Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Exile (Punishment) in the Bible »

Abstract In preexilic times, moral purification (the enforcement of the death penalty and כּרת, "to be cut off") held tragic and fatal consequences for the offender, as well as the nation at large, dynamically illustrated when the nation was collectively "cut off" in exile. In response to the severe punishments occasioned by moral impurity, the prophets considered a survivable alternative for moral purification in place of the harsh Pentateuchal penalties. They envisioned, metaphorically, a lustral cleansing that could wash away moral impurity. The Hebrew Bible does not provide evidence of a literal adaptation of this metaphor into praxis. In looking to the Second Temple period literature, we find that 1QS provides the earliest witness of a literal adaptation of the prophetic imagery into a baptism of moral purification. As such, 1QS is a very important document for demonstrating an approach to moral purification that is both a development of the postexilic Hebrew Bible, as well as a precursor to the practices evident in the lives of John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul.

The article deals with the creative reception of a complex of motifs “sin - repentance - salvation” and the hero’s moral reflections that form the basis of Crime and Punishment and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s unfulfilled plan of a book about the “Great Sinner.” We analyze the works of several Russian and Hungarian authors of the 1960s-1990s. In Victor Pelevin’s novel Chapayev and Pustota, the hero involuntarily becomes a murderer. Instead of being exiled to Siberia, he ends up in a mental hospital, which functionally serves as a replacement for Raskolnikov’s “punishment” stage - a prison sentence. After leaving the hospital, the hero, who has not accepted the new reality, flees to a Buddhist monastery in Inner Mongolia to escape from the criminalized and dangerous modernity. The motifs of crime and failed repentance of the outsider writer are used by Vladimir Makanin in the novel The Underground or the Hero of Our Time. His hero recognizes Dostoevsky’s authority, projecting the novel’s situation onto his own. However, he rejects the need to repent the murders, since for him Raskolnikov’s story is an “alien” literary plot and a humiliation of his very “self.” The heroes of Limonov’s early prose constantly relate themselves to the marginal heroes and criminals of Dostoevsky. For them, the impossibility of repentance does not cancel the hero’s selfdoubt, his “state of hesitation” that determines, according to Dostoevsky, the behavior of the Great Sinner and Raskolnikov. In Russian prose of the 1990s, the text and plot allusions of which refer to Crime and Punishment, the main antihero is a writer and reader of Dostoevsky who tries on the situations and actions of Dostoevsky’s heroes, ultimately dismissing them as “alien” and “literary.” The classics of modern Hungarian literature, Janos Pilinszky and Miklos Meszoly, admitted that they literally lived inside Dostoevsky’s world. The novels of Meszoly of the 1960s, The Death of an Athlete and Saul, both tell the story of rebirth and conversion of two heroes - the runner Balint and the detective Saul. Balint is lonely and aspires to the absolute, a sports record, for which he is willing to sacrifice everything. He is similar to Dostoevsky’s sinner in his pridefulness. However, before his death, he ascends a mountain. The motifs that accompany his “spiritual ascent” point to the sacred symbolism of rebirth. The final change in the direction and purpose of running turns him into an “athleta Christi”, a repentant proud man. However, the plot of Saul does not follow the Bible to the end and finishes with Saul’s blinding, interrupting the biblical story and not representing his enlightenment as of the future Paul the Apostle. Similarly to Crime and Punishment, the novel unfolds around a murder - a “stoning” of the victim, Stephen the Apostle. Saul, like Raskolnikov, renounces his former self-identification and logic of the Law. The shock in both cases is the sin of murder, the internal experience of the crime. Saul takes the blame for the beating of Stephen. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Summary This article examines nine sacred cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach which address the subject of exile and religious identity. The biblical or general theological background of the text of each selected cantata, as well as the way in which Bach set the text to music, is discussed. We can learn from Bach that, first, there should be a legitimate space to express fear and insecurity about the arrival of foreigners. Second, believers who are in exile can associate their Christian identity with the life of Jesus while inviting unbelievers to find their identity in Jesus. Third, both suffering and hospitality are true features of Christian discipleship. Fourth, Bach’s interpretation of exile as a divine punishment is not the final message. The motif of exile as punishment is transformed by a Christological interpretation. Finally, the end of exile can be celebrated. In exile, believers dare to hope and to believe; at the end of the exile, believers celebrate without forgetting their past suffering. Both testify to a sound religious identity.

The new era of Slovene spiritual, cultural and, in a certain sense, political history, is marked by the condition of exile. The first Slovene book, printed in 1550, was written by Primož Trubar, a Protestant, emigrant and exile par excellence. Trubar and his followers translated, wrote, made plans, and worked, “for the prosperity of their homeland,” in exile; therefore, the fundamental document of Judeo-Christian civilization and culture—the Holy Bible—was translated into Slovene, in exile. Books were sent to the homeland in barrels, and young people were invited to be educated at German universities. Trubar died an exile, convinced that his cause in the homeland was, if not won, at least well on the road to success.

It is not surprising that the ancient republics allowed the condemned to escape death through flight. Exile did not seem to them a softer sentence than death. Roman jurisprudence also called it capital punishment.

The article aims to analyze the evolution of detention on the Romanian territory, during the periods of its transformation from exile to a form of punishment, namely the Medieval and Modern Ages. We noticed that, although there was always detention as a form of restraint of the perpetrator until the application of other punishments and rarely as a form of punishment, the deprivation of liberty in prisons became, only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the main form of punishment. We will initially analyze the methods of punishment used in Romanian Medieval period and the locations of detention ("mines", "dungeons", "bulk", "hearth" or "monastery") and then, will follow their transformation in modern detention areas.