My research question started from why the Jewish community called themselves 'Israel' in the post-exilic period, though 'Israel' and 'Judah' were two different entities in the first half of the first-millennium BCE. In particular, since the term 'Israel' has a political, religious and ethnic function in the Bible, my question has developed into investigating the problem of the nature and membership of Israel in each story of the Bible. The present thesis deals with the membership and nature of Israel in the three independent stories of Ezra-Nehemiah in the Masoretic text finally considered as the official version of the Jewish community and canonically used as the Old Testament in the Protestant community. This means I will focus on analysing the systematic structures of these biblical stories as they are in their final form and searching for the unity of a story with its unique ideology in a given book as it stands, rather than on investigating the origin of the fragmentary sources in each story and the history of their editing to form the various biblical stories. In chapters 1, 2 and 3, I will investigate the vision of the nature and membership oflsrael depicted in each section through a close reading which allows us to analyse the contents of the biblical stories with their plot developments and their different ideologies which are evident in a close study of their final forms. Then, in the synthesis and conclusion, I will address the ramifications of my findings from the perspective of both ideological criticism and cultural memory. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to determine whether that vision is monolithic across the three sections, or whether different visions are presented. With the result of this investigation, we will keep going on our journey searching for which Israel is dealt with in each story unit in the Bible.

This thesis engages with the biblical archive and its animals, asking what it means to read the Bible after Jacques Derrida’s “question of the animal”, that is, critical questions directed at the characterisations, representations and utilisations of animals past and present which deem animals distinctly different to humans in order to demarcate their inferiority. At the same time, it is a critical response to Derrida’s Bible. Derrida – arguably one of the most important and influential thinkers of the twentieth century – provides a significant philosophical contribution to the question of the animal. In animal studies, the Bible is treated as a foundational legacy for concepts of the “human” and is frequently held up to blame for a misplaced human hubris. Derrida too draws on the Bible in implicit and explicit ways to underpin his critique of human/animal distinctions. Building on Derrida’s work on animality, I provide close and critical interpretations of four crucial texts of the biblical archive. I argue that these biblical texts are caught up in irreducible tensions: on the one hand, these texts depict and describe how humans and animals alike abide as finite, fellow creatures under God as a justice to come which calls for a radical similitude and solidarity; on the other hand, animals are portrayed as objects that are mastered by humans to demonstrate God’s power over the living. God’s power thus resides in a double bind – it both displaces power from humans to show them as animals, and it simultaneously provides a model for human power over animal others. In the first chapter I explore the significance of Derrida’s motifs of nakedness and shame over nakedness for his critique of human/animal distinctions, arising from his reading of Genesis. Critically continuing Derrida’s play on myths of origin, I tackle the question of the first carnivorous man, Noah, in Genesis 9 in order to show how this text can both be read as a license to enact the sovereignty of man over animals, and, how this text radically resists such a reading in God’s covenant with all life, human and non-human. Following my exploration of myths of origin, the second chapter grapples with Derrida’s notion of a deconstructed subject through his emphasis on response and responsibility. Derrida puts forward the biblical response “here I am”, as the mark of vulnerability in every relation with the other. I explore what this responsible response might mean in the context of the Book of Daniel that portrays encounters between human, nonhuman animals and God. Developing Derrida’s injunction to follow the nonhuman other, I argue that the double context of Daniel conveys two distinct visions of the concept of the political as animal: one, in which a fantasy for a harmonious domestication and cohabitation amongst rulers and their human and animal subjects is fostered under the only true ruler, a benign God; and, a collapse of such a fantasy, where rulers – human and divine – are portrayed as carnivorous, ferocious creatures who turn their subjects from pets to prey. The third chapter follows this collapse to Derrida’s critique of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” as a commandment relating only to humans and thus a detrimental Judeo-Christian legacy. Derrida draws on the story of Cain and Abel to