Not for general readers, but an illuminating, challenging look at the original significance of many of the Bible’s stories.
A meticulously researched primer on the Hebrew Bible’s role as part of an evolving theological and political discourse.
Although the Bible is often read as if it exists in isolation, the import of its stories cannot be fully grasped without an understanding of the pre-biblical literature and traditions that held sway at the time of its creation. The transition from paganism to a monotheistic, recognizably Jewish belief system played out over centuries, and the biblical canon encompasses dozens of individual campaigns to reinforce, suppress or transform pagan views and philosophies that were common in the ancient Middle East. Biblical scholars Shinan and Zakovitch (both of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) argue that many passages can be read as miniature polemics aimed at reinterpreting pre-existing legends in order to make them more compatible with a monotheistic theology. In closely argued and densely footnoted academic prose, the authors present 30 examples, from the reasons for eating matzah to the proper etiquette for relationships between men and women. In demonstrating how the Bible “actively argues against ancient traditions that were deemed unsuitable to the biblical writers for inclusion in their great work,” Shinan and Zakovitch paint a richly nuanced portrait of the biblical literature as an interlocutor in the debates of its day, but their language may alienate nonspecialist readers. Many points rely on a close reading of the Hebrew and Aramaic texts as well a familiarity with multiple modes of exegesis, and although capably translated, the book can be occasionally bewildering to those without the requisite background.
Not for general readers, but an illuminating, challenging look at the original significance of many of the Bible’s stories.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8276-0908-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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