Band 10, Heft 2

Apocalyptic literature has been designated as “crisis literature” and as a “form of protest against society” by some interpreters. This essay explores Martin Luther King Jr.’s reception and use of apocalyptic literature and thought in his sermons and writings. In doing so, it examines how King appropriates this literature as well as apocalyptic motifs to speak about the significance of African American history and to protest racism in American society. Such an analysis provides insight into the ongoing importance of the protest and crisis features of these apocalyptic texts. Moreover, the apocalyptic facets of King’s work have never been analyzed from a biblical studies perspective and this essay highlights the significance of these dimensions for his social justice work.

A cataclysmic event, often spelling disaster for the environment, is an essential element to the backstory of any post-apocalyptic tale. In these stories, the presupposed ecological tragedy may have severely altered the environment, but it has not annihilated it. In fact, what has happened is that the apocalyptic catastrophe has neutralized the ecological threats that were the original catalysts for the devastation in the first place, resulting in an opportunity for the environment to rebound once its abusers have faced judgment. In other words, Earth may get beaten black-and-blue, yet the final effect is a green apocalypse—an event that rids Earth of its destructive inhabitants or at least counterbalances their negative effects, giving the global ecosystem a chance to renew. In this article I offer readings of two apocalyptic stories— 1 Enoch and Darren Aronofsky’s Noah . My approach to these stories utilizes elements from a method of ecological hermeneutics that has been developed by Norman Habel and others from the Earth Bible team. The Noahic flood story is one of the earliest examples of a “green” apocalypse, in which the penultimate event may have been devastation on the planet, but the ultimate end was a renewal of Earth. It is my hope that these ecological readings with their attention to the concept of a green apocalypse may be useful in appreciating the possibility of eco-friendly interpretations of apocalyptic texts.

Rev 16:16 is a textbook case for any reception history analysis. Indeed, its reception has several successive tipping points, as in any reception history. In Revelation, as the text makes clear, it is a Hebrew literary name whose interpretation was not easy: from Tyconius to the most contemporary commentators, Armageddon is understood as a code name whose key remains lost. It was not until the 16th century that the name of a mountain was recognised, har Mageddo, the mountain of Magedon, linked to the fortress of Megiddo in the Jezreel plain. From Joachim of Flora onwards, the location of the eschatological battle is sought geographically. This change of lexical category marks a major interpretive revolution, for if one can locate the place on a map, then the war that takes place there becomes concrete. By virtue of geography, what belonged to myth—and thus to non-time—becomes tangible and is inscribed in a future temporality. From Alexander the Minorite to Hal Lindsey, the battle of Armageddon becomes a mirror of the geopolitics of the Latin and Anglo-American world. This ubiquity of the term over the last forty years has had a paradoxical effect: its withdrawal from geographical considerations. Thanks to the mechanism of antonomasia, the toponym tends to cover, by synecdoche, all the events of the end of time. It thus becomes the proper name of the end of time.

In this article, a trajectory is traced that demonstrates that the soft consensus that Behemoth and Leviathan are the hippo and croc, respectively, is part of a larger phenomenon whereby these originally monstrous beasts have become domesticated and demythologized or their mythological nature rationalized. The great beasts as natural Egyptian animals only goes back to a 17th century Huguenot who was an etymologist, orientalist, antiquarian, and minister. This process of/domestication/demythologization in a weak form actually can be discerned in the Hebrew Bible itself but reaches its zenith during the Enlightenment. In the article, a trajectory of protest against this process is mapped out. And, finally, monsters are shown to be important theodicean agents in the ancient world as well as representing important mechanisms of cultural identity.

While a wealth of recent scholarship and popular reception has suggested the Elihu speeches in Job 32–37 are redundant and perhaps do not belong, still others maintain the character’s status as revelatory and divinely-inspired within the narrative. This article highlights Elie Wiesel’s little-noticed contribution to the discourse on Elihu through a reading of Wiesel’s play, The Trial of God . The play expands on an interpretation of Elihu first found in the pseudepigraphal Testament of Job and suggests that Elihu is a truly diabolical character who threatens the faithfulness of the righteous sufferer. This article begins with a brief survey of recent scholarly reception of Elihu, then offers a close reading of Wiesel’s analogue to Elihu in his play. The article concludes with a discussion of the ways Wiesel’s reception of Elihu can aid biblical scholars and theologians in their work on the Book of Job.

For interpreting Scripture, one needs to figure out what exactly is to be interpreted when the Word of God is interpreted. Because canon and hermeneutics are so tightly connected, several early Christian introductions to Scripture ( introductiones ) provided lists of canonical books. This article assesses a little-known canonical list provided by a sixth-century treatise Instituta regularia divinae legis by Junillus. His aim was to show the particular ways the biblical books in various genres communicated their message as the canonical Scripture. Junillus’ Instituta is a Latin version of the lost work of Paul the Persian, who was educated in Syria, at the School of Nisibis. As such, Instituta is a unique and original example of a broadly Antiochean exegetical tradition, which is disseminated for western readers. Cassiodorus recommended it to his students at Vivarium.