Academic literature on the topic 'Twelve tribes of Israel in art'

An important artistic element or symbolic text of ancient Jewish cemeteries are the tombstones - matsevi. The most commonly used motifs in decorative decoration of Galician matsevahs are zoomorphic, ornithological and vegetative motifs, which are often used in all other forms of Jewish art. The image of subject motifs and larger objects is just as original as the decorative adornment of facades of matsevahs of Eastern Galicia XVI - the first third of the XX century. and deserves a separate thorough study. The presentation of these motifs on the matsevahs' facades gives the viewer enough visual information about a particular person, even without translating and deciphering the very text of the epitaph, which, in the vast majority of cases, correlates and significantly supplements, interprets, informs, extends and clarifies the symbols of the carving of the upper part of the matsevahs. Sometimes the symbolic image was unrelated to the text, it was only decorative and contained traditional Jewish characters or symbols. One should note the desire of the authors, stone-cutters, for originality, artistic individuality, recognition of a particular object as a characteristic feature, of the use of substantive motifs for the decoration of the matsevahs, as well as the significant impact of family traditions with the provision of a peculiar author's decision to build a composition or property of the client with appropriate simplification or the complication of the carved decoration and the refinement of the composition. Very few monuments of stone-making art of the 16th-17th centuries have remained intact until now, which makes it impossible to give a full description of the artistic peculiarities of the memorial plastics; and, the vast majority of the preserved monuments were erected over burials at the end of the 18th and 19th centuries. and preserved until the first third of the XX century. The article is based on materials of field studies by the author of ancient Jewish cemeteries within Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk regions, in particular: Belza, Brody, Bolechova, Burshtyn, Busk, Dobromil, Drohobych, Zabolotova, Kosova, Kremenets, Kutov, Nikolaev, Leshnava, Stary Razdol, Skole, Snyatin, Solotvyn, Stanislavchik, Old Sambir, Ternopil, Turks, Shchyrets, Yabluniv, Yazlivets and others. In the article, individual examples of carved decor are studied, the features of compositional techniques and the specifics of their artistic and plastic expression on the facades of ancient matsevahs of the studied region are analyzed and described. Subject motifs like zoomorphic, ornithomorphic, and vegetative, formed on the basis of the texts of the Torah and the Talmud, biblical metaphors and allegories, which became the symbols of the Twelve tribes of Israel, the people and the land of Israel in the traditional Jewish art of Eastern Galicia from the XVIII - the first third of the XX century. are the dominant motives in stone carving and the matsevah's memorial plastics. The article deals with the most common substantive motifs found on preserved matsevahs of Eastern Galicia of the period under consideration. To systematize and describe the subject motifs are presented in alphabetical order in the following sequence: Building. Vase. Zban (jug) and tray (bowl) for washing hands of levites. Tools, objects and technical equipment. Interior. Chalice. Klepsidra. Book. Ship. Crown. Well. Lamp. Menorah. Subjects and objects of the second plan: Candle holder, candle, platform for Tora, Decalogue tablets. Treasure chest. Arrow. Urn. Cabinet. Poison. Further field investigations and thorough scientific research in accordance with the methodology of scientific study of Jewish cemeteries, which includes: architectural measurements, photo fixation, graphic documentation, writing, reading, decoding and elaboration of texts of epitaphs and documentation of information will help to discover, understand and popularize the traditional art of numerous Jewish communities, which were an integral part of the polyethnic Galician city of the studied period. After all, most of the monuments of stone masonry art are in an extremely poor condition, some of them are on the verge of extinction and require a number of urgent professional measures for their further preservation and research

Dale Allison is right to assert that ‘the twelve tribes in the Diaspora’ invokes Jewish ideas about the Ten Lost Tribes, but wrong to disassociate this thesis from the scholarly consensus that the pseudepigraphal author sees the church as Israel. For James, rather, the restored Israel consists of members of the Two Tribes of Judah and Benjamin (= Jewish Christians) plus members of the Ten Tribes. The latter, rather than being far away in some mythical, inaccessible realm, have been living since the Assyrian invasion in known Diaspora realms, where they lost their Israelite identity until it was reawakened by their recent encounter with the Gospel. Gentiles who respond positively to the Christian message, then,arefor James the Ten Lost Tribes.

