Friday, March 12, 2010

holy hemistitching and the temple tantrum: "How do you expect to get to heaven playing board games!?"

This radical video below:


..and the following observations (believe it or not) may make the same point! (:
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Tzemah Yoreh's article on symmetry, parallelism and chiasm touches on the biblical use of hemstitch (PDF here) helps confirm the "temple tantrum as tageting racism" interpretation:


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The two most common literary structures in Biblical literature are parallelism and chiasm. These structures exist in every book of the Bible and in units of every size ranging from a single verse to complete works. Almost every aspect of the structures in question has been discussed extensively in scholarship. One of the goals of this project is to use the macrostructures we have identified to examine one particular ramification of the structures in question--their role in larger exegetical questions.
Biblical verses of two or more parallel hemistiches will very often omit a word, a term or an idea already found in a previous hemistich (less common is the omission of content in the first hemistich). The reader is of course supposed to fill in the blank on her own. In other words, the first hemistich (or the fuller hemistich) is integral to one’s understanding of the deficient hemistiches in the same verse. This drawing of syllogisms or analogies between parallel hemistiches is of course one of the basic tools used in the analysis of biblical poetry—one used unconsciously by most readers of the Bible. - PDF here


I have always felt that Mark's fuller quotation of Jesus ( "house of prayer for all nations")
was an intentional emphasis for many and multiplex reasons, and that (thus) the mere quotation of "house of prayer" (without for all nations) in Matthew and Luke (compare all four gospel accounts here) made it all the more emphasized and underlined... conspicuous by its absence.

Of course in Matthew's overarching Jewish context and audience, all the more need to emphasize
the inclusivity of the invitation.

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Hey, thanks for engaging the conversation!