Before I retired from teaching at the University of Minnesota Duluth at the end of May 2009, I taught an introductory-level survey course on the Bible once a year. As we worked our way through selections in the Hebrew Bible, I used to say to the students, "Don't you think we should shop around for another deity?"
Here's Bloom's literary appreciation of the deity constructed by the Yahwist author in the strand of text in the Hebrew Bible known as J: "The Yahwist's great creature is Yahweh, who contains Falstaff's vitalism, Hamlet's ontological denials, Iago's destructiveness, and Lear's jealous furies and shattering madness. The Bible matters most because the Yahwist imagined a totally uncanny god, human-all-too-human and exuberant beyond all bindings" (page 11).
I know, I know, not everybody at the bottom of our American culture today will catch and understand Bloom's allusions to four of Shakespeare's characters. But that may be OK, provided that the people at the bottom of our American culture today can grasp Bloom's next sentence.
If people at the bottom of our American culture today are familiar enough with the Hebrew Bible that they can grasp Bloom's characterization of the deity in the Hebrew Bible as totally uncanny, human-all-too-human, and exuberant beyond all bindings, then those same Americans should be able to grasp that the deity in the New Testament is presented in the character known as Jesus Christ as a somewhat more domesticated deity.
But so what? What difference would this make? Would grasping this contrast in the portrayal of the deity really amount to anything significantly different from typical Christian propaganda? Perhaps it wouldn't. But it might provoke people of religious faith today to reflect a bit more deeply on their own received conceptualizations of the monotheistic deity. But would anything positive come from deeper reflection of their own conceptualizations of the deity, anything that might lead to bottom-up change? Your guess is probably as good as mine about that.
Now, Bloom says that he has long been troubled by Psalm 116:17: "I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will call upon the name of the Lord" (quoted on page 169). Bloom comments, "Surely it is better to offer thanksgiving rather than a lamb or heifer" (page 169). No, it is not if you want to eat a meat meal. Bloom continues, "but what does it mean to regard thanks giving as a sacrifice to God?" (page 169). It means that you are offering up a living animal (the sacrifice) in thanksgiving to God, the source of the animal's life. Out of your sense of reverence for life, you are thanking God for giving you the animal's life to provide you with a meat meal.
In an important passage in his book WHO WROTE THE BIBLE?, mentioned above, Friedman explains what sacrifice means. "The function of sacrifice is one of the most misunderstood matters in the bible. Modern readers often take it to mean the unnecessary taking of animal life, or they believe that the person that the person who offered the sacrifice was giving up something of his or her own in order to compensate for some sin or perhaps to win God's favor. In the biblical world, however, the most common type of sacrifice was for meals. The apparent rationale was that if humans wanted to eat meat they had to recognize that they were taking life. They could not regard this as an ordinary act of daily secular life. It was a sacred act, to be performed in a prescribed manner, by an appointed person (a priest), at an altar. A portion of the sacrifice (a tithe) was given to the priest. This applied to all meat meals" (pages 91-92).
The ritual slaughter of animals for meat meals was a custom not only in the ancient monotheistic tradition but also in the ancient polytheistic tradition. The sacrifice of the animal did not involve incinerating an entire animal, but usually only the bones and inedible parts of the animal. But the ritual of the sacrifice was based on the recognition that an animal life's was being taken. Thus the sacrifice involved the sense of reverence of ancient people for animal life.
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