In 2000, I participated in an international artist workshop entitled "La Llama" (The Flame), on the Hacienda Tacata Arriba located approximately one hundred kilometers away from Caracas in the valleys of Tuy, Venezuela. This was the year after "Los Deslaves" (The Washaways), where thousands of Venezuelans were washed into the Caribbean Sea by landslides caused by days of torrential rain. This intense workshop became a period of reflection during which I tried to make sense of the contingent relation between nature, culture and the socio-political dynamics at play in Venezuela's capital city. The dramatic scars I had witnessed on the Caribbean mountainside when landing at Maiquetia airport testified to the breakdown of the fragile balance in the relationship between man and nature. I realized for the workshop, a series of riverside installations that led to points of reflection within the tranquil beauty of the workshop site. These ephemeral installations - constructed alongside and within the Guaire River - were assembled with building materials found on the hacienda, echoing the precariousness of shantytowns. Each installation consisted of different found construction elements that were installed on locations which connected visually from one site to the next, leading one along the river into the forest. The last installation was a structure composed of three door panels that created a personal cabin right in the middle of the river, a space seemingly suspended in time, where one could ponder on questions provoked by this natural disaster.

"In Babel's Shadow is an ambitious, sophisticated book that addresses crucial, timely issues in the study of life-writing, translation, translingualism, literary theory, and linguistics. Its range is extensive and its erudition and intellectual calisthenies dazzling."---Steven G. Kellman, author of The Translingual Imagination --

In Babel: Political Rhetoric of a Confused Legacy, Samuel L. Boyd offers a new reading of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9. Using recent insights on the rhetoric of Neo-Assyrian politics and its ideology of governance as well as advances in biblical studies, Boyd shows how the Tower of Babel was not originally about a tower, Babylon, or the advent of multilingualism, at least in the earliest phases of the history and literary context of the story. Rather, the narrative was a critique against the Assyrian empire using themes of human overreach found in many places in Genesis 1-11. Boyd clarifies how idioms of Assyrian governance could have found their way into the biblical text, and how the Hebrew of Genesis 11:1-9 itself leads to a different translation of the passage than found in versions of the Bible, one that does not involve language. This new reading sheds light on how the story became about language. Boyd argues that this new understanding of Babel also illuminates aspects of the call of Abram when the Tower of Babel is interpreted as a story about something other than the origin of multilingualism. Finally, he frames the historical-critical research on the biblical passage and its reception in ancient Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sources with the uses of the Tower of Babel in modern politics of language and nationalism. He demonstrates how and why Genesis 11:1-9 has become so useful, in often detrimental ways, to the modern nation-state. Boyd explores this intellectual history of the passage into current events in the twenty-first century and offers perspectives on how a new reading of the Tower of Babel can speak to the current cultural and political moment and offer correctives on the uses and abuses of the Bible in the public sphere.

In this concise volume, a team of fresh Old Testament voices explores the theological dimensions of the Pentateuch and provides specific examples of critically engaged theological interpretation. This Pentateuch text is unique in that it emphasizes theological reading, serving as an affordable supplement to traditional introductory Pentateuch texts. Each chapter introduces theological themes and issues in interpretation then offers exegesis of one or two representative passages to model theological interpretation in practice. This useful text will be valued by students of the Old Testament and the Pentateuch as well as pastors.