The messiah epithet in the Hebrew Bible

Rather than a reference ''to a present, political and religious leader who is appointed by God, applied predominantly to a king, but also to a priest and occasionally a prophet'' as proposed in 1985 by the first Princeton Symposium of Judaism and Christian origins, the term 'MSH' in the Hebrew Bible is an epithet or title which functions within a literary and mythic but not an historical context. The role of the messiah as played in the Hebrew Bible is not uniquely Jewish, but functions within the symbol system of ancient Near Eastern royal ideology and functions within a theology of divine transcendence and immanence. The coherence of the mythic role of the messiah is identified in relation to concepts of messianic time, as in the functions of expiating and mediating transcendence, of maintaining creation through war against the powers of chaos and the establishment of eternal peace. David's role as messiah in the Psalter is described in his role as ideal representative of piety, and as ruler over destiny bringing the good news expressed in various forms of ''the poor man's song.'' Finally, the role of the messiah myth is integrated with utopian concepts of a new Israel.     

Using the Concept of Ethnicity in Defining Philistine Identity in the Iron Age

ABSTRACT

Normally the discussion about Philistine identity vis-à-vis Isra-elite identity moves on a macro basis: On one side the Philistines, and on the other the Israelites. Little attention has been paid to the related concept of “scale and social organization.” If we try to find a background for the macro definitions: Israelites, Philistines, we move on an imaginary level. It is a kind of literary concept nourished among the elite—never more than a few percent of any ancient society. The realities of ancient Palestine in the Iron Age were different. First of all nationality was an unknown concept, and any idea of ethnicity related to the issue of nationality (as in Avraham Faust's recent book on Israelite origins) is irrelevant. Second, there were, as argued by, among others Mario Liverani, no national borders in Antiquity. Borders were fiscal delimitations: Who paid tax to whom? Third, ethnicity follows the group, and a certain person may change identity as he moves through differ-ent groups. In a society of such small extent as ancient Palestine, each villager would have an identity defined by his village as against the members of the neighboring community—ethnicity cannot be separated from identity—and villagers living in one area will have a distinct consciousness of being differ-ent from those who live “on the other side of the river.” “National” identity, when the idea of ethnicity includes all people living within the fiscal borders of an ancient state, would hardly ever be called upon, except when the elite wanted to defend its privileges—its right to obtain taxes—against intruders. Thus the concept of a Philistine—Israelite controversy based on different ide-as about ethnicity is no more than a projection of modern ideas about the na-tional state which came into being two hundred years ago.     

Personal Names of the Pentateuch in the Northwest Semitic Context: A Comparative Study

The personal names of the Pentateuch (the first 11 chapters excluded) have not very often been under systematic scientific investigations. The topic is interesting from the points of view of linguistics, onomastics, theology and ethnohistory. The anthroponyms of the Pentateuch are compared with personal names found from the 2^nd millennium BCE (from Amorite, Ugaritic and Amarna Canaanite sources) and with anthroponyms from extrabiblical and biblical Hebrew sources, as well as with Phoenician sources of the first half of the 1^st millennium. The conclusion is that the anthroponyms of the Pentateuch reflect the onomasticon of the second millennium, having slightly modified typological and lexical roots in the same Northwest Semitic entity as Amorite, Amarna Canaanite and Ugaritic personal names.     

Defending the Concept of Time in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

Due to the scarcity of reflection on time as an independent subject in the Hebrew Bible, there has been a scholarly tendency to consider biblical time conception more limited than our own_perhaps even nonexistent. This article confronts the scholarly skepticism regarding the ability of the biblical authors to think about time, defending the presence of time conceptualization in the Hebrew Bible. In the article I discuss central research contributions to the subject of biblical time, in particular Sacha Stern’s thesis that the concept of time is entirely absent from the Hebrew Bible and from ancient Judaism more widely. I explore linguistic and anthropological assumptions which underpin large parts of the discussion on time within biblical studies, arguing that one cannot assume on the basis of either that the biblical authors lacked a concept of time. Finally, I suggest that the ability of the biblical writers to coordinate unrelated processes according to a temporal axis is a strong argument in favour of their awareness of time.     

The Limits of Power: Revisiting Elijah at Horeb

When the story of Elijah at Horeb (1 Kgs 19,3–18) is held in narrative continuity with the preceding showdown between Elijah and the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kgs 18,1–39), it reads as a compelling lesson on the limitations of power. Whereas power is clearly the means of persuasion on Mount Carmel, the “still small voice” (1 Kgs 19,12, NKJV) at Horeb introduces a revised perception of transcendence within which power is no longer the central element.     

近代江南乡村妇女的"财产权"

在近代江南乡村,尽管妇女对家庭生计有着重要的贡献,但家产的男系传承原则使她们基本上没有财产权可言。在家庭结构健全的场合,妇女根本就无权获得家产份额。寡妇相对而言有一定的家产处置权,但那仅仅是代儿孙监管而已,在寡妇无子的情况下,还要将家产捐给族里。出嫁女获赠“奁田”,娘家有随时收回的权利。因此,妇女的所谓“财产权”是残缺的,在家族共财制的农业社会的历史场境中,这是很容易解释的。     

Working-Class Women and Republicanism in the French Revolution of 1848

Abstract

Following the February Revolution in 1848, working-class women as well as men attempted to hold the government to its promise of the right to work, through street demonstrations, individual and collective demands for work, and participation in the national workshops that had been established in an attempt to address the problem of unemployment in the capital. In the process, these activists articulated what scholars have labelled as a democratic socialist vision of republicanism. In June of 1848, women participated in the insurrection that sought to defend the vision of a social republic. While the republicanism of working-class men and bourgeois women such as George Sand has been examined, studies of working-class women in the first half of the nineteenth century have to this point focused on the romantic socialist influences that shaped their activities, in particular the Saint-Simonian movement. Drawing primarily on individual letters, police interrogations and newspaper reports, a vision of republicanism emerges that includes the ability for women to sustain their families through waged as well as household labour. This concept of republican virtue based itself not in suffrage but in women's capacity to act as both producers and consumers under just and equitable conditions.     

Iranian Women's Perspectives on Violence against Women in Iran and the UK

This study explores the perspectives of female Iranian students living in both Iran and the UK concerning violence against women. A qualitative approach, in the form of in-depth interviews, was carried out with 21 participants. Drawing on Stark's concept of “liberty crime” the research found that the participants, regardless of their country of residence, perceived violence against women (VAW) as denying the opportunity for equal personhood by stripping away the victim's sense of self. However, the scope of what was considered to be liberty crime was affected by the individual participants’ religious beliefs and their degree of acceptance of the Iranian state's gender ideology. The research highlighted the extent to which different forms of VAW are interlinked and combine in order to control and subjugate women irrespective of their country of residence.     

Promoting Women,Peace and Security in the Pacific Islands: hot conflict/slow violence

How has the Women, Peace and Security agenda been advanced in the Pacific Islands? While some observers argue that this region suffers from a contagion of unrest, violence and state weakness, these estimates commonly ignore the vital work women have performed in the region as promoters of peace and security. Even when such activity places them in direct personal danger, women across the region have spearheaded efforts to bridge communal boundaries and challenge the increasing normalisation of violence, gendered and otherwise, that accompanies threatened or actual incidents of conflict. As this article demonstrates, these efforts have had profound impacts on the ground in conflict-affected Pacific Island countries. They have also received increased recognition at the level of institutional politics, with member states of the Pacific Islands Forum recently accepting a Regional Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. This has been hailed as a significant achievement for the region's women peacebuilders. But much of this plan is focused on women's contributions to peacebuilding at the pointy end of a crisis. This overlooks the extent to which the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation, masculinised politics and militarism also compound gendered insecurity in the region. Attention to these issues offers a contradictory picture of the gains made in promoting the Women, Peace and Security agenda in the Pacific Islands. While this advocacy framework has provided important opportunities for the region's women peacebuilders, it may also have discouraged broader reflection on the prevailing structural conditions at work across the region which function in an attenuated fashion to undermine women's security and the achievement of a gendered regional peace.     

