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Marital Imagery In The Bible (Apostolos New Testament Studies)
Wipf and Stock
ISBN13:
9781532669200
$40.00
$36.09
Marital Imagery in the Bible. It can only be imagined that when the New Testament writers made their (albeit brief) comments on divorce and remarriage that they assumed they would be understood. So what has gone wrong? In the years after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, when Graeco-Roman culture was at its height, the Jewish perspective of marriage and divorce, and thus the context of those brief New Testament comments was lost. The Christian church of that era was influenced by the neoplatonic ideas of the day, and an idealised concept of marriage developed from on Adam and Eves marriage recorded in Genesis 2:23it was love at first sight, a marriage made in heaven. These concepts frame an understanding of marriage in much of Western culture even today. However, that was never the understanding of ancient Israel. Instead they looked to Genesis 2:24: Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one fleshso a naturally born man chooses a wife for himself, and their union was based on a covenantin other words an agreement. The Old Testament makes it clear what the basis of that agreement was. Furthermore, it is clear, if that agreement was broken, there could be a divorce and a remarriage. All the Bibles marital imagery (where the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures imagine that God is married to his people) is based on that understanding of human marriage. But so strong is our concept of marriage, that when Genesis 2:24 is referred to in the New Testament, it is thought that the reference is to Adam and Eves marriage. It is a paradigmatic marriage that for many excludes (or greatly restricts) the possibility of divorce and remarriage. This study looks to challenge that paradigmand to suggest that the New Testament writers would not have employed an imagery which had at its center divorce and remarriage, only to deny the possibility of such in their own human marriage teaching. Colin Hamers thesis represents the only recent work on metaphor theory in biblical scholarship. It challenges centuries of academic scholarship and ecclesiastical assumptions about divorce. Hamers detailed and well researched analysis challenges the consensus view that the marriage of Adam and Eve in Gen 2:24 represents an ontological unity, suggesting important implications for contemporary Christian teaching on marriage and divorce.
- | Author: Colin Hamer
- | Publisher: Wipf And Stock
- | Publication Date: Jan 04, 2019
- | Number of Pages: 334 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Paperback
- | ISBN-10: 1532669208
- | ISBN-13: 9781532669200
- Author:
- Colin Hamer
- Publisher:
- Wipf And Stock
- Publication Date:
- Jan 04, 2019
- Number of pages:
- 334 pages
- Language:
- English
- Binding:
- Paperback
- ISBN-10:
- 1532669208
- ISBN-13:
- 9781532669200