Summary Notes on Literature and World of the Hebrew Bible | REL 101, Study notes of World Religions

Download Summary Notes on Literature and World of the Hebrew Bible | REL 101 and more Study notes World Religions in PDF only on Docsity! REL 101 Lecture 37 1 Hello again and welcome to Literature and World of the Hebrew Bible. This is class session 37 and this is a summary of our course. I want to open up with a few pictures of modern day Jerusalem. Modern day Jerusalem has got to be — at least in my experience, my opinion — perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in the entire world today. People from all over the world flock to Jerusalem to visit this city, and it’s because it is a city of — it’s a holy city for so many of the world’s population, holy city for three major religions of the world — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — and yet it is that very fact that also makes it a city that’s torn by strife. Today, you know, we have — this is in January of 2006 when we’re taping this program and this session, and just recently Hamas has been voted into power in the Palestinian controlled territories. Of course Hamas’s chief political plank of their platform is that Israel has no legitimacy to exist whatsoever. And then you have at the time that this is being taped Arial Sharon is in a deep coma and it doesn’t look like there’s hope that he’s going to come out of that coma, and so there’s uncertainty and ambiguity in what’s going to happen in the Israeli situation politically. All of this leads to a lot of tension. At this time in January of 2006 this past summer Israel pulled out of Gaza and withdrew its settlements from the Gaza Strip. At the same time, they’re building the security wall that separates Palestinian areas from the Israeli areas. All of this is reflective of the shifting political situation and the strong political situation, and the strife that runs through the political situation there in Palestine and the Mideast. Ultimately, this relates back to the fact that Jerusalem and Palestine is holy territory for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And this — as citizens today, no matter what our religious beliefs tend to be -- whether we are a conservative Christian, a cultural Jew, a fundamentalist Muslim — no matter what our religious faith, it demands our attention as global citizens. Because REL 101 Lecture 37 2 what’s going on in Jerusalem is a strong and sharp illustration of some of the tensions that are running throughout our world, running throughout our society, running throughout actually our city here in Springfield, Missouri. Because increasingly the world is becoming a diverse place, increasingly as the — as technology brings down natural borders like mountain ranges and oceans, increasingly we realize that we are living in a diverse world. Not just ethnically and racially, but ideologically. And the kinds of clash that you see in Palestine is not so much a racial or ethnic, but more a ideological clash between diverse groups that claim this territory to be holy and feel that they have an ultimate claim on this territory. Well, let’s look, then, at the Hebrew Bible. Because one of the things — this brings us back to the Hebrew Bible because one of the things that we’ve seen and I want to summarize for us today in this class period is that the Hebrew Bible is a diverse document. One of the intriguing things that I have found about the Hebrew Bible as I’ve studied it throughout the years — one of the things I discovered about it and didn’t quite realize I was going to discover it going into the study was that the Hebrew Bible has a tremendous amount of tolerance for diversity. Circles of tradition would include and hold onto texts with perspectives that perhaps they didn’t even agree with or fully buy into, but they held onto those texts because those texts were authoritative. They had already obtained some sort of a status of canon. And so the Hebrew Bible today is a diverse document. It is not a monolithic document. There are within the Hebrew Bible — just structurally when we looked at it — three major divisions. These divisions accrued to the text over time. There’s the Torah or the law. There’s the prophets or the Nevieem. And then there’s the writings or the Ketuveem. We’ve noticed that there’s diverse language in the Book of Daniel, for example. We saw how the text would shift from Hebrew to Aramaic and back to Hebrew, seemingly without any real worry about trying to smooth that or edit through REL 101 Lecture 37 5 This literature, too, looked hopeful, optimistic, or at least maybe not optimistic but it looked to the future. It looked to a time when one day it might again be an autonomous political state. Interestingly enough, the priestly literature leaves Moses on Mount Nebo, across in the Transjordan area — across the Jordan, not in the promised land — and looking over into the promised land to one day when in the future God would lead them back. That’s the priestly literature’s vision of where they were in their day. They were hopeful of one day obtaining that but it was a future event. How far distant they thought it might be in the future, it’s hard to say. But it’s also a literature that looked to strengthen the present position of the priests, looked to strengthen and provide for — and this is again critical — peace and stability in their present. Under Darius there were revolts and rebellions all through and they were a part of the settling and the stabilizing power that came into Palestine at that time. The thesis of the priestly literature? Israel is Yahweh’s testimony to the world that he’s the one who defeats chaos and controls the powers of chaos. Israel will be that testimony if the proper priesthood maintains the Jerusalem temple cult. And so you have a real emphasis here on the temple and the cult and religious ritual and practice, because that’s what power that they had and that’s what they believed would lead to greater autonomy. It may not have been an intentional shift from the kind of covenantal and theocratic kind of thinking that we saw in the Deuteronomistic literature, but the circumstances drew them in that way. We looked at the prophets and we’ve talked about the prophets as intermediaries between God and the people. And that in a theocracy these folks were political consultants and commentators. And so we ran through a number of prophets. We looked at Amos who was a Judean prophet, who went up north to condemn the north and was not well received there. We looked at Hosea, an Ephreamite prophet who also prophesied against the northern kingdom and predicted its downfall because of its REL 101 Lecture 37 6 unfaithfulness such as a wife who was