Like many commentators, Leclerc points out the puns in Isaiah 5:7: Yahweh expected mishpat but found mispach ; tsadaqa but found tse’aqa . But he notes that most commentators miss the connection of this wordplay with the larger context. The problem with the vineyard, after all, is not absolute fruitlessness, but the production of “wild” or “sour” or “stinking” grapes instead of fine grapes. As he explains, “The point is that they looked like the real thing but upon closer... Read more
In his Yahweh Is Exalted in Justice , Thomas Leclerc points out the links between the opening condemnation of corrupt Jerusalem in Isaiah 1 and the vision of a restored Zion in 2:1-4. Both use the combination “word of Yahweh and torah” (1:10; order inverted in 2:3), and these are the only places in Isaiah where this combination of terms appears. “Judge” and “decide” also appear together, uniquely, in 1:17-18 and 2:4. The claim that “they will not learn war... Read more
In a 2009 article in Biblica , Brandon D. Crowe argues that the phrase “that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit” in Matthew 1 alludes back to Deuteronomy 32:18. In the LXX of the Song of Moses, the verb gennao is used to describe “God’s begetting of Israel, his son.” The Hebrew verb behind the LXX is yalad , used in Isaiah 1:2; 66:9; Psalm 2:7; Proverbs 8:25. Isaiah 1:2 is certainly part of the background,... Read more
“Torture and terror are reciprocal phenomena,” says Paul W. Kahn in Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty (Law, Meaning, and Violence) : “terror is met with torture, and torture with terror.” That is because “both work in the most primitive register of political meaning.” This can be explained in terms of one of the standard narratives of modern political history. In contrast to premodern societies, where judicial torture was commonly practiced, the modern state operates within the rule of law.... Read more
“The pornographic,” writes Paul W. Kahn in Putting Liberalism in Its Place , “is the ecstatic moment shorn of religion. It stands in the antipolitical tradition of the hierophanic. The sacred too can displace ordinary forms of language. In both, we are rendered speechless, without even that most rudimentary form of speech – our own name. In another age and another culture, this would be the moment of spiritual rapture and complete identification with the oneness of the universe: Freud’s... Read more
Gedicks again, on the claim that the Establishment Clause requires the government to remain neutral between “religion and irreligion” and between “belief and unbelief”: “This dictum, present at the birth of contemporary Establishment Clause doctrine inthe Everson case in 1947, is my personal candidate for the most frequently invoked incoherent constitutional rule. I mean, really, what sense can one possibly make ofa rule that requires the government to remain neutral between a proposition and its negation? One may agree or... Read more
In a 2006 article in the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal , Frederick Mark Gedicks points out the impotence of civil religion in a pluralist society: “The irony of civil religion is that it is supposed to provide a substitute for theestablished church, a means of morally instructing and spiritually unifying the peopleso as to bind them to republican government. Yet, in a radically plural society likethe United States, like most of the countries of Western Europe, there... Read more
Is America a “Christian nation”? A perennial puzzle, and finally impossible to answer without many “in what respects?” qualifiers. One distinction might help: Presuppose a nation full of Christians, as America was for much of its history. That nation might take various forms, and the distinction I want to introduce is that between a biblical nation and a Christian nation. A nation where the rite of royal anointing includes explicit references to the king’s iconic relation to the Anointed Jesus... Read more
Not classics deconstructed by postmodern theorists, but the classics themselves deconstructing inherited materials. There is a deconstructive element in much of our great fiction and drama. So argues John Gardner in his classic The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers : Shakespeare does it: “The genre is by nature righteous and self-confident, authoritarian: There is no doubt that vengeance is the hero’s duty, and our pleasure as we watch is in seeing justice done, however painful the... Read more
Was “religion” in the First Amendment implicitly understood to mean “Christian denominations” or “Christianity”? Not by everyone. During the debates over disestablishment in Virginia in 1785, Jefferson explained that the vote on one amendment proved that “they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindu and Infidel of every denomination.” Jefferson certainly would have understood the First Amendment in the same fashion. Read more
Leithart
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