From Babylon to Eternity
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From Babylon to Eternity

The Exile Remembered and Constructed in Text and Tradition

Bob Becking, Alex Cannegieter, Wilfred van der Poll, Anne-Mareike Wetter

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From Babylon to Eternity

The Exile Remembered and Constructed in Text and Tradition

Bob Becking, Alex Cannegieter, Wilfred van der Poll, Anne-Mareike Wetter

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About This Book

First Published in 2014. Generally, readers have a negative idea of the Exile. Psalm 137 has fuelled the idea that this was a time of sorrow and despair. This image of the Exile influenced, for instance, Luther's ideas on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. The four essays in this volume deconstruct and reconstruct this image. Bob Becking tries to recreate a history of the Exile. On the basis of the available evidence, this could be no more than a fragmented history, nevertheless showing that the fate of the exiles was not as bad as often supposed. Anne-Mareike Wetter reveals that the biblical image of exile is multi-faceted. She shows how a tradition of a people tied to their God-given land was challenged by the reality of foreign occupation. And how that people eventually succeeded in translating this experience, appropriating it through a transformation into a counter-tradition that enabled them to cope with the new situation, without breaking entirely with their cultural and religious heritage. Jewish ideas on exile are discussed by Wilfred van de Poll. He concentrates on the use of the concept of galut, which refers to the paradigmatic and identity-shaping function of the dispersion of the people of Israel and showed that the Exile in Jewish thinking had become a permanent reality up until the present day. From the perspective of intertextual reading, Alex Cannegieter discusses four texts of varying ages and background – Augustine, Petrarch, Luther, and a Dutch sermon held after the end of the Second World War. She explores the ways authors chose biblical texts to appropriate them a new context, thereby changing the meaning of the new, as well as the source texts.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781134903931
Topic
History
Edition
1
FROM BABYLON TO ETERNITY: APPROPRIATION OF THE BABYLON-MOTIF IN CHRISTIAN HOMILETICAL CONSTRUCTIONS
Alex Cannegieter
Introduction
The topic of this volume is the way the motif of the Babylonian Exile has been transmitted through the ages in various Christian and Jewish texts. The first contributions focused on sources from the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish tradition. In this chapter a selection of texts from the Christian tradition will be discussed, dating from the first to the twentieth century CE. The focus will be on the concept of intertextuality: the interrelation between two or more texts and between text and reality. How does one text influence another? How do writers read earlier sources and how do they reutilize them?
In cases where the Hebrew Bible provides the source texts, the situation is complicated. The Hebrew Bible is a collection of a variety of books, dating from diverging ages, belonging to different genres and with varying purposes. The motif of the Babylonian Exile has been discussed within narrative (e.g., 2 Kings 24–25), prophetic (e.g., Jeremiah 51) and poetical (e.g., Psalm 137) texts and from the perspectives of despair (e.g., Lamentations), hope (e.g., Deutero-Isaiah) and hindsight (e.g., Ezra). This diversity of texts makes the analysis of reutilization more complicated. On the other hand, it is one of the reasons that the Bible is still felt to be authoritative, after thousands of years, because it continues to give readers the opportunity to find texts that fit their particular needs and situations.
The aim of this chapter is to try to illustrate how writers, from different ages and in varying circumstances, selected texts relating to the Babylonian Exile from the Hebrew Bible, read them, gave new meaning to them and transformed them according to their particular needs and situation, by using them in a new textual context.
The first section will discuss the concept of intertextuality, as it has been developed during the last decades, the transforming aspect of intertextuality and the notion of appropriation, and finally two contrasting approaches of intertextuality. During the next sections, works of Christian authors will be discussed. The discussion will start with the use of the Babylonian motif in the Book of Revelation. As a biblical text, Revelation has it own authority and it has in its turn become a source for the Christian appropriation of the motif of Babylon.
Subsequently, works of four authors that stand in the Christian tradition will be discussed. The “source,” the Hebrew Bible, consists of a large variety of texts; this variety is reflected in the choice of Christian authors. Therefore, texts have been selected from different periods in time, dating from Antiquity (Augustine), through the Middle Ages (Petrarch), the Reformation (Luther), up until the twentieth century (Cannegieter). The selection contains texts of systematical-theological, polemical and pastoral character, texts that aim to explain or actualize the biblical text and texts that make use of the biblical motif of the Exile more loosely.
