Methods for Exodus is a textbook on biblical methodology. The book introduces readers to six distinct methodologies that aid in the interpretation of the book of Exodus: literary and rhetorical, ...genre, source and redaction, liberation, feminist, and postcolonial criticisms. Describing each methodology, the volume also explores how the different methods relate to and complement one another. Each chapter includes a summary of the hermeneutical presuppositions of a particular method with a summary of the impact of the method on the interpretation of the book of Exodus. In addition, Exodus 1–2 and 19–20 are used to illustrate the application of each method to specific texts. The book is unique in offering a broad methodological discussion with all illustrations centered on the book of Exodus.
The relationship between secularity and religion/religiosity is a main topic of practical theology and ecclesiastical pastoral care. However, several research papers on religious studies show that ...the thesis that with disappearing institutionalized religiosity, plural and differentiated forms of religiosity increase is not convincing. In fact, the development shows that where people do not experience religion, it becomes irrelevant to them. This fact is an urgent question for the Church: With and from which basic attitude can and will she be able to encounter religious and secular people in such ways that the Christian gospel of human emancipation and redemption can become a reality in their lives? The Church can realize such a fundamental attitude in reference to the biblical Exodus and by generating a pastoral exodus.
In this elegant and personal new work, Michael P. Steinberg reflects on the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics-of the formation not of a nation but of a political ...community grounded in universal law. Modern renderings of the story of Moses, from Michelangelo to Spinoza to Freud to Schoenberg to Derrida, have seized on the story's ambivalences, its critical and self-critical power. These literal returns form the first level of the afterlife of Moses. They spin a persistent critical and self-critical thread of European and transatlantic art and argument. And they enable the second strand of Steinberg's argument, namely the depersonalization of the Moses and Exodus story, its evolving abstraction and modulation into a varied modern history of political beginnings. Beginnings, as distinct from origins, are human and historical, writes Steinberg. Political constitutions, as a form of beginning, imply the eventuality of their own renewals and their own reconstitutions. Motivated in part by recent reactionary insurgencies in the US, Europe, and Israel, this astute work of intellectual history posits the critique of myths of origin as a key principle of democratic government, affect, and citizenship, of their endurance as well as their fragility.
Exodus into Ordinary Life Bielik-Robson, Agata
Angelaki : journal of theoretical humanities,
05/03/2024, 2024-05-03, Volume:
29, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This essay focuses on Eric Santner's psychoanalytic reinterpretation of the crucial symbol of Judaism - yetziat mitzrayim, the getting out of Egypt - as "the Exodus out of our own Egyptomania." ...Formulated in his book on Rosenzweig and Freud, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, it appears in all Santner's later works concerned with political theology, where "Egyptomania" stands for everything that overburdens human life with an excessive "signifying stress" or "ex-citation," weighing it down with the impossible demands of the ultimate metaphysical self-justification and the interpellating call to sublimity. Contrary to Hegel's definition of Judaism as "the religion of the sublime," Santner consequently champions the opposite view, according to which the Abrahamic revelation forms the first religion of radical desublimation that blocks the vertical transport into the extraordinary "beyond" and focuses instead on the immanent transcendence as the radical otherness of the neighbour/stranger in the world. The Exodus, therefore, is to be understood not as an exit out of the world, following the call of the otherworldly God, but precisely the other way round: as an exit of the Egyptomaniac metaphysical paralysis, where "Egypt" represents an impasse of the self-negating life which cannot tolerate its finite condition and invents a sublime alibi in a false promise of immortality.
This work examines how Jews defended themselves against anti-Jewish slander concerning the biblical despoliation of Egypt. The embarrassment of the episode was later 'healed' through allegory and ...became a critically important biblical justification for the Christian appropriation of the Greco-Roman cultural heritage.
The parting of the sea Sivertsen, Barbara J; Sivertsen, Barbara J
2009., 20090217, 2009, 2009-02-17
eBook
For more than four decades, biblical experts have tried to place the story of Exodus into historical context--without success. What could explain the Nile turning to blood, insects swarming the land, ...and the sky falling to darkness? Integrating biblical accounts with substantive archaeological evidence, The Parting of the Sea looks at how natural phenomena shaped the stories of Exodus, the Sojourn in the Wilderness, and the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Barbara Sivertsen demonstrates that the Exodus was in fact two separate exoduses both triggered by volcanic eruptions--and provides scientific explanations for the ten plagues and the parting of the Red Sea. Over time, Israelite oral tradition combined these events into the Exodus narrative known today. Skillfully unifying textual and archaeological records with details of ancient geological events, Sivertsen shows how the first exodus followed a 1628 B.C.E Minoan eruption that produced all but one of the first nine plagues. The second exodus followed an eruption of a volcano off the Aegean island of Yali almost two centuries later, creating the tenth plague of darkness and a series of tsunamis that "parted the sea" and drowned the pursuing Egyptian army. Sivertsen’s brilliant account explains inconsistencies in the biblical story, fits chronologically with the conquest of Jericho, and confirms that the Israelites were in Canaan before the end of the sixteenth century B.C.E.
This article argues that in the three instances in Luke-Acts where the phrase ‘And suddenly, two men. . .’ occurs, Luke 9, Luke 24 and Acts 1, the author expects us to understand that these men are ...Moses and Elijah, who are named in the first occurrence at the Transfiguration. This interpretation makes literary, audience expectation, and theological sense, creating a deeper understanding of the significance of the two prophets for the proclamation of the resurrection and the mission of the Church. It is argued that the interpretation that the ‘two men’ are ‘angels,’ like Gabriel, does not pay sufficient attention to the details of the text and reads across an understanding that the ‘men’ are ‘angels’ from Luke 24 to Acts 1 without warrant.
