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3 books match the query 'Lamentations'

cover of Daughter Zion: Her Portrait, Her Response

Daughter Zion

Her Portrait, Her Response

Mark J. Boda

SBL Press, 2012

This volume showcases recent exploration of the portrait of Daughter Zion as “she” appears in biblical Hebrew poetry. Using Carleen Mandolfo’s Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets (Society of Biblical Literature, 2007) as a point of departure, the contributors to this volume explore the image of Daughter Zion in its many dimensions in various texts in the Hebrew Bible. Approaches used range from poetic, rhetorical, and linguistic to sociological and ideological. To bring the conversation full circle, Carleen Mandolfo engages in a dialogic response with her interlocutors. The contributors are Mark J. Boda, Mary L. Conway, Stephen L. Cook, Carol J. Dempsey, LeAnn Snow Flesher, Michael H. Floyd, Barbara Green, John F. Hobbins, Mignon R. Jacobs, Brittany Kim, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Christl M. Maier, Carleen Mandolfo, Jill Middlemas, Kim Lan Nguyen, and Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer.
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cover of Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book

Surviving Lamentations

Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book

Tod Linafelt

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Most contemporary interpretations of the biblical book of Lamentations focus on the figure of the "suffering man" as a role model for submission in the face of God's punishment for sin. Yet such a model offers small consolation to survivors of the Holocaust or other mass atrocities and also ignores chapters 1 and 2 of Lamentations, in which the personification of Zion laments her sufferings and demands a response on behalf of her dying children.

In Surviving Lamentations, Tod Linafelt offers an alternative reading of Lamentations in light of the "literature of survival" (works written by survivors of catastrophe) as well as literary and philosophical reflections on "the survival of literature." He refocuses attention on the figure of Zion as a manifestation of a basic need to give voice to suffering, and traces the afterlife of Lamentations in Jewish literature, in which text after text attempts to provide the response to Zion's lament that is lacking in Lamentations itself.

Seen through Linafelt's eyes, Lamentations emerges as uncannily relevant to contemporary discourse on survival.
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cover of Trauma and the Failure of History: Kings, Lamentations, and the Destruction of Jerusalem

Trauma and the Failure of History

Kings, Lamentations, and the Destruction of Jerusalem

David Janzen

SBL Press, 2019

A theoretical and exegetical exploration of trauma in the Hebrew Bible

David Janzen discusses the concepts of history and trauma and contrasts the ways historians and trauma survivors grapple with traumatic events, a contrast embodied in the very different ways the books of Kings and Lamentations react to the destruction of Jerusalem. Janzen’s study warns that explanations in histories will tend to silence the voices of trauma survivors, and it challenges traditional approaches that sometimes portray the explanations of traumatic events in biblical literature as therapeutic for victims.

Features:

  • Exploration of history as a narrative explanation that creates a past readers can recognize to be true
  • Examination of how trauma results in a failure of victims to fully experience or remember traumatic events.
  • A case for why the past is a construction of cultures and historians
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