This book offers a new approach by combining the disciplines of history, psychology, and religion to explain the suicidal element in both Western culture and the individual, and how to treat it. Ancient Greek society displays in its literature and the lives of its people an obsessive interest in suicide and death. Kaplan and Schwartz have explored the psychodynamic roots of this problem--in particular, the tragic confusion of the Greek heroic impulse and its commitment to unsatisfactory choices that are destructively rigid and harsh. The ancient Hebraic writings speak little of suicide and approach reality and freedom in vastly different terms: God is an involved parent, caring for his children. Therefore, heroism, in the Greek sense, is not needed nor is the individual compelled to choose between impossible alternatives.

In each of the first three sections, the authors discuss the issues of suicide from a comparative framework, whether in thought or myth, then the suicide-inducing effects of the Graeco-Roman world, and finally, the suicide-preventing effects of the Hebrew world. The final section draws on this material to present a suicide prevention therapy. Historical in scope, the book offers a new psychological model linking culture to the suicidal personality and suggests an antidote, especially with regard to the treatment of the suicidal individual.

We live in an age when it is not uncommon for politicians to invoke religious doctrine to explain their beliefs and positions on everything from domestic to foreign policy. And yet, many of us would be hard pressed to pinpoint the exact source of these political beliefs in the religious texts that are said to have spawned them. In Politics in the Hebrew Bible: God, Man, and Government, Kalman J. Kaplan and Matthew B. Schwartz offer a genre-straddling examination of the political themes in the Jewish Bible. By studying the political implications of 42 biblical stories (organized into the categories Social Order, Government and Leadership, Domestic Relations, Societal Relations, Morale and Mission, and Foreign Policy), the authors seek to discern a cohesive political viewpoint embodied by the Jewish Bible. Throughout the text, the views put forth in the Jewish Bible are compared to those put forth by Greco-Roman philosophers in order to argue that the Bible offers a worldview that fosters a "high degree of creative individualism within a supportive non-chaotic and well-functioning society". Kaplan and Schwartz are generous with their explanations of Greco-Roman philosophical concepts in the introductory chapters and with giving background information about the biblical stories engaged in the text.

In much of Western literature and Greek mythology, women have an evident lack of purpose; a woman needs to either enter or leave a relationship in order to find herself and her own identity. Matthew Schwartz and Kalman Kaplan set out to prove that the converse is true in the text of the Hebrew Bible. Examining the stories of women in Scripture ? Rebecca, Miriam, Gomer, Ruth and Naomi, Lot's wife, Zipporah, and dozens more ? Schwartz and Kaplan illustrate the biblical woman's strong feminine sense of being crucial to God's plan for the world and for history, courageously seeking the greatest good for herself and others whatever the circumstances. Empowering, illuminating, and fascinating, The Fruit of Her Hands makes a singular contribution to the fields of biblical and women's studies.

This book offers a new approach by combining the disciplines of history, psychology, and religion to explain the suicidal element in both Western culture and the individual, and how to treat it. Ancient Greek society displays in its literature and the lives of its people an obsessive interest in suicide and death. Kaplan and Schwartz have explored the psychodynamic roots of this problem--in particular, the tragic confusion of the Greek heroic impulse and its commitment to unsatisfactory choices that are destructively rigid and harsh. The ancient Hebraic writings speak little of suicide and approach reality and freedom in vastly different terms: God is an involved parent, caring for his children. Therefore, heroism, in the Greek sense, is not needed nor is the individual compelled to choose between impossible alternatives. In each of the first three sections, the authors discuss the issues of suicide from a comparative framework, whether in thought or myth, then the suicide-inducing effects of the Graeco-Roman world, and finally, the suicide-