Biblical Terror

In this book, Phyllis Trible examines four Old Testament narratives of suffering in ancient Israel: Hagar, Tamar, an unnamed concubine and the daughter of Jephthah. These stories are for Trible the "substance of life", which may imspire new beginnings and by interpreting these stories of outrage and suffering on behalf of their female victims, the author recalls a past that is all to embodied in the present, and prays that these terrors shall not come to pass again. "Texts of Terror" is perhaps Trible's most readable book, that brings biblical scholarship within the grasp of the non-specialist. These "sad stories" about women in the Old Testament prompt much refelction on contemporary misuse of the Bible, and therefore have considerable relevance today.

"It is widely recognized that the Hebrew Bible is filled with rape and sexual violence. However, feminist approaches to the topic remain dominated by Phyllis Trible's 1984 Texts of Terror, which describes feminist criticism as a practice of "telling sad stories." Pushing beyond Trible, Texts after Terror offers a new framework for reading biblical sexual violence, one that draws on recent work in feminist, queer, and affect theory and activism against sexual violence and rape culture. In the Hebrew Bible as in the contemporary world, sexual violence is frequently fuzzy, messy, and icky. Fuzzy names the ambiguity and confusion that often surround experiences of sexual violence. Messy identifies the consequences of rape, while also describing messy sex and bodies. Icky points out the ways that sexual violence fails to fit into neat patterns of evil perpetrators and innocent victims. Building on these concepts, Texts after Terror offers a number of new feminist strategies and approaches to sexual violence: critiquing the framework of consent, offering new models of sexual harm, emphasizing the importance of relationships between women (even in the context of stories of heterosexual rape), reading biblical rape texts with and through contemporary texts written by survivors, advocating for "unhappy reading" that makes unhappiness and open-endedness into key feminist sites of possibility. Texts after Terror also discusses a wide range of biblical rape stories, including Dinah (Gen. 43), Tamar (2 Sam. 13), Lot's daughters (Gen. 19), Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11), Hagar (Gen. 16 and 21), Daughter Zion (Lam. 1 and 2), and the Levite's concubine (Judg. 19)"--

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. For biblical authors and readers, law and restoration are central concepts in the Bible, but they were not always so. To trace out the formation of those biblical concepts as elements in defensive strategies, Cataldo uses as conversational starting points theories from Zizek, Foucault and Deleuze, all of whom emphasize relation and difference. This work argues that the more modern assumption that biblical authors wrote their texts presupposing a central importance for those concepts is backwards. On the contrary, law and restoration were made central only through and after the writing of the biblical texts - in particular, those that were concerned with protecting the community from threats to its identity as the "remnant". Modern Bible readers, Cataldo argues, must renegotiate how they understand law and restoration and come to terms with them as concepts that emerged out of more selfish concerns of a community on the margins of imperial political power.

Meandering between desert sands and skyscrapers, between past, present, and alternate timelines, "She Nailed a Stake Through His Head" is a gallery of horrors inspired by the most nightmarish images of Near Eastern cultures.

In this seminal work of biblical studies, renowned scholar Phyllis Trible focuses on four variations on the theme of terror in the Bible. By combining the discipline of literary criticism with the hermeneutics of feminism, she reinterprets the tragic stories of four women in ancient Israel: Hagar, Tamar, an unnamed concubine, and the daughter of Jephthah. In highlighting the silence, absence, and opposition of God, as well as human cruelty, Trible shows how these neglected stories--interpreted in memoriam--challenge both the misogyny of Scripture and its use in church, synagogue, and academy.

In this seminal work of biblical scholarship, Phyllis Trible focuses on four variations on the theme of terror in the Bible as she reinterprets the stories of four women in ancient Israel. Trible shows how these neglected stories--interpreted in memoriam--challenge both the misogyny of Scripture and its use in church, synagogue, and academy.

This is the shocking truth: Jesus was a zealot who wanted to be King of Israel. The apostles and disciples were members of his family, by blood and by marriage, and they went on to wage a war against Rome. Far from converting, Saul, the false apostle, remained malicious and vindictive to the end. Saul invented Christianity, borrowing the rituals of a pagan religion, Mithraism. The gospels are a deliberately scrambled version of Jewish zealot propaganda with characters, who were Jewish warriors, stolen and subverted by Christian writers.

Completely revised and updated, this new edition of Terror in the Mind of God incorporates the events of September 11, 2001 into Mark Juergensmeyer's landmark study of religious terrorism. Juergensmeyer explores the 1993 World Trade Center explosion, Hamas suicide bombings, the Tokyo subway nerve gas attack, and the killing of abortion clinic doctors in the United States. His personal interviews with 1993 World Trade Center bomber Mahmud Abouhalima, Christian Right activist Mike Bray, Hamas leaders Sheik Yassin and Abdul Azis Rantisi, and Sikh political leader Simranjit Singh Mann, among others, take us into the mindset of those who perpetrate and support violence in the name of religion.

Hailed in Sacred Scripture as the “beginning of wisdom” (Ps 111:10), the “fear of the Lord” is seldom mentioned and little understood today. A gift of the Spirit and a moral virtue or disposition, the “fear of the Lord” also frequently entails emotional experiences of differing kinds: compunction, dread, reverence, wonderment, and awe. Starting with the Bible itself, this collection of seventeen essays explores the place of holy fear in Christian spirituality from the early church to the present and argues that this fear is paradoxically linked in various ways to fear’s seeming opposite, love. Indeed, the charged dynamic of love and fear accounts for different experiences and expressions of Christian life in response to changing historical circumstances and events. The writings of the theologians, mystics, philosophers, saints, and artists studied here reveal the relationship between the fear and the love of God to be profoundly challenging and mysterious, its elements paradoxically conjoined in a creative tension with each other, but also tending to oscillate back-and-forth in the history of Christian spirituality as first one, then the other, comes to the fore, sometimes to correct a perceived imbalance, sometimes at the risk of losing its companion altogether. Given this historical pattern, clearly evident in these chronologically arranged essays, the palpable absence of a discourse of holy fear from the mainstream theological landscape should give us pause and invite us to consider if and how—under what aspect, in which contexts—a holy fear, inseparable from love, might be regained or discovered anew within Christian spirituality as a remedy both for a crippling anxiety and for a presumptive recklessness. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Christian spirituality, theology, biblical studies, religious studies, and religion and literature. Contributors: Ann W. Astell, Pieter G. R. de Villiers, Donna R. Hawk-Reinhard, John Sehorn, Catherine Rose Cavadini, Joseph Wawrykow, Robert Boenig, Ralph Keen, Wendy M. Wright, Ephraim Radner, Julia A. Lamm, Cyril O’Regan, Brenna Moore, Maj-Britt Frenze, and Todd Walatka

Professor Trible focuses on four variations upon the theme of terror in the Bible. By combining the discipline of literary criticism with the hermeneutics of feminism, she reinterprets the tragic stories of four women in ancient Israel: Hagar, Tamar, an unnamed concubine, and the daughter of Jephthah. In highlighting the silence, absence, and oppostition of God, as well as human cruelty, Trible shows how these neglected stories—interpreted in memoriam—challenge both the misogyny of Scripture and its use in church, synagogue, and academy.