A misanthropic view at the societies of the Old Testament in the books of smaller prophets
Keywords:
misanthropology,
Old Testament,
God,
prophets,
sociability,
moral,
anthropology
Abstract
The subject of work is a value relationship that is established towards the society in the books of the prophet of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, and Malachi. Their attitude toward the current state of social organization of the Jewish people is negative. They see the social and cultural life as morally bad, where the roots of that evil are in deviation from God's laws given to Moses, and its manifestations are all of those actions that, from an eschatological perspective, lead to punishment, not salvation. We call this relationship a misanthropic one, since it is not a simple view of society as morally distorted, but such distortion is set in a kind of teleological perspective, in which it turns out that given sociability for the prophets is a systematically organized way of human existence contrary to the basic interests of man – life in in accordance with God's laws for salvation.
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References
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Aycock, D. Alan. 1989. „Sudbina Lotove žene: strukturalno posredovanje u biblijskoj mitologiji“. U Strukturalističke interpretacije biblijskog mita, Edmund Leach i D. Alan Aycock, 147-155. Zagreb: August Cesarec.
Ben Zvi, Ehud. 1999. Wrongdoers, Wrongdoing and Righting Wrongs in Micah 2. Biblical Interpretations 7 (1): 87-100.
Berg, Shane. 2013. Ben Sira, the Genesis Creation Accounts, and the Knowledge of God’s Will. Journal of Biblical Literature 132 (1): 139–157.
Biblija. 1974. Biblija ili Sveto pismo Staroga i Novoga zaveta, Beograd: Biblijsko društvo.
Bimson, John J. 2006. Reconsidering a ‘Cosimc Fall’. Science and Christian Belief 18 (1): 63-81.
Bošković, Aleksandar. 2017. Individualizam u antropologiji. U Individualizam, ur. Suzana Ignjatović i Aleksandar Bošković, 4-24. Beograd: Institut društvenih nauka.
Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology. Ethos: Journal of Anthropology 18 (1): 5-47.
Cranshaw, James L. 2003. “Theodicy in the Book of the Twelve”. In Thematic Threads in the Book of the Twelve, eds. Paul L. Redditt, Aaron Schart, 175-191. Berlin/ New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Cranshaw, James L. 2010. Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction. Westminster: John Knox Press.
Daglas, Meri. 1993. Čisto i opasno. Analiza pojmova prljavštine i tabua. Beograd: Plato/ XX vek.
Di Vito, Robert A. 1999. Old Testament Anthropology and the Construction of Personal Identity. The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61: 217-238.
Douglas, Mary. 1996. “Sacred Contagion”. In Reading Leviticus: A Conversation With Mary Douglas, ed. John F. A. Sawyer, 86-106. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
Douglas, Mary. 2002. Responding to Ezra: The Priests and the Foreign Wives. Biblical Interpretation 10 (1): 1-23.
Douglas, Mary. 2004. Jacob's Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Drew, Gavin. 2009. “Show me the money!” Part 2: Speculations about the trap within the gates. Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought & Practice 17 (4): 39-41.
Friedman, Hershey H, William D. Adler. 2011. Moral Capitalism: A Biblical Perspective. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 70 (4): 1014-1028.
Heim, Maria Anne Monius. 2014. Recent Work in Moral Anthropology. Journal of Religious Ethics 42 (3): 385–392.
Kim, Chang-Hoon. 2006. Prophetic Preaching as Social Preaching. Evangelical Review of Theology 30 (2): 141-151.
Kuper, Adam. 2016. “Anthropologists and the Bible”. In Local Knowledge, Global Stage. Histories of Anthropology Annual 10, eds. Regna Darnell, Frederic W Gleach, 1-30. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Lakan, Žan. 1983. Spisi. Beograd: Prosveta.
Leach, Edmund. 1969. Genesis as Myth and Other Essays, London: Cape.
Leach, Edmund. 1982. “Anthropological approaches to the study of the Bible during the twentieth century”. In Humanizing America's Iconic Book: Society of Biblical Literature Centennial Addresses 1980, eds. Gene M. Tucker, Douglas A. Knight, 73-94. Chico, CA: Scholars Press .
Molina José Luis, Miranda Jessica Lubbers, Hugo Valenzuela-García, Silvia Gómez-Mestres. 2017. Cooperation and competition in social anthropology. Anthropology Today 33 (1): 11-14.
Newsom, Carol A. 2012. Models of the Moral Self: Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism. Journal of Biblical Literature 131 (1): 5–25.
Rogerson, J.W. 1979. W.R. Smith: Religion of the Saints. Expository Times XC: 228-233.
Rogerson, J.W. 1981. Anthropological and Theological Approaches to the Old Testament: A Rejoinder. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford XII (1): 16-20.
Shapira, Haim. 2011/2012. “For the Judgement is God’s”: Human Judgement and Divine Justice in the Hebrew Bible and in Jewish Tradition. Journal of Law and Religion 27 (2): 273-328.
Sherwin, Byron L. 2012. Heinous Sin: Harbinger of Catastrophy or redemption. Jewish Biblical Quarterly 40 (2): 81-88.
Sinani, Danijel. 2007. Opsednutost i egzorcizam u Srbiji. Antropološka perspektiva, Beograd: Srpski genealoški centar i Odelјenje za etnologiju i antropologiju Filozofskog fakulteta.
Wells, Bruce. 2015. Sex Crimes in the Laws of the Hebrew Bible. Near Eastern Archaeology 78 (4): 294-300.
Wright, Christopher J. H. 2011. The Righteous Rich in the Old Testament. Evangelical Review of Theology 35 (2): 255-264.
Žikić, Bojan. 2016. Why Do We Need Misanthropology in Anthropology? An Explanatory Essay in Deliberating the Research Subfield. Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology 11 (4): 967–988.
Žikić, Bojan. 2018. Antropologija tela. Beograd: Odelјenje za etnologiju i antropologiju Filozofskog fakulteta i Dosije studio.
Published
2018-12-30
How to Cite
Žikić, Bojan, and Danijel Sinani. 2018. “A Misanthropic View at the Societies of the Old Testament in the Books of Smaller Prophets”. Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology 13 (4), 1091–1112. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v13i4.9.
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