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The contemporary family faces many challenges. Divorce is one of the most serious problems in our society. It is caused by different stresses with which the family must deal. The “Song of Songs” offers hope in resolving such stresses. It proposes a different way of life as opposed to the trials of modern marriage: love, sacrifice and enduring passion.
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This approach explores Naaman’s story through the Old Testament texts, aiming to highlight the expiatory role of the water, especially of the Jordan River.
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This study explores the pesher interpretation, a method of biblical exegesis used by the Qumran community, and whether early Christians like the author of Matthew's Gospel employed similar techniques. Since the 1950s, scholars have analysed the so-called “formula quotations” in Matthew, finding parallels with the pesharim commentaries found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Krister Stendahl argued Matthew comes from a “school” using pesher to radically reinterpret Old Testament passages as fulfilled in Jesus. Others like Richard Longenecker also find Matthew employing this Second Temple Jewish method, especially in texts with “fulfilment formulae”. However, objections have been raised. Joseph Fitzmyer notes the differences between Qumran pesharim and Matthew's use of scripture. Norman Hillyer wonders if the fulfilment formula indicates a distinct hermeneutic, not pesher. Ulrich Luz stresses Matthew proclaims fulfilment, not hidden meanings like pesharim. In conclusion, applying the ideas of pesher from Qumran to the New Testament raises problems. Similarities between pesher and Patristic exegesis are noted, but determining dependence requires examining the original historical meaning versus the contemporary application of prophecies. More analysis of whether early Christian use of scripture mirrors Qumran pesher or develops its fulfilment hermeneutic is needed.
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This study aims to bring a series of clarifications regarding the objectives pursued by Saint Nicodemus in creating a Tetraevangelion for the Tismana Monastery in 1405. We believe that these objectives could be better understood based on the investigation of the relationship that Saint Nicodemus’ Tetraevangelion has with similar Slavic-Byzantine manuscripts, especially with Bulgarian and Serbian manuscripts, of his time. This relation helps identify both the characteristics of the manuscript made by Saint Nicodemus at the beginning of the fifteenth century, as well as its originality among other Slavic-Byzantine manuscripts.
More...![Apariţia textului biblic grecesc (Septuaginta [LXX]): Breviar istorico-filologic](/api/image/getissuecoverimage?id=picture_2023_74664.jpg)
Our paper examine the historical process of translating the hebrew bible into greek, for the needs of jewish diaspora in Alexandria. Scholars who specialize in Septuagint studies point out, however, that in a more technical sense the word Septuagint refers only to the Greek translation of the Pentateuch (285-246 B.C.). Uncertainties about the process of translation are responsible for the various meanings of the term. The Prophets books and writings were translated later, certainly most of them by 130 B.C. as the Prologue to the Greek translation of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) indicates. To complicate matters further, long before all the books had been translated, revisions of existing translations were already being made. The process of conducting systematic, thorough revisions supposedly continued since 200 B.C. until 200 A.D. The scholars have yet to establish the precise line of demarcation between the original translation and its revisions.
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In this article we present the continuation of our work on an alternative paraphrase of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. The specificity of the alternative paraphrase lies in the fact that we reach for new translation solutions that we confront with the existing translations of the Bible into Polish. The purpose of the alternative paraphrase is to revive the biblical message by abandoning some common formulations in favor of idiomatic constructions referring either to the context of Judaism in the time of Jesus, or to the etymology and original meaning of expressions that over the centuries have grown theological patina, or to modern formulations that may even be considered colloquialisms.
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The article aims to present a reinterpretation of the history of Abraham's calling in the treatise of Philo of Alexandria. The text of Genesis (12:1-4) describes the patriarch's immediate reaction to the command to leave Haran. This process began in Ur. According to Philo, building a relationship between God and Abraham required proper preparation. First, he gave up worshiping the gods, and then he discovered that the world is material and spiritual. Philo emphasizes the long-term nature of the conversion process. This article presents and explains its individual stages - not described in the Hebrew Bible.
