
By Gila Safran Naveh
In Biblical Parables and Their smooth Re-creations, Gila Safran Naveh rigorously charts the old transformation of those deceptively basic narratives to bare basic shifts of their shape, functionality, and most importantly, their readers' cognitive strategies. Bringing jointly for the 1st time parables from the Scriptures, the synoptic Gospels, Chassidic stories, and medieval philosophy with the mashal, the rabbinic parables well-known to interpret Scripture, this ebook brilliantly contrasts the rhetorical options of historic parables with more moderen examples of the style through Kafka, Borges, Calvino, and Agnon. through the use of an interdisciplinary strategy and insights from present semiotic, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and gender theories, Naveh unearths a dramatic social, cultural, and political shift within the approach we view the divine.
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Additional info for Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-Creations: From "Apples of Gold in Silver Settings" to "Imperial Messages"
Example text
Lastly, the parable is meant to console the simple man who eventually finds himself afraid before his own death. p implies the parable, if the great sage R. Johanan ben Zakkai was confounded before his 18 IN PURSUIT OF WISDOM death, how much more perplexed should we simple mortals be. Such parables were told to provide the reader/addressee with strength at a crucial moment in life, when man senses a most profound alienation, at the moment of his death. The wisdom how to leave this world, how to part with our friends and foes, is possibly as difficult to attain as it is fundamental; therefore it needed to be taught by our great sages.
87 In sharp contrast with fables, which also teach (fabula docet) but allude to a "real-out-there," even if only in an oblique manner, parables are only a special teaching aid, an artifact to clarify or illustrate a point. Parables make use of ready motifs from a preexisting pool of fixed themes, and are the pure concatenations of a parabolizer. Because of this feature, parables have been always difficult to interpret, and presently have become enigmatic. Parables use anthropomorphisms quite infrequently, and when anthropomorphisms are used, they are not being used in the same manner as in fables.
7' A typical rabbinic or Gospel parable concluded with a verse from the Bible, which interestingly, functioned both as the prooftext and the The Nature and Structure of Parables 21 climactic point/reason for which the parable was told. 74 For the interpretation of Jeremiah 23:7-8, for example, "The Traveler and the Perils" was elicited: R. Simeon bar Yochai says: One can illustrate it by a parable. To what can it be compared? to the following: One was traveling along the road. He encountered a wolf and was saved from him.