Edward L. Greenstein

The Formation Of The Biblical Narrative Corpus

Following the lead of Spinoza, most of us have come to regard the sequence of Hebrew narrative from Genesis through Kings as a unified literary composition. It tells the story of Israel and its God from the creation of sky and land through the exile of Israel from its particular land. Although the anonymous narrator focuses on the fate of his people, he virtually always tries to identify with YHWHs point of view. For this reason, and possibly others, the narrator submerges his own identify and background. Unlike his near-contemporary Herodotus, who begins his Histories by introducing himself and his explicit agenda, the Hebrew author speaks from a perspective as wide as the cosmos. He would seem to assume the authority of God and give voice to a divinely certified account of his peoples historical experience to (one assumes) his own community.

A Pragmatic Pedagogy of Bible

Many Bible scholars have become aware of the fact that the results we produce are dependent on the particular approaches that we choose to employ, and have become more self-conscious about the methods we use and the reasons we use them. Each approach to the analysis and interpretation of a text will yield its own type of meaning or understanding. This thesis is an outgrowth of pragmatic philosophy. A multiperspective approach to teaching Bible is advocated, and it is illustrated with reference to the Tower of Babel narrative.

YITZHAK RABIN: AN APPRECIATION

*This article is based upon remarks made at a memorial service for Yitzhak Rabin at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Methodological Principles in Determining that the So-Called Jehoash Inscription is Inauthentic

The so-called Jehoash Inscription has been the subject of academic and even juridical contention. With respect to the so-called Jehoash Inscription, the most basic outlook that a philologist must adopt, or belief the philologist must form, at the very outset is whether to treat the text as presumably authentic or presumably inauthentic or suspect. The methods of analysis and evaluation that one employs will follow from that initial decision. This chapter reviews a few of the most outstanding deviations from literary and linguistic norms associated with royal building and memorial inscriptions that one encounters in the Jehoash text. It concludes that there is no single, simple, economical way of explaining the abnormalities of the so-called Jehoash Inscription and presents some of the facts concerning the language and form of the Jehoash Inscription. Keywords: authenticity; Jehoash Inscription; linguistic norms; memorial inscriptions

A Manual of Hebrew Poetics

This manual closes a circle which began in 1954 with the beginning of work on a doctoral dissertation defended at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in April 1957 (published in Spanish in 1962). During three decades of teaching and writing the author has kept an active interest in poetics and stylistics and the resulting accumulated knowledge has been concentrated in the present manual. The primary purpose of the book is not to serve as a source of information about facts and authors but rather to initiate the reader into the stylistic analysis of poetry. Among the poetic techniques discussed are sound and sonority, rhythm, imagery, figures of speech, dialogue and monologue, development and composition.