On the Seclusion of Women in Antiquity

Summary: The study of the feminine in ancient Iran is an area which deserves much greater attention than it has thus far received. By utilizing a number of primary sources, textual and otherwise, a few observations are offered here which concern the rites of women through the centuries. These evolving rites, which are described by the doctors of the then-dominant religion of Zarathustra, deal with the preservation of purity through seclusion of women in a world which is under constant attack from the demonic, polluting forces. Throughout the essay, the different means of fighting this battle are explored and suggestions for further research in the field are made.     

Single Working-class Women and the City in Java and Vietnam

Through investigation into the lives of single migrant women who work as department store salesgirls in Surabaya and Ho Chi Minh City, this paper suggests that while commonalities exist with regard to their controlled use of beauty in the workplace, their lack of time and disposable income, and the temporary nature of their right to live in their respective cities as migrants, there are significant differences between them. These differences run contrary to conventional stereotypes of the “outspoken” Javanese woman and the “servile” Vietnamese woman, which in turn are based on stereotypes of the bilateral Southeast Asian kinship tradition and the patrilineal East Asian kinship tradition respectively. Taking into account the forces for and against conservative gender relations in both societies, this paper suggests that it is the Vietnamese working-class woman who exercises more power over how she lives in the city.     

A Place for Women Only: Health,Healing and the Divine at an Islamic Shrine in Central Asia

This article analyses the relationships between traditional healing and biomedical practices found in contemporary Central Asia from the late Soviet period into the early twenty-first century. Gendered demarcation of space, the roles of women as caregivers and protectors of spiritual health in legends and emphasis on life cycle rituals position women at the centre of discussions of healing practices in Central Asia. Through historical and ethnographic work conducted in the Kyrgyz Republic, this article offers a view of women as practitioners and recipients of healing and as producers of knowledge about health and healing.     

Building the City of Women: creating a site of feminist resistance in a northern Colombian conflict zone

Against all odds, in uncertain and violent times, Colombian women are mobilising for peace. They do so even when they face ongoing violence and personal threats from a variety of armed actors. Despite a well-established tradition of studying women’s social movements in times of conflict, there is a lacuna when it comes to analysing feminism as a mobilisation strategy. This article uses the case study of the League of Displaced Women, the Liga de Mujeres Desplazadas (LMD) to illustrate the utility of Zulver’s High Risk Feminism framework to explain how and why women chose to build the City of Women, despite the real and threatened danger that this implied. The article narrates the history of the LMD, from its foundations in a geography of marginality to its creation of a space of resistance for displaced women and their families. In all, this articles demonstrates how feminist resistance has not only become a way of life for the women of the LMD, but also a strategy for creating pockets of safe places in the midst of a conflict zone.     

Protecting the Jewish throat: Hebrew accent and hygiene in the Yishuv

In 1913 the Hebrew Language Council (Va’ad ha-lashon ha-ivrit) instituted guidelines for the pronunciation of Hebrew, based on the Sephardic accent. Immigrants struggled to master the new sounds, especially the guttural phonemes, and to repress their native accents. Their pronunciation was frequently criticized as ugly and in need of correction. In the 1930s, Yitzhak Epstein (1862–1943) developed a new approach to the problem of standardizing and beautifying the Hebrew accent that drew on medical evidence to argue that the mispronunciation of various phonemes could damage the vocal cords and cause throat ailments. In the 1940s, Epstein’s “hygienic Hebrew” program was endorsed by a special committee of the Hebrew Language Council, chaired by Shlomo Dov Goitein (1900–1985) and included several of Epstein’s associates, that had been formed to address problems of “speech culture” in the Yishuv. Although the committee enjoyed a successful start, its mission was soon interrupted by the events of 1948–49. By claiming a scientific basis for the preferred Sephardic accent, the language hygienists were able to rationalize their desire to purge Hebrew of unpleasant Yiddish phonemes and to curtail the influence of Arabic on Yishuv speech.