unfaithful. We looked at Isaiah, a Judean prophet in the Jerusalem court, who had a tremendously powerful vision of Yahweh in the temple. We looked at Jeremiah, an Ephream prophet down in the south at the time of Josiah’s reform, it would seem, and a prophet who struggled to communicate and explain the disaster that he saw his nation and his city go through. And we saw Ezekiel, a Judean prophet, a court figure who had — who was a part of the nobility and the intelligentsia of Judea that was carted off and taken in and deported and taken into exile, and who had his understanding and his explanation of why the nation was being destroyed. It was because of its religious abominations that it was practicing. We saw that vividly portrayed in Chapter 8 of Ezekiel. And we saw Haggai. By that time maybe these — seeing these political allegiances within Israel and the nation had dissolved. In the post-exilic point of time, what’s the point of hanging on to these kinds of allegiances. And Haggai and Zachariah, Zerubbabel and Joshua, worked together to rebuild the temple and to take one step toward reestablishing the temple state. Ezra and Nehemiah came on later. And we looked, though, at all the prophets as working toward and envisioning God’s actions happening in this world in this day, and they were intermediaries consulting and advising about what to do now in this realm to bring about salvation in this world. Time went on and hope for salvation in this world waned. And so with the writings we no longer see strict national and political borders and allegiances at this point. We looked at just a couple of examples. We looked at the Book of Job which is a wisdom book. And there it talks about universal truths. Not nationalistic truths. Not truths of a particular dynasty or a particular king such as Josiah, or a particular group of priests such as the priestly literature adhered to, but it looked at universal truths. The question it dealt with, the Book of Job, was a question of theodicy. Why do good things — bad things happen to good people? Why is it that we as a nation, fundamentally a REL 101 Lecture 37 7 good people, were destroyed and defeated and carted off into exile? Or literally, why was Job afflicted with horrible skin lesions and things when he was a righteous man? Then we have the Book of Daniel, chronologically the latest book in the Hebrew canon, and it’s made up of two parts. Court tales. Court tales call to faithfulness the — a nation or the Israelites, the Hebrew people — by that time they were referred to as Jews — who lived in foreign lands. And an apocalypse which expressed the hope and the conviction that God was in control and ultimately the righteous would be saved. And we even then wandered a little bit beyond the scope of the Hebrew Bible into the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scrolls that came later and reflected the hopes, dreams, aspirations of the Qumran community, a Qumran community that hoped for — that they would be the first of the righteous to receive salvation. They envisioned a time and positioned themselves where Elijah might return back from his chariot and bring him with the heavenly armies. They maintained — some of the communities would maintain a priestly ritual purity and they studied texts seeking out guidance from above as to how to interpret and understand the turbulance — the turbulant world in which they lived and from which they were very much disaffected. They were out of power, they were marginalized, and they had little control over their own fate. Where was the salvation for them in that world? And that’s the kind of community we saw when we glimped at it at Qumran. Multiple communities searching for a more perfect way of life. Well, this romp through the Hebrew Bible and through all of its diverse views and pictures and stories and literature, ultimately it is a reflection of the human experience, a human experience that is just as valid today as it was back then. It is a struggle ultimately for peace or the Hebrew word would be shalom. And the peace that they’re talking about is not a lack of violence or a lack of war, but it is the sensation that comes over a person when everything is in its proper place and everything is done. I tell my students that shalom is what you feel like when you’ve turned in your last paper and REL 101 Lecture 37 10 the Declaration of Independence, this pursuit of happiness, and I think that’s why this course is — has a role to play at Missouri State University where we have a public affairs mission, a mission that hopefully develops educated people to be thoughtful citizens in this global society. Not just of our own nation, but of the entire world. Let’s return back to Jerusalem and take again a few looks at Jerusalem today. Jerusalem today is not only the capital of Israel and not only was it the capital of the Hebrew Bible. Jerusalem today is claimed by great traditions — Islam, Christianity, Judaism — as their holy site, as their holy city. Certainly it makes Jerusalem a cosmopolitan city, but it also makes Jerusalem a center for strife and war and terrorism. It has not, unfortunately, brought about any kind of sense of shalom or peace. And this is just one issue that we as global citizens face. It’s just one issue that we as global citizens should concern ourselves with. This is the issue in 2006. My guess is that ten years from now, if this course is still being shown, it will still be perhaps the major issue facing global citizens today, in their day in 2016. No matter the case, global citizens are going to need to look at the major public issues and I hope that this course has some sort of a role in filling up the kinds of understanding, the kind of wisdom, and the kind of tolerance needed to deal with whatever the issue is. This understanding of this distant history and the way these ideas in this literature played out in a distant history, I think, can lead us to a better understanding of our modern recent history. I hope that this understanding, then, again leads to a wise approach to issues dealing with the Middle East, but to issues dealing here locally and nationally and all around the world. I think that these elements — understanding, wisdom, tolerance — are essential for a global citizen seeking again to provide all citizens, all the citizens around the world, with the opportunity and the liberty to pursue their deep-seated happiness, their ultimate concern. I know that this course isn’t going to accomplish all of this, but I certainly hope it REL 101 Lecture 37 11 took some significant steps along this way. Thank you for being a part of this course and I appreciate the opportunity to be here to teach it. I’ve enjoyed it a great deal. Thank you.