Marriage Metaphor And Feminine Imagery In Jer 21 42

Sharon Moughtin-Mumby explores the complex, and potentially subversive, power of metaphor as a tool of persuasion in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. Often such language is used to speak of the worship of gods other than Yhwh, of undesirable cultic practices, or of political alliances with foreign nations. Evaluating several schools of language and biblical criticism, including a Traditional approach, a Feminist critique and a Literary-historical investigation, Moughtin-Mumby brings lucid new readings with a fresh perspective to these dramatic texts. The study emphasises the importance of context for understanding metaphorical meaning and challenges previous scholarship which has read such language in terms of the traditional concept of 'the marriage metaphor' and the hypothetical background of cultic prostitution.

Marital Imagery in the Bible. It can only be imagined that when the New Testament writers made their (albeit brief) comments on divorce and remarriage that they assumed they would be understood. So what has gone wrong? In the years after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, when Graeco-Roman culture was at its height, the Jewish perspective of marriage and divorce, and thus the context of those brief New Testament comments was lost. The Christian church of that era was influenced by the neoplatonic ideas of the day, and an idealised concept of marriage developed from on Adam and Eve’s marriage recorded in Genesis 2:23—it was love at first sight, a marriage made in heaven. These concepts frame an understanding of marriage in much of Western culture even today. However, that was never the understanding of ancient Israel. Instead they looked to Genesis 2:24: ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’—so a naturally born man chooses a wife for himself, and their union was based on a ‘covenant’—in other words an agreement. The Old Testament makes it clear what the basis of that agreement was. Furthermore, it is clear, if that agreement was broken, there could be a divorce and a remarriage. All the Bible’s marital imagery (where the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures imagine that God is married to his people) is based on that understanding of human marriage. But so strong is our concept of marriage, that when Genesis 2:24 is referred to in the New Testament, it is thought that the reference is to Adam and Eve’s marriage. It is a paradigmatic marriage that for many excludes (or greatly restricts) the possibility of divorce and remarriage. This study looks to challenge that paradigm—and to suggest that the New Testament writers would not have employed an imagery which had at its center divorce and remarriage, only to deny the possibility of such in their own human marriage teaching. Colin Hamer’s thesis represents the only recent work on metaphor theory in biblical scholarship. It challenges centuries of academic scholarship and ecclesiastical assumptions about divorce. Hamer’s detailed and well researched analysis challenges the consensus view that the marriage of Adam and Eve in Gen 2:24 represents an ontological unity, suggesting important implications for contemporary Christian teaching on marriage and divorce.

Multifaceted insights into female life in prophetic contexts Both prophets and prophetesses shared God’s divine will with the people of Israel, yet the voices of these women were often forgotten due to later prohibitions against women teaching in public. This latest volume of the Bible and Women series focuses on the intersection of gender and prophecy in the Former Prophets (Joshua to 2 Kings) as well as in the Latter Prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Essays examine how women appear in the iconography of the ancient world, the historical background of the phenomenon of prophecy, political and religious resistance by women in the biblical text, and gender symbolism and constructions in prophetic material as well as the metaphorical discourse of God. Contributors Michaela Bauks, Athalya Brenner-Idan, Ora Brison, L. Juliana Claassens, Marta García Fernández, Irmtraud Fischer, Maria Häusl, Rainer Kessler, Nancy C. Lee, Hanne Løland Levinson, Christl M. Maier, Ilse Müllner, Martti Nissinen, Ombretta Pettigiani, Ruth Poser, Benedetta Rossi, Silvia Schroer, and Omer Sergi draw insight into the texts from a range of innovative gender-oriented approaches.

The Hebrew Bible offers a metaphor of marriage that portrays men and women as complementary, each with their distinct and 'natural' roles. Queer Theory and the Prophetic Marriage Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible draws on contemporary scholarship to critique this hetero-normativity. The book examines the methodological issues involved in the application of queer theory to biblical texts and draws on the concept of gender performativity - the construction of gender through action and behaviour - to argue for the potential of queer theory in political readings of the Bible. The central role of metaphor in reinforcing gender performativity is examined in relation to the books of Jeremiah, Hosea and Ezekiel. The book offers a radical reassessment of the relationship between biblical language and gender identity.

“In my bibliographies there are no women in the evangelical tradition, and no Australian women scholars.” This unique volume addresses this gap, with eighteen biblically rich and academically rigorous chapters by established and emerging Australian women scholars in the evangelical tradition. The authors consider our relationship with the land and Indigenous peoples, neighborhood, embodiment, (dis)ability, abortion, leadership, work, architecture, the media, Song of Songs and domestic violence, and Jeremiah and weaponized rape, and demonstrate recent methodologies such as a social identity reading of Exodus, sensory readings of Psalms and John’s Gospel, and discipleship readings of Mary and Martha and the woman at the well. A contemporary Kriol psalm and stories of pioneering Australian women theological students and teachers complete the volume. Valuable for students and teachers across Bible, theology, ministry, and practice subjects, this book is an essential inclusion in any theological library.

