The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity

Գրքի շապիկի երեսը
Yale University Press, 01 հնվ, 1993 թ. - 257 էջ
The near-sacrifice and miraculous restoration of a beloved son is a central but largely overlooked theme in both Judaism and Christianity, celebrated in biblical texts on Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Joseph, and Jesus. In this highly original book, Jon D. Levenson explores how this notion of child sacrifice constitutes an overlooked bond between the two religions.
Levenson argues that although the practice of child sacrifice was eradicated during the late seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E, the idea of sacrificing the first-born son (or the late-born son whose preferential treatment promotes him to that exalted rank) remained potent in religious literature. Analyzing texts from the ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and rabbinic literature, Levenson shows how tales of the son handed over to death by his loving father in the Hebrew Bible influenced the Church's identification of Jesus as sacrificial victim. According to Levenson, the transformation of the idea of child sacrifice was central to the accounts given by the people Israel and the early Church of their respective origins, and it also underlay the theologies of chosenness embraced, in their differing ways, by the two religions. Furthermore, the longstanding claim of the Church that it supersedes the Jews, says Levenson, both continues and transforms elements of the old narrative pattern in which a late-born son dislodges his first-born brothers. Levenson's book, which offers novel interpretations of several areas crucial to biblical studies, will be essential reading for scholars in the field.

From inside the book

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A Fathers Gift
1
Deviation or Norm?
3
YHWH versus Molech
18
The Sacrifice of the Son as the Imitation of God
25
El and the Beloved Son
32
The People Israel as the Son of God
36
Eradicated or Transformed?
43
The Beloved Sons in Genesis
53
The Aqedah as Etiology
111
Isaac Unbound
125
The Beloved Son as Ruler and Servant
143
The Beloved Son Between Zion and Golgotha
171
The Rewritten Aqedah of Jewish Tradition
173
The Displacement of Isaac and the Birth of the Church
200
The Revisioning of God in the Image of Abraham
220
Notes
233

FirstBorn and LateBorn Fathers and Mothers
55
The Loved and the Unloved
61
Favor and Fratricide
69
Let me not look on as the child dies
82

Common terms and phrases

Հեղինակի մասին (1993)

Jon D. Levenson, Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at the Divinity School and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, is the author of numerous other books.

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