Daniel Anlezark’s Old Testament Narratives explores the tale of Adam and Eve, but it allows for an inspection between the relationship of God and humans through the interesting dynamic of the Forbidden Fruit of Knowledge. At the beginning of Genesis B, God commands Adam and Eve to “renounce that tree, guard yourselves against the fruit. For you two there will be no unsatisfied desire” (19). And Adam and Eve continued…
One of the most fascinating aspects of Genesis B is its numerous departures from the Vulgate Bible, most notably in the depiction of Eve. The poem’s recounting of the first Biblical story, the fall of humanity from Eden, calls into question notions of culpability and agency in the Bible. Did Adam and Eve have agency, and by extension, do their descendants, humans, have agency in the Judeo-Christian universe? When…
I find the act of transformation as punishment interesting, because within the Genesis retellings of the Old Testament Narratives, God seems to punish all those who betray him by severely distorting or wholly changing their humanity and physical body. This then presents the idea of sin and being able to avoid it as the definition of being human while sinning in general is, on the other hand, the definition of…
As society evolves so do the ways in which we convey different imagery. In this post, I tracked artwork depicting “The Expulsion,” from the year 1000 AD all the way to 2012.
By Julia Liu, Wren McMillan, Ann Rayburn This is a genuine question. For all we know, God most probably speaks a language. Or rather, language holds an incredibly role in the Bible as well as the Old Testament narratives. In Genesis, God created the world by commanding. He said, “let there be light”. And there was light. It was God’s words that made the world. In the Old Testament narrative,…
By Faryn Thomas, Jennifer Morse, Joseph Marques, and Robert Carhuayo How is witnessing acts of God treated across Genesis, Daniel, and Margaret? In Margaret, page 131, a huge crowd of people witness Margaret pray to God for salvation at the end, before her feet and hands are to be burned. God hears her and there is an earthquake, after which God speaks directly to her from the heavens. As…
“It is very right for us that we should praise with words the guardian of the heavens, the glorious king of hosts, should love him in our minds.”(Anlezark, 3) The above quote functions as a thesis statement for Anlezark’s translation of Old Testament Narratives, as an absolute reverence for god pervades the text from the very start. Following the opening, the writer gives praise to God in the form…
By Faryn Thomas, Jennifer Morse, Joseph Marques, and Robert Carhuayo God’s divine goodness and beauty are often mentioned in the same breath. But there are other things that are somewhat surprisingly portrayed as beautiful, for example, Sodom. “The people’s settlements there were beautiful — the men without honor, hateful to their creator” (137) The Sodomites are obviously without any sort of goodness or grace, and…
Drenched in blood and covered in gore, there is no shortage of violence in Prudentius’ Psychomachia — a gruesome battle between Vices and Virtues for control of the human soul. However, despite all the blood in the poem, and the fact that the Virtues do not always clearly have the upper hand, it is striking that the Virtues only actually bleed once: Discord had entered our ranks wearing the counterfeit…
Because the Old English poems Genesis A & B do more than just regurgitate they key aspects of their source material, telling the stories from the book of Genesis in a way that bears little formal resemblance to any Bible, we ought not to think of them as mere translations, but rather as poems in their own right, with their own agenda, and their own stories to tell. In one pertinent example, Genesis…
