Men, Masculinities and Intermarriage in Ezra 9-10

Men, Masculinities and Intermarriage in Ezra 9-10
Author: Elisabeth M. Cook
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2023-10-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000968391

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.

Life and Death

Life and Death
Author: Francesca Stavrakopoulou
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2021-01-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567699315

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.

The Womb and the Simile of the Woman in Labor in the Hebrew Bible

The Womb and the Simile of the Woman in Labor in the Hebrew Bible
Author: Karen Langton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2024-10-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040149685

This book explores figurative images of the womb and the simile of a woman in labor from the Hebrew Bible, problematizing previous interpretations that present these as disparate images and showing how their interconnectivity embodies relationship with YHWH. In the Hebrew Bible, images of the womb and the pregnant body in labor do not co-occur despite being grounded in an image of a whole pregnant female body; the pregnant body is instead fragmented into these two constituent parts, and scholars have continued to interpret these images separately with no discussion of their interconnectivity. In this book, Langton explores the relationship between these images, inviting readers into a wider conversation on how the pregnant body functions as a means to an end, a place to access and seek a relationship with YHWH. Readers are challenged and asked to rethink how these images have been interpreted within feminist scholarship, with womb imagery depicting YHWH’s care for creation or performing the acts of a midwife, and the pregnant body in labor as a depiction of crisis. Langton explores select texts depicting these images, focusing on the corporeal experience and discussing direct references and allusions to the physicality of a pregnant body within these texts. This approach uncovers ancient and current androcentric ideology which dictates that conception, gestation, and birth must be controlled not by the female body, but by YHWH. The Womb and the Simile of the Woman in Labor in the Hebrew Bible is of interest to students and scholars working on the Hebrew Bible, gender in the Bible and the Near East more broadly, and feminist biblical criticism.

The Dawn of Agriculture and the Earliest States in Genesis 1-11

The Dawn of Agriculture and the Earliest States in Genesis 1-11
Author: Natan Levy
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2023-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1003804500

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.

Embodiment of Divine Knowledge in Early Judaism

Embodiment of Divine Knowledge in Early Judaism
Author: Andrei A. Orlov
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2021-11-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000465969

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.

Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism

Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism
Author: Jonathan Klawans
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2004
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 0195177657

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.

Hebrew Masculinities Anew

Hebrew Masculinities Anew
Author: Ovidiu Creanga
Publisher:
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2019-06-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781910928547

The study of biblical masculinities is now a clearly recognizable discipline in critical biblical gender studies. This book, the third in a series of SPP volumes that include Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond (ed. Ovidiu Creangă, 2010) and Biblical Masculinities Foregrounded (ed. Ovidiu Creangă and Peter-Ben Smit, 2014), takes stock of recent methodological and thematic developments, while introducing fresh new questions, expanding traditional approaches, and adding new texts to the corpus of masculinities in the Hebrew Bible. The volume's introduction (Ovidiu Creangă) celebrates the rich palette of approaches and disciplinary intersections that now characterize the study of Hebrew Bible masculinities, while calling attention to understudied topics. The next thirteen chapters dig deep into the methodological building-blocks underpinning biblical masculinity (Stephen Wilson); the theoretically essential distinction between queer and non-queer masculinities (Gil Rosenberg); the often-neglected yet essential representation of God's masculinity (David J.A. Clines); the competing masculinities of God, Pharaoh, and Moses in historical and lesbian perspective (Caralie Focht and Richard Purcell); Queen Jezebel's performance of masculinity (Hilary Lipka); Priestly and Deuteronomic fantasies of male perfection (Sandra Jacobs); the problem-ridden masculinity of Moses (Amy Kalmanofsky); the rhetoric of 'queen-making' in the prophetic literature (Susan E. Haddox); Jonah's homosocial masculinity (Rhiannon Graybill); the scribal masculinity of Daniel (Brian C. DiPalma); the ephemeral masculinity of mortal men (Milena Kirova); the masculine agencies in the Song of Songs (Martti Nissinen); and the intertwining of money and masculinity in the Book of Proverbs (Kelly Murphy). In the final chapter, Stuart Macwilliam reflects on methodological opportunities, thematic expansions, and a future direction for biblical masculinities.

War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible

War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible
Author: Jacob L. Wright
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2020-07-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1108574300

The Hebrew Bible is permeated with depictions of military conflicts that have profoundly shaped the way many think about war. Why does war occupy so much space in the Bible? In this book, Jacob Wright offers a fresh and fascinating response to this question: War pervades the Bible not because ancient Israel was governed by religious factors (such as 'holy war') or because this people, along with its neighbors in the ancient Near East, was especially bellicose. The reason is rather that the Bible is fundamentally a project of constructing a new national identity for Israel, one that can both transcend deep divisions within the population and withstand military conquest by imperial armies. Drawing on the intriguing interdisciplinary research on war commemoration, Wright shows how biblical authors, like the architects of national identities from more recent times, constructed a new and influential notion of peoplehood in direct relation to memories of war, both real and imagined. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Hebrew Bible

The Hebrew Bible
Author: Gale A. Yee
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2018-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1506425496

This volume provides an introduction and essays on the four key sections of the Hebrew Scriptures from the perspective of top female biblical scholars: Part One: Torah/Pentateuch Part Two: Deuteronomistic History (Joshua–2 Kings) Part Three: Prophets and Prophecy Part Four: Writings and the Book of Daniel This volume highlights key issues in the Hebrew Scriptures from the perspective of top female biblical scholars. This includes historical critical and literary textual analysis and exegesis, particularly as viewed through feminist and intersectional interpretive lenses. Intersectional lenses include the racial/ethnic, class, Global South, postcolonial, and so forth, and their interconnections with gender. The introduction to the volume by the editor introduces feminist intersectional biblical scholarship, making the case that this scholarship addresses perspectives that are often missing from even very thorough survey texts: feminist and intersectional issues regarding the women characters, sexual assumptions, sexual and domestic violence, symbolization of women, class and race relations, and so forth. The essays have been created for students who may be encountering feminist biblical and intersectional scholarship for the first time. Other contributors to this volume include Carolyn J. Sharp, Vanessa Lynn Lovelace, Corrine L. Carvalho, Melody Knowles, and Judy Fentriss-Williams.