Joseph and Aseneth

Angebote / Angebote:

Joseph and Aseneth, a book of the Old Testament Pseud--epigrapha, is a love story about the biblical Joseph and hisEgyptian wife Aseneth which, in richly symbolic language, tells how the idol worshipper Aseneth was converted to beliefin the one God. In recent decades, it has featured prominentlyin discussions of Second Temple Judaism as a testimony to aHellenistic diaspora Judaism that neither observed the rules ofconversion to Judaism (giyyur) nor cared much for the lawsof the Torah.Rivka Nir offers a completely different understanding. Josephand Aseneth, she argues, teaches us nothing about SecondTemple Judaism. Rather, its vocabulary, ideas, symbols andstructure become fully comprehensible only when viewedagainst the background of Syriac Christianity of the third andfourth century. In this setting, Aseneth and Joseph aresymbolic and typological images: Aseneth symbolizes thechurch, Joseph is a prototype of Christ, and their marriage is asymbolic representation of the eternal marriage betweenChrist and the church. Aseneth's religious transformationshould be understood as conversion to Christianity, anexample for polytheists to follow. Turning our attention to thecentral role virginity plays in the story, Nir addresses theproblematic scene of the honeycomb and the bees, reading itas a call to those joining the church to take a vow of virginityand resolve to lead a life of sexual abstinence.Through Nir's detailed analysis of the symbols and metaphorsof Joseph and Aseneth in a Christian context, the bookcoalesces into a tightly integrated and meaningful whole, onboth the theological and the symbolic levels.