The Heir of Righteousness and the King of Righteousness: The Priestly Noachic Polemics in 2 Enoch and the Epistle to the Hebrews

It has previously been noted that 2 (Slavonic) Enoch, a Jewish pseudepigraphon written in the first century CE, contains traces of polemics against the priestly Noachic tradition. In the course of the polemics the role of Noah as the pioneer of animal sacrificial practice to whom God reveals the commandments about the blood becomes transferred to other characters of the story, including the miraculously born priest Melchizedek. In light of the polemics detected in 2 Enoch, it is possible that another work written at the same period of time, namely, the Epistle to the Hebrews—a text which like 2 Enoch deals with the issues of blood, animal sacrificial practice, and the figure of Melchizedek—might also contain implicit polemics against Noah and his role as the originator of such practice. It has been noted before that the author of Hebrews appears to be openly engaged in polemics with the cultic prescriptions (δικαιώματα λατρείας) found in the law of Moses and perpetuated by the descendants of Levi. Yet the origin of animal sacrificial practice and the expiatory understanding of blood can be traced to the figure of Noah, who first performed animal sacrifices on the altar after his disembarkation and who received from God the commandment about the blood. By renouncing the practice of animal sacrifices and invalidating the expiatory significance of the animal blood through the sacrifice of Jesus, who in the Epistle to the Hebrews is associated with the figure of Melchizedek, the authors of the Epistle to the Hebrews appear to be standing in opposition not only to Moses and Levi, but also to Noah. Here again, as in 2 Enoch, the image of Melchizedek serves as a polemical counterpart to Noah and the priestly Noachic tradition, which the hero of the Flood faithfully represented

Menorah Review (No. 60, Winter, 2004)

America and the Holocaust, Revisited: Notes on the Writing of ... -- The Road to Jewish Nationalism -- From the Classics -- The Reference Shell -- The Fundamentals of Fundamentalism -- From the Classics -- Hasidic Parables, Hasidic Polemics -- From the Classics -- Noteworthy Book

The Dialogical Subgenres of Argument in British and Ukrainian Lexicographical Presentation: a Comparative Aspect

The thesis is devoted to the comparative study of the dialogical genre “argument” in the present-day British and Ukrainian language pictures of the world. This type of investigation has been the first so far in the field of comparative linguistics that deals with human communication. Argument is a widespread type of day-to-day communication, namely a kind of dialogue that finds its verbal conceptualization in English and Ukrainian. The general idea of argument can be formulated as an emotionally coloured verbal communication between partners who differ about something and try to convince each other in the righteousness of one’s position. Such a general scheme of argument interpretation is modified in the structures of ethnic languages. Thus, the terms argument and суперечка reflect the existing differences between two nations as for the type of interaction itself. The crucial difference is understanding of argument as a verbal exchange in British society and a verbal contest in Ukrainian one. One more allomorphic feature is that the British typically tend to get excited in argument, the fact reflected in the semantic components a heated or angry interaction. The next verbal specification argument gets in a number of its forms or subgenres. A closer comparative look at such kinds of argument as debates, polemics, dispute and discussion is suggested. The main differences and common features of the genres are established

Political Polemics: What\u27s in a Name?

The National Committee for Honest Political Naming (L.R.N. Ashley, President and Chief Executive Officer) is a one-member, one-issue organization dedicated to exposing what The New Republic called in its 1 Sep 1986 issue viewspeak, defined as the increasingly popular trick of disguising your own self-interest in the rhetoric of public interest. The rule is the more partisan the Political Action Committee (PAC), the less partisan-sounding its name. The difference between the names of the lobbying groups and what they are up to suggested this little quiz. See if you can guess the concern of each group of lobbyists from their official name. If you do, you are eligible to join Onomastic Honesty-Observant Heroes (OH-OH)

Disavowal. Distinction and Repetition: Alain Badiou and the Radical Tradition of Antisemitism

My focus in this chapter on the militant French philosopher, Alain Badiou, emerges from my work into the various ways that the Shoah has been incorporated into antisemitic ways of thinking. In what follows, I argue that Badiou’s thoughts on what he terms “uses of the word ‘Jew’”3 in general, as well as on the Shoah in particular, offers a series of continuities with what can be called the radical tradition of antisemitism—a tradition that reaches back at least as far as Bruno Bauer’s anti-emancipationist, and avant le lettre, antisemitic texts of the 1840s. It simultaneously questions the notion of a sharp rupture between what have been termed “classical” and “new” antisemitism. It questions also the place of the Shoah in recent critical thinking within a dialectic of disavowal, dis-tinction, and repetition

The Gods of My Father Terah’: Abraham the Iconoclast and the Polemics with the Divine Body Traditions in the Apocalypse of Abraham

The first eight chapters of the Apocalypse of Abraham recount the early years of the young hero of the faith who is depicted as a fighter against the idolatrous practices of his father Terah. The conceptual developments found in this section of the work, especially in the depictions of the idolatrous statues, seem to play an important role in the work\u27s overall retraction of the anthropomorphic understanding of the deity. In the depictions of the idol Bar-Eshath (`the Son of Fire\u27) and some other human-like figures, whose features are vividly reminiscent of the familiar attributes of the anthropomorphic portrayals of the deity in Ezekiel and some other biblical and pseudepigraphical accounts, one can detect subtle polemics with the divine body traditions. This article investigates these conceptual developments in the Apocalypse of Abraham and seeks to understand their place in the larger anti-corporeal ideology of the Slavonic pseudepigraphon