For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open BookChoice Outstanding Academic Title of 2008 Alicia Ostriker named to Moment Magazine's list of Ten Great Jewish Poets, 2011 Quoting King Solomon's famous prayer to God at the Temple in Jerusalem, "Behold, the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded," Alicia Suskin Ostriker posits a God who cannot be contained by dogma and doctrine. Troubled by the way the Bible has become identified in our culture with a monolithic authoritarianism, Ostriker focuses instead on the extraordinary variability of Biblical writing.For the Love of God is a provocative and inspiring re-interpretation of six essential Biblical texts: The Song of Songs, the Book of Ruth, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Jonah, and Job. In prose that is personal and probing, analytically acute and compellingly readable, Ostriker sees these writings as "counter-texts," deviating from convention yet deepening and enriching the Bible, our images of God, and our own potential spiritual lives. Attempting to understand "some of the wildest, strangest, most splendid writing in Western tradition," she shows how the Bible embraces sexuality and skepticism, boundary crossing and challenges to authority, how it illuminates the human psyche and mirrors our own violent times, and how it asks us to make difficult choices in the quest for justice. For better or worse, our society is wedded to the Bible. But according to Talmud, "There is always another interpretation." Ostriker demonstrates that the Bible, unlike its reputation, offers a plenitude of surprises. |
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Work such as this is essentially collective, and I am grateful to many friends and associates for their stimulating and wise conversations, criticisms, and suggestions. Jill Hammer, J. Cheryl Exum, Mary Campbell, Athalya Brenner, ...
The lovers are sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by friends. Neither is named, although the woman is once referred to as the Shulamite, which may mean “woman from Jerusalem” or possibly “woman of peace” or “Solomon's woman”; ...
... or whether it is “love” itself, that needs to be protected until it ripens on its own, or whether the Shulamite is urgently advising her friends about their own future love lives, this tender warning is unique in the Bible.
14 I think of the great thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi, in one of his many poems addressed to a “you” he sometimes calls the Friend, who may be God, or a lover, or an aspect of the self: “I asked for one kiss.
Is she perhaps addressing her friends and then turning to him? Or is she perhaps speaking at first to herself and then to him? When we read the piquant “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine,” ...
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Contenido
| 9 | |
The Book of Ruth and the Love of the Land | 34 |
A Personal Interlude | 55 |
Ecclesiastes As Witness | 76 |
The Book of the Question | 99 |
The Open Book | 120 |
Afterword | 143 |
Some Further Reading | 147 |
Notes | 153 |
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Información bibliográfica
| Título | For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book |
| Autor | Alicia Suskin Ostriker |
| Editor | Rutgers University Press, 2007 |
| ISBN | 0813548721, 9780813548722 |
| Largo | 164 páginas |
| Exportar cita | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |