Gorgeous commentary.
Halevi shines new light on a very old story, offering a brilliant interpretation of perhaps the most influential piece of scripture ever written.
It’s said that when second-century Jewish rabbis envisioned heaven, they imagined a great table at which the blessed would sit, arguing over the possible meanings of torah–Jewish teaching–for all eternity. If this is paradise, Shira Halevi is well on her way. Her new tome is a targum–basically a hybrid of translation and commentary–of the opening chapters of Genesis. The allure of writing a targum for a comprehensive thinker like Halevi is evident: the format allows its creator to tease out all (or at least some) of the various meanings of the famously spare Hebrew scriptural text. Thus Halevi fills her elaborately footnoted expansion on the story of Adam and Eve (or Havah) with alternate translations, interpretive traditions, linguistic clarifications and explanatory dialogues. Among its many strengths, her targum is both devout and progressive. The author has an easy familiarity with modern biblical scholarship and willingness to parse stale orthodoxies. Her discussions of gender and theodicy are particularly piercing. Further, her innovative interpretations of this oldest of tales may provide new insights for even experienced readers. Nonetheless, it is clear from the intricacy of Halevi’s introduction–a long and detailed excursion into the technical differences between torah, targum, midrash and other forms of scripture and commentary–that the book will likely appeal to none but the most literate reader of Jewish texts. More casual observers will probably turn away when she writes of “medium[s] for polyvalency” and “triliteral consonantal roots.” But for those willing to immerse themselves in Torah–surely, Halevi’s ideal readers–Adam and Havah offers a myriad of joys.
Gorgeous commentary.Pub Date: March 30, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4414-9784-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The director of the Florilogia Institute in Sonoma, Calif., uses literature, current events, and the Bible to argue that the efficacy of ritual violence in human affairs has been undermined by the Judaeo-Christian concern for the victim. Bailie proceeds from a traditional anthropological understanding of how cultures are held together by sacred violence: Periods of social chaos are often resolved by acts of definitive violence that, because they establish order, become sacred to a community's memory; and such definitive acts need to be reenacted from time to time by the ritual death of one or more scapegoats. The author argues that the effectiveness of this social mechanism has been gradually eroded, over the course of history, by an awakening empathy for the victim. In the first half of his book, he traces history from Aeschylus, who glosses over the sacrificial death of Iphigenia prior to the Trojan War, to US intervention in Somalia and the beating of Rodney King, observing that the status of victim has now become the seal of moral rectitude. The result, he claims, is a crisis of culture that has led to the increase, not the decrease, of violence—part of which, he asserts, is due to the evaporation of the Cold War's useful conventions. In the book's second half, Bailie shows how the Bible itself struggles with the concept of scapegoat, especially when Abraham's God rescinds the traditional demand for human sacrifice and when the Crucifixion becomes the vindication par excellence of the victim. Throughout, the author displays an awareness of the Western literary and philosophical tradition, and if his prose is at times obscure, it is brightened by exciting insights. Demanding but stimulating fare for those who believe that human events are ultimately responses to ideas and attitudes.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8245-1464-5
Page Count: 326
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
Controversial biblical scholar Crossan restates his thesis that the Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus tell us more about the polemics of the early Christians than about what really happened. For Crossan (Biblical Studies/DePaul Univ.; Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 1994, etc.) Jesus was the leader of a liberation movement that contrasted itself with Rome by seeking to empower rather than dominate people. He argues that the accounts of Jesus' trial, death, and especially resurrection are fiction, a patchwork of themes drawn from the prophets and written down as history. Moreover, he sees the role attributed to the Jews in Jesus' condemnation as reflecting a much later historical situation, when the vast majority of Jews had rejected the Christians' claims that Jesus was their messiah. This book is essentially a polemical reply to Raymond Brown's acclaimed Death of the Messiah and a popularization of Crossan's earlier study The Cross that Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative. Crossan takes fierce issue with Brown, who holds that the various agendas at work in the passion narratives do not mean that they lack a strong historical basis. Crossan's pages are marred by his frequent sardonic references to Brown, and although he argues his case well, it stands or falls according to whether the reader accepts his highly reductionist position that the supernatural, or even the unusual, could not have happened. Inevitably, Crossan's reasoning comes across as circular, and even arrogant, when he pronounces on events that are presupposed to be unique by an appeal to his own reading of what is ``more likely'' to have happened. Thus he holds that a nobody like Jesus could never have had a trial before Roman governor Pilate and that his crucified body was probably eaten by dogs from a shallow grave. Brilliant writing in the service of a disappointingly dogmatic positivism.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-061479-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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