Françoise Mirguet

In this book, Françoise Mirguet traces the appropriation and reinterpretation of pity by Greek-speaking Jewish communities of Late Antiquity. Pity and compassion, in this corpus, comprised a hybrid of Hebrew, Greek, and Roman constructions; depending on the texts, they were a spontaneous feeling, a practice, a virtue, or a precept of the Mosaic law. The requirement to feel for those who suffer sustained the identity of the Jewish minority, both creating continuity with its traditions and emulating dominant discourses. Mirguet's book will be of interest to scholars of early Judaism and Christianity for its sensitivity to the role of feelings and imagination in the shaping of identity. An important contribution to the history of emotions, it explores the role of the emotional imagination within the context of Roman imperialism. It also contributes to understanding how compassion has come to be so highly valued in Western cultures.

Though several studies have already been devoted to biblical representations of God, the present research considers the position towards the divine they imply, on the basis of syntactic and narrative analysis. The book examines, in the stories of the Pentateuch, different appearances of the divine character: his speeches, as well as their modes of reporting; his actions, their mediations, and the points of view from which they are told; his perceptions and emotions, as well as the so-called omniscient narration; and some interpretations and distortions of his words. It appears that the Pentateuch presents the divine in an essentially mimetic way, mainly from the perspectives of other characters, portraying different human experiences and interpretations of divinity.