Browsing by Author "Davis, Ellen F"

ABSTRACTThis thesis is offers exilic texts as the basis for restoration for communities traumatized by displacement. The scriptural focus for the thesis is Jeremiah 30-33, the Book of Restoration. The purpose of the thesis is to provide tools for inner-city pastors to navigate the opportunities and challenges of displacement caused by gentrification. The thesis is fueled by the contrast between numerous studies that report the benefits of gentrification versus its ills experienced as a pastoral witness of the machinery of displacement in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. In Dr. Ellen Davis’ work on Jeremiah, she shows Jeremiah’s painful growth into his prophetic role. This growth occurs through laments or “protests addressed to God” thus making it possible to “lay claim to realistic hope.” This birth of hope is in the beginning of the book in Jeremiah 1:10, “See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant,” with building and planting as themes for Jeremiah 30-33. Dr. Davis further explicates hope’s placement. Hope finds a concrete place economically through Jeremiah’s land purchase (Chapter 32:6-15) and socially through community building (chapters 30 and 31). Building upon this work, my thesis concludes that Book of Restoration provides a relevant and effective model of restoration for today’s church.

Genesis is central to both hegemonic and counterhegemonic conceptions of communal identity. Read one way, the book undergirds contemporary assumptions about the nature of communality and the categories through which it is constructed. Read another way, however, it undermines them. This project considers these two readings of Genesis, their asymmetrical approaches to the book, and the intersection between them.

Using family storytelling as an approach to biblical interpretation allows this study to hold together the constitution of the reading community and the interpretation of the biblical text. In a Eurocentric reading of Genesis, the constitution of the reading community governs engagement of the biblical text. Conversely, in the YHWH-centric reading advocated here, the biblical text governs the constitution of the reading community. This study reopens the question of what it means to be an "us" rather than leaving participation in an "us" as an (often unacknowledged) a priori condition of all interpretation. In doing so it does not deny the existence or the significance of such preexisting commitments, but rather it refuses to regard those commitments as fixed and final.

From an exegetical standpoint, this study challenges Eurocentrism by finding in Genesis a vision of communality that, in emphasizing the importance of living out the relatedness of all humans to one another and to God, holds the potential for more fruitful relationships between communities. From a methodological standpoint, it offers a reading of Genesis that incorporates features of the text that have been neglected by colonizing readings and avoids the difficulties and internal inconsistencies from which they suffer. Making use of Benedict Anderson's account of the relationship between the imagined community of the nation and religiously imagined communities, as well as Jonathan Sheehan's account of the Enlightenment Bible, this study argues that certain ways of reading the Bible arose to help the West articulate its sense of itself and its others. Drawing attention to the text's reception and the way in which Eurocentric approaches displace Jews and marginalize (the West's) others, this project considers alternative ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the Bible and those who call it their own.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modern historical-critical study of the book of Isaiah succeeded in showing that the text emerged in stages over perhaps three hundred years, rather than as the fully formed product of a preexilic prophet. This mode of inquiry resulted in the widespread assumption that Isaiah is best approached as at least three distinct texts that express little if any intrinsic relationship with each other. The rise of literary criticism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, reminded readers that the Bible deserves to be studied as a body of theological literature regardless of the multiplicity of authorial contexts from which it derives. Overcoming Isaiah’s well-established diachronic fragmentation, however, has proven no straightforward task; readers have often and understandably resorted to thematic generalizations in their effort to describe the whole. The differences characteristic of these two approaches to Isaiah reflect the methodological splintering of biblical studies at large, where analysis of a text’s literary shape and theological message is frequently pitted against its rich history of composition.

Recent research has begun to ask a more profitable, interdisciplinary set of questions: What is the relationship between Isaiah’s diachronic development and its final form, and what might synchronic analysis of its final form teach us about its history of composition? Indeed, as several scholars have pointed out, a synchronic examination of Isaiah’s language and argument is a necessary first step in making accurate judgments regarding its diachronic development. Fresh inquiry into the book’s synchronic shape that does not ignore the history and culture from which it arose therefore represents a leading edge in Isaiah studies today.

