away from the 'foreign women' to the men who are the primary actors in this work. This approach addresses the diversity of masculinities and the ways in which they are implicated in the production of power relations in the text. It explores the ‘feminized’ masculinity of the peoples-of-the-lands, the unstable masculinity of the golah, Ezra’s performance of penitential masculinity, and the rehabilitation of divine masculinity. The rejection of the marriages and the call for the expulsion of the women and children are addressed as sites on which masculinities and power relations are configured. In doing so, this book sheds light on how women and the traits and performances culturally ascribed to women, femininity and inferior masculinities, are appropriated to produce masculinities and negotiate power relations between men. It posits that the debate in Ezra 9-10 is not, ultimately, about the women themselves, but about bringing the masculinities, bodies and practices of dissenting men under the ‘management’ of those who wield the Torah in the narrative world of the text. Men, Masculinities and Intermarriage in Ezra-9-10 is of interest for scholars and students working on the Book of Ezra specifically, as well as the Hebrew Bible and its world more broadly. It is also a valuable study for those working on masculinities and gender in the biblical world and ancient Near East.
Author: Francesca Stavrakopoulou
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567699315
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Life and Death: Social Perspectives on Biblical Bodies explores some of the social, material, and ideological dynamics shaping life and death in both the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel and Judah. Analysing topics ranging from the bodily realities of gestation, subsistence, and death, and embodied performances of gender, power, and status, to the imagined realities of post-mortem and divine existence, the essays in this volume offer exciting new trajectories in our understanding of the ways in which embodiment played out in the societies in which the texts of the Hebrew Bible emerged.
Author: Natan Levy
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003804500
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
This book invites a close textual encounter with the first 11 chapters of Genesis as an intimate drama of marginalised peoples wrestling with the rise of the world’s first grain states in the Mesopotamian alluvium. The initial 11 chapters of Genesis are often considered discordant and fragmentary, despite being a story of beginnings within the context of the Bible. Readers discover how these formative chapters cohere as a cross-generational account of peoples grappling with the hegemonic spread of domesticated grain production and the concomitant rise of the pristine states of Mesopotamia. The book reveals how key episodes from the Genesis narrative reflect major societal revolutions of the Neolithic period in Mesopotamia through a three-fold hermeneutical method: literary analysis of the Bible and contemporary cuneiform texts; modern scholarship from archaeological, anthropological, ecological, and historical sources; and relevant exegesis from the Second Temple and rabbinical era. These three strands entwine to recount a generally sequential story of the earliest archaic states as narrated by non-elites at the margins of these emerging state spaces. The Dawn of Agriculture and the Earliest States in Genesis 1–11 provides a fascinating reading of the first 11 chapters of Genesis, appealing to students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible and the Near East, as well as those working on ecological injustice from a religious vantage point.
Author: Katherine Southwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199644349
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Revision of author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Oxford, 2010.
Author: Willa M. Johnson
Publisher: Sheffield Phoenix Press Limited
ISBN: 9781907534218
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 146
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Book Description
In the Book of Ezra-Nehemiah, Ezra commands Yehudite men to put away their foreign wives to avoid further defiling the 'holy seed'. What is the meaning of this warning? Are Ezra's words to be understood as a concern about race-mixing or is it emblematic of some more complex set of problems prevalent in the fledgling postexilic community? Ezra's words, with their seemingly racialized thinking, have been influential in much political, religious and popular culture in the USA. It has been a backdrop for constructing racial reality for centuries, melding seemingly biblical ideologies with accepted European Enlightenment-era ideas about racial superiority and inferiority. Willa Johnson combines archaeological data with social-scientific theory to argue for a new interpretation. In this anthropological and narratological analysis, Johnson views Ezra's edict in the light of ancient Yehudite concerns over ethnicity, gender, sexuality and social class following the return from exile. In this context, she argues, the warning against intermarriage appears to be an effort to reconstitute identity in the aftermath of the cataclysmic political dominance by first the Babylonian and then the Persian empires. This book represents a postmodern interdisciplinary approach to understanding an ancient biblical socio-political situation. As such, it offers fresh perspectives on ways that interpretations of the Bible continue to reflect the ideologies of its interpreters.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
This book aims to bring a new way of understanding Ezra 9-10, which has become known as an intermarriage 'crisis', to the table. A number of issues, such as ethnicity, religious identity, purity, land, kinship, and migration, orbit around the central problem of intermarriage. These issues are explored in terms of their modern treatment within anthropology, and this information is used to generate a more informed, sophisticated, understanding of the chapters within Ezra itself. The intermarriage crisis in Ezra is pivotal for our understanding of the postexilic community. As the evidence from anthropology suggests, the social consciousness of ethnic identity and resistance to the idea of intermarriage which emerges from the text point to a deeper set of problems and concerns, most significantly, relating to the complexities of return-migration. In this study Katherine E. Southwood argues that the sense of identity which Ezra 9-10 presents is best understood by placing it within the larger context of a return migration community who seek to establish exilic boundaries when previous familiar structures of existence have been rendered obsolete by decades of existence outside the land. The complex view of ethnicity presented through the text may, therefore, reflect the ongoing ideology of a returning separatist group. The textualization of this group's tenets for Israelite identity, and for scriptural exegesis, facilitated its perpetuation by preserving a charged nexus of ideas around which the ethnic and religious identities of later communities could orbit. The multifaceted effects of return-migration may have given rise to an increased focus on ethnicity through ethnicity being realized in exile but only really being crystallized in the homeland.
