Chaos Uncreated PDF Download

Author: Rebecca S. Watson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110900866
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 525

View

Book Description
This monograph presents a challenge to the view that the Hebrew Bible contains allusions to Yahweh’s battle with chaos, showing how the term has been inappropriately applied in a range of contexts where far more diverse spheres of imagery should instead be recognised. Through the construction of a careful diachronic model (developed with particular reference to the Psalter), the author presents a persuasive case for reversing common assumptions about the development of Israelite religion, finding instead that the combat motif was absent in the earliest period, whilst the slaying of a dragon was attributed to Yahweh only in a distinctive monotheistic adaptation, which arose from around 587 B.C.

Author: Eric M. Vail
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1630874175
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 284

View

Book Description
Talk about chaos is pervasive. Biblical scholars, theologians, and scientists have been using the word chaos for some time, occasionally mingling ideas across disciplines around the shared word. Quite often, discussions of chaos center on the issues of creation's origin and nature, as well as on God's creative methods and relationship to creation. Eric M. Vail investigates the current uses of the word chaos in those areas. A new way of articulating creation out of nothing is offered as both helpful and appropriate in our current milieu. He suggests where we ought to focus our use of the word chaos in Christian discourse and argues that chaos is more fitting for naming where creation has gone awry rather than for naming that state out of which creation comes to be.

Author: JoAnn Scurlock
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1575068656
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

View

Book Description
Hermann Gunkel was a scholar in the generation of the origins of Assyriology, the spectacular discovery by George Smith of fragments of the “Chaldean Genesis,” and the Babel-Bibel debate. Gunkel’s thesis, inspired by materials supplied to him by the Assyriologist Heinrich Zimmern, was to take the Chaoskampf motif of Revelation as an event that would not only occur at the end of the world but had already happened at the beginning, before Creation. In other words, in this theory, one imagines God in Genesis 1 as first having battled Rahab, Leviathan, and Yam (the forces of Chaos) in a grand battle, and only then beginning to create. The problem with Gunkel’s theory is that it did not simply identify common elements in the mythologies of the ancient Near East but imposed upon them a structure dictating the relationships between the elements, a structure that was based on inadequate knowledge and a forced interpretation of his sources. On the other hand, one is not entitled to insist that there was no cultural conversation among peoples who spent the better part of several millennia trading with, fighting, and conquering one another. Creation and Chaos attempts to address some of these issues. The contributions are organized into five sections that address various aspects of the issues raised by Gunekl’s theories.

Author: Debra Scoggins Ballentine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199370265
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

View

Book Description
There are many ancient West Asian stories that narrate the victory of a warrior deity over an enemy, typically a sea-god or sea dragon, and his rise to divine kingship. In The Conflict Myth and the Biblical Tradition, Debra Scoggins Ballentine analyzes this motif, arguing that it was used within ancient political and socio-religious discourses to bolster particular divine hierarchies, kings, institutions, and groups, as well as to attack others. Situating her study of the conflict topos within contemporary theorizations of myth by Bruce Lincoln, Russell McCutcheon, and Jonathan Z. Smith, Ballentine examines narratives of divine combat and instances of this conflict motif. Her study cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries as well as constructed time periods, focusing not only on the Hebrew Bible but also incorporating Mesopotamian, early Jewish, early Christian, and rabbinic texts, spanning a period of almost three millennia - from the eighteenth century BCE to the early middle ages CE. The Conflict Myth and the Biblical Tradition advances our understanding of the conflict topos in ancient west Asian and early Jewish and Christian literatures and of how mythological and religious ideas are used both to validate and render normative particular ideologies and socio-political arrangements, and to delegitimize and invalidate others.

