Middle East Biblical Prophecy
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The big picture of Middle East biblical prophecy can be found in major ideas that drive the narrative and argument of both the Old and New Testaments, with Old Testament treatment of prophecy having implications for how it is treated in the New. Prophetic content of the Old Testament, in turn, cannot be understood without reference to the culture of Israel conceptualized as comprising the people of God. Old Testament narrative is relevant to the Middle East because the Levant region, lower Egypt, and the Sinai peninsula constitute the geographical setting in which Israel's--and later, Christianity's--cultural history and myth emerged. Biblical prophetic and eschatological narrative and teaching remain relevant to the Middle East in the modern period because cultural memory is long and remains linked by geography and history as much to the heirs of monotheistic culture as to the biblical-era ancestors who shaped it. How and why that is so is the subject of this research.Although the main focus of Genesis is the Hebrew patriarchs--Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (King, 1990)---they are interesting less as personalities than as embodiments of a culture that reaches mythic meaning when Yahweh covenants with Abram (Abraham) that, as long as his people worship Yahweh alone, "To your descendants I will give this land" (Genesis 12:7). Thus does the special relationship between Yahweh and his people become the overarching theme of narrative. Again at Genesis 17.8, Yahweh gives Israel/Jaco
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ssed from predicting the end of the world and a privileged soteriological place for inheritors of the kingdom to consolidating its doctrinal position vis-à-vis the project of addressing the vagaries of ongoing human experience. That does not mean that, as Pagels points out, orthodox Christian tradition did not "adopt the literal view of resurrection," by extension perforce literalizing much else of scripture (Pagels, 1979, p. 5). Indeed, the acceptance of the literal truth of biblical accounts became doctrinally, sometimes violently enforced for centuries.
Over the long term, however, mainstream Christian thought, including mainstream Catholicism, formerly the primary agent of enforcement against heresy, has moved away from the idea of both literalism and imminent universal catastrophe as ultimate transformation and toward the notion of transformational catastrophe as a metaphor for the condition of the soul, such that the individual would be reborn not as a resurrected dead person poking out of the grave but of water and the spirit and thereby partake of the kingdom of heaven. In that regard, recent Catholic commentary has observed that metaphor permeates the Bible and "is one way of describing mystery . . . a never-ending proce
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Jesus Christian, Middle East, Christian Israel's, Christ Christianity, Emergent Judaism, Christ Bruce, Israel Judah, Jews Babylon, American Jewish, Universal Triumphant, middle east, human experience, university press, york oxford, oxford university, oxford university press, york oxford university, reign christ, millennial reign, chosen people, hiesberger ed catholic, role 2003, jm hiesberger ed, hoover 2002, kingdoms israel judah,
Approximate Word count = 4773
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page)
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