Paul tells the story of Abraham, Hagar, Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac as an allegory (Galatians 4). He’s not reading into the text. He’s reading an allegory out of the text, an allegory that would have been evident to Israelite readers of the exodus generation. Hagar is the first human being in the Bible to venture into the wilderness, and she does it twice (Genesis 16, 21). The first time, she’s alone. Yahweh finds her by a spring of water (16:7)... Read more
Anthony Flint’s forthcoming biography of Le Corbusier, Modern Man, recounts the architect’s famous exploits, sexual, artistic, intellectual. It’s a lively story, breezily written. What surprises is the impact that what Flint characterizes as a “side trip” to the Carthusian Monastery of Val D’ema had on the architect. The honeycomb of small, high-ceilinged rooms, the conjunction of common areas and zones for private reflection. Each cell had a garden, and a view of the country. Gothic style, he said in a... Read more
The TLS reviewer of David Gange’s Dialogues with the Dead and Bob Brier’s Egyptomania catalogues some of the Egyptian trinkets that amused Victorians: “Victorian ladies wore sarcophagi charms and brooches of winged scarabs; men’s coat buttons were embossed with pharaohs’ heads. ‘Egyptian’ cigarettes were all the rage along with smoking paraphernalia, some of whose motifs were unintentionally portentous, like the gold cigarette cases inscribed with scenes from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, cigarette holders featuring Anubis ushering the deceased into the... Read more
Hugh Thomas’s World Without End is the final installment of his trilogy on imperialism in the century after Columbus. It focuses on what Thomas calls the “age of administration,” the age (in the words of the Economist reviewer) “in which professional officials, many of them clerics, gradually took over from conquistadors.” Thomas isn’t satisfied with standard accounts of Philip or the Spanish empire: “Lord Thomas wants to rehabilitate both. He portrays the monarch not as an intolerant control-freak but as a cultured... Read more
Traci Slatton, novelist wife of sculptor Sabin Howard, is ecstatic about sculpture. Her 2011 Art of Life is a passionate, occasionally overwrought, defense of sculpture as the master art, filled with photos of her husband’s stunning classical figures. She points out the complexity of sculpting. While a painting presents a single angle of vision, determined by the painter, “sculpture shows an infinite number of views, including eight principle views, as a viewer walks around a piece. Each view has to be... Read more
In his Criticism of Heaven, Roland Boer lays out a taxonomy of how Marxism has related to the Bible. There are three categories: biblical Marxism, Catholic Marxism, and the “Protestant turn.” In the first category are Marxists like Ernst Block and Walter Benjamin who interact with Christianity primarily by attention to the Bible. “Catholic” Marxists are thinkers like Althusser, Lefebvre, Gramsci, and Eagleton who either worked in Catholic countries or were themselves Catholics. The Protestant turn is more recent: “In Slavoj... Read more
The final chapters of Isaiah are a letdown. From chapter 40 on, Isaiah has given a brilliant portrait of the coming redemption, a return from exile. Yahweh will return to His people. His Servant will bring justice to the nations. Gentile kings – Cyrus especially – will build Yahweh’s house. Exiles will return, so many that they won’t be able to fit in Jerusalem. Zion’s lost children will be found, her heartbreak mended, her disrupted marriage repaired. With chapter 63,... Read more
Yahweh promises Abram a son, but he grows old. He knows that his son will come from his own flesh (Genesis 15) but he doesn’t yet know that Sarai will be the mother (cf. Genesis 17). Sarai comes up with a plan: Hagar can serve as surrogate. Sarai’s goal is to obtain children, but the Hebrew of Genesis 16:2 says literally “perhaps I can build [myself] from her.” For Sarai, having a son is a construction project, which builds her.... Read more
In a 2001 article in History of Religious, Guy Stroumsa hightlights the role of John Spencer’s De legibus hebraeorum ritualibus (1685), sometime master of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, in the development of evolutionary and scientific studies of religion. Spencer, in turn, drew heavily on Jewish sources. Stroumsa writes, “Spencer was quite aware that his book came in the wake of a long tradition in medieval Jewish theology, on the question of the reasons of the Divine Commandments . . . . Since Saadia... Read more
Shlomo Sand argues in How I Stopped Being A Jew that “he foundations on which the State of Israel was created were essentially laid by socialists from the various Eastern European nations. These individuals were secularists who rebelled against Judaism, yet they were forced none the less to adopt from the start key markers of the religious tradition, including the Jewish communitarian ethic intrinsic to it.” Colonization of Palestine was justified by appeal to the Bible, as the “religious myth of... Read more
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