Author: Daniel C. Owens
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1620329689
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 255

View

Book Description
What have the Psalms to do with ethics? Readers prize the Psalter for its richly theological prayers, but into these prayers are woven a variety of ethical issues. This book explores the ethics of the Psalter by examining the four portraits of the righteous person that punctuate Book I. It begins by studying these psalms as individual compositions and then employs both the canonical approach and dialogic criticism to identify the complex relationship between the portraits' vision of the righteous life and its outcome. Does the righteous person enjoy security and the good life? The answer may be surprising, but joining the psalmist on the rocky path of the interface of faith and experience is certain to prove a formative experience.

Author: Denise Dombkowski Hopkins
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0814681204
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 464

View

Book Description
Feminist biblical interpretation has reached a level of maturity that now makes possible a commentary series on every book of the Bible. It is our hope that Wisdom Commentary, by making the best of current feminist biblical scholarship available in an accessible format ... will aid readers in their advancement toward God's vision of dignity, equality, and justice for all. - Book jacket.

Author: Jason M. Silverman
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0567205517
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

View

Book Description
A renewed study of Iranian influence on apocalyptic traditions, arguing for a methodology which takes into account Iranian studies, oral theory, and the Achaemenid context.

Author: Daniel C. Peterson
Publisher: The Interpreter Foundation
ISBN: 1534649220
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 422

View

Book Description
This is volume 19 of Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture published by The Interpreter Foundation. It contains articles on a variety of topics including: "On Being a Tool," "Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, and the American Renaissance: An Update," "Science and Mormonism," "Latter-day Saint Youths’ Construction of Sacred Texts," "Telling the Story of the Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon," "'My People Are Willing': The Mention of Aminadab in the Narrative Context of Helaman 5-6," "'See That Ye Are Not Lifted Up': The Name Zoram and Its Paronomastic Pejoration," "Why Did You Choose Me?", "Nice Try, But No Cigar: A Response to Three Patheos Posts on Nahom (1 Nephi 16:34)," "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Map: Part 1 of 2," "Mormonism at Oxford and What It Signifies," "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Map: Part 2 of 2," "Mormonism and the Scientific Persistence of Circles: Aristotle, Spacetime, and One Eternal Round," "Alma — Young Man, Hidden Prophet," "'From the Sea East Even to the Sea West': Thoughts on a Proposed Book of Mormon Chiasm Describing Geography in Alma 22:27," "Shulem, One of the King’s Principal Waiters," and "Conversations with Mormon Historians."

Author: Brian R. Doak
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 145148951X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 219

View

Book Description
Theologians and philosophers are turning again to questions of the meaning, or non-meaning, of the natural world for human self-understanding. Brian R. Doak observes that the book of Job, more than any other book in the Bible, uses metaphors drawn from the natural world, especially of plants and animals, as raw material for thinking about human suffering. Doak argues that Job should be viewed as an anthropological “ground zero” for the traumatic definition of the post-exilic human self in ancient Israel. Furthermore, the battered shape of the Joban experience should provide a starting point for reconfiguring our thinking about “natural theology” as a category of intellectual history in the ancient world. Doak examines how the development of the human subject is portrayed in the biblical text in either radical continuity or discontinuity with plants and animals. Consider Leviathan explores the text at the intersection of anthropology, theology, and ecology, opening up new possibilities for charting the view of nature in the Hebrew Bible.

Author: Abigail Pelham
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004230297
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271

View

Book Description
In Contested Creations in the Book of Job: the-world-as-it-ought- and -ought-not-to-be Abigail Pelham reads the Book of Job both ‘forwards’—examining the perspectives on creation presented by Job and his friends and corrected by God’s authoritative voice from the whirlwind—and ‘backwards,’ demonstrating how the epilogue explodes readers’ certainties, forcing a reappraisal of the characters’ claims. The epilogue, Pelham argues, changes the book from one containing answers about creation to one which poses questions: What does it mean to make the world? Who has the power to create? If humans have creative power, is it divinely sanctioned, or has Job, acting creatively, set himself up as God’s rival? Engaging more thoroughly with Job’s ambiguity than previous scholars have done, Contested Creations explores the possibilities raised by these questions and considers their implications both within the book and beyond.