The Pre-Priestly Abraham Narratives from Monarchic to Persian Times, Semitica 59, 2017, 261-296 (original) (raw)
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La recherche récente sur le Pentateuque souligne que l'essentiel de l'histoire d'Abraham en Gn 12–25 est d'origine soit sacerdotale, soit post-sacerdotale. Néanmoins, quelques traditions pré-sacerdotales peuvent être identifiées, notamment en Gn 12,10–20 ; 13* ; 16* ; 18–19*, des passages qui peuvent difficilement être lus comme formant une narration unifiée. Sur la base d'observations littéraires et historiques, l'article défend la thèse selon laquelle Abraham était à l'origine une figure du Sud judéen qui appartenait à divers groupes ethniques. Les traditions les plus anciennes qui nous soient parvenues, en parti-culier le récit d'Abraham et Lot, qui est associé à la promesse d'un fils et à sa naissance, étaient probablement transmises dans le sanctuaire de Mamré durant la période monar-chique tardive. Plus tard, à l'époque exilique, où les sanctuaires judéens hors de Jérusalem reprennent de l'importance, les anciens récits d'Abraham ont été complétés par la tradition de la matriarche en danger en Gn 12,10–20 et celle de la naissance d'Ismaël en Gn 16*. Ces deux passages, qui témoignent de liens importants, accentuent la dimension plu-riethnique de la figure d'Abraham. Ce n'est qu'à la période perse que les récits pré-sacerdotaux sur Abraham ont été utilisés par les élites de Jérusalem en vue de justifier leurs prétentions cultuelles et politiques sur la région du Sud.
The Pre-Priestly Abraham Narratives from Monarchic to Persian Times
2017
*, des passages qui peuvent difficilement être lus comme formant une narration unifiée. Sur la base d'observations littéraires et historiques, l'article défend la thèse selon laquelle Abraham était à l'origine une figure du Sud judéen qui appartenait à divers groupes ethniques. Les traditions les plus anciennes qui nous soient parvenues, en particulier le récit d'Abraham et Lot, qui est associé à la promesse d'un fils et à sa naissance, étaient probablement transmises dans le sanctuaire de Mamré durant la période monarchique tardive. Plus tard, à l'époque exilique, où les sanctuaires judéens hors de Jérusalem reprennent de l'importance, les anciens récits d'Abraham ont été complétés par la tradition de la matriarche en danger en Gn 12,10-20 et celle de la naissance d'Ismaël en Gn 16*. Ces deux passages, qui témoignent de liens importants, accentuent la dimension pluriethnique de la figure d'Abraham. Ce n'est qu'à la période perse que les récits présacerdotaux sur Abraham ont été utilisés par les élites de Jérusalem en vue de justifier leurs prétentions cultuelles et politiques sur la région du Sud. * This article is based on two papers presented by Oded Lipschits and Thomas Römer at a symposium on The Politics of the Ancestors (held January 15 th to 17 th 2016 at the University of Oldenburg, Germany). The papers will be published in the proceedings of the symposium. Observations at the symposium were that Lipschits's historical-archaeological approach and Römer's exegetical investigation resulted in similar conclusions about the origins of the Abraham tradition. These observations triggered the idea of merging the two texts into a combined piece. This was accomplished with the assistance of Hervé Gonzalez, who added further ideas and comments of his own.
In this article I argue that the pre-Priestly Abraham story was originally a unified and coherent composition, written as part of a larger literary-historical work that describes the history of Israel’s three ancestors. None of the three patriarchs belong to either Israel or Judah; they belong to the entity of the “New Israel.” The story was composed around the mid-sixth century BCE and reflects the anxieties and hopes of the people who remained within the land. Its author was guided by distinctive historiographical and theological concepts and reconstructed the remote past on the basis of some oral stories and his creative imagination. Hence, the cultural memories embedded in the stories cannot be separated from the other literary and theological elements included therein. The Patriarchal story-cycle is wholly innovative in its concepts of both the three ancestors of the people of Israel and the 12 tribes as an embodiment of Israel’s segregated origin. It was written in order to support the claim of the remainees that they are the heirs of Abraham and hence the land had been given to them in possession. These messages did not fit the theology of the returnees, who took over the story-cycle, reshaped the figure of Abraham, and depicted him as a faithful observer of the laws of the Torah.
Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, 2014
Between " Realia " and " Exegetica " In this article we deploy biblical exegesis and insights from archaeology and extra-biblical historical sources in order to offer some preliminary observations on strands of " realia " in the Abraham narratives that could reveal their date and historical context. We first attempt to identify the early Abraham material and suggest that it represents traditions about the eponymous hero of the population of the southern highlands in the later phases of the Iron Age; these traditions could have been kept in the shrine of Mamre, which was possibly connected to the tomb of the hero. We then deal with the next phase in the development of the patriarchal story – the merging of the Abraham and the northern Jacob narratives. Finally, we describe those Abra-ham traditions that seem to date to exilic and post-exilic times and ask whether the Abraham material also contains a few insertions from the Hasmonean era.
In the Bible Abraham is revered as the prophet to whom God chose to reveal himself and with whom God initiated a covenant saying, "To you I will give the land of Canaan as your portion for an inheritance." However, most mainstream Bible scholars today consider Genesis to be primarily mythological rather than historical and most historians view the patriarchal age, along with the exodus and the period of the biblical judges, as a late literary construct that does not relate to any particular historical era. In this paper we examine the evidence that Abraham is mythological and compare it to the evidence that Abraham is historical.
The Hebrew Bible does not describe how Abraham, the common patriarch of the three monotheistic faiths, came to know the one God. However, literature from the Second Temple period, texts of Rabbinic Judaism, targumim (Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible), the Quran, and other documents abound with narratives based on a common plot that recount how Abraham came to know the one God, confronted the idolatry that had continued until the generation of his father, and broke down the practice through various schemes. This paper presents translations of passages taken from the Book of Jubilees, the Apocalypse of Abraham, Genesis Rabba, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, and the Quran that relate the tradition of "Abraham the iconoclast, " believed to have been highly popular at the time of the writing of the respective texts. The passages are then analyzed to extract a common plot, identify different focal points, and compare in terms of Abraham's relationship with his father, Terah. From this comparative reading, the following observations can be made: the focus is placed on the importance of knowing one God in the Book of Jubilees, and on confrontation with idolatry in the Apocalypse of Abraham; various narrative components appear evenly with similar frequency in Genesis Rabba and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, possibly to maintain conformity as exegeses; in the Quran, the focus is on Abraham's role of introducing the monotheistic notion to local residents.
In dialogue with recent research on the Roman discourse of exemplarity, this article explores representations of Abraham in selected sources from the fi rst and early second centuries C.E. In the fi rst part of the article, references to the patriarch in the writings of Philo and Josephus are considered in light of the transformation of Greek ideas about exempla by Roman authors like Polybius, Livy, and Valerius Maximus. In the second part, the inversion of Abraham's exemplarity in the Testament of Abraham is investigated in relation to the treatment of famous fi gures in the Apocolocyntosis and in Juvenal's 10th Satire. By juxtaposing the use of exempla in contemporaneous Roman and Jewish writings, the article explores their parallel refl ections on the power of the past and shows how Romans and Jews alike appropriated of elements of Greek culture for the articulation of new expressions of local pride, ethnic specifi city, and cultural resistance.
"Abraham in Islamic and Jewish Exegesis," Religion Compass (2011)
Jewish and Muslim exegetical narratives on the shared forefathers (known as midrash aggadah and tafs ır ⁄ h : adīth=qis : as : al-anbiy a ' ⁄ isr a'iliyy at) have long been recognized as a meeting point of Judaism and Islam. Early studies of the forefathers, Abraham in particular, strove to 'prove' that much of what appeared in the Islamic exegetical materials derived from the traditions that predated Islam, mainly Judaism. More recent scholarship has abandoned such a reductionist approach for a more moderated view. Studies of the Jewish and Muslim exegetical material on Abraham show that while scholars continue to trace the historical development of the Muslim exegetical narratives, they also look to uncover the inner meaning of the narratives themselves. This article traces the shift from the purely reductionist treatment of the Muslim and Jewish exegetical narratives to the more nuanced approach, especially as it applies to Abraham. Four categories of Abrahamic motifs are singled out here: Abraham and his sacrifice of his son, Abraham and his relationship with Sarah, Abraham and his later visit to Ishmael, and narratives relating to Abraham's birth and early life.