By: Ayana Young,
on 3/25/2016
The phrase “moveable feast,” while popularized by Ernest Hemingway’s memoir, refers primarily to the holidays surrounding Passover and Easter. Although “Easter” is not a biblical word, Passover is a major holiday in the Jewish calendar. The origins of the festival, while disputed among scholars, are narrated in the biblical texts in Exodus 12–13
The post When’s Easter? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: ErinF,
on 1/2/2015
In an effort to introduce readers to our global staff and life here at Oxford University Press (OUP), we are excited to bring you an interview with Robert Repino, an editor in the reference department. His debut novel, Mort(e), will publish in January with Soho Press.
When did you start working at OUP?
October 2006.
Can you tell us a bit about your current position here?
I am the editor of three online resource centers: Oxford Islamic Studies Online (OISO), Oxford Biblical Studies Online (OBSO), and the Oxford African American Studies Center (AASC). The term editor, though, is a bit misleading, since I spend more time managing projects than actually editing text. The main part of my job is recruiting scholars in different fields to write or review new content for the site, which consists mostly of encyclopedia-style articles, but can also include primary source documents, editorials, and teaching aids. I also plan out the different areas of focus for each year. For example, this year we obviously need more content covering the situation in Syria and Iraq for Oxford Islamic Studies Online. Finally, I coordinate with the Marketing team to bring more attention to the sites through blog posts, interviews, and partnerships with academic organizations.
You are about to publish your first novel. Where did your inspiration come from for the book?
I had a dream one night in which aliens landed on earth and somehow altered all of the non-human animals to make them intelligent. The animals could speak, walk upright, and form armies that could fight the humans. It was very alarming—I remember in particular an image of a saucer hovering over my childhood home, with animal soldiers exiting it, marching down a giant gangplank into my backyard.
As I thought about it in those first few moments, the idea reminded me of all the big stories I’ve wanted to write since I was much younger. Like many nerdy kids who grew up watching Star Wars and Star Trek, I had always wanted to create some kind of science fiction epic, only I wanted mine to be a little subversive, and I wanted it to comment on politics, religion, and morality. Very quickly, I decided to frame this story around a sentient animal fighting in a rebellion against humanity. I turned the aliens into ants because I wanted them to have a good reason for being angry with humans. And I grounded the story in the unlikely relationship between a cat and a dog. In fact, these characters are based on the cat I grew up with, and the dog who was his playmate. Perhaps because of this friendship, my cat apparently came to believe he was a dog. The scene in the novel in which the cat “guards” the house against a babysitter is based on a true story. (We never saw the babysitter again after that.)
Did the projects that you are working on here at OUP influence you at all while writing your novel?
Yes, especially with regard to religious studies. The Queen of the ants believes that humans are evil because they see themselves as the center of the universe, the species chosen by their creator to rule over the world. Meanwhile, the main character, Mort(e), discovers that he is the prophesied savior whom the humans believe will end the war and destroy the Queen. As a result, the novel devotes a lot of space to exploring the power of religious beliefs, the promise (or threat) of the afterlife, the cryptic nature of sacred scriptures, and the difficult and often lonely decision one faces when rejecting a religion in certain contexts. In some ways, Mort(e) is an inversion of the prophet/savior archetype, as he doesn’t believe in the mythology that the humans have crafted around his life story. At the same time, he recognizes the power of these religious traditions, and accepts that spiritual experience is perhaps universal among all sentient beings. As you can imagine, a lot of this stuff is in Oxford Islamic Studies Online and Oxford Biblical Studies Online, and scholars of religious studies will probably recognize some of the terminology and imagery. (Plus, the epigraph is from Numbers 22:28–31. Look that up, and you’ll see why it’s quite appropriate.)
Has your experience as an author impacted the way that you edit?
I think so. It took me a year to write the book, but nearly four years to revise, edit, and proofread it. So, I now understand, after much resistance, that editing is writing. It can be hard to accept that sometimes. But I think I’m better at seeing the big picture in a given article or essay than I used to be. And, very often, I understand a simple cut solves a ton of problems.
What was the most surprising thing that you learned?
A novelist who was kind enough to blurb the book told me that a scene in Mort(e) in which a giant rat throws up at the sight of a corpse is not accurate. Apparently, rats and horses are the only mammals that cannot vomit. I’ll just leave that for you to ponder.
Do you have any advice for first time authors?
Write as much as you possibly can. For sheer volume—and therefore, more practice—short stories are easier to work on than novels. (Novels can become extremely discouraging between pages 30 and 50.) Write a story, and when you’re finished, celebrate by writing another. There is a great speech by Ray Bradbury that is available on YouTube in which he challenges people to write a short story a week (or a month, whatever) for a year. At the end of that year, most of your work will stink. Some of it might be good. But no matter what, you will be a much better writer.
Any suggestions for others working in publishing with dreams of finishing their novel?
I think that finishing a novel can be daunting for anyone who has a full-time job. It’s so important to set up a time of day to write that works for you, and to stick to that as best as you can. And, to occasionally sequester yourself on a weekend if you have to. Even writing 100 words that you later delete is better than writing nothing (and then binge watching a reality show). And then, when you have finally powered through, you have to embrace the revision process, which can often require reaching out to people you trust for help. This being publishing, you should be able to find someone.
The post Getting to know Reference Editor Robert Repino appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 12/15/2014
The Red Tent was perfect for the Lifetime channel. The network’s four-hour miniseries closely followed Anita Diamont’s 1997 novel, which gave voice—and agency—to the biblical character of Dinah. In both the novel and the miniseries, Dinah the daughter of Jacob is characterized not as a victim (as in Genesis 34) but as a strong, assertive woman raised by a band of mothers who draw power from one another and from their worship of the Divine Mother rather than the patriarchal god of Jacob. And yet, as much as she delivers strong speeches against patriarchal ways, Dinah Redux does not stray from the traditional scripts for women. Her life is shaped by romances with muscled men and by motherhood.
Dinah is tenderly loved by two men. Her first husband Shalem, who in Genesis 34 is called Shechem and is described as seizing Dinah by force, becomes in The Red Tent Dinah’s consensual spouse. Refusing to request permission to marry from her father, she claims her union with Shalem as “my life, my future, my choice.” It is the men of her family who construe her choice as defilement, using it as a pretext for slaughtering Shalem and all the men of his village. Her second husband, created for the novel, overcomes her reluctance to marry again and, like her first husband, consummates their union in slow motion on a dimly-lit bed of mutual pleasure and tenderness. While criticizing patriarchal ideas in general and some men in particular (including Laban, who is depicted as a drunk, gambling, abusive tyrant), Dinah clearly loves her husbands as well as her brother Joseph.
From the beginning of her pregnancy with Shalem’s child, Dinah’s identity rests in her role as mother. When her son is claimed by Shalem’s Egyptian mother, Dinah is willing to live in a mice-infested cellar and be treated as a slave in order to remain in her son’s life. Childbearing as the essential essence of womanhood, indeed, runs throughout The Red Tent. Even as a child, Dinah learns from her mothers in the women’s-only space of the tent the power of menstrual blood and the ability to give birth; her later role as midwife allows her to continue to participate in this most female of activities.
In placing romance and the mother-child bond at the center of women’s lives, The Red Tent follows a very modern script. Like the heroines of romance novels, Dinah willingly surrenders to the attentions of attractive men and is passionately devoted to her son. Other modern tropes appear as well. She and her mothers attempt to protect Laban’s wife from domestic violence, treat slaves as their equals, and eventually manage their anger. While Dinah resists patriarchy as a system, she ultimately forgives the people (like her father) who embody that system. Dinah is strong and independent but still desirable to men, still a devoted mother, still kind in a self-sacrificing way.
The novel The Red Tent is so beloved by many women because it offers a relatable female biblical character, one whose loves, commitments, and challenges resonate in the modern world. Presented as the recovery of the lost voices of ancient women, it also plays well with a current climate of distrust in religious traditions and institutions. Like The Da Vinci Code, The Red Tent is fiction, but its claim that history has demeaned women’s stories rings true for many who are desperately seeking a usable past.
And yet, by making the past mirror the present, this retelling of the biblical story not only does disservice to the past but also reinscribes the very gender scripts it claims to resist.
My recent work as the editor in chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies aims to work against such anachronistic assumptions. In the case of ancient Israel, our participating scholars explored topics such as the nature of goddess worship, marriage, gender roles, and the social significance of children. They argue that the worship of female deities was not limited to women and had little bearing on the well-being of human women; that children’s importance was as much economic as affectional; that “biblical marriage” required neither female consent, mutual vow making, nor romance; and that low life expectancies not only promoted the “marriage” of females by the age of 13 but also meant that few people would have ever known their grandparents. Johanna Stiebert, author of “Social Scientific Approaches,” contextualizes The Red Tent as one strategy of feminist appropriation of the ancient world, while Susanne Scholz (“Second Wave Feminism”) and Teresa J. Hornsby (“Heterosexism/Heteronormativity”) explain the perspectives of those who find the valorization of romance and motherhood as reflective of rather than resistant to patriarchy. Deborah W. Rooke (“Patriarchy/Kyriarchy”) traces the history of conversations about goddesses and women in the ancient world.