History and Hope: The Agrarian Wisdom of Isaiah 28–35 examines the rhetorical function of Isa 28–35, a relatively overlooked series of six woe-oracles, in relation to the reader’s encounter with the book of Isaiah as a whole. At a diachronic level, the project seeks to improve the historical model that typically informs scholars’ perceptions of Isaiah’s construction. Through comparisons to the thought and practice of several contemporary agrarian thinkers, it draws attention to the holistic, agrarian worldview of the people who wrote and transmitted the Bible. This comparison suggests that an “agrarian hermeneutic” provides a historically- and phenomenologically-appropriate lens by which to examine the eight chapters in question. At a synchronic level, the project uses modern literary theory to describe the written text’s “epistemological layering,” thereby accounting for important differences between characters and readers. When combined with an agrarian hermeneutic, this move opens scholarly understanding of Isaiah’s written rhetoric to the associative logic by which it is constructed, and which is everywhere evident in the “intratextual” web of Leitwörter, motifs, and recurring ideas that run throughout the book. Through careful, exegetical analysis of Isa 28–35 in its sequential unfolding relative to the book as a whole, the project argues that these eight chapters use the language of agrarian wisdom to issue a call to obedience that transports the reader from prior reflections on historical destruction into a vision of ultimate hope.

This project explores the relationship between Christian discipleship and intimacy with God. Appreciating that many discipleship models focus exclusively on the New Testament and speak minimally to the soul’s ability to love, my own approach finds its base in the Old Testament, concentrating primarily on the Song of Songs and the Shema as texts that convey intimacy and love toward God.

My research will present a study on intimate discipleship that culminates in the form of a curriculum, but it will first survey a range of existing discipleship curricula. There are several excellent teaching resources draw on Matthew 28 to propose strategies about how to effectively make (and in some cases, mature) disciples, but the deep-seated religiopolitical tensions of our day are not simply calling for the making of new disciples; they are pressing Christians to assess the quality of our discipleship. Accordingly, my thesis will argue that to reclaim a more comprehensive discipleship, our conversation about faith practice should commence not with the Great Commission but rather the Great Commandment, which is derived from the Shema.

This project explores the relationship between Christian discipleship and intimacy with God. Appreciating that many discipleship models focus exclusively on the New Testament and speak minimally to the soul’s ability to love, my own approach finds its base in the Old Testament, concentrating primarily on the Song of Songs and the Shema as texts that convey intimacy and love toward God.

My research will present a study on intimate discipleship that culminates in the form of a curriculum, but it will first survey a range of existing discipleship curricula. There are several excellent teaching resources draw on Matthew 28 to propose strategies about how to effectively make (and in some cases, mature) disciples, but the deep-seated religiopolitical tensions of our day are not simply calling for the making of new disciples; they are pressing Christians to assess the quality of our discipleship. Accordingly, my thesis will argue that to reclaim a more comprehensive discipleship, our conversation about faith practice should commence not with the Great Commission but rather the Great Commandment, which is derived from the Shema.

With its description of God as wrathful and vengeful and its graphic depiction of war and violence, Nahum has often been treated as a dangerous book, both in church settings and in academic circles. This dissertation is an effort to confront violence, both in my community and in the book of Nahum. It is a contextual reading of Nahum against the background of the wars that have plagued my country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo since the early 1990s. It argues that Nahum’s description of God and its depiction of war scenes were meant to evoke in seventh-century BCE Judahite audiences the memory of war and destruction at the hands of the Assyrians. The vivid images of YHWH’s war against Nineveh do not give readers a historical report on the fall of Nineveh, neither do they intend to foreshadow the historical fall of that Neo-Assyrian capital city in 612 BCE. Rather, they more likely reflect the prophet-poet’s attempt to depict a world that would have spoken to the painful collective memory of those who survived the destruction of Lachish and other Judahite towns during Sennacherib’s invasion of Judah in 701 BCE. The prophet uses lyric poetry to evoke (rather than narrate) Judah’s memory of war and reveal the immediate and comforting presence of YHWH within the conditions of war. He presents that revelation by adapting two traditional literary forms, the biblical Oracle against foreign Nations (OAN) and the Ancient Near Eastern city lament. Given the rhetoric of the book within its early audience, I show that this book can also speak powerfully into the conditions of Congolese Christians who have suffered the trauma of war.

