La thèse porte sur la construction de soi, le sujet masculin dans le livre d’Ezéchiel. Il s’agit de comprendre et d’analyser les différentes stratégies de pouvoir qui manipulent le sujet et canalisent son sentiment d'identité. Le livre d'Ezéchiel est analysé à travers l’articulation pouvoir/savoir, princeps fondateur de la pensée occidentale. L'hypothèse principale est que l'homme et ses représentations constituent le bloc fondamental des sociétés (y compris les sociétés bibliques). Un homme est un «Soi» qui est pris dans un processus d'identification par des mécanismes de construction et de déconstruction, dans un discours incessant qui façonne et refaçonne des mythes dans le but politique de déterminer ce qui va être «bon» ou «mauvais». L’homme existe comme une notion neutre, même s’il s’inscrit constamment dans un processus d'identification, auquel il importe d’intégrer le rôle de la femme dans la construction du sujet mâle, et l'utilisation du féminin comme une practice dans l'économie des hommes. Une autre hypothèse est que l'identité n’est jamais fixe, que toutes les identités sont fluides et à même de se transformer afin de répondre à des événements politiques ou pour viser un but politique. Ce qu’on désigne comme identité est en réalité un sujet pris au piège dans un processus d'identification constante. La question principale de cette recherche est ainsi : « quelle est la généalogie du processus théologique de subjectivation politique dans le livre d'Ézéchiel? » Une autre question traverse ce travail : « quelles sont les stratégies de pouvoir à l’oeuvre et comment manipulent-elles le lecteur afin de générer un sujet qui souscrit au texte? » / The dissertation focuses on the construction of the self, in this case the male self. It wishes to understand and analyze different technologies of power that manipulate the subject and render his a self to an ‘I’ with a strong sense of identity. The case study is the book of Ezekiel as a manifesto of power/knowledge process, and as a brick in the adobe of western thinking. The main assumption is that the fundamental building block of (also the biblical) societies is Man and his images. A Man is a ‘Self’ that is caught in an identification process through construction and deconstruction, in an ever-changing discourse that shapes and reshapes myths and produces the ‘correct’ and ‘wrong’ knowledge in order to fulfill a political end. The notion Man exists as something neutral even though it is constantly in the process of identification. Another assumption is that no identity is fixed, and all identities are fluid and are changing as response to political events or to fulfill a political end. In fact, there is no such thing as an identity but a subject trapped in a constant identification process. The main research question is: What is the genealogical theological process of the political subjectivization in the book of Ezekiel? Asked differently: What is the total sum of the technologies of power that are manipulated on the reader and generates the subject who subscribes to the text?

Sacred texts authored in antiquity present a challenge for contemporary religious practitioners because there is always a question regarding how to interpret and apply the message today. Prominent Pentecostal theologian and disability theorist Amos Yong faces this challenge concerning the Bible as it relates to disabilities and those who have them. As I argue in this thesis, Yong succeeds in challenging the Pentecostal perceptions of disability without compromising on the over-all Pentecostal view of scripture. The Hebrew Bible, which, according to Yong, "...serves as the foundation of the Christian scriptures," contains multiple passages that portray disability in a negative light. For example, the Old Testament contains laws and regulations governing the priestly liturgical cult that place very strict guidelines on who is allowed to fulfill what duties based on one's lineage and physical condition. The Old Testament also contains passages in which the God of the Hebrews makes a covenant linking obedience with health and disobedience with sickness. The second part of the Christian scriptures (the New Testament) also includes multiple narratives that portray disability as (at the very least) an undesirable phenomenon. For example, the healing narrative and miracles attributed to Jesus and his followers are used by Pentecostals to stress the importance of physical healing. Consider also the Pentecostal understanding of the cross event. According to Pentecostal scholar Keith Warrington, the cross is used to emphasize triumph over suffering, sin, and the devil. The challenge for contemporary religious practitioners, then, is deciding how one is to interpret and apply the message of a given text today. For example, (a) how does a contemporary Pentecostal (that utilizes the Bible as a sacred text) view the phenomenon of disability