After shortly outlining what can be called hermeneutics of love, the author carries out a brief interpretation of a poem written by Heinrich Heine from the perspective of Alain Badiou’s theory of ...love. For this purpose, and after analyzing the structure and content of Heine’s poem itself, the author synthetizes and formalizes four different conceptualizations of love as explained by Badiou in a lecture from 2006 (Mexico City). The author finally uses the conceptual background of Badiou’s proposal to re-interpret Heine’s poem and to show that Heine’s poem offers another key concept missing in Badiou’s theory for the understanding of the experience of love, i. e. the concept of sincerity (Aufrichtigkeit).
The study of midrash-the biblical exegesis, parables, and anecdotes of the Rabbis-has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Most recent scholarship, however, has focused on the aggadic or narrative ...midrash, while halakhic or legal midrash-the exegesis of biblical law-has received relatively little attention. InScripture as Logos, Azzan Yadin addresses this long-standing need, examining early, tannaitic (70-200 C.E.) legal midrash, focusing on the interpretive tradition associated with the figure of Rabbi Ishmael. This is a sophisticated study of midrashic hermeneutics, growing out of the observation that the Rabbi Ishmael midrashim contain a dual personification of Scripture, which is referred to as both "torah" and "ha-katuv." It is Yadin's significant contribution to note that the two terms are not in fact synonymous but rather serve as metonymies for Sinai on the one hand and, on the other, the rabbinic house of study, the bet midrash. Yadin develops this insight, ultimately presenting the complex but highly coherent interpretive ideology that underlies these rabbinic texts, an ideology that-contrary to the dominant view today-seeks to minimize the role of the rabbinic reader by presenting Scripture as actively self-interpretive. Moving beyond textual analysis, Yadin then locates the Rabbi Ishmael hermeneutic within the religious landscape of Second Temple and post-Temple literature. The result is a series of surprising connections between these rabbinic texts and Wisdom literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Church Fathers, all of which lead to a radical rethinking of the origins of rabbinic midrash and, indeed, of the Rabbis as a whole.
In this study, it is argued that the trust of previous (and existing) hermeneutical approaches of promoting ancient biblical texts as applicable to the everyday life of contemporary readers is not ...only imaginable but also too ambitious. The Hebrew Bible emerged from an Israelite cultural context, which neither speaks to nor deliberates on issues concerning the African cultural contexts. The present essay utilises a narrative approach comprising three main overtures. Firstly, some examples of previous contributions on hermeneutics will be discussed. Secondly, this study interrogates the legitimacy of employing African biblical hermeneutics that utilises ancient Jewish texts as applicable to African societies today. Thirdly and finally, the study will critically appraise for a balanced reading of the biblical text.Contribution The present study aims at engaging (debriefing) existing hermeneutical contributions towards proposing a balanced reading of the biblical text. In order to achieve that goal, the study engages into a dialogue following hermeneutical approaches, which are popular amongst most African scholars, namely African biblical hermeneutics, black biblical hermeneutics, contextual biblical hermeneutics, feminist hermeneutics and oral hermeneutics.
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