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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:557950 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Jo, Gyu Oh |
| Publisher | University of Sheffield |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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