Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-Creations

"In Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-creations, Gila Safran Naveh carefully charts the historical transformation of these deceptively simple narratives to reveal fundamental shifts in their form, function, and most significantly, their readers' cognitive processes. Bringing together for the first time parables form the Scriptures, the synoptic Gospels, Chassidic tales, and medieval philosophy with the mashal, the rabbinic parables commonly used to interpret Scripture, this book contrasts the rhetorical strategies of ancient parables with more recent examples of the genre by Kafka, Borges, Calvino, and Agnon. By using an interdisciplinary approach and insights from current semiotic, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and gender theories, Naveh reveals a dramatic social, cultural, and political shift in the way we view the divine."--BOOK JACKET.