In this dissertation, I attend to historical receptions of Esther MT to illustrate problematic trends in the Christian use of the book and to identify avenues for the development of ethically responsible modern Christian approaches. The receptions under consideration—both Christian and Jewish—are principally premodern. I examine them with attention to the social locations of the communities from which they emerge and the dynamics of power and domination they reflect. An overview of Christian reception of Esther reveals a history of relatively sparse and at times openly hostile treatment of the book. It further shows that in Christian hands Esther has been viewed from an overwhelmingly serious aspect. More often than not, the book has been read from the perspective of and in overt alignment with the interests of the religiously and politically dominant. In striking contrast, the body of Jewish Esther receptions produced across the centuries is rich and abundant. While many of these works are serious in tone, there is also a prominent strand marked by humor, mirth, and play. Furthermore, many are recognizably written from the position and perspective of communities living on the underside of (usually Christian) domination. I contend such receptions reveal that Jewish communities recognized Esther MT as what James C. Scott terms a ‘hidden transcript’—literature responding to the experience of domination—and extended its work with hidden transcripts of their own. Beyond identifying and illustrating the above trends, the core contribution of this project is to read rabbinic Esther receptions through the lens of the hidden transcript. I illuminate ways in which the rabbis respond to contemporary experiences of domination through play with characters such as Haman and King Ahasuerus. I argue that such play is far from frivolous; instead, through play, the rabbis perform work of utmost ethical and theological importance, work worthy of modern attention. Given the harm they have perpetrated through both the use and neglect of this book, modern Christians reading from positions of power and seeking to develop appropriate responses to Esther must first attend to rabbinic and other Jewish voices from across history. In so doing, they will confront the discomforting fact that they often have been recognized as Haman-like villains by those whose survival Esther was written to support. They will also encounter teachers who model the ethical and theological possibilities of responding to a biblical text in what may be for them an unfamiliar mode: that of play.

Sacrifice often connotes death or some form of lack within popular discourse. The association of sacrifice with death is assumed in some strains of the Christian tradition that employ sacrifice within a penal substitutionary account of the atonement. In this framework, sacrifice is understood as death for the purposes of punishment. This dissertation challenges the identification of sacrifice with death. It presents a reinterpretation of sacrifice through a canonical and literary reading of Old and New Testament texts. Sacrificial practice displayed in Leviticus and Hebrews suggests that sacrifice is oriented at life rather than at death. Specifically, sacrifice in Leviticus aims toward a reinstatement of the good order of creation displayed in Genesis 1. The telos of the Levitical cult is humanity’s redemption and creation’s restoration. Both are achieved on the Day of Atonement described in Leviticus 16 as a Sabbath. Hebrews expands upon the sacrificial logic of Leviticus in presenting Christ’s resurrection as the perfection of the cult. Christ’s sacrifice is his resurrected body, not his death. Christians are called to participate in Christ’s sacrifice, and discipleship assumes a form that challenges society’s deathly sacrifices.

Unusually for the Hebrew Bible, the book of Jeremiah contains a high number of references to writers, writing, and the written word. Written during the exilic period, the book demonstrates a key moment in the ongoing integration of writing and the written word into ancient Israelite society. Yet the book does not describe writing in the abstract. Instead, it provides an account of its own textualization, thereby blurring the line between the narrative and the audience that receives it and connecting the text of Jeremiah to the words of the prophet and of YHWH.

To authenticate the book of Jeremiah as the word of YHWH, its tradents present a theological account of the chain of transmission from the divine to the prophet, and then to the scribe and the written page. Indeed, the book of Jeremiah extends the chain of transmission beyond the written word itself to include the book of Jeremiah and, finally, a receiving audience. To make the case for this chain of transmission, this study attends in each of three exegetical chapters to writers (including YHWH, prophets, and scribes), the written word, and the receiving audience. The first exegetical chapter describes the standard chain of transmission from the divine to the prophet to the scribe, demonstrating that all three agents in this chain are imagined as writers and that writing was a suitable conduit for the divine word. The narrative account of Jeremiah's textualization is set forth, with special attention to the way in which the narrative points beyond itself to the text of Jeremiah itself. The second exegetical chapter builds upon this argument by attending to the written word in Jeremiah, pointing especially to Jeremiah's self-references (e.g. "in this book," "all these words") as a pivotal element in the extension of the chain of transmission beyond the words in the text to the words of the text. Finally, the third exegetical chapter considers the construction of the audience in the book of Jeremiah, concluding that the written word, as Jeremiah imagines it, is to be received by a worshipping audience through a public reading.

