Israel 201

Your next-level guide to the magi, mystery, and chaos! of life in the holy land.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

After creating man and woman, God's first recorded blessing upon them is "be fruitful and multiply." Like the blessings of food and health, the human experience of procreation is so common that we may overlook its importance within the biblical narrative. However, I Will Surely Multiply Your Offspring, a comprehensive examination of the progeny blessing, demonstrates that this motif is both prevalent and significant within the Old Testament by tracing its development throughout the redemptive-historical narrative. Viands identifies different progeny blessing traditions associated with the Abrahamic covenant, the Sinai covenant, and the new covenant, and describes their interrelationships as well as their relationship to the universal blessing first found in Genesis 1. This study lays the foundation for a biblical worldview of human proliferation, contributing to contemporary discussions concerning whether humans are obligated to bear children as well as procreation ethics.

Civil Society in the Middle East is a project of the Department of Politics and the Koverkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University. Project director is Augustus Richard Norton (Boston University). While there is wide disagreement about the outcome among those who follow events in the Middle East, there is little doubt that the regimes in the region are under increasing pressure from their citizens. In rich and poor states alike, incipient movements of men and women are demanding a voice in politics. Recent political developments in Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon, even the future state of Palestine, clearly show the vitality and dynamism of civil society, the melange of associations, clubs, guilds, syndicates, federations, unions, parties and groups which provide a buffer between state and citizen and which are now so clearly at the forefront of political liberalization in the region. Civil Society in the Middle East, a two-volume set of papers providing an unusually detailed and rich assessment of contemporary politics within the Middle East, and in this sense alone, quite literally peerless, is the result of a project of the Department of Politics and the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. Volume I contains contributions by Augustus Richard Norton, Raymond A. Hinnebusch, Laurie Brand, Muhammad Muslih, Mustafa Kamil al-Sayyid, Ghanim al Najjar and Neil Hicks, Eva Bellin, Jill Crystal, Saad al-Din Ibrahim, and Alan Richards.