discuss the way the killing of an animal leads to the killing of a brother. To explore questions of killability I, however, turn to the negotiations of such issues in Acts 10. In the animal vision of Acts 10, questions of clean/unclean animals are suspended and hospitality is apparently opened up between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians. I demonstrate that the universalism associated with this text refers to an exclusive human fellowship which evades the actual implications of the animal vision. Yet, I posit that there are again two ways of reading the animal vision. In the first reading the analogical resemblance set up between animals and Gentiles implies that Gentiles too become killable as “clean” and thus the animal vision allows for indiscriminate killability amongst the living in general. In the second reading the cleanness of all animals is in fact a radical redemption of animal life for fellowship, in the same way that Peter accepts the fellowship and hospitality of Gentiles. Ultimately, the category of the living and the dead draws humans and non-humans together into what I call “mortability”; that is, the capacity for death shared amongst the living in the suspension of judgement until Jesus returns. In the fourth chapter, I follow up on the suspension of judgement by analysing Derrida’s thinking of sovereignty and animality in relation to Revelation 17. Crucially, Derrida’s logic of sovereignty includes Christ as lamb, in his logos or reason of the strongest, despite its ostensible weakness as a diminutive animal. I explore this further by turning to the scene of Revelation 17 in which the Lamb is at war with the Beast and the woman riding it. Developing Derrida’s allusions to sexual difference as it relates to the question of the animal, I explore how Revelation 17 denigrates both animals and women by characterising them as the figure of evil: Rome. The logic of the animal representations sets up the divine as the good on the side of the weak in the figure of the suffering Lamb. But as the Lamb becomes a beast-like indivisible sovereignty that asserts its reason of the strongest, the figures of “evil” become the vulnerable weak victims – the animal others. Another image of Rome emerges, then, as a deconstructed sovereignty in the subjects that stand as powerless figures in the political order, namely the animals of the Roman arenas and the prostitutes of the Roman Empire. The four texts I examine abide in the ambiguous tensions of an archive that can in the end neither be presented as animal-friendly nor as straightforwardly anthropocentric. The biblical archive is a complex compendium fraught with tensions that can, with its animals, only be held in abeyance. There can be no final “ownership” proclaimed of this archive and its animals, nor can any interpretive act dis-suspend them from such an ambivalent state. These very different texts do, however, provide the material and momentum to show central and crucial instances of how the biblical archive characterises its humans, animals and gods. My analysis reveals that the very same spaces in which these characterisations might be fixed as detrimental to animal life, are where the possibilities of seeing animals radically otherwise lie.

L’utilisation de παιδεύω dans la Septante (LXX) a été interprétée comme le témoin d’un glissement dans la pensée religieuse aux temps hellénistiques. L’idée hébraïque d’un Dieu qui corrige son peuple (יסר), aurait laissé place à l’idéal grec de l’éducation. Pourtant, dans la LXX, παιδεύω porte une nuance de correction corporelle, absente de la littérature classique et serait, par conséquent, un mot grec utilisé dans un sens hébreu. La présente thèse se veut une approche nouvelle. Constatant l’équivalence lexicale entre יסר et παιδεύω, puis ayant analysé la racine hébraïque et le lemme grec dans leur contexte, elle vise à expliquer pourquoi les traducteurs grecs ont fait un tel choix lexical et pourquoi ils s’en démarquent parfois. Elle démontrera que dans la LXX, le Dieu éducateur reste un Dieu « correcteur » comme dans la Bible hébraïque. Cependant, une autre idée apparaît aussi : Dieu pourvoit aux besoins de son enfant Israël. / It has been held that the use of παιδεύω in the Septuagint (LXX) reflects a shift in religious thinking in the Hellenistic era. The Hebrew idea of a God who disciplines (רסי) his people is thought to have given way to the Greek ideal of education. However, in the LXX, παιδεύω has the nuance of punishment, something that is absent from Classical Greek literature. Consequently, the Greek word could be thought to be used in a Hebrew sense.This doctoral dissertation suggests a new approach to the issue. After establishing the lexical equivalence between רסי and παιδεύω, and then analyzing the hebrew root and the Greek lemma in context, it aims to explain why the Greek translators have chosen this equivalence and why they have sometimes departed from it. It will be stated that, in the LXX, God the educator remains a God who disciplines, as in the Hebrew Bible. However, another idea appears to be associated to the word παιδεύω: that of God who provides for the needs of his child, Israel.

