The Family in the Bible

Abstract

I had begun study of the varied depths of partriarchalism in the Bible before Leland White died, even before 9/11, but when the opportunity arose to join in a tribute to my long-time friend I knew I had written it for him. The whole of the Bible and of Jewish and Christian tradition can be viewed within the tension between the Bible's focus on family, or community worth and responsibility, and its struggle toward affirmation of individual worth and responsibility within the larger family. That tension was brought home to the West in a traumatic way in the events of 9/11 and dramatized tragically in the recent climax of the Second Intifada. The varying levels of the Hellenization of Early Judaism, and reactions to it, brought about the cultural mix that produced Christian Judaism, which warmly embraced Greco-Roman culture, on the one hand, and Rabbinic Judaism, on the other, which tried bravely to resist it. The current cultural tensions between Islam and the West, and even in the so-called culture wars in this country, are illumined by a socio-cultural reading of the Bible as a whole.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.