The Hebrew idiom שׂים עין על (“to set/put the eye on”) appears in Genesis 44:21 within Judah’s speech, where he quotes Joseph’s command concerning Benjamin. Traditional interpretations have generally understood the phrase as a neutral or benevolent expression of attention or authority. This article proposes that, from Judah’s fearful perspective, the idiom evokes the image of a powerful and potentially dangerous gaze. Employing a cognitive linguistic approach, the study analyses the expression as a metaphorical-metonymic construction in which the eye functions as an instrument of influence and authority. Attention is given to the idiom’s dual valence – capable of conveying both benevolent oversight (cf. Jer 24:6) and potential threat – and to its relationship with the more frequent prophetic idiom שׂים פנים על (“set the face on”). Ancient Near Eastern parallels, particularly from Mesopotamia and Egypt, illuminate the cultural background of the active, projective eye and help clarify Judah’s anxiety in the context of the silver cup crisis (Gen 44:2–17). By focusing on Judah’s perspective, this study offers new insight into the emotional depth and cultural resonance of Genesis 44–45, contributing to a broader understanding of how biblical authors engaged with shared regional concepts of vision, power, and authority.
In the 1960s and 70s, Joseph Fletcher’s “situation ethics” (or “new morality”) emerged as a prominent attempt to loosen Christian moral reflection from inherited legalism and dogmatism amid new dilemmas in medicine and public life. While influential, it also provoked sustained criticism from many Christian ethicists, not least because its appeal to love risked reinforcing a decision-centered account of moral agency. This essay reconstructs that debate and highlights Stanley Hauerwas’s early engagement with Fletcher in Vision and Virtue, where Hauerwas affirms the ambiguity of moral notions yet resists reducing ethics to case-by-case adjudication. Drawing on Iris Murdoch and Wittgenstein, Hauerwas describes Christian ethics as an “aesthetics” in the limited but important sense that moral life depends on trained perception: we can act only within the world we are able to see. Crucially, such “vision” is not an individual achievement but is learned through participation in the community of believers – its narratives, practices, and disciplines – that forms the virtues by which the world can be truthfully described. The result is a reorientation from deciding well in isolated cases to becoming the kind of people who can see and live faithfully.
This article applies transtextuality theory to the nativity narrative prefix in the Gospel of Luke. After briefly explaining the theory, the article examines how the Lukan storytelling plan moulds the Markan-inherited tradition. As opposed to the historical-critical approaches that seek to differentiate the authentic traditions from the inauthentic, as in form criticism, transtextual theory aims to understand and appreciate how the various components mutually interact to form a unified whole that functions on the synchronic plane in its present shape. As opposed to redaction criticism, the Gospel of Luke is not viewed as a mere embellishment of Mark but as an original story version to be considered in its own right. Transtextuality theory explains the inner workings between the individuating textual components that animate the Lukan story and how the resulting version creates a differing image of the dramatis personae therein.
Book review on Christian Frevel, Desert Transformations: Studies in the Book of Numbers. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 137, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020, xvi + 610 pp., ISBN 978-3-16-153967-1
Viktor Frankl views self-transcendence as a key objective in developing into a fully realised human being. Hesychastic spirituality in Orthodox monasticism has a similar aim. During the transition from the secular to monastic life, monks go through radical self-transformation from the egoic to Edenic state. In that setting, self-transcendence becomes the ultimate aim of deification and a coping mechanism to deal with the suffering experiences often accompanying monastic spiritual development. I consider four elements of Hesychast spirituality: nostalgia, metanoia, Jesus Prayer, and spiritual fatherhood, to be forming elements of spiritual transformation based on the real-life experiences of Athonite hermits. Through qualitative interviews with four participants and thematic phenomenological analysis, I focus on psychological transformation processes that have been only partially addressed in previous research.
