A Comparative Study Of The Biographical Features Of The Old Testament

The Holy Bible is a cultural classic with manifold attributes of religion, history, literature, and so on. The modern context characterized by cultural pluralism has triggered a profusion of approaches to the study of the Bible. With comparative literature into vogue, the biblical study has evolved into an interdisciplinary and intercultural scholarship. This paper, based on biographical theories, is intended to make a systematic research into the Old Testament. With reference to classical and contemporary biographic theories and works in China, this dissertation explores the biographical features of the Old Testament with concrete analysis of each volume and global consideration of the whole book. Focusing on biographical features, the paper is divided into three parts-introduction, main body and further discussion,.The introduction is devoted to the literature review of the literary and the biographical research of the Bible, the presence and the generation of the biographical features of the Old Testament.The main body, composed of three parts, demonstrates the association between the Old Testament and biographical features.Part I exhibits the biography categories in the Old Testament in three chapters. The first chapter is concerned with the biographical dimensions in the Old Testament. On the basis of Zhu Dongrun’s biographical theory, the chapter discusses the three dimensions of reality, art and individuality as well as the close relationship between history and literature so as to expound on the biographical attributes of the Old Testament.The second chapter is an exposition of the three biographical types in the Old Testament-the biography of individuals, the biography of ethnic groups, and the autography. The first section is about the narrative features, the specific works and the classification on the part of the biographies of individuals as well as the types of heroes and their common traits in the Old Testament while the second and the last sections, deeming the Jews as an independent case, probe into the text attribute of the Old Testament as the biography of ethnic groups and the autography.The third chapter centers on the religious attribute of the whole text, the generative mechanism of the religious attribute, and the penetration of the religious elements into the biographical writing.PartⅡ, an investigation of the ethnic consciousness in the Old Testament, concerns the cardinal theme of the biography in a global view. The first chapter traces the history of the Jewish ethnic groups presented in the Old Testament so as to reveal the Jewish images and the formation of the Jewish ethnic consciousness. Starting from the angle of the compilers, the second chapter discloses the ethic significance of the Jews’ compiling the Old Testament and the process of rewriting the Jewish history to idealize Jewish people.PartⅢinvestigates the perception of the otherness consciousness in the Old Testament. The first chapter reveals that Jehovah’s images in various historic periods mirror the Jewish ethnic characters and that as a representative of otherness, the God of Sanctity plays a guiding role in the formation of the Jewish character. Conversely, the next chapter explicates the Jewish ethnicity’s creation of otherness images such as other races and other gods for constructing the ideal mirror image of themselves and its expansion of the self by highlighting other’s opposition.In the further discussion, the paper studies the influence of the biographical features of the Old Testament on the narration of the New Testament, the hagiology and the ensuing biographical writings with emphasis laid on the evolution and writing strategies of the hagiology in the Middle Ages.