Methodological Investigations: Intertextuality
No texts, including the classic single-authored works of Shakespeare or Dostoevsky, for example, are organic self-contained unities, created out of the spontaneous, freely willed act of a self-identical subject (Boyarin, 1994: 14).
This observation, made by Daniel Boyarin, is not only true for the works of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, but can also be applied to the works of “classic” Christian authors, like Augustine and Luther. Individual authors write within a certain cultural, social, historical, and personal context. This means that they make use of words, expressions, pictures, associations that they derive from the world in which they and their respective audience live. If they did not do that, then their work would be unreadable, incomprehensible. The most important carriers for those words, expressions, pictures, and associations are other texts.
The Development of the Concept
The past 30 years saw an increasing awareness of this phenomenon. As early as the 1920s, Michael Bakhtin introduced the notion of dialogicity, implying that someone who writes is not only led by text-internal considerations, but also enters in dialogue with other texts and with reality (Van Wolde, 1997: 427). Forty years later Julia Kristeva took up Bakhtin’s ideas and introduced the term intertextuality. She used the term to indicate the intersection of one text into another. Although, contrary to Bakhtin, she restricted the term to the relationship between texts, at the same time she expanded the concept of text to the point of comprising reality itself. Furthermore she changed the perspective from the text itself to the intertext, also called “the book of culture,” of which the text only formed a part (Van Wolde, 1997: 427; 1989: 45). This development of the term intertext was extended by (post)structuralism and postmodernism up to the point that everything was believed to be text and everything had become intertext (Van Wolde, 1997: 428). This point of view developed from the realization that it is not possible to describe, or even observe, other than through language, and that language is a construction of culture (Boyarin, 1994: 14).
Intertextuality, thus, is a phenomenon that belongs to every text, whether the relationships with other texts are made subconsciously or consciously. On the one hand, authors use phrases, pictures, themes that have been internalized in their own culture to such an extent, that they connect to other texts automatically, without consciously doing so. On the other hand, they can also make deliberate relationships, for instance when they use quotes from other texts, or when they introduce motifs or words in the text that are striking to the reader, because they are particularly meaningful or even because they are seemingly out of place. While (post)structuralists and postmodernists emphasize the fact that all texts are embedded in the whole social and cultural context, other theorists think that the concept of intertextuality should only be applied to the connections that an author deliberately makes, because it is impossible to retrace the other influences to which that author was subjected (Weren, 1999: 198).
Transformation and Appropriation
It is probably safe to say that most authors make connections to other texts deliberately as well as subconsciously. When analysing a text, however, it is only possible to make statements about relationships between texts that are demonstrable (Van Wolde, 1997: 429). How can one establish that a text is reused?
The most obvious way of reutilizing a text is quotation: the inclusion of a segment of one text into another. This can be done explicitly or implicitly (Weren, 1999: 202). Explicit quotations are more recognizable. Authors, for instance, mention the fact that they are quoting and from which text the quotation is taken. Or, the quote is famous to such an extent that most readers recognize it immediately. Implicit quotations are less easy to trace. The reader must be acquainted with the source to recognize the quotation. A more remote way of connecting to another text is by allusion, where a link is made in content, though the formulation may be completely different (Weren, 1999: 202).
Even if authors include literal quotes in their texts, it is important to realize that they are doing more than just repeating these words. As we have seen, each text is subject to the phenomenon of intertextuality. That means that each text is related, directly or indirectly, to its cultural, historical and textual context. When you take a text out of its original and into a new context, you automatically change the meaning of that text. In other words, the quote changes its new environment, the new (con)text, but that context also transforms the quote (Van Wolde, 1997: 429; Boyarin, 1994: 16).