These and other entries suggest just how speculative, selective, and skewed many of The Red Tent’s portrayals of the ancient world are. In Diamant’s world, four women willingly share Jacob as husband and experience little competition within women’s space. In the red tent, they cooperate with one another, sharing stories and essential oils. Such portrayals downplay not only biblical stories of tensions between women but also the modern systems that pit women against one another.
By paying attention to the ways in which gender is constructed in the diverse texts, cultures, and readers that constitute “the world of the Bible,” gender-sensitive biblical scholarship seeks to move beyond such stereotypes of women. It suggests that women—and men and those whom societies place as “other”—operate within systems and structures that must be named and, when necessary, critiqued. Though giving Dinah agency within a world that limits women’s roles to romance and motherhood might seem liberating to some readers/viewers of The Red Tent, gender studies brings into focus the socially constructed nature of these limits of women’s worth.
Headline image credit: The Red Tent. Photo Joey L. © 2014 Lifetime Entertainment Services, LLC
The post Biblical women and Lifetime’s The Red Tent appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Rebecca,
on 2/19/2010
Sometimes, when I am a step ahead of my email (yes, this is a rare occurrence), I get a chance to spend some time just browsing all the great online products OUP publishes. This morning, I spent some time in Oxford Biblical Studies Online and found an article about the relationship between medicine and the bible that I thought you would all enjoy. The article is from The Oxford Companion to the Bible and was written by J. Keir Howard. Check it out below.
It is generally agreed that modern Western medicine takes its origin from two main sources, the Greek ideals enshrined in the Hippocratic tradition, to which was added the influence of the biblical teaching of love of one’s neighbor (Lev. 19.18; Luke 10.25–37). Thus, although Western medicine owes much to its classical heritage, especially as this has been reinterpreted since the Renaissance, it was the added dimension of a biblically based ethic that gave it a distinctive approach, centered in a profound respect for the person.
The pragmatism of Greek ideals is reflected in writings dealing with the exposure of unwanted or weak infants and with solutions to the problems of the chronically ill. The latter, being useless to themselves and to the state, should be allowed to die without medical attention (Plato, Republic 407). Biblical religion, on the other hand, had the frame of reference of a transcendent God to whom humankind was ultimately answerable; this gives rise to a profound respect for the dignity and innate value of the individual, seen as created in the image of God (Gen. 1.27). The responsibilities of biblical faith, whether Jewish or Christian, in the relations of people with one another are summed up in texts like “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19.18) and “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7.12;…). From the standpoint of medicine, this was admirably summed up in the prayer of the great Jewish physician Maimonides (1135–1204 CE): “May I never see in my patient anything else than a fellow creature in pain.”
The influence of such biblical precepts introduces an element of moral obligation into medical ethics as it developed in parallel with the rising influence of Christianity in the later Roman empire and throughout the medieval period in Europe. It also provided the spur to the church to establish hospitals that provided care for the sick; refuges that gave shelter to the blind, sufferers from leprosy, the mentally ill, and others outcast from society; and dispensaries for the poor. This same obligation, at a much later stage, led to the development of medical missionary work in conjunction with, yet distinct from, the growth of evangelistic concern that took place in the nineteenth century.
In providing a moral base for such developments, the Bible has given to modern medicine a great deal more than it might now care to acknowledge. Nevertheless, the centrality of respect for the person that originates in the Bible has now become enshrined in modern medical codes, such as the Geneva Convention Code of Ethics (1949) and the Helsinki Convention (1964) of the World Medical Association.
On the other hand, as a result of the ways in which the Bible has been interpreted and applied, there have been times when its influence on medicine has been negative. Until there was any proper understanding of the causative factors in disease and the actual disease processes themselves, there was a tendency to see sickness as the result of divine visitations and punishment for wrongdoing. The Bible itself knows little of physicians as such (see Medicine), and in the faith of Israel it was God alone who was the healer and giver of life. Most references to physicians are uncomplimentary (as in Mark 5.25–26, more temperately put in Luke 8.43) or
