YAHWEH, THE ANIMAL TAMER: JUNGLES, WILD ANIMALS AND YAHWEH’S SOVEREIGNTY IN THE APOCALYPTIC SPACE OF DANIEL 7:1-28

  • Matthew Michael Research Fellow,faculty of Theology, Dept. Old and New Testaments, Stellenbosch University, South Africa and Faculty of Arts, Dept. Christian Religious Studies, Nasarawa State University, Keffi, Nigeria. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2264-3547
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7833/119-1-1696
Keywords: Animals, Apocalyptic literature, Polemics, Sovereignty, Hunting, Poetics, Daniel, Politics

Abstract

Jewish Apocalyptic imagination often treats politics as a wild jungle with kings and empire builders as beasts and monsters. Polemically situated in this jungle-like rhetoric, human kings are animalized and intentionally implicated in the theological arrangements of this horrifying sub-human space. Considering the active deployment of this literary device in apocalyptic genre, the paper engages the spatiality of the wild space from the recent discourses of the poetics of spaces in general and the specific appropriations of these critical works to biblical studies. Consequently, the study presents the poetics of the wild space in Daniel 7:1-28 in the subtle portrait of Yahweh as the “Animal Tamer” who rules over this apocalyptic jungle. Reading the entire book of Daniel in this zoological mapping, the paper underscores the extended use of wild space in the rhetoric of this particular passage, especially the apocalyptic poetics of Yahweh as the sovereign Lord of the wild space.

Author Biography

Matthew Michael, Research Fellow,faculty of Theology, Dept. Old and New Testaments, Stellenbosch University, South Africa and Faculty of Arts, Dept. Christian Religious Studies, Nasarawa State University, Keffi, Nigeria.
Dr.  Matthew Michael, Senior lecturer, Faculty of Arts, Dept. Philosophy & Christian Religious Studies,  Nasarawa State University, P. M. B. 1022, Keffi, Nigeria.
Published
2020-08-27
Issue
Vol. 119 No. 1 (2020)
Section
Articles

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