Biblical Terror - Visiting Assistant Professor Jeremiah W. (Grand Valley State University Cataldo - Bog

Law and restoration are now central concepts for the Bible, but they were not always so. Cataldo uses as conversational starting points theories from Zizek, Foucault, and Deleuze, all of which who emphasize relation and difference, to expose deep-rooted processes of identity formation and self-preservation within the golah (or remnant, generally) community. The more modern perception that biblical authors wrote their texts presupposing a central importance for these concepts is fallacious; it incorrectly assumes that the idealized reality behind those concepts was already known in a way that people could simply be reminded of it. To the contrary, law and restoration were made central in the writing of the texts; they were shaped by ideological forces concerned not with any altruism but with protecting the community from threats to the boundaries of its collective identity. The concepts of law and restoration, Cataldo concludes are products of selfish desire.