Author: Sweety Helen Chukka
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This dissertation aims to examine the problem of mixed marriages presented in Ezra 9-10 and employs an anti-caste reading hermeneutic to discuss the intricacies of caste present in the text. Upon the return of exiles under the leadership of Ezra, authorized by the Persian Empire, some Persian officials complained to Ezra about the irreconcilable nature of mixed marriages. Employing purity terminology, some officials have claimed that the “holy seed” has mixed with the daughters of the people(s) of the land(s) practicing abominations similar to the autochthonous nations indicated in Deuteronomy 7:1-4. By way of introducing an alterity discourse, the so-called mixed marriages are shown as polluting the genealogical purity of the “holy seed” (Ezra 9) and violating geographical boundaries (Ezra 10). In Ezra 10, the so-called mixed marriage discourse is taken to the next level. Shecaniah, a Persian military official, declared the marriages as illegitimate and proposed the expulsion of “foreign” women and children as the solution to the violation. Ezra, the priest, the Persian authorized official, subscribes to the proposal and makes the people swear that they would do as suggested. However, the expulsion proposal was unsuccessful because some returnees demonstrated resistance to the prohibitions of mixed marriages. If one carefully analyzes the texts, it becomes evident that under the guise of constructing identity, some of the officials have constructed a caste system that centers the prominence of endogamous marriages even when there has not been a universal principle of endogamy in the Hebrew Bible. The problem in examining Ezra 9-10 by favoring the voices and experiences of the people(s) of the land(s) is the potential danger of falling into the trap of anti-semitic discourse. In this study, the writer first articulates an anti-caste hermeneutical proposal to avoid the trap of anti-semitism. Anti-caste hermeneutic discussed in the first chapter creates a space to hold multiple marginalities in tension yet adopts a reading strategy that favors the least marginalized without engaging in Oppression Olympics. This chapter presents “caste” as a lens to examine Ezra 9-10 for two reasons: first, as a Dalit Woman from India, any hierarchy in Indian context, can be understood better with the lens of “caste” (in the first chapter, I discuss the reasons for choosing “caste” as a category instead of “Dalit”). Second, to discuss that the mixed marriages are an internal problem within the returnees and the lens of “caste” delineates the ways in which, a system of caste is constructed by one group of officials against their own people. In chapter 2, the writer presents an overview of scholarship on Ezra 9-10 into four categories: historical-critical methods, socio-scientific methods, contextual methods, and empire critical methods. Chapter 3 provides translation, text-critical notes, translation notes of Ezra 9-10, a textual analysis that predominantly establishes the close relationship of the officials and Ezra to the Persia empire, a source-critical analysis of Ezra 9-10, and a commentary. The fourth chapter explores the construction of identity by some officials in Ezra 9-10 and its connections to the construction of the caste system as discussed by B. R. Ambedkar and Isabel Wilkerson arguing that Ezra 9-10 is an ideological construction of the caste system that arranges people hierarchically and outcastes some people. The fifth chapter counters the officials’ presupposition that the endogamous principle is a universal and homogenous social practice in the Hebrew Bible. Exploring some examples of mixed marriages in the Pentateuch and from texts around the Persian period, the writer presents that mixed marriages were not a homogeneous or a dominant social practice and that not all returnees opposed mixed marriages. Employing an anti-caste lens, the writer presents endogamy, identity, purity, and “foreignness” as a dangerous combination characteristic of the caste system. In conclusion, the writer summarizes the study, highlights the significance of the methodology articulated in this study to the field of Dalit theology, and finally in an excursus provides an outlook for further research by juxtaposing Numbers 27:1-11 with Ezra 9-10.
Author: Andrei A. Orlov
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000465969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
This book explores the early Jewish understanding of divine knowledge as divine presence, which is embodied in major biblical exemplars, such as Adam, Enoch, Jacob, and Moses. The study treats the concept of divine knowledge as the embodied divine presence in its full historical and interpretive complexity by tracing the theme through a broad variety of ancient Near Eastern and Jewish sources, including Mesopotamian traditions of cultic statues, creational narratives of the Hebrew Bible, and later Jewish mystical testimonies. Orlov demonstrates that some biblical and pseudepigraphical accounts postulate that the theophany expresses the unique, corporeal nature of the deity that cannot be fully grasped or conveyed in some other non-corporeal symbolism, medium, or language. The divine presence requires another presence in order to be transmitted. To be communicated properly and in its full measure, the divine iconic knowledge must be "written" on a new living "body" which can hold the ineffable presence of God through a newly acquired ontology. Embodiment of Divine Knowledge in Early Judaism will provide an invaluable research to students and scholars in a wide range of areas within Jewish, Near Eastern, and Biblical Studies, as well as those studying religious elements of anthropology, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and gender studies. Through the study of Jewish mediatorial figures, this book also elucidates the roots of early Christological developments, making it attractive to Christian audiences.
Author: Katherine E. Southwood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000163415
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
This book focuses on the expressions used to describe Job’s body in pain and on the reactions of his friends to explore the moral and social world reflected in the language and the values that their speeches betray. A key contribution of this monograph is to highlight how the perspective of illness as retribution is powerfully refuted in Job’s speeches and, in particular, to show how this is achieved through comedy. Comedy in Job is a powerful weapon used to expose and ridicule the idea of retribution. Rejecting the approach of retrospective diagnosis, this monograph carefully analyses the expression of pain in Job focusing specifically on somatic language used in the deity attack metaphors, in the deity surveillance metaphors and in the language connected to the body and social status. These metaphors are analysed in a comparative way using research from medical anthropology and sociology which focuses on illness narratives and expressions of pain. Job's Body and the Dramatised Comedy of Moralising will be of interest to anyone working on the Book of Job, as well as those with an interest in suffering and pain in the Hebrew Bible more broadly.
Author: Jonathan Klawans
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195177657
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Jonathan Klawans shows how the link between moral impurity and physical defilement, as understood by the ancient Hebrews, can be followed through to St Paul and the Christian era when the need for ritual purity was finally rejected.
