First Glance

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The ten plagues that struck the Egyptians and culminated in the watery destruction of Pharaoh’s army in the depths of the Red Sea (Exodus 7–12) are the stuff of Cecil B. De Mille extravaganzas. But the story of the ten plagues is far more than grist for the Hollywood scriptwriters’ mill: As commentators on the Bible have long noted, the plague narrative is a tightly structured tale with many layers of meaning. Ziony Zevit joins this distinguished line of biblical exegetes with “Three Ways to Look at the Ten Plagues.” Zevit examines two plausible explanations for the plagues—that they were a series of natural disasters and that they were specific attacks on individual Egyptian gods—and then puts forward a new way of understanding the story, one that links the plagues to the Creation events in Genesis.

Zevit is professor of biblical literature and Northwest Semitic languages at the University of Judaism, the Los Angeles affiliate of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He has published widely in scholarly journals and is the author of a book on the development of Hebrew spelling in the biblical period, which enables scholars to date ancient writings based on the spelling of certain words. Zevit’s current research focuses on the literary principles used in Hebrew, Phoenician and Ugaritic poetry and on the folk religion of the ancient Israelites as derived from biblical and archaeological evidence.

Zevit spent the 1986–87 academic year at the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, in Jerusalem, and participated in the excavation of the religious center at Tel Dan.

Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, two towering figures on the landscape of modern art whose lives intersected for a troubled time, each painted “Self-Portraits as Christ.” In her magnificently illustrated article, Kathleen Powers Erickson shows that the two works differ drastically from each other. Closely examining both the iconography and the stylistic aspects of these two paintings and drawing on biographical detail, Erickson explains how Gauguin’s self-portrait reflects his none-too-modest view of himself as a messiah of a new art and his role as master to a group of artist-disciples, while Van Gogh’s work captures his personal torments and his profound desire for physical and spiritual regeneration.

Kathleen Powers Erickson is completing her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Van Gogh at Eternity’s Gate: The Religious Aspects of His life and Work,” at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her article, “From Preaching to Painting: Van Gogh’s Religious Zeal,” was named the first place essay in the 1990 Call for Papers on Religion and the Arts by The Christian Century, where it appeared this spring.

Whether the ancient Egyptians were a black people whose civilization was, therefore, a black achievement has sparked a heated controversy in recent issues of BR’s sister magazine, Biblical Archaeology Review. A somewhat similar controversy has erupted in the field of classical scholarship with the publication of the first volume of Martin Bernal’s projected series, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Molly M. Levine tells what Professor Bernal says and why he says it in “Classical Scholarship—Anti-Black and Anti-Semitic?”

Levine received her doctorate summa cum laude in 1980 from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, where she subsequently taught as assistant professor. She now serves as lecturer in the classics department at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Among her publications are Ovid’s Games of Love (Wayne State Univ. Press, 1985) and, as editor, The Challenge of Black Athena, a special volume of the journal Arethusa. Levine received the 1990–91 Blegen Research Fellowship from Vassar College. Her interests include Augustan poetry, women in antiquity, mythology and the art of translation.

Three issues back (BR 05:06), noted scholar F. F. Bruce contributed a typically illuminating entry on eschatology to our Glossary department (see Glossary, BR 05:06). This month he explicates the term “apocalyptic.” Often confused with eschatology, apocalyptic is actually a particular genre of literature popular in the centuries just before and just after the turn of the era. Bruce outlines common apocalyptic themes and describes the apocalyptic books that made it into the Hebrew and Christian Bibles—and those that did not (see Glossary in this issue).

F. F. Bruce was, until his retirement in 1978, the Rylands Professor of biblical criticism at the University of Manchester, England. Among 003his many books are Second Thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Paul: Apostle of the Free Spirit and Jesus and Paul: Places They Knew. Bruce is a Fellow of the British Academy and received its prestigious Burkitt Medal in Biblical Studies in 1979. He is a member of BR’s Editorial Advisory Board.

Although it may never become summer reading, the millions of words of religious teachings, commentary and debate contained in the Talmud have, with the ongoing publication of the Steinsaltz edition in Hebrew, become much more accessible for the lay reader. Now the first volume of an English translation of the Steinsaltz edition brings this treasury of religious writings to an even larger audience. In “Bringing the Talmud into the 20th Century” Walter Reich does more than review the new translation, he offers a clear description of the Talmud’s history and of its parts for those who have been daunted by the arcane reputation of this Jewish classic.

Reich is senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, D.C. He is the author of A Stranger in My House: Jews and Arabs in the West Bank and editor of the forthcoming Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind.

Is religious fundamentalism growing in the United States? How do Americans view the Bible, and are their views affected by schooling? In “Americans and the Bible,” pollster George Gallup, Jr. and Jim Castelli summarize what Americans say about the Bible and examine those responses in relationship to the respondents’ region, ethnicity, religion and level of formal education.

In Bible Books, Harvey Minkoff reviews two new revisions of popular Bible translations, the New English Bible and the Revised Standard Version, as well as a new edition of Tyndale’s New Testament.

Minkoff is associate professor of English linguistics at Hunter College, City University of New York, and author of “Coarse Language in the Bible? It’s Culture Shocking!” BR 05:02.

The ten plagues that struck the Egyptians and culminated in the watery destruction of Pharaoh’s army in the depths of the Red Sea (Exodus 7–12) are the stuff of Cecil B. De Mille extravaganzas. But the story of the ten plagues is far more than grist for the Hollywood scriptwriters’ mill: As commentators on the Bible have long noted, the plague narrative is a tightly structured tale with many layers of meaning. Ziony Zevit joins this distinguished line of biblical exegetes with “Three Ways to Look at the Ten Plagues.” Zevit examines two plausible explanations for the plagues—that they […]