Many readers will find the account of Kabasele’s mysterious illness riveting, but little else in this awkwardly written...
Kabasele’s traditional defense of Christianity blends biblical interpretation with an autobiographical account of a mysterious illness healed by faith.
Kabasele (Jesus Christ is My God, 2011) is a Congolese Muslim by birth and an evangelical Christian by calling. His book is largely an analysis of assorted biblical passages from Jewish and Christian versions of the holy book, although names of translations are omitted. Literal interpretation abounds as does a theological perspective that seems conservative evangelical Protestant. The author uses a simple though non-specific style and rarely strays from brief declarative sentences. He has a keen eye for etymology and offers finely detailed explanations of many of the original Hebrew and Greek terms in the Bible. Kabasele selects an unusual assortment of passages for exegesis: Job, Paul’s Letter to the Romans and Paul’s epistle to Philemon. There are 14 chapters, most of which run little more than a page. Each chapter moves through interpretation to conclude with a prayer culled directly from scripture or a quote to ponder. Interrupting this pattern is a curiously moving account of the author’s nearly yearlong hospital stay due to a disease doctors had difficulty diagnosing. Kabasele credits a bedside visit from Jesus as the spark for his unexpectedly speedy recovery; full healing might be credited, however, to the surgeons who removed his spleen. Unfortunately, Kabasele’s biblical analyses suffer from a lack of interpretative rigor. His understanding of the complex book of Job concludes with “I believe that if God had not used Job, many people in today’s world would not understand what’s going on with them.” This position is not clearly articulated, theologically developed, or framed through specific examples. The author also tends to make sweeping and unsubstantiated generalizations, once going so far as to claim that human beings control other planets.
Many readers will find the account of Kabasele’s mysterious illness riveting, but little else in this awkwardly written evangelical tract is original.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1467879293
Page Count: 80
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The story of the relationship, real and imagined, between the biblical land of Israel and the modern state of Israel, would make a wonderful book—but this extended apology for the perceived faults of modern Jewish nationalism isn't it. Erlich, formerly an academician (English/City College, CUNY) and now a psychotherapist in Seattle, presents Jewish history and thought as a seamless thread that runs from ancient Mesopotamia to today's Tel Aviv. The contrary idea, the denial of connections between ancient and modern Jewish ideals, has become fashionable in some anti-Zionist circles; but Erlich's unsophisticated counterargument is equally untenable. His central thesis is that ``the Bible treats nationalism as a literary idea that is able to serve as a summation of the intellectual life.'' Therefore modern Israel, as the inheritor of this tradition, can only be understood as a manifestation of intellectual tradition. Here we enter a rarefied realm in which all of biblical history, and subsequent Jewish history, is read as striving for the abstract and the imaginative—a thousand years of Jewish life as a long meeting of PEN. And the psychotherapeutic enters here as well. For the Bible, ``literary'' culture not only promotes a culture of literacy and the imagination (is that why there were all of those wonderful American Jewish novelists?), it also encourages mental health. Commenting on the covenant in the Book of Leviticus, which threatens ``terror and consumption and burning ague'' on those who worship other gods, Erlich states that ``the modern reader may mistake this for hellfire. But the emphasis is not on terror but on creating both individual and national health of mind.'' The real kicker here is the book's closing chapter, a defense of the West Bank settlers and an attack on their critics. It is also a counterattack against Edward Said's The Question of Palestine (1979): Contrary to Jewish nationalism, Erlich argues, Palestinian nationalism is intellectually hollow. Not that we wouldn't benefit from a sustained, intelligent response to Said's polemic. But again, Erlich's own intellectually hollow polemic isn't it.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-902352-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
The freshest, most elegantly written of the new books about the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls (see Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 1107, The Hidden Scrolls, p. 1108). In this very thorough study, Golb (Jewish History and Civilization/Univ. of Chicago) surveys earlier scholarship on the topic and finds it wanting. Almost all of the individuals and groups who have devoted themselves to piecing together and deciphering the scrolls and fragments found between 1947 and 1955 have believed they were written by scribes of the Essene community who lived in the ``monastery'' of Qumran not far from the shores of the Dead Sea. In 1980 Golb advanced his own explanation of the scrolls' origins: Qumran was not a monastery but a fortress, he argued, and the scrolls represent the remnants of the libraries of Jerusalem's various Jewish sects, who, in order to preserve their manuscripts from the Roman conquerors in the first century a.d., hid these religious and literary treasures in the Dead Sea area. Backing up his assertions here, Golb makes accessible some very technical material, demystifying the process of manuscript discovery, reconstruction, and decipherment. While many of his academic adversaries have depicted him as an upstart and a professional gadfly, he emerges from this volume as a reasoned, impassioned advocate of a more likely scenario for the concealment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He doesn't spring his solution on us suddenly; he includes the reader in the process by which someone who has been involved in scroll research for the better part of his life, who once accepted the ``Qumran Hypothesis,'' began to see problems with it in the early '70s and eventually developed a compelling alternative. While detailing that process, Golb also chronicles the battles for control of the scrolls' possession and publication, a story that has been told before, though not in such exhaustive detail. The legions of scroll aficionados around the world can now read of conflicts both ancient and modern in a lively and informative new book. (Book-of-the-Month/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selections; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-544395-X
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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