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Author: Martin Sicker
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595350348
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Judaism has always had adherents that, driven by both awe and love of God, strove to penetrate the mystery of divine wisdom and grasp what the philosopher deemed to be beyond the reach of man's rational faculty, as well as to explore other mysteries that seem to leap out from the pages of Scripture. These metarational leaps of intellect and imagination generally fit into the categories of the exoteric and the esoteric, referring to teachings traditionally considered suitable for public instruction and those deemed inappropriate for such purpose. The exoteric includes those attempts at intellectually and spiritually bridging the gap between God and man, that one finds strewn throughout the pages of the classical literature of Judaism. The esoteric includes those speculations and practices that have been more or less systematized and formulated and presented as mystical doctrines, that have been characterized since the Middle Ages as Kabbalah. The opening chapters of Aspects of Jewish Metarational Thought consider the question of the relationship between finite man and the unknowable God, and how the divine-human communication essential to that relationship takes place. Other chapters consider the purpose behind human existence and the critical aspects of the biblical account of the creation, issues relating to the idea of a visionary ascent to the celestial realm, the influence of metarational considerations on normative Jewish religious practice, and the special attributes believed to inhere in the Hebrew language and the role that these have played in metarational biblical interpretation from antiquity to the present.
Author: Martin Sicker
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595350348
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Get Book Here
Book Description
Judaism has always had adherents that, driven by both awe and love of God, strove to penetrate the mystery of divine wisdom and grasp what the philosopher deemed to be beyond the reach of man's rational faculty, as well as to explore other mysteries that seem to leap out from the pages of Scripture. These metarational leaps of intellect and imagination generally fit into the categories of the exoteric and the esoteric, referring to teachings traditionally considered suitable for public instruction and those deemed inappropriate for such purpose. The exoteric includes those attempts at intellectually and spiritually bridging the gap between God and man, that one finds strewn throughout the pages of the classical literature of Judaism. The esoteric includes those speculations and practices that have been more or less systematized and formulated and presented as mystical doctrines, that have been characterized since the Middle Ages as Kabbalah. The opening chapters of Aspects of Jewish Metarational Thought consider the question of the relationship between finite man and the unknowable God, and how the divine-human communication essential to that relationship takes place. Other chapters consider the purpose behind human existence and the critical aspects of the biblical account of the creation, issues relating to the idea of a visionary ascent to the celestial realm, the influence of metarational considerations on normative Jewish religious practice, and the special attributes believed to inhere in the Hebrew language and the role that these have played in metarational biblical interpretation from antiquity to the present.
Author: Martin Sicker
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1450217443
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Pondering the Imponderable explores the philosophical and theological problems of God and their implications from a Judaic perspective including the attempts at knowing the unknowable and naming the unnamable that have been articulated over the course of some two millennia, as well as how the chasm between man and God is bridged through revelation and the implications of these ideas for the ultimate question of what takes place after death, resurrection, immortality of the soul, or transmigration or reincarnation. In discussing these issues, the non-specialized reader will be introduced to the vast corpus of rabbinic literature written over a period of some two millennia to the present day and to many works that have never been translated into English.
Author: Martin Sicker
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595483194
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
The Ten Commandments is an exploration into the background, meaning, and implications of the Decalogue from a Judaic perspective. Although they have become a universal symbol of Judeo-Christian civilization, it is only within Judaism that the Ten Commandments have a juridical function that goes beyond the mere announcement of a set of key precepts for man and society. In Judaism, the Ten Commandments are considered an epitome of the vast body of biblical legislation, a concise statement of a mere 172 Hebrew words that was presented as a credo that could easily be memorized and serve as a basic list of essentially easily understandable general rules. It was not expected that the ordinary citizen would remember or fully understand the plethora of commandments found in the Torah that demand compliance and observance by the children of Israel, their descendents, and those who chose to cast their lot in life with them. To understand the meaning and significance of the Ten Commandments in Judaic thought, it is therefore necessary to correlate them with the body of legislative enactments set forth in the Torah dealing with the same subject matter, a rather complex endeavor that this study hopes to facilitate.
Author: Martin Sicker
Publisher: Author House
ISBN: 1496960998
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
Perusing this biblical book through a theopolitical prism, it may be seen that another unifying theme that courses through the diverse contents of this biblical work is that of molding the diverse tribes of the children of Israel into a functioning confederacy presided over by an increasingly strong central authority. For forty years, Moses wrestled with the problem of retaining the tribal structure of the children of Israel as a vehicle for the transmission of traditional teachings and values from the generation of the exodus to their descendants and, at the same time, attempting to restructure intertribal relationships within the confederacy by the nationalization and centralization of the evolving religion, focused on the Tabernacle and its rites that served as the adhesive that bound them to each other. What the narrative also illustrates is the challenge of exercising the effective central leadership essential to containing the centripetal social forces that tended to impede the transition from a tribal confederacy to a unified nation, a challenge that purportedly caused an eleven-day trip from Mount Sinai to the Promised Land to take thirty-eight years to complete.
