Despite numerous helpful efforts to ascertain Habakkuk’s historical context, few scholars ask how Habakkuk addresses itself to audiences across varying contexts. Employing Jeffrey Alexander’s concept of cultural trauma, this essay argues that...
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Index theologicus der Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen
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Despite numerous helpful efforts to ascertain Habakkuk’s historical context, few scholars ask how Habakkuk addresses itself to audiences across varying contexts. Employing Jeffrey Alexander’s concept of cultural trauma, this essay argues that Habakkuk’s portrait of victims and perpetrators facilitates a didactic representation of ancient Israel’s collective trauma beyond its original settings. Examining Habakkuk’s trans-historical nature, this study demonstrates that the book’s portrayal of the prophet and the Babylonians communicates cultural trauma in two ways: through the personalization of trauma and through the universalization of evil. The prophet’s direct speeches to YHWH personalize trauma by deepening the identification to victims of trauma from earlier generations, while representing the prophet as an archetype of victims. Simultaneously, Habakkuk’s moral and religious critiques of past perpetrators of trauma correspond to the cultural phenomenon of universalizing evil, which raises readers’ moral awareness and increases resistance to re-traumatization.
While praise of the righteous is endemic in both Jewish and Christian Scripture, its application to named individuals is remarkably rare throughout. In the New Testament, it is reserved for pre-Christian saints and especially for Jesus himself—most...
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Index theologicus der Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen
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While praise of the righteous is endemic in both Jewish and Christian Scripture, its application to named individuals is remarkably rare throughout. In the New Testament, it is reserved for pre-Christian saints and especially for Jesus himself—most clearly in Acts. Responding to the suggestion (by Richard Hays and others) that ‘the Just’ was specifically a messianic title, the article shows instead that its application to figures like James the brother of Jesus and Simon the son of Onias II documents part of a development toward the rabbinic usage of the Tzaddiq. The Just is a typically retrospective honorific designating a rare observant and pious person, possibly suffering and persecuted but divinely vindicated and endowed with charismatic qualities, who facilitates mediation between God and human beings and helps sustain the world.
