James G. Williams

The Beautiful and the Barren: Conventions in Biblical Type-Scenes

In the literary study of biblical texts a recent gain has been a developing sensitivity to the forms and conventions that ancient and modern authors and audiences presuppose. Such sensitivity must be partially based on historical and sociological studies and in turn contributes to them. We have sets of expectations which we bring to anything we hear and see and so did any given audience in ancient Israel. Perhaps the &dquo;grids&dquo; that traditional societies place upon various human expressions are more fixed than are ours; that is a debatable question, complicated by the fact that we are too deeply engaged in our own unconscious cultural patterns to get a good view of the question. We do know that we have certain literary and dramatic conventions that writers for a popular audience will use formulaically: there are customarily expected and accepted rules, with stock personages, functions and scenes that characterize given genres of representation /1 /. Robert Alter, whose recent essay on biblical type-scenes and the uses of convention has influenced this study /2/, presents an interesting hypothetical example of what future historians of 20th century cinema might find /3/. Twelve Hollywood Westerns survive: in eleven of them there is a sheriff who can draw his gun out of its holster faster than

On job and writing: Derrida, Girard, and the remedy‐poison

Abstract Over the last two decades some of the most interesting developments in biblical criticism have come from the influence of literary criticism and critical theory. Practically simultaneously and side‐by‐side with sociological approaches, as in the work of Gottwald and Jobling, for example, literary methods and hermeneutics have opened up biblical texts in a new way. Emerging after a golden period for theology and biblical studies spanning the period roughly from the end of World War I to the middle or late 1960s, literary criticism in biblical studies reflected disaffection with historical criticisms dismantling of the text for the sake of reconstructing historical origins, causes, and sequences, and simultaneously it reflected the concerns of professional scholars about their credentials and status in the academic world. Literary criticism in biblical studies was a way of getting away from history — which in the twentieth century has seemed like “one damned thing after another” — and getting back...

Nietzsche, Dionysos, and the Crucified

Except for Freud, Nietzsche had the greatest influence on Rene Girard among nineteenth-century thinkers. Nietzsche’s thought concerning Christ, Christianity, and what he perceived as the Christian self-orientation forms a kind of negative parallel to Girard’s understanding. This article focuses on four areas of Nietzsche’s significance for Girard and the mimetic theory. (1) Overlapping areas of concern: mimesis and language, pity and resentment, friendship and difference. (2) Wagner, Dionysos, and Christ. (3) Nietzsche as Antichrist. (4) The founding murder. For Girard this is the crucifixion of Christ. For Nietzsche it is the “murder” of God, followed by the age of the new human being, the Overman, as announced by Nietzsche/Zarathustra.

Many Things At a Time

’Wisdom’ and ’Law’: two modes for the ordering of life, two perspectives and frames of reference which seem to have a common or related source in human existence. Their kinship is recognized, both intuitively and critically, in Judaism and Christiantity. But how can one get a larger and deeper view of the relationship between the two? In a book belonging to the new Oxford Bible Series, Joseph Blenkinsopp essays a study of this relationship in the OT. He touches on all the important topics in the Hebrew Scriptures and he even has something to say here and there about the NT and tannaitic Judaism. His occasional forays into a broader conceptualizing of the textual and historical information are