Author: Martin Sicker
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595469035
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
The biblical narrative of the Exodus and of Moses, the reluctant prophet who was chosen to lead it, deals with the critical formative event in the history of ancient Israel. However, the narrative also contains a number of enigmatic passages as well as some seemingly unrelated episodes. In this book, the author undertakes to unravel the enigmas and show how the various disparate elements contribute to the narrative. The focus in The Exodus and the Reluctant Prophet is on what the biblical text is telling us, explicitly as well as implicitly, about the world in which the ancient Israelites became transformed from a mass of ethnically related people into a nation bound by a divine covenant, and the extraordinary role that the Exodus played in the process. In the effort to comprehend and explain the highly complex biblical text, the author has consulted a wide range of commentaries and studies written over a period of some two millennia that have sought to understand the biblical texts from a wide variety of perspectives, many of which are presented for the reader's consideration, including many sources inaccessible to those without a working knowledge of Hebrew.
Author: Martin Sicker
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595514812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
The biblical narrative of the revelatory events at Mount Sinai, and the covenant with God entered into by the children of Israel, deals with the critical formative event in the religious and cultural history of ancient Israel. However, the narrative also contains a number of enigmatic passages that have long troubled readers of Scripture. In this book, the author undertakes to unravel some of these enigmas and to show how they contribute to a fuller understanding of the narrative. The focus in The Convocation at Sinai is on what the biblical text is telling us, explicitly as well as implicitly, about the world in which the ancient Israelites became transformed from a mass of ethnically related people into a nation bound by a divine covenant, and the extraordinary role that the covenant between God and Israel played in the creation of the religious civilization known as Judaism. In the effort to comprehend and explain the highly complex biblical text, the author has consulted a wide range of commentaries and studies written over a period of some two millennia that have sought to understand the biblical texts from a wide variety of perspectives, many of which are presented for the reader's consideration, including many sources inaccessible to those without a working knowledge of Hebrew.
Author: Martin Sicker
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595446159
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
The sagas of Jacob and his sons are presented in the biblical book of Genesis in a series of sometimes seemingly unrelated episodes. In this book, the author undertakes to show that these episodes are all intimately connected and were selected to illustrate the problems faced by Jacob in coping with the sibling rivalries among his dozen sons and welding them into a collective body capable of giving birth to a nation. The focus in Jacob and His Sons is on what the biblical text is telling us, explicitly as well as implicitly, about the world in which they lived and how the historical conditions came into being for them ultimately to become transformed into a nation. In the struggle to comprehend the biblical text, the author has consulted a wide range of commentaries and studies written over a period of some two millennia that have sought to understand the biblical texts from a wide variety of perspectives, many of which are presented for the reader's consideration, including many sources inaccessible to those without a working knowledge of Hebrew.
Author: Martin Sicker
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 147724803X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Although there are numerous diverse aspects to Daniel, eschatological, theological, historical, and philological that have long engaged scholars of the work, this study of the text reads it as having a single overarching theme, an exposition of the implicit biblical philosophy of history, which posits the divine role in history as understood from a prophetic perspective. The prophetic idea of history is very different from the secular idea of history as a study of the past that helps explain the present. Prophetic history begins by postulating the end point towards which mankind should strive and records mankinds successes and failures in that regard. It also takes note of the patterns of past and present behavior that will likely cause further successes or failures in the future. In this respect the prophetic approach to history is truly reflected in the motto engraved on a keystone at the entrance to the National Archives in Washington, Past is Prologue.
Author: Martin Sicker
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1491827912
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 541
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Book Description
The theme that unifies the diverse contents of this biblical work is that of holiness, as the text asserts: Ye shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy (Lev. 19:2). The burden of the work is set forth guidelines as to how the children of Israel were to attain that goal. One of the great practical issues dealt with in Leviticus is the problem of connecting with the one and only God through the practice of a form of worship that is superficially similar to but at the same time radically different from the modes of worship practiced by the other peoples of the ancient world, which almost universally included sacrificial rites. Because it was extremely difficult for one to relate to a deity that could not be depicted graphically, sacrificial rites were also prescribed for the children of Israel as a concession to human weakness, but were designed in a manner to leave little if any room for human inventiveness, which if left unchecked would likely result in idolatrous practices. Accordingly, the ancient rites were infused with layers of detailed instructions and obscure symbolisms that make the text difficult to comprehend, while raising important ethical considerations that are an essential aspect of the biblical concept of holiness. This study explores some of the profound ideas that lie buried beneath the surface of this extremely complex biblical text.
Author: Martin Sicker
Publisher: Author House
ISBN: 1491801905
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 411
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Book Description
The subject of this study is the story of the rise of David to become the king of Judah and subsequently king of all Israel, and the anything but smooth transition from a tribal confederacy to a centralized state, from the ethnic kingdom of the Israelites to the territorial kingdom of Israel that also included numerous minority groups, as presented in the Masoretic text of the Second Book of Samuel. The term story rather than history of the transition is employed to describe the subject because the biblical book is a history only in the very special sense of prophetic history, which bears little relationship to history in the modern sense of the term. The distinguishing feature of prophetic history is that it is written from a prophetic perspective with a particular purpose in mind, namely, to illustrate to later generations of the children of Israel the historical consequences of failure by its political and religious leaders to observe and comply with the terms of the divine covenant entered into between God and the children of Israel. The story related in the Second Book of Samuel is based on events that were popularly believed to have taken place, but as perceived through a prophetic prism. Accordingly, the primary focus of these prophetic narratives is on the moral implications of the decisions and actions taken by men rather than the factual historical accuracy of the details of the events described.