The cross of Christ is undeniably central to the Christian faith. But, how can the cruelty and brutality of a two-thousand-year-old Roman cross touch base with a hedonistic world that has been so desensitized towards violence? Within the postmodern setting of a body-obsessed culture, Christianity urgently requires an innovative and stimulating way of understanding the cross and its atoning significance. At the heart of this book is the Naked Christ--an emblem through which the author draws on the rich resources of the Christian tradition in its portrayal of the cross. He explores how the metaphors of nakedness and clothing can encapsulate aspects of atonement and enable them to be understood within a variety of contemporary contexts. The Naked Christ is a useful resource for anyone seeking fresh ways to express what the cross of Christ means to contemporary culture.

This book explores figurative images of the womb and the simile of a woman in labor from the Hebrew Bible, problematizing previous interpretations that present these as disparate images and showing how their interconnectivity embodies relationship with YHWH. In the Hebrew Bible, images of the womb and the pregnant body in labor do not co-occur despite being grounded in an image of a whole pregnant female body; the pregnant body is instead fragmented into these two constituent parts, and scholars have continued to interpret these images separately with no discussion of their interconnectivity. In this book, Langton explores the relationship between these images, inviting readers into a wider conversation on how the pregnant body functions as a means to an end, a place to access and seek a relationship with YHWH. Readers are challenged and asked to rethink how these images have been interpreted within feminist scholarship, with womb imagery depicting YHWH’s care for creation or performing the acts of a midwife, and the pregnant body in labor as a depiction of crisis. Langton explores select texts depicting these images, focusing on the corporeal experience and discussing direct references and allusions to the physicality of a pregnant body within these texts. This approach uncovers ancient and current androcentric ideology which dictates that conception, gestation, and birth must be controlled not by the female body, but by YHWH. The Womb and the Simile of the Woman in Labor in the Hebrew Bible is of interest to students and scholars working on the Hebrew Bible, gender in the Bible and the Near East more broadly, and feminist biblical criticism.

In his commentary on Hosea, H. W. Wolff proposed that the divine marriage metaphor is the central metaphor of the entire OT. In Hebrew prophetic books, the metaphor reflected the covenantal relationship between Yahweh and his people. No other metaphor reached as deeply into the heart of this relationship or better described the tragedy of a broken relationship between Yahweh and his people. No other metaphor expressed more fully the abundance of God's grace shown in the promise of covenant restoration and renewal in the eschaton. In this volume, Polish Reformed academic Sebastian Smolarz demonstrates that the divine marriage metaphor is also one of the leading NT metaphors used to describe God's restored covenant relationship with his people, especially in the Book of Revelation. Smolarz argues for continuity between OT and NT concepts and theologies in general, and for continuity between the Apocalypse and OT material in particular, showing that the Apocalypse has much in common with other parts of the NT. In doing so, he focuses on some Gospel parables and reads them against their OT background. He also examines instances of the divine marriage metaphor in Paul's theological reflections. The focus of Smolarz' volume is a covenantal reading of the Apocalypse. He argues that the metaphor helps to establish the Apocalypse's Sitz im Leben, which he relates to the main conflict between the faithful and the unfaithful within the people of God in the first century CE. His work establishes that the Apocalypse contains not only explicit instances, but also implicit references and many echoes of this covenantal metaphor.

This publication is significant within the field of Jewish studies and beyond; the essays include comparative material and have the potential to reach scholarly audiences in many related fields but are written to be accessible to all, with the introductions in every chapter aimed at orienting the enthusiast from outside academia to each time and place.

This volume showcases recent exploration of the portrait of Daughter Zion as “she” appears in biblical Hebrew poetry. Using Carleen Mandolfo’s Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets (Society of Biblical Literature, 2007) as a point of departure, the contributors to this volume explore the image of Daughter Zion in its many dimensions in various texts in the Hebrew Bible. Approaches used range from poetic, rhetorical, and linguistic to sociological and ideological. To bring the conversation full circle, Carleen Mandolfo engages in a dialogic response with her interlocutors. The contributors are Mark J. Boda, Mary L. Conway, Stephen L. Cook, Carol J. Dempsey, LeAnn Snow Flesher, Michael H. Floyd, Barbara Green, John F. Hobbins, Mignon R. Jacobs, Brittany Kim, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Christl M. Maier, Carleen Mandolfo, Jill Middlemas, Kim Lan Nguyen, and Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer.