Biblical Sources

Beginning with the text of Genesis, degrees of textual difference can be discerned. Consider the fact that, as Gochberg notes (545), Genesis contains two separate creation stories. The first story deals with the day-by-day creation of the physical universe, culminating in the creation of male and female mankind, which would have dominion over the earth (Gen. 1:27). The second story collapses the creation of the physical universe into the image of Eden, to be inhabited by man, out of whose rib woman is created, along with the concept of the conjoining of man and woman as sentient beings capable of a degree of creation on their own (Gen 2.22-25). What these two creation stories share is the lending of moral weight to the principle of the Creation, o

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" Job refuses to "sin with his lips." The gift of life, which comes from God, entails an affirmative obligation to have an impulse toward life, yielding in all humility to the incomprehensibility that is God's wisdom and to the contingency that is the unavoidable reality of human experience. The main distinction between the New and Old Testaments is that the New Testament claims, to resolve many of the contingencies of human experience that dominated Old Testament thought and perforce the lives of the Jews. This resolution is held to be accomplished by the teaching of Jesus, although it has ambiguities of its own because it partly departs from the old moral law (Matt. 5:33-4, 38-9, 43-4) and partly fulfills it (Matt. 5:17). As Gochberg puts it (591): "[T]he appearance and teachings of Jesus represented a new covenant or testament (the words are the same in Greek), superseding the old one between God and the Jews." The picture of this dynamic that is drawn in Matthew shows that the teachings of the New Testament very much targeted the Jews. Jesus's status as a Jew and, according to the internal evidence of the Matthew text (5:1), possibly a rabbi, is one aspect of this. But the content of the teachings programmatically distinguis
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2440
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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