Thursday, September 10, 2009

Class Summary for 09/10/09

Well, here we go, today's class in a nutshell.


Class Discussion
  • Repetitive Parallelism - Commonly used in Hebrew poetry, a technique in which one term is balanced/repeated by another (typically in the next verse)
  • Vico, an Italian secular philosopher, who hypothesized the "stages of language" as
    1. Metaphorical (pictures, images)
    2. Metonymy (one thing stands for something else)
    3. Demotic (vulgar, descriptive, ironic language)
    • Vico also organized the 3 "ages" of civilization: the divine, the heroic, and the human.
    • You can read more about it here (it starts in about the second paragraph)
  • We talked about the Critical approach to the bible (A more scholarly, studious approach, obviously, Moses didn't write the first five books).
  • And we also talked about the Traditional approach to the bible, which isn't interested in critique, more of a literal application.
    • Dr. Sexson actually brought up an excellent point that there is a difference between taking the bible literally, and using it as a metaphorical tool to help us with problems in our lives, and with things that we can't explain. Awesome stuff. I believe he said, "We must relativise our traditions to furnish in a larger context."
  • The Documentary Hypothesis:  The bible wasn't written by one person, rather a series of redactors.
  • Ovid and Claude Lévi-Strauss were mentioned.
  • Logos=words.
Additional Stuff

  • Rio shared a link to an online King James bible: bartleby.com/108
  • Here is a YouTube link to the Miserere, by The Kings College Choir. (The song is the right one, I don't know if the video is actually Roy Goodman) You can buy it off iTunes as well as an individual song (.99 for this beautiful music!).
I hope I've done well.

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