The dissertation The Life of the World: The Vitality and Personhood of Non-Animal Nature in the Hebrew Bible addresses personalistic portrayals of non-animal nature (rocks, plants, soil, etc.) in the Hebrew Bible. Examples of personalistic nature texts include the obligation of the land to rest in Leviticus 25 and 26, the ground swallowing Korah in Numbers 16, the mourning of the land in the Prophets, and creation’s speech in Psalm 19. The primary theoretical framework is anthropological research on animist traditions, which is used to interrogate Western categories of personhood, relationality, and nature. Of particular importance is the work of Graham Harvey, Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viviero de Castro, Nurit Bird-David, and Timonthy Ingold. Based on parallels between biblical texts and animist traditions, it is argued that biblical writers perceived non-animal nature as alive; these texts do more than simply anthropomorphize nature. The dissertation traces the activity of non-animal nature through the three parts of the Jewish canon – Torah, Prophets, and Writings – and supports the argument by means of close reading. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, interactions between humans and non-animal nature are social and require respect and attention. The Israelite writers inhabit a world full of persons, only some of whom are human, and these other-than-human persons must be taken into account in agriculture, warfare, worship, and ethics.

The life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus are not often read against the backdrop of the sacrificial system of Leviticus, despite the fact that the Letter to the Hebrews and other New Testament texts do exactly this. Until recently, Hebrew Bible scholars had little insight into the function of many of the sacrifices of Leviticus. However, over the last thirty years, Jacob Milgrom has articulated the purgative function of the purification offering of Leviticus, the principal sacrifice offered for wrongdoing. The blood of the purification offering, which contains the animal's ,nefesh, best understood as the animating force of the animal, acts as a ritual cleanser. Milgrom has insisted that the purification offering only cleanses the sanctuary, never the offerer. This conclusion likely has kept many New Testament scholars from seeing the impact this sacrifice had on various New Testament authors. Thus although Milgrom's work has had a profound impact on Hebrew Bible scholarship, it has had little effect on New Testament scholarship on the sacrifice of Jesus.

Using source criticism and a close reading of the relevant Hebrew Bible texts and New Testament texts, this study argues that the purification offering of Leviticus can purge the offerer, as well as the sanctuary. Moreover, the logic of the purification offering of Leviticus informs many New Testament texts on the sacrificial offering of Jesus. Leviticus demonstrates that there is a relationship between the Israelites and the sanctuary. The wrongdoings and impurites of the Israelites can stain the sanctuary and sacrificial procedures done in and to the sanctuary can purge the Israelites. The purgation of the offerer takes place in two stages. In the first stage, described in Lev 4:1-5:13, the offerer moves from being guilt-laden to being forgiven. In the second stage, outlined in Lev 16, the sanctuary is purged of the wrongdoings and impurities of the Israelites. The Israelites shift from being forgiven to being declared pure. The Israelites cannot be pure until the sanctuary is purged and reconsecrated.

The Letter to the Hebrews, along with other New Testament texts, articulates the same process and results for the sacrificial offering of Jesus. The emphasis in Hebrews and elsewhere in the New Testament is on the power (typically the cleansing power) of Jesus' blood. Jesus' death is necessary but insufficient. Hebrews clearly asserts that it was through the offering of Jesus' blood in the heavenly sanctuary that the heavenly things were cleansed, and more importantly, that believers were cleansed. Hebrews also articulates a two-stage process for the transformation of believers. In the first stage, believers are cleansed by Jesus' sacrificial offering in heaven. However, believers anticipate a final rest after Jesus' return when their flesh will be transformed as Jesus' flesh was after his resurrection. This transformation allows believers to dwell in harmony with and in proximity to God. The logic of the purification offering of Leviticus, then, informs the Letter to the Hebrews and other New Testament texts.

The book of Leviticus literarily portrays an encounter between YHWH and Israel that is mediated through discourse. In keeping with the priestly creation account, the book of Leviticus shows the divine discourse at Sinai to be a world- and people-shaping constitutive force: new forms of life are generated that take shape in the daily rhythms of Israel’s cultic and communal life in the wilderness. Although the divine instructions are not directly addressed to the twenty-first century reader, an unconventional use of literary techniques destabilizes a clear sense of grammatical tense or narrative time so that the reader is included in the discourse mediated through the text. This suggests the intriguing notion that the experience of reading Leviticus, maximally understood as the various stages of reading and study that are involved in the process of interpretation, may be analogous to Israel’s experience of encountering the divine discourse at Sinai. This study thus examines the notion of discourse as a way to open up a new understanding of the kind of text that Leviticus is and how it may communicate in the text-reader relationship.

