Literary and literate biblical exegesis from Jerusalem- based teacher and lecturer Zornberg. Based on ten years' worth of Zornberg's classes on the Pentateuch, these 12 loosely constructed essays correspond to the 12 traditional Jewish weekly portions found in the book of Genesis. Each one is based on some part of the text that Zornberg finds intriguing—often an implicit tension in a story—and she moves easily from idea to idea and in and out of the biblical narrative. In ``Bereshit: The Pivoting Point,'' Zornberg takes off from the mystery behind the strange Hebrew syntax of the first line of the Bible, which reads (in the Jewish Publication Society translation that she uses): ``In the beginning of God's creation of heaven and earth...'' She uses the line as a jumping off point for a discussion of what she calls ``the problem of man,'' or humanity's ambiguous situation between God and the natural world. According to Zornberg, man (she uses the masculine pronoun in the universal sense) is given mixed messages during the creation story. In a single verse, God tells him to ``be fertile and increase,'' using words that connote lowly, even insectlike activities, and also to ``master'' the earth, or rise above it, a predicament she also finds in Hamlet's rhetorical question: ``What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?'' Zornberg elaborates, invoking Elias Canetti, Franz Kafka, and traditional Jewish sources with equal facility, demonstrating that the landscape of her mind, as she calls it, is vast and varied. Zornberg's Orthodox reading of the biblical text constrains her interpretation but doesn't detract from it. If anything, her reverence towards her subject prevents Zornberg from taking easy escapes from awkward situations—such as claiming multiple authorship of the Bible. Zornberg's writing is challenging but perfectly accessible to the careful lay reader. A wonderfully erudite debut.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8276-0521-8
Page Count: 458
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
An absorbing, challenging work of ``bottom-up'' history that gives a voice to the unlettered and the disempowered. Blackbourn (History/Harvard) transforms an apparently minor historical curiosity, an instance at best of religious pathology, into a fascinating, surprising, and moving picture of cultural turmoil in the new German nation-state. The event in question is the alleged visitation of the Virgin Mary to three schoolchildren in the remote Rhineland village of Marpingen in 1876, and the response thereto. With sure control of his material and an archaeologist's reconstructive gift, Blackbourn deftly reveals the Marpingen events as a tangled but telling intersection of multiple cultural currents: religious strife, both interdenominational and between competing tendencies in the Catholic hierarchy itself; local communal rivalry; class tensions; grassroots populist activism; Bismarck's ongoing Kulturkampf (``cultural war'') against the Catholic Church; and the upheavals in work and family life provoked by the confrontation of a traditional rural culture with the very different rhythms of a 19th-century industrial state. Blackbourn brushes against the grain of readers' expectations: He encourages us to regard the widespread popular support of the visionaries not as superstitious medieval credulity but as a sophisticated mobilization of deep-rooted cultural resources by a community beset by social dislocation. Conversely, the ``progressive'' modernizing forces of state authority, whose response to the apparitions varied from patrician condescension to outright contempt or suspicion, stand revealed as at least as self- righteous and blinkered (by a faith in secular rationality often as unyielding as religious dogma) as the peasants they undertook to control. The Church itself is riven and ambivalent, its sponsorship of the cult of the Madonna at odds with the increasingly authoritarian bent of the 19th-century Vatican. This dense, authoritative book demands and deserves an attentive reading and offers rewards few recent historical narratives can match.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41843-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
A markedly contemporary study that navigates the New Testament scholar past the perils of Pauline theology. Boyarin (Talmudic Culture/Univ. of Calif., Berkeley; Carnal Israel, not reviewed) attempts to ``reclaim Paul as an important Jewish thinker.'' He goes on to establish this primary apostle as a Hellenized Jew whose Platonic sensibility calls for a universal sameness that negates the divisions separating Jew from Gentile and man from woman. The disembodied spirituality of Platonic dualism allows females (especially virgins) to be equal to men under Christ, and allows an uncircumcised Christian of any gender to ``circumcise the foreskin of her [sic] heart'' with Hebrew Bible commandments universalized and allegorized. Boyarin does not glibly valorize Paul as a champion of feminism and an opponent of Jewish exclusivist chauvinism. After crediting Paul for being a radical social critic, the author makes clear how the apostle's pre-Marxist universalism too easily slid into violent coercion in the later, blood-soaked chapters of Christian history. Boyarin analyzes the work of many Christian scholars in concluding that Lutheran misinterpretations of Paul allow us to consider the apostle to be far more antagonistic to Jews and Judaism than he really was. The benefit of Boyarin's Jewish defense against hermeneutical Christian anti-Semitism is tempered by his disdain for a Judaic ``tendency towards contemptuous neglect for human solidarity'' and his anti- Zionism (``modern Jewish statist nationalism has been...very violent and exclusionary''). Sometimes he confuses Christian ``salvation'' theology with Jewish belief, and he fails to find any similarity between Pauline Platonism and the allegorical and universal levels of Torah laws. The final chapter digresses to a personal view of the ``essentialist/social constructionist dichotomy,'' but the book does end with ample notes and bibliography. A rewarding read for students of Christian theology willing to be challenged by today's multicultural, poststructuralist, postfeminist scholarship.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08592-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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