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The purpose of the study is to analyze the conduct and motivations of two bibli- cal figures, King Balak and the soothsayer Balaam, in relation to the deities they worshipped. The study shows that their conduct has a common trait: both of these characters abandoned their god and turned against him. Therefore, Balak and Ba- laam can and should be described as traitors to their gods. The two betrayals had different character and causes. Balak turned away from his god, turning to the God YHWH. His actions were guided by his disbelief that the god of Moab could provide a defense against the Israelites. Therefore, he did not engage the prophet of his god to obtain the curse of the Israelites from him, but abandoned him and turned to the prophet of YHWH, the God of Israel, for this purpose. Balaam, on the other hand, turned away from his God, going against His will to help the enemies of His people. The motivation for his conduct was payment for his assistance in acting against Israel. Since Balaam did not receive it because he could not get YHWH to curse the Israelites, he decided to obtain it by giving the Moabites another way to deprive Israel of God's protection.
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This article presents the significance of the apocryphal Third Book of Maccabees for the reconstruction of the social situation of the Diaspora in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic dynasty. The central part of the work in question is the description of the miracle at the Hippodrome, the miraculous rescue of the Jews from the death planned for them by Ptolemy IV. Although some scholars deny the historicity of this event, it explains the origin of the holiday commemorating divine intervention.There are many indications that the purpose and message of the work is to show the Diaspora as loyal to the ruler and striving for harmonious coexistence with the Greek population of the city, respecting cultural and religious differences. While not hiding their religious differences, the Jewish Alexandrians in this work present themselves as full citizens of the Hellenistic world and its culture.
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For many years biblical scholars have been trying to answer the question of what “Scripture” is fulfilled in the Jesus’ words in Jn 7:38. Two dominant interpretative trends – christological and anthropological – are often juxtaposed as complementary. The aim of this article, based on the intertextual approach, is to show another point of reference – the description of the first temple in Jerusalem in 1Kgs 6–7, which contains an unknown architectural element rendered by the Hebrewwordֶבֶטּּן,simi-larinmeaningtoκοιλίαfromJn7:38–aswellasto analyze both the christological and anthropological aspects of showing the temple as a human body and the human body as a temple, with the particular emphasis on the symbolism of flowing water in the context of the (new) birth.
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There are several names and titles, both for the Bible and for the books of the Bible, the knowledge of which is necessary to eliminate possible confusions, perplexities, misunderstandings in their correct and easy identification.
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The paper presents the rhetorical aspects of Johannine literature and shows the countercultural character of the community that produced it. Although different in genre, content and scope, the Gospels, the three Epistles and the Book of Revelation exude the same countercultural mechanism. To recognise these mechanisms on the literary level, the first part of the paper shows the impulses of countercultural interaction with the audiences. They are marked as a confrontation with religious and political authorities. Being in constant conflict with the Jewish synagogue and God-defying structures of the Greco-Roman world, the Johannine community built its own world. This world is legitimised as countercultural, i.e. constructed in opposition to the prevailing social structures and cultural practices. René Girard's anthropological concept of the scapegoat serves to observe the countercultural basis of Johannine Christianity, which is contained in the Christological symbol of the lamb. In the second part of the paper, examples of the operation of the countercultural mechanism are listed, and how it reshapes cultural practices and social structures is shown. The Johannine motifs of love and sacrifice are crucial in this process. Finally, the paper's conclusion briefly discusses the potential of the countercultural contribution of Johannine literature to Christianity and contemporary society.
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The large number and wide geographic spread of the Latin manuscripts shows that the Acts of Thecla were widely known in the Middle Ages in spite of the negative views of Tertullian, Jerome and the Decretum Gelasianum. Included in liturgical books, among martyr passions and lives of saints, the story shaped the faith of monastic, clerical and church communities. This paper explores the extent to which the manuscript tradition preserves or modifies the difficult details of the writing: the encratic teaching of Paul, Thecla’s affection for the apostle, and in particular her baptism and teaching. The Latin manuscripts are essentially faithful to the narrative, including potentially difficult issues. However, some manuscripts tend to mitigate details and statements that seem problematic, to align Thecla’s deeds with conventional ecclesial teaching and practice.
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Jacob, Laban, and the World of the Near Eastern Nomads. The following study looks at a well-known story from the Book of Genesis. Jacob is a central figure in the narratives describing the traditions of early Israel. The relevant text (Gen 29–31) tells the progenitor’s enrichment and growth from a solitary figure into an extensive clan. Our paper draws on the conceptual framework of the social dynamics of ancient Near Eastern nomadism to analyse some of the narrative’s features.