and passages of scripture that marginalize the differently-able today? Furthermore, (b) how does Yong successfully arrive at non-Pentecostal convictions concerning the differently-able while maintaining his Pentecostal beliefs about scripture? In order to explain how Yong succeeds in justifying his non-Pentecostal perceptions of the differently-able one must first understand the overall Pentecostal convictions concerning scripture which inform the Pentecostal perception of disability. The authority of, and use for, the Bible as it informs the perception of disability within Pentecostalism (a variant of (a)) will be the focus of Chapter One. Chapter Two will introduce Yong's theological hermeneutic which articulates his understanding of the purpose of scripture. By examining the hermeneutical approach utilized by Yong in his earlier work Spirit-Word-Community, on biblical interpretation, one can gain a clearer picture of how he relates methods of interpretation to his perception of disability in his later work The Bible, Disability, and the Church (a variant of (b)). The final task, then, is to demonstrate how Yong successfully solves the problem of exclusion experienced by the differently-able while maintaining his Pentecostal beliefs about scripture. Chapter Three articulates Yong's hermeneutical solution to the problem of exclusion justified within the Pentecostal understanding of scripture. This is done through understanding Yong's `disability hermeneutic. This chapter explicates Yong's assertion that the way Pentecostals have misinterpreted scripture is to blame for exclusive and oppressive perceptions of disability.

<p>Abstract</p><p>This dissertation examines the book of Genesis as a functioning literary whole, orienting</p><p>post-exilic Persian-era Judeans toward their ideal future expectations. While many have</p><p>contrasted Genesis' account of origins with the prophetic books' account of the future, this work</p><p>argues that Genesis narrates Israel's origins (and the world's) precisely in order to ground Judean</p><p>hopes for an eschatological restoration. Employing a speech-act linguistic semiotics, this study</p><p>explores the temporal orientation of Genesis and its indexical pointing to the lives and hopes of</p><p>its Persian-era users. Promises made throughout Genesis apply not only to the characters of</p><p>traditional memory, but also to those who preserved/ composed/ received the text of Genesis.</p><p>Divine promises for Israel's future help constitute Israel's ongoing identity. Poor, sparsely</p><p>populated, Persian-ruled Judea imagines its mythic destiny as a great nation exemplifying (and</p><p>spreading) blessing among the families of the earth, dominating central Palestine in a new pan-</p><p>Israelite unity with neighboring Samaria and expanding both territory and population.</p><p>Genesis' narrative of Israel's origins and destiny thus dovetails with the Persian-era</p><p>expectations attested in Israel's prophetic corpus--a coherent (though variegated) restoration</p><p>eschatology. This prophetic eschatology shares mythic traditions with Genesis, using those</p><p>traditions typologically to point to Israel's future hope. Taken together, Genesis and the prophetic</p><p>corpus identify Israel as a precious seed, carrying forward promises of a yet-to-be-realized</p><p>creation fruitfulness and blessing. Those who used this literature identify their disappointments</p><p>and tragedies in terms of the mythic destruction and cursing that threaten creation but never</p><p>extinguish the line of promise. The dynamic processes of Genesis' usage (its composition</p><p>stretching back to the pre-exilic period, and its reception stretching forward to the post-Persian</p><p>era) have made Genesis an etiology of Israel's expected future--not of its static present. Because</p><p>v</p><p>this future will be fully realized only in the coming divine visitation, Genesis cannot be attributed</p><p>to an anti-eschatological, hierocratic establishment. Rather, it belongs to the same Persian-era</p><p>Judean synthesis which produced the restoration eschatology of the prophetic corpus. This</p><p>account of Genesis contributes to a canonical understanding of Second Temple Hebrew literature;</p><p>prophetic scrolls and Pentateuchal (Torah) scrolls interact to form a textually based Israelite</p><p>identity, founded on trust in a divinely promised future.</p> / Dissertation

The story of Gilgamesh has been viewed as an example of several different narrative genres. This thesis establishes how scholarship in English published between 1872 and 1967 has described Gilgamesh as a myth, or denied Gilgamesh status as a myth and discusses new the meanings that the context of myth brings to the story. This thesis represents preliminary work on a larger project of exploring present day artistic meaning making efforts that revolve around Gilgamesh.

