First Reading Critique: The Sacred Bridge
Anson Rainey and R. Steven Notley are the authors of The Sacred Land Bridge, which is an Atlas of the biblical world and includes maps, pictures, and historical cementation as to the significance of this region. The biblical world that this atlas focuses on is defined as the eastern Mediterranean littoral, or more commonly called the Levant in modern archeological discussions. In my critique of this book I will be focusing on pages 30-34 which will define the boundaries and explain the importance of the Levant.
One of the first points the author makes is that the area of the Levant is often called the "Promised Land", yet this term is not found in the biblical texts. He then goes on to explain that this term was simply give to the area based on the happenings in Genesis 15: 18-19, where God makes a covenant with Abram giving him the land. The area described in this biblical text is that from the River of Egypt (Nile) to the great river, the River Euphrates. Rainey and Notley go on to divide the area of the Levant into three parts, which are Egypt, The Northern Levant (Syria/Lebanon), and the Southern Levant (The Land of Canaan/ which becomes Israel). The authors go on to explain each of these areas by both the people living in them and the geographical placement and their topographical descriptions. Also, the authors expand on the area further in their description of Israel by including the areas of the Rift Valley and the Transjordan mountain range. By using the above explanations the authors explained the placements of major towns, travel routes, and the limitations to the accessibility of the areas. As far as travel is concerned the basic rule to follow is the path of least resistance and quickness in getting from one place to the next, as well the accessibility of water. These factors also came into play with the city placements as well, which were positioned in places of easy defense of the area and roads, while being as close to water as possible.
The authors also go into great detail to discover the meaning of some of the better, but sometimes hard to define, boundary descriptions in the Bible. The authors attribute some of the difficulty in defining these boundaries due to the fact that the authors of the texts they are found in used vogue terms of their own time.
It is the reader and his or her interpretive community who attempts to impose a unified reading on a given text. Such readers may, and probably will, claim that the unity they find is in the text, but this claim is only a mask for the creative process actually going on. Even the most carefully designed text can not be unified; only the reader's attempted taming of it. Therefore, an attempt to use seams and shifts in the biblical text to discover its textual precursors is based on a fundamentally faulty assumption that one might recover a stage of the text that lacked such fractures (Carr 23-4).
The Bible: The Old Testament. The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed. Sarah Lawall et al. Vol 1. 7th ed. New York: Norton, 1999. 47-97.
Michael Joseph Brown, unveils new ways to read and examine the Bible in his book, titled “What They Don’t Tell You: A Survivor’s Guide to Biblical Studies”. Although quite technical, the guide, not book, really goes into depth on the process of studying the Bible and its documents. Brown has a new and refreshing way of giving the reader this information that is necessary in a small group, or for a Biblical scholar. This guide is not meant solely for the biblical scholar and talks in detail about the difference between these two, because some may link the two together. Published by the Westminster John Knox Press, WJK for short, this book gives straight forward answers on the best way to thoroughly understand Biblical text. As you read on you will find out more about how they differ and why they appear so similar from an outside perspective. Brown has taken a wide variety of information, and made it into something interesting and extremely useful for the reader. In his own words, “What I have done is to ‘translate’ some foundational concepts in biblical studies into an idiom more people can understand” (xiii)
1996. “Sacrifices and Offerings in Ancient Israel” in Community, Identity, and Ideology: Social Science approach to the Hebrew Bible., ed. Charles E. Carter.
Main Events in the history of Jerusalem. (n.d.). Retrieved May 8, 2011, from Century One Educational Bookstore: http://www.centuryone.com/hstjrslm.html
Hause, S., & Maltby, W. (2001). The Ancient Near East: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Phoenicia and Israel. Essentials of Western Civilization (pp.7-15). California: Wadsworth.
Lewis, Bernard. The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. New York: Scribner,
Harris, Stephen. Understanding The Bible. 6 ed. New York City: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 2002. Print.
The Oriental Institute featured an exhibit focused on the development of ancient Middle East Pioneers to the Past: American Archaeologists in the Middle East 1919–20 January 12 - August 29, 2010. And this was the exhibit I found most intriguing and most i...
LaSor, W., Hubbard, D., Bush, F., & Allen, L. (1996). Old Testament survey: The message, form, and background of the Old Testament (2nd ed.). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans
Zevit, Ziony. "Exodus in the Bible and the Egyptian Plagues." Biblical Archaeology Society. N.p., 17 July 2011. Web. 23 Nov. 2013.
Cosby, Michael R. Interpreting Biblical Literature: An Introduction to Biblical Studies. Grantham: Stony Run, 2009. 120-25. Print.
Thiselton, A.C. (2005). Can the Bible mean whatever we want it to mean? Chester, U.K.: Chester Acadamic Press, 10-11.
The Middle East has come along way since the rise of civilization thousands of years ago. Civilization emerged in the Middle East and northeast Africa along the river systems as agricultural societies grew in population and developed new forms of social organization. For the last two thousands years the west has been drawn to the middle east fascinated by the culture, religion, resources and politics. The Middle East has an immense impact on the world globally. My goal in this paper is to explain the ancient and modern significance of the Middle East and how it impacts the world in such a globalizing way.