Allegorical Epic

Last updated on: February 14, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Christopher Warner argues in The Augustinian Epic that Renaissance epic and medieval exegesis share two crucial features. First, both share an interest in history, but one that aims to peer behind the veil of fact into the allegorical meaning of facts. Petrarch’s epic of the Second Punic War and Tasso’s on the first crusade aren’t “historical” in contrast the “allegorical”: “Rather than judging that these poems’ bases in history oppose them to allegorical literature, as is frequently done, we might perceive... Read more

Bah Humbug

Last updated on: February 14, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Felicity Morse is the self-appointed Grinch of Valentine’s day: “Walk into any shop and you’re practically attacked by romance. Angry red hearts dangle threateningly from ceiling tiles, cushions shouting LOVE are scattered accusingly across displays, and judgmental teddies guard stands like scornful sentinels. It’s not just in gift shops anymore either, even our food has to be heart-shaped. This annoys me most. It is far more difficult to binge eat into oblivion my fear that I will be forever alone when... Read more

Cain/Abel, Saul/Jonathan

Last updated on: February 14, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Saul’s three sins in 1 Samuel 13-15 correspond to the sins of Adam, Cain, and the sons of God. Like Adam, he sins with regard to worship; like Cain, he attacks his fellow Israelites; like the sons of God, he makes an alliance with an enemy. At each point, of course, there is a variation. He doesn’t eat forbidden fruit, but offers a prohibited sacrifice. He doesn’t intermarry with Gentiles but refuses to kill one, king Agag of the Amalekites.... Read more

Smoke Signals for the Gods

Last updated on: February 14, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

F.S. Naiden’s Smoke Signals for the Gods is a landmark study of Greek sacrifice. Naiden’s main opponents are Walter Burkert (Homo Necans), who views sacrifice psychologically as an act of sublimated violence, and Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, whose Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks replaces Burkert’s “Teutonic guilt” with French sociology, commensality, and “Gallic deletation” (Naiden, 4). For Detienne and Vernant, sacrifice centers on the solidarity of an egalitarian mean; for Burkert, it centers on an act of killing that is... Read more

Smoke Signals for the Gods

Last updated on: February 14, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Changing the King’s Word

Last updated on: February 14, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

When Shadrach, Meschach and Abed-nego emerge from the furnace unscathed, Nebuchadnezzar praises their God, whose angel saved the men from the fire. The three men “put their trust in Him, violating the king’s command, and yielded up their bodies so as not to serve any god except their own God” (Daniel 3:28; NASB). This translation doesn’t quite get it. “Violate” is not the best translation of the Aramaic shenah, which means “change, alter, be changed, be different.” It’s the same... Read more

Sevens and Eights

Last updated on: February 14, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

CE Douglas points out (Last Word in Prophecy, 134-5) that Greeks as much as Hebrews were obsessed with sevens: “There were seven wonders of the world, seven sages, seven metals, seven tones and so on. Thebes, the city of the Phoenician Cadmus who taught the Greeks their letters, had seven gates. Even the grouping of cities in sevens has a respectable ancestry in the Aegean Sea. Thera . . . was organized by one of Cadmus’s companions as a lead... Read more

Dead and Living One

Last updated on: February 13, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jesus’ declaration to the prostrate John (Revelation 1:17-18a) is a neat little, rich little chiasm: A. I am (ego eimi) B. First C. Last D. Living One C’. Became dead B’. Behold! Alive A’. I am (eimi) to ages of ages Several observations: First, the whole statement is surrounded by the Hellenistic equivalent of Yahweh – “I am.” The internal assertions unpack the meaning of the I am. If this is so, then, second, “I am” is not a claim... Read more

Dead and Living One

Last updated on: February 13, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Exhausted Germans

Last updated on: February 13, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Exhaustion has become a popular topic in Germany, many complaining “We are the most exhausted age.” Wolfgang Martynkewicz provides some contrary evidence, though he doesn’t appear to know it. In Das Zeitalter der Erschopfung, he examines German bourgeois and bohemians of the early twentieth century and finds that they were already “drained by the demands of what they perceived as ever more complex modernity.” Anna Katharina Schaffner sums up the evidence in her TLS review: “Perceptive case studies include the ‘tired colossus’... Read more