Twenty-eight years ago, F.J. van Dijk published in the New West Indian Guide what remained for a long time the only scholarly paper on the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Undoubtedly the largest Rastafari organization both in terms of membership and international expansion, the Twelve Tribes of Israel remains little known in public and academic circles. This article fills two major but closely related gaps in Van Dijk’s seminal article. The first is information on the formation and history of the Twelve Tribes, and the second is how the organization mobilized the return of members to Africa, a cornerstone of Rastafari belief. This article argues that the issue of return to the continent determined the very genesis of the organization and subsequently the development of its eighteen international branches. In its turn, this focus on return to Africa offers another perspective on the internal dynamics of the Rastafari movement, namely the structuring role of Rastafari organizations, a role which challenges the common image of Rastafari as an “acephalous” movement. Exploring the tangible relationship of Rastafari with Ethiopia, through the return to Ethiopia of members of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, offers new insight into the history of the Rastafari movement.

It is widely accepted that the two volumes of Luke-Acts are based on an inaugurated eschatological framework. The kingdom of Christ has already been established, but it is not yet present in its fullness. Given this framework of “already/not yet,” how do we understand Jesus' promise to the Twelve in Luke 22:28–30 that they would “sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel?” If that is the promise, what does the fulfillment entail? Here we will examine Jesus' promise in Luke's Gospel and its fulfillment in the Book of Acts. The central proposal of this study is that the twelve apostles began to judge the twelve tribes of Israel in their inaugurated co-regency in the series of events following the ascension of Jesus and culminating in Pentecost.

The Caucasus region has been called the “Mountain of Tongues”. History writers from Herodotus, 2,500 years ago, until present time have given different numbers of languages, e.g. the Greek geographer and historian Strabo (64 BCE- 21 CE) claimed more than 70 tribes speaking different languages, Pliny stated that the Romans used 130 interpreters when trading. At present more than 50 languages are spoken in the Caucasus (Catford 1977: 283). Hebrew is the ancient original language for all the twelve tribes of Israel, also after the division of the Land of Israel in 927 BCE into the Northern Kingdom, Israel, with ten of the tribes and the Southern Kingdom, Juda, with two tribes. The Israelites got exiled by the Assyrian Kings, e.g. Shalmaneser in 722 BCE. These ten tribes soon lost their language and identity. The southern tribes, Juda, got exiled by the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar, between 606-586 BCE, who destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem (586 BCE).

AbstractA careful analysis of the Qumran "sectarian" texts reveals a consistent preference for self-identification as "Israel" rather than "Judah." In fact, they contain no unambiguous identifications of the community as "Judah" or its members as "Judeans". Like most biblical texts and unlike Josephus and the authors of 1–2 Maccabees, the Qumran community does not equate Israelite with Judean. They regard themselves as the vanguard of the eschatological restoration of the twelve tribes; for them, the Judean state is not the sole heir of biblical Israel.

This paper claims the heraldry of the twelve tribes of Israel as a distinct iconographic invention in post-Reformation England. It is argued that the theme became popular during the reign of King James, a period usually regarded as iconophobic. Little-studied examples of church wall-painting are understood in relation to analogous bible illustrations and writings which have been ignored by historians of this period. The depictions of the twelve patriarchs themselves, part of a ‘Laudian’ beautification of Burton Latimer church in the 1630s, during the incumbency of Robert Sibthorpe allows exploration of the shifting meanings of this Reformation subject.

This chapter discusses the squareness of the ideal city in the Bible. The Bible describes a model city or settlement on four separate occasions, and in each instance it has the form of a square. The ultimate square city is the New Jerusalem, described by both John of Patmos and the prophet Ezekiel as a twelve-gated, walled square The forty-eight Levitical cities described in Numbers 35 were likewise square. And even that archetypal of all biblical settlements, the encampment of the twelve tribes of Israel during their wanderings, was itself arranged as a square. Thus, anyone looking to the Bible for guidance on how to build a community must come to the conclusion that a godly city should be square.