The idea of Jesus’s bleeding side wound being metaphorical female genitalia is both conflicting and corresponding to the traditional ideas of female purity. Firstly, the blood from Jesus’s side wound is said to be lifegiving. His sacrifice is lifegiving in several ways. Firstly, his sacrifice and martyrdom is what seems to have saved the population. Thus, the blood is physical evidence of his self-sacrifice. On the other hand, his blood…
The story of Cain killing Abel is found three books earlier in the Vulgate Genesis: the Latin version, given on the right above, is significantly more succinct than the Old English, a fragment from which is given on the left.
The personified Earth drinking the blood of the first murder is only found in the Old English telling of the story, which leans into and elaborates on the act itself and the fallout experienced even before God arrives and calls Cain to account for his brother. Once we arrive at the interrogation point in the story, the words track more directly: in every iteration, Cain’s retort that he is not his brother’s keeper is preserved.
Though the fall of Adam and Eve is the most well known story of descent in Genesis, both biblical Genesis and the Old English interpretation are full of backend stories about the biblical forefathers making a couple mistakes and seeming much less likable or heroic than who they were when they were first introduced. Lot turns from a favored nephew to a confused old man manipulated by his daughters, and…
In Genesis in the Old Testament Narratives, Eve, deceived by the messenger of Satan, ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of death. The “Fall” of the sinned Adam and Eve carried out by the furious God is, on the appearance, due to the disloyalty of his chosen servants. However, a close reading of the “Fall” entails an inherent contradiction in the nature of Eve’s sacrilege. Note that the story…
Prudentius’ Psychomachia is known as one of the first examples of the literary and artistic form known as allegory, in which abstract concepts are illustrated through the use of an extended metaphor . In the case of the Psychomachia, Prudentius explains how Christians should live a virtuous life by illustrating a violent battle between personified virtues and vices. (For example: “Faith first takes the field to face the doubtful chances…
Derrida may be understood to use the image of a mask to think about the relation between testimony and reality. A testimony is like a mask that “covers” an objective reality in that a witness’s testimony is an affirmation of their claiming to have been present in some space at some time (76). Consequently, a testimony cannot be guaranteed because once it is, its sense of reflecting a witness’s presence…
So we did something a little different for this post: I asked questions to Wren and Julia, and I recorded their answers. So here’s that. Benjamin makes an implicit distinction between gore and violence, saying that gore ≠ violence, but how much do you believe gore adds to violence? Wren: She remembered Niles saying something important about bloodshed and its ability to impurify the body by mixing the self with…
In this post I will very briefly discuss the discourse surrounding the ethics of the role of emotion in testimony of suffering/evil. This stuff is incredibly complex- I’ve just included some things I found interesting. Hannah Arendt’s report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil- was written with an apathetic tone which was met with intense criticism and accused of “‘heartlessness’…
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,…
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…