Although recent scholarship has seen a resurgence of interest in Leviticus, the book’s basic character as discourse has largely been overlooked. Scholarly treatments have overwhelmingly focused on what Leviticus may have “said” in its historical context rather than what it may “say” in the contemporary discourse between text and reader. In conversation with Paul Ricoeur and George Steiner, this study argues that the literary presentation of Leviticus asks us to approach the text as a potential conversation partner. It articulates a notion of interpretation as a process of coming to recognize the life-possibilities on offer in the vision of life that a text portrays. This construal of the task and aim of interpretation enables the discourse of Leviticus to generate new ways of thinking and being for contemporary reading communities, as demonstrated through three exegetical probes that seek to connect the function of speech in the priestly writers’ portrayal of life in the wilderness community to the ways that speech is enacted in contemporary discourse. The study concludes that the vision of life that the priestly writers project in the book of Leviticus opens up a number of promising directions of thought that can generate new life-possibilities in and for contemporary reading communities.

The book of Leviticus literarily portrays an encounter between YHWH and Israel that is mediated through discourse. In keeping with the priestly creation account, the book of Leviticus shows the divine discourse at Sinai to be a world- and people-shaping constitutive force: new forms of life are generated that take shape in the daily rhythms of Israel’s cultic and communal life in the wilderness. Although the divine instructions are not directly addressed to the twenty-first century reader, an unconventional use of literary techniques destabilizes a clear sense of grammatical tense or narrative time so that the reader is included in the discourse mediated through the text. This suggests the intriguing notion that the experience of reading Leviticus, maximally understood as the various stages of reading and study that are involved in the process of interpretation, may be analogous to Israel’s experience of encountering the divine discourse at Sinai. This study thus examines the notion of discourse as a way to open up a new understanding of the kind of text that Leviticus is and how it may communicate in the text-reader relationship.

Although recent scholarship has seen a resurgence of interest in Leviticus, the book’s basic character as discourse has largely been overlooked. Scholarly treatments have overwhelmingly focused on what Leviticus may have “said” in its historical context rather than what it may “say” in the contemporary discourse between text and reader. In conversation with Paul Ricoeur and George Steiner, this study argues that the literary presentation of Leviticus asks us to approach the text as a potential conversation partner. It articulates a notion of interpretation as a process of coming to recognize the life-possibilities on offer in the vision of life that a text portrays. This construal of the task and aim of interpretation enables the discourse of Leviticus to generate new ways of thinking and being for contemporary reading communities, as demonstrated through three exegetical probes that seek to connect the function of speech in the priestly writers’ portrayal of life in the wilderness community to the ways that speech is enacted in contemporary discourse. The study concludes that the vision of life that the priestly writers project in the book of Leviticus opens up a number of promising directions of thought that can generate new life-possibilities in and for contemporary reading communities.

This thesis outlines how a Christian leader can guide the faithful to live their life rightly in light of true stories of God, self, Church, and Creation. Each of us perceives, contextualizes, and interprets our experiences in life through our social imaginary, an interpretive framework that is narratively and communally formed. This social imaginary can be distorted by false stories that corrupt our understanding of what gives meaning to our lives, leading us to embrace destructive desires and no longer live in harmony with God’s intention for us. To unlearn such false stories and to re-form our social imaginary in harmony with God’s true stories is the work of narrative repentance, a cooperative effort of priest, parishioner, and God to heal our souls from the corrosive spiritual affliction of sin. Narrative repentance encompasses the human work of purifying our social imaginary from false stories and the hoped-for divine work of revealing to us the true story of our soul through divine illumination and communion with the life of the Holy Trinity. Understanding narrative repentance as a pastoral principle that underlies all pastoral work impacts the Christian leader’s effective practice of preaching, teaching, and worship. Most notably, an understanding of narrative repentance allows a Christian leader to enter the sacred space of parishioners’ social imaginaries and collaborate with them in unlearning false stories of God, self, Church, and Creation, and in adopting the true stories that may free them from captivity to their distorted desires and thus allow them to live freely in the world as witnesses to God’s love and the joy of life in His Kingdom.