<p>The first-person Hebrew narrative of the Persian courtier sent to be governor of Judah, the "Nehemiah Memorial" (or NM: Neh 1-2:20; 3:33-7:3; 13:4-31), is a crucial text for understanding how elements within ancient Judaism conceived of their relationship to the Persian Achaemenid Empire, which ruled over Judah from the 6th to the 4th centuries BCE. This dissertation investigates NM via the issue of genre. Scholarship on NM in recent years has reached an impasse on this topic, suggesting that NM resists identification with any one genre. Newer developments in genre theory, however, offer resources for understanding genre not simply as a classificatory matter but also as a malleable relationship between writers and readers that can be exploited for rhetorical effect. NM makes use of two main genres: a "foreign court narrative" (cf. Daniel, Esther, and the Joseph narrative) slowly transforms into a biographical inscription or "official memorial", a genre attested throughout the ancient Near East. The subtle combination of these different genres suggests that Nehemiah's pious advocacy for his people and his city carries over from his role as Judean courtier before the Persian king to his role as governor over the Persian province of Judah. It also, however, ultimately underscores the ideological incompatibility of these genres, just as the goals of the subversive courtier at the mercy of the Persian king are at odds with the goals of the governor representing that king. Early readers of NM responded to these contradictions. A literary investigation of Ezra-Nehemiah reveals that editors of that book incorporated Nehemiah's story, but subtly corrected it, whether by reframing his actions in terms of the work of community as a whole and the Torah (Neh 10, Neh 12:44-13:3) or by contrasting him to the superior reformer Ezra (Ezra 7-10). The book of Ezra-Nehemiah thus mutes the signals sent by NM's use of genre indicating that the authority for Nehemiah's reforms, which were essential to Jerusalem's restoration, derived not from Israelite tradition or from the will of the people, but from the power of Judah's imperial masters.</p> / Dissertation

<p><p>In the first book of the Bible, every patriarch and many of the matriarchs have significant encounters with anger. However, scholarship has largely ignored how Genesis treats this emotion, particularly how Genesis functions as Torah by providing ethical instruction about handling this emotion's perplexities. This dissertation aims to fill this gap in scholarship, showing both how anger functions as a literary motif in Genesis and how this book offers moral guidance for engaging this emotion.</p></p><p><p>After an introductory chapter outlining the goals, methods, and limitations of this study (ch. 1), this dissertation draws on works in translation theory, anthropology, and cross-cultural psychology to lay a theoretical framework for analyzing emotion described in another language by another culture (ch. 2). Next, it appropriates the findings of cognitive linguistics to analyze the terminology, conception, and associations of anger in the Hebrew Bible (ch. 3). The following chapter evaluates the advances that have taken place in the field of Old Testament ethics in recent decades, supplementing them with insights from philosophical, literary, and critical theorists to formulate an understanding of ethics and narrative that aligns with the contours of Genesis (ch. 4). The next chapter employs a rhetorical-literary approach to examine how texts in Genesis provide a conversation with one another about anger and its moral perplexities (ch. 5). Various themes from this study are then collected and summarized in the concluding chapter (ch. 6).</p></p><p><p>This dissertation concludes that understanding Genesis' message about anger requires laying aside traditional Western assumptions about both emotion and ethics. Genesis does not, for example, provide a set of ideal principles for engaging anger. Rather, readers who experience Genesis' narratives view anger from a variety of perspectives and in different lights, gaining wisdom for diverse encounters with anger they may face. They acquire a deep sensitivity to human frailty, an acute awareness of anger's power, and a realistic range of possibilities for engaging this emotion.</p></p> / Dissertation

