Dynamics Of Charity And Reciprocity In The Book Of Sirach

The presence of didactic, wisdom-like passages in the Book of Psalms presents a puzzle because it suggests a non-liturgical origin and pedagogical aim distinct from the more dominant psalmic language of lament and praise. Catherine Petrany argues for a literary and theological approach to the question of wisdom's role in the psalms that accounts for its meaningful integration with these other kinds of discourse. The unique contextualization of wisdom motifs in the psalms creates a pedagogical platform unique to the book, one related to but distinct from the pedagogies of the biblical wisdom corpus. Human wisdom speech in the psalms points beyond the classroom to the congregation and asks its hearers to become speakers, that is, to enter into conversation with the divine.

Five Pentateuchal texts (Lev 24:10-23; Num 9:6-14; Num 15:32-36; Num 27:1-11; Num 36:1-12) offer unique visions of the elaboration of law in Israel's formative past. In response to individual legal cases, Yahweh enacts impersonal and general statutes reminiscent of biblical and ancient Near Eastern law collections. From the perspective of comparative law, Dylan R. Johnson proposes a new understanding of these texts as biblical rescripts: a legislative technique that enabled sovereigns to enact general laws on the basis of particular legal cases. Typological parallels drawn from cuneiform and Roman law illustrate the complex ideology informing the content and the form of these five cases. The author explores how latent conceptions of law, justice, and legislative sovereignty shaped these texts, and how the Priestly vision of law interacted with and transformed earlier legal traditions.

The Gog Oracles' (Ezek 38-39) reuse of antecedent scripture is crucial to their purpose and meaning. The pattern of continuous allusion in the Gog Oracles reflects something more than a writer saturated with scriptural idiom. It is a practice of disciplined and deliberate reference to select texts on select themes. William A. Tooman shows that recognizing the volume and density of scriptural reuse within the Gog Oracles is indispensable for understanding these chapters' role within the book, its composition, and its place within Second Temple literature. A close examination of the methods, effects, and motives of scriptural reuse that are evident within the Gog oracles reveals that these chapters are a unified composition that was crafted as a supplement to a book of Ezekiel, in order to fill gaps in the book's message and to harmonize the book with other traditions of prophetic revelation.

In this study, Jonathan Huddleston examines Genesis as a rhetorical whole, addressing Persian-era Judean expectations. While some have contrasted Genesis' account of origins with prophetic accounts of the future, literary and historical evidence suggests that Genesis narrates Israel's origins precisely in order to ground Judea's hopes for an eschatological restoration. Promises to the ancestors semiotically apply to those who preserved, composed, and received the text of Genesis. Judea imagines its mythic destiny as a great nation exemplifying and spreading blessing among the families of the earth. Genesis' vision of Israel's destiny coheres with the postexilic prophetic eschatology, identifying Israel as a precious seed to carry forward promises of a yet-to-be-realized creation fruitfulness.

The law on the "cities of refuge" contained in Numbers 35:9-34 is almost universally seen as a simple repetition of legal content that is basically already present in the legislation of other biblical books. Francesco Cocco demonstrates that we find ourselves here before a case of reformulation instead of simple repetition, the implications of which are extremely interesting for the understanding of biblical penal legislation. In this particular fragment, it exhibits traces of modernity so surprising as to be as good as the defence of civil liberties in the legal systems currently in force in the majority of democratic states. The author's enquiry takes its starting point and develops, therefore, from the novel contribution which the legislation in Numbers 35:9-34 confers on the entire biblical law of a penal character. --

This study brings insights from character ethics in addition to the much discussed biblical scholarship on social justice in order to elucidate the concept of righteousness present in the book of Proverbs. The author’s choice of Proverbs as a wisdom text in relation to the concept of righteousness reflects the realization that previous scholarship has not dealt with righteousness as a concept in its own right but as a corollary to the issue of social justice. Like character ethics, Proverbs use its depiction of the righteous person as its prominent pedagogic device of moral discourse. In other words, instead of offering abstract statements about morality, Sun Myung Lyu portrays the life of the righteous person as the paradigm of moral life, which is pregnant with numerous realizations into specific actions befitting diverse life situations. What the righteous person embodies is righteousness, the character in toto , which encompasses yet transcends specific virtues and actions. After presenting a comparative study of Proverbs with the Psalms and the ancient Egyptian wisdom texts, the author concludes that despite many similarities and parallels, Proverbs still stands out in its strong emphasis on character formation and internalization of virtues as foundations of morality in general and righteousness in particular.

Appealing to Monster Theory and the ancient Near Eastern motif of "Chaoskampf," Safwat Marzouk argues that the paradoxical character of the category of the monster is what prompts the portrayal of Egypt as a monster in the book of Ezekiel. While on the surface the monster seems to embody utter difference, underlying its otherness there is a disturbing sameness. Though the monster may be defeated and its body dismembered, it is never completely annihilated. Egypt is portrayed as a monster in the book of Ezekiel because Egypt represents the threat of religious assimilation. Although initially the monstrosity of Egypt is constructed because of the shared elements of identity between Egypt and Israel, the prophet flips this imagery of monster in order to embody Egypt as a monstrous Other. In a combat myth, YHWH defeats the monster and dismembers its body. Despite its near annihilation, Egypt, in Ezekiel's rhetoric, is not entirely obliterated. Rather, it is kept at bay, hovering at the periphery, questioning Israel's identity.