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Ben Sira and the Men Who Handle Books

Gender and the Rise of Canon-Consciousness

by Claudia V. Camp

  • Hardback
  • 226 pages
  • Publisher: Sheffield Phoenix Press
  • 15.6 x 23.4 x 1.5 cm

£50.45

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What have women to do with the rise of canon-consciousness in early Judaism? Quite a lot, Claudia Camp argues, if the book written by the early second-century BCE scribe, Ben Sira, is any indication. One of the few true misogynists in the biblical tradition, Ben Sira is beset with gender anxiety, fear that his women will sully his honor, their shame causing his name to fail from the eternal memory of his people. Yet the same Ben Sira appropriates the idealized figure of cosmic Woman Wisdom from Proverbs, and identifies her with 'the book of the covenant of the most high God, the law that Moses commanded us'. This, then, is Ben Sira's dilemma: a woman (Wisdom) can admit him to eternity but his own women can keep him out. It is Camp's thesis that these conflicted perceptions of gender are fundamental to Ben Sira's appropriation and production of authoritative religious literature, and that a critical analysis of his gender ideology is thus essential for understanding his relationship to an emerging canon. Ben Sira writes a book, and writes himself into his book, creating a possession into which he can sublimate his anxiety about the women he cannot truly possess and the God he cannot truly trust. What is more, if Ben Sira can be considered representative of his scribal class and context, his work may also provide a window into aspects of the larger cultural process of canon building, including the question of whether we would have a canon at all-or have the canon we have-if the men in that particular patriarchal culture had not coded it in the gendered terms that Ben Sira did.
Ben Sira and the Men Who Handle Books and The Book of Kings and Exilic Identity: 1 and 2 Kings as a Work of Political Historiography
The Book of Kings and Exilic Identity: 1 and 2 Kings as a Work of Political HistoriographyBen Sira and the Men Who Handle Books

  • Author

    Claudia V. Camp

  • Book Format

    Hardback

  • Publisher

    Sheffield Phoenix Press

  • Published

    May 2013

  • Weight

    495g

  • Page Count

    226

  • Dimensions

    15.6 x 23.4 x 1.5 cm

  • ISBN

    9781907534744

  • ISBN-10

    1907534741

  • Eden Code

    4249756

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