<p>It is fair to identify the motive of this dissertation with the paradoxical formulation of Gerhard von Rad, to the effect that the essence of biblical Wisdom is disclosed where the sages articulate this wisdom as inherently limited. This coincidence of opposites has been widely embraced by commentators and read as evidence for the sages' encounter with an infinite divine transcendence, to which they responded in humility, and by which their epistemological certitudes were rebuked. Proceeding from these assumptions, the interpretation of Proverbs has widely concerned itself with two nodal points: (1) the fear-of YHWH as the central concept in Proverbs' articulation wisdom as a finite human operation, conducted in the presence of an infinite divine; and (2) the figuration of this sublime experience in the iconic form of Woman-Wisdom. </p><p>The hypothesis of von Rad lends itself to another trajectory that prioritizes immanence over transcendence. On this reading, the limit of Wisdom lies not between its mere appearance for us (i.e. finite human subjects) and its essential being in itself (corresponding to a noumenal, divine beyond) but rather runs through the field of appearance, which cannot be rendered coherent by the sages' discursive intervention. This non-symbolizable yet immanent check on the sages' wisdom is analyzed in terms of Lacan's Real, a kernel of being (in psychoanalytic terms, jouissance) entirely beyond the signified that nevertheless arises out of the operations of signification. If discourse is thus intrinsically self-defeating, the status of transcendence should re-evaulated with respect to "limit." Transcendence is not the site that disturbs the Symbolic field, but rather the aporetic conditions of linguistic meaning rely on an externalizing process--what I have called a "poetics of making transcendent"-- for a given discourse to maintain its own coherence, i.e. as that which would be coherent if not for the contingent, impossible object. The fear-of YHWH and Woman-Wisdom, whose importance no one disputes, are re-read from this perspective: the former according to Lacan's concept of the Master-Signifier, the latter according to object (a), the object cause of desire.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Unusually for the Hebrew Bible, the book of Jeremiah contains a high number of references to writers, writing, and the written word. Written during the exilic period, the book demonstrates a key moment in the ongoing integration of writing and the written word into ancient Israelite society. Yet the book does not describe writing in the abstract. Instead, it provides an account of its own textualization, thereby blurring the line between the narrative and the audience that receives it and connecting the text of Jeremiah to the words of the prophet and of YHWH. </p><p> To authenticate the book of Jeremiah as the word of YHWH, its tradents present a theological account of the chain of transmission from the divine to the prophet, and then to the scribe and the written page. Indeed, the book of Jeremiah extends the chain of transmission beyond the written word itself to include the book of Jeremiah and, finally, a receiving audience. To make the case for this chain of transmission, this study attends in each of three exegetical chapters to writers (including YHWH, prophets, and scribes), the written word, and the receiving audience. The first exegetical chapter describes the standard chain of transmission from the divine to the prophet to the scribe, demonstrating that all three agents in this chain are imagined as writers and that writing was a suitable conduit for the divine word. The narrative account of Jeremiah's textualization is set forth, with special attention to the way in which the narrative points beyond itself to the text of Jeremiah itself. The second exegetical chapter builds upon this argument by attending to the written word in Jeremiah, pointing especially to Jeremiah's self-references (e.g. "in this book," "all these words") as a pivotal element in the extension of the chain of transmission beyond the words in the text to the words of the text. Finally, the third exegetical chapter considers the construction of the audience in the book of Jeremiah, concluding that the written word, as Jeremiah imagines it, is to be received by a worshipping audience through a public reading.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation lays the groundwork for a reevaluation of early Protestant understandings of salvation in the sixteenth century by tracing the emergence of the confessional formulation of the doctrine of justification by faith from the perspective of the history of biblical interpretation. In the Introduction, the author argues that the diversity of first-generation evangelical and Protestant teaching on justification has been widely underestimated. Through a close comparison of first- and second-generation confessional statements in the Reformation period, the author seeks to establish that consensus on this issue developed slowly over the course over a period of roughly thirty years, from the adoption of a common rhetoric of dissent aimed at critiquing the regnant Catholic orthopraxy of salvation in the 1520's and 1530's, to the emergence of a common theological culture in the 1540's and beyond. With the emergence of this new theological culture, an increasingly precise set of definitions were employed, not only to explicate the new Protestant gospel more fully, but also to highlight areas of divergence with traditional Catholic teaching.