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Are Metaphors Getting Lost? – The Usefulness of Linguistic-Poetic Analysis of Old Testament Poetic Texts for Theological Interpretation. This paper presents an interdisciplinary experiment. The core of the experiment is to examine the Hebrew poetic text of the Old Testament through a textual analysis of its textuality prior to theological interpretation and to ask why and which linguistic-literary solutions, i.e. poetic procedures, are used in the construction of meaning. On this basis, a research design can be created that asks how linguistic-poetic analysis can help in the exegesis of Old Testament poetic texts (or of any other textual genre). Poetics is about the production of meaning: all of our verbal utterances are made with some kind of poetics or speech strategy in mind – our communications are not formulated randomly. The linguistic analysis proposed here examines not only whether a word or phrase in a particular poetic text of the Hebrew Bible is written correctly or not but also the poetic role of that phrase, word, sentence, and grammatical or other structure in the larger textual unit (i.e. the poem) under study.
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The phrase ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου in Revelation 13:8 can be interpreted and translated in two ways. First, the Lamb-Christ was slain since the creation. Second, the worshippers of the beast have been missing from the Book of Life since the beginning. The main problem arises from the fact that the phrase ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου immediately follows τοῦ ἐσφαγμένου, which points to the lamb. Although the proponents of this reading list many other arguments, the literal proximity provides the basis for all other ideas. However, if we look at the problem from a broader perspective, the conclusion is different. For example, Revelation 13:7–10 focuses on the relationship between the beast and humanity. It can be seen that the section does not centre on the Lamb. Further changes of perspective confirm that ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου refers to individuals not mentioned in the Book of Life (e.g. Rev 17:8).
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Dialectical Christology Using the Example of Mk 15:33–41. In my article, I would like to show Emil Brunner’s early thoughts and statements included in his sermons in Obstalden among others. These sermons are unknown and unpublished to date. It is mostly claimed that Brunner entered in a modern and dialectical phase because of his colleague in the Reformed Church, Karl Barth. The truth is that they later had intense discussions about theses and antitheses in the phase of dialectics. Brunner, however, formulates new dialectical thoughts earlier than Barth does – for example, already in 1916 on dialectical Christology by using the text Mk 15:33–41 and reflecting arguments of modern theology. He speaks in his sermons about God (thesis), man (antithesis), and “Gottmensch” (synthesis).
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The language of the papyri is of paramount importance to the study of Septuagint Greek. Adolf Deissmann, at the end of the nineteenth century, showed that many words and grammatical forms characteristic of the Septuagint, but more or less absent from literary Greek, are well attested in documentary sources of the Ptolemaic era.1 John Lee, in his 1972 dissertation titled A Lexical Study of the Septuagint Version of the Pentateuch, essentially followed in Deissmann’s footsteps, while focusing particularly on vocabulary. Anna Passoni Dell’Acqua has devoted her life’s work to the analysis of titles, technical terms and other items of language attested in the papyri, showing how close the world of the Septuagint translators was to that of Ptolemaic Egypt
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Our knowledge of the social and educational background of the translators of the Septuagint is still hazy at best. The Letter of Aristeas states that the translation was conducted by elders of the Jewish tribes in a project initiated by the king of Egypt (possibly Ptolemy II Philadelphus). The letter is widely accepted not to depict the actual developments of the translation process, however. In many cases, the choice to use vernacular Koine vocabulary, and clear occasions where the translator did not completely understand the Hebrew original, seem to indicate that some of the translators did not represent the educated and eloquent strata of their society. Alternatively, this phenomenon could have been motivated by some other reason, such as the need for the wider and less educated social group to understand the translated scripture. Although the actual process of translating and editing all the books that finally would compose the Septuagint took few hundreds of years – perhaps even almost four centuries –3 some traits of the used lexicon remain consistent. Choice of the words for weapons is one of them.
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The peace in the Bible is a virtue connected to God himself. Analysing the New Testament’s writings, we discover that the peace brought by Christ cannot be read and understood only from political perspective thus it is not just a simple lack of war. The peace is God’s gift, it is the sign of the time of the Messiah. In Paul’s letters the peace it is a virtue related to justification that must be cultivated, because the peace of God is more effective than a man can imagine. It can not only break down all hostility and divisions, but also bring men closer to God himself. The John’s tradition brings similar view. Peace as a reality related to Jesus himself is the fullness of messianic goods and is eschatological in nature. However, these features make it therefore unfamiliar to the world. Adopting this way of seeing the peace and then putting it into practice has also its consequences. It leads to breaking away from the ‘structure of the world’ as we know it. But only then peacemak-ing becomes a manifestation of true wisdom. All those who introduce peace understood in this way deserve to be called children of God
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