The reutilization of an existing text or motif has been labelled by historical and cultural-historical literature with the term appropriation (Frijhoff, 1997: 99–118). This term is used in a variety of ways, so it is important to establish the sense in which it is applied to this current discussion. We propose that for our purposes, the most fruitful definition is one used in the cultural sciences: appropriation as “the use of texts, or ideas for a specific goal, the specific way in which meaning is given to a text within the context of the user” (1997: 110). Appropriation is not a single event but is an ongoing process. Writers who, in (and because of) their context as writers, use and transform older texts, have previously received those texts as readers. After having given it meaning within their own context as users, they re-use it during the process of creating a new text. Subsequently readers, who receive this new text, transform it again, now into their own context.
Two Approaches to Intertextuality
In her article “Intertextuality: Ruth in Dialogue with Tamar,” Ellen van Wolde describes two contrasting concepts of intertextuality (Van Wolde, 1997: 429–32). One approach is restricted to text production, the other to text reception. Van Wolde presents the following diagram to illustrate her point:
Intertextuality: Text Production
Intertextuality: Text Reception
Writer
Diachronic
Sources
Causality
Indexicality
Compulsory relations
Reader
Synchronic
Functions
Analogy
Iconicity
Potential relations
A good example of the type of intertextual analysis that focuses on text production can be found in historical-critical exegesis within biblical studies. The focus of the historical-critical exegetes is to reconstruct the biblical texts and attempt to discover the sources that lie behind a text. These scholars make use of the comparative approach, which states that the older text (or genotext) has influenced a later text (or phenotext) (Van Wolde, 1989: 45). The focus of this approach, consequently, is on the production phase of the text and the sources used by writers when composing the text. It is thought that it is possible to recover the writers’ intentions by identifying the sources that they used. The viewpoint, therefore, is diachronic, the later text following the older text, and causal, the later text being influenced by the older text. It follows the principle of indexicality, the term index meaning a sign that is directly influenced by another sign or reality.1 Once the text is composed, its meaning is fixed. The reader is forced to follow the line of thinking of the writer. In other words, writers determine the context and the meaning of the text, while readers receive the text as it is composed, without appropriating it into their own context.
Conversely, the intertextual analysis that focuses on text reception starts with the reader. Readers give meaning to the text by relating it to their own context, consisting of culture, texts read and life-experiences. This type of intertextual analysis is less concerned with the sources that the writer has used, and more with the function that the text has when it is received and appropriated by the reader. The intertextuality is not analysed diachronically, but synchronically. The relations between the texts are not thought to be causal (the genotext determining the phenotext) but based, more loosely, on the principle of iconicity, or simultaneousness and analogy.2 Readers, however, are not entirely free in their interpretation; they find possible points of departure within the text. Such freedom lies in the choice of which connections they actually make, which potential relations they actualize.3 How they actualize them, and what significance they attach to them, depends on their individual context and life-experience.4
These two concepts, as described by Van Wolde, seem to be mutually exclusive. However, the analysis of the reutilization of texts might prove to be more fruitful when use is made of both approaches, both writer-oriented and reader-oriented. After all, a writer, before becoming a writer, is a reader. It is important to research which sources a writer has chosen to refer to, before one assess the function of this reference. The question should be: how do authors receive a text, how do they determine that it has a relation to their own context, what makes them choose a text to reutilize and how do they appropriate it, make it fit into a new text?
Application
Van Wolde, in her article, proposes a procedure for intertextual research (Van Wolde, 1997: 432–33). The first step is to study the texts on their own merit. Next an inventory has to be made of the semantic and stylistic repetitions in the text, on the level of words, larger textual units or structures, and repetitions of narratological features, such as analogies in character types or similar narrative representations. Finally, the researcher should concentrate on the new network of meaning that has been created by the meeting of both texts.
With regard to the Babylonian motif, a similar procedure will be applied. As the texts from the Hebrew Bible have been discussed earlier, the focus of this section will be on the reception and reutilization. The selected texts will be analysed with regard to the following questions. In what historical and personal context did the writer work? To which source texts does the author refer? On what level does repetition take place: at semantic, stylistic or narrative level? Does the author make use of explicit or implicit quotation of allusion? Why did the author choose this particular source text? How does the author interpret this text? How is it made to “fit” into the author’s own...

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