</p> <p> With this groundwork in place, the author then examines the development of several key concepts in the emergence of the confessional doctrine of justification through the lens of biblical interpretation. Focusing on two highly contested chapters in Paul's epistle to the Romans, the author demonstrates that early evangelical and Protestant biblical exegesis varied widely in its aims, motivations, and in its appropriation of patristic and medieval interpretations. Chapter 1 consists of a survey of pre-Reformation exegesis of the first half of Rom 2, and the author demonstrates that this text had traditionally been interpreted as pointing to an eschatological final judgment in which the Christian would be declared righteous (i.e., "justified") in accord with, but not directly on the basis of, a life of good deeds. In Chapter 2, the author demonstrates that early evangelical exegetes broke away from this consensus, but did so slowly. Several early Protestant interpreters continued, throughout the 1520's and 1530's, to view this text within a traditional frame of interpretation supplied by Origen and Augustine, and only with Philipp Melanchthon's development of a rhetorical-critical approach to the text were Protestants able to overcome the traditional reading and so neutralize the first half of Rom 2 as a barrier to the emerging doctrine of justification by faith alone.</p> <p> Chapters 3, 4, and 5 all deal with the reception history of what is arguably the central text in the Reformation debates concerning justification by faith, Rom 3. Chapter 3 turns once more to patristic and medieval interpretation, and here it is argued that that two major strands of interpretation dominated pre-Reformation exegesis. A "minority view" contrasted justification with works of the ceremonial law, arguing that Paul's assertion of justification "apart from works of the law" was aimed at highlighting the insufficiency of the Jewish ceremonial law in contrast with the sacraments of the Catholic church. In contrast with this view, the "majority view" (arising again from Origen and Augustine) argued that the contrast was properly viewed as one between justification and works of the moral law, thus throwing into sharp relief the problem of justification in relation to good works. This tradition generally followed Augustine in drawing a contrast between works of the law performed prior to, and following upon, the initiation of justification as a life-long process of transformation by grace, but at the same time insisted that this process ultimately issued in the believer fulfilling the demands of the moral law. In Chapter 4, I turn to Luther's early exegesis of Rom 3, as seen in his lectures from 1515. In contrast with Luther's own description of his "Reformation breakthrough" later in life, I argue that Luther did not arrive at his new understanding of justification in a flash of inspiration inspired by Augustine; rather, his early treatment of Romans is unimpeachably Catholic and unmistakably Augustinian, although there are indications even in this early work that Luther is not entirely satisfied with Augustine's view. In Chapter 5, I consider the ways in which Luther's followers develop his critique of the Augustinian reading of justification in the first generation of the Reformation. Throughout this period, it was unclear whether Protestant exegesis of Paul would resolve itself into a repristinization of patristic theology, inspired in large part by Augustine, or whether it would develop into something genuinely new. The key turning point, I argue, came in the early 1530's with Melanchthon's rejection of Augustine's transformative model of justification, and his adoption in its place of a strictly forensic construal of Paul's key terms. Many of Melanchthon's fellow reformers continued to operate within an Augustinian framework, however as Melanchthon's terms passed into wider acceptance in Protestant exegesis, it became increasingly apparent that the Protestant reading of Paul could not ultimately be reconciled with patristic accounts of justification.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation begins a conversation between "apocalyptic" interpretations of the Apostle Paul and the contemporary revival in "virtue ethics." It argues that the human actor's place in Pauline theology has long been captive to theological concerns foreign to Paul and that we can discern in Paul a classical account of human action that Alasdair MacIntyre's work helps to recover. Such an account of agency helps ground an apocalyptic reading of Paul by recovering the centrality of the church and its day-to-day Christic practices, specifically, but not exclusively, the Eucharist. To demonstrate this we first offer a critique of some contemporary accounts of agency in Paul in light of MacIntyre's work. Three exegetical chapters then establish a "MacIntyrian" re-reading of central parts of the letter to the Romans. A concluding chapter offers theological syntheses and prospects for future research.</p> / Dissertation