L’autorité étant une forme de « pouvoir » fondée sur la soumission à la hiérarchie, à l’inégalité et aux ordres sociaux préétablis, a été rejetée par les Modernes parce qu’elle est incompatible avec le principe même de la démocratie. Paradoxalement, suite à l’affaiblissement de l’autorité dans le monde moderne, on souhaite aujourd’hui son « retour ». De ce fait, notre réflexion s’est donnée pour tâche d’étudier, dans le domaine de la philosophie politique, les relations complexes qui existent entre les concepts d’autorité et de pouvoir en répondant aux questions : Qu’est-ce que l’autorité et le pouvoir ? Comment se constituent-ils ? Quels sont leurs modes d’institutionnalisation dans les structures politiques et juridiques qui perpétuent la domination et reproduisent l’obéissance ? Ainsi formulées, ces questions nous mettent non seulement au cœur de l’hypothèse que ce travail essaie de soutenir, mais elles touchent aussi la problématique que notre réflexion tente de résoudre. Elle concerne les confusions fréquentes faites par nos contemporains entre, d’une part, les concepts d’autorité et de pouvoir, et, d’autre part, les concepts de pouvoir, de violence, de force, d’autorité et de domination souvent utilisés comme s’il s’agissait simplement de synonymes. Face à une telle confusion, nous avons présumé avec H. Arendt que, puisque « ces mots se réfèrent à des qualités différentes, leur sens devrait donc être soigneusement examiné et déterminé ». Puisque l’usage correct de ces concepts « n’est pas seulement une question de grammaire, mais aussi de perspective historique », un détour par l’acquis antique des notions auctoritas et potestas nous est nécessaire. Ceci nous permet non seulement d’apprécier la valeur d’un héritage que nous n’assumons pas pleinement aujourd’hui, mais également de mieux comprendre certaines notions clés de la philosophie politique et de pouvoir dissiper la confusion fréquente entre les concepts d’« autorité » et de « pouvoir ». Pouvoir, autorité, souveraineté, légitimité, légalité, liberté, démocratie, domination, puissance, force et violence. Tels sont les termes articulés dans ce travail. / The modern philosophers rejected authority because it was judged to be incompatible with democratic values. Paradoxically, following the weakening of authority in the modern societies, we observe a growing number of people demanding for its "return". Following this situation, we decided to undertake, in the field of political philosophy, a study of the complex relationships that involve the concepts of authority and power, namely: What is authority and power ? How are they constituted ? What are the conditions or forces that create direct and use them? What are their modes of institutionalization in the political and legal structures that perpetuate domination and reproduce obedience ? Formulated in that way, these questions touch not only the assumption that this work tries to support, but also the problematic which our study seeks to provide an answer. It concerns the frequent confusion made by our contemporaries between, on one hand, the concepts of authority and power, and on the other, those of violence, force, domination and sovereignty often used as if they are mere synonyms. With H. Arendt we assume that since these notions "refer to different realities, the meaning of each one of them should be carefully examined and determined." We think that the correct use of these notions is "not just a matter of grammar, but also of a historical perspective," a return to the original meaning of auctoritas and potestas is necessary. This returning help us firstly, to measure the gap between what ought to be the notions of authority and power in the ancient world and what they have become today; secondly, to appreciate the inherited value that we probably do not fully make use of it today; and thirdly, the study helps us to have a better understanding of major concepts of political philosophy; and, in so doing, to be able to dispel the confusion often made between authority, power and other related concepts such as force, violence, domination and sovereignty.

The nature of trials, tests, and temptation in the Epistle of James has been extensively debated in New Testament scholarship. However, scholarship has underexamined the tension between the author’s mitigation of divine agency in testing ( Jas 1:13–14) and the author’s appeal to well-known biblical testing narratives such as the creation account (1:15– 18), the Binding of Isaac ( Jas 2:21–24), and the Trials of Job ( Jas 5:9–11). is juxtaposition between the author’s theological apologetic and his biblical hermeneutic has the potential to reveal either the author’s theological incoherence or his rhetorical and hermeneutical creativity. With these tensions of divine agency and biblical interpretation in mind, this dissertation compares the Epistle of James against other examples of ancient Jewish interpretation, interrogating two points of contact in each Jewish work: their portrayals of the cosmic drama of testing, and their resulting biblical hermeneutic. The dissertation assembles a spectrum of positions on how the divine, satanic, and human roles of testing vary from author to author. These variations of the dramatis personae of the cosmic drama exercise a direct influence on the reception and interpretation of the biblical testing narratives. When the Epistle of James is examined in a similar light, it reveals a cosmic drama especially dependent on the metaphor of the divine law court. Within this cosmic drama, God stands as righteous judge, and in the place of divine prosecutor stand the cosmic forces indicting both divine integrity and human religious loyalty. These cosmic and human roles have a direct impact on James’ reading of biblical testing narratives. Utilising an intra-canonical hermeneutic similar to that found in Rewritten Bible literature, the Epistle appeals to a constructed ‘Jobraham’ narrative in which the Job stories mitigate divine agency in biblical trials such as those of Abraham, and Abraham’s celebrated patience rehabilitates Job’s rebellious response to trial. In conclusion, by closely examining the broader exegetical discourses of ancient Judaism, this project sheds new light on how the Epistle of James responds to theological tensions within its religious community through a hermeneutical application of the dominant biblical narratives of Job’s cosmic framework and Abraham’s human perfection.