Word: hebrews
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...Paul argued, did it come through tribal inheritance. The God of the Hebrew Bible deemed Abraham to be "righteous" years before his circumcision, he wrote, which meant that his listeners didn't need to become circumcised Jews to be Abraham's inheritors. Baptism in faith would more than suffice. Paul waffled as to whether Christianity rendered Judaism's Abrahamic Covenant null and void. But his successors assumed so. The 2nd century church father Justin Martyr wrote that far from an indication of grace, circumcision marked Jews "so that your landmight become desolate, and your cities burned," something of a self...
Things devolved from there. Jews, stung, took steps to cement Abraham's Jewish identity. The Talmud describes him anachronistically as following Mosaic law and speaking Hebrew. And they severely downgraded Ishmael. Initially, says Shaul Magid, professor of Midrash at New York City's Jewish Theological Seminary, Jewish parents named their boys after Abraham's Arab son, but the custom evaporated as they began living under Muslim rule. By the 11th century the great biblical scholar Rashi, citing earlier authorities, described Ishmael as a "thief" whom "everybody hates," an insult that can still be found in his prominently placed commentary...
...would disagree with Barks that, like the God-intoxicated ecstatics of other religious traditions from the Hebrew prophets to St. Francis of Assisi, Rumi was out to seriously question the spiritual assumptions of his day. By the standards of 13th century Balkh, his songs of union with the divine were rebellious fare indeed. But they were also uttered by a man who, at all points in his life, considered himself a devout Muslim. Rumi scholars like Franklin D. Lewis, author of the recent Rumi: Past and Present, East and West, are anxious to remind the poet's legions...
DIED. UZI GAL, 79, Israeli inventor of the Uzi submachine gun; in Philadelphia. He let his name be used for the gun only after the manufacturer insisted; Uzi is the abbreviation for the Hebrew phrase "God is my might...
...tombstones - and Haidler intends to record them all. So far he has completed 30 cemeteries and estimates he will need another five to eight years to do the rest. Haidler started haunting graveyards under communist rule when he used the tombstones as textbooks for his study of Hebrew. It was then that he discovered that, in addition to the customary dates and names, many stones carried colorful eulogies detailing the life and times of the deceased. One of his favorites: "Don't ask the stone about the man buried underneath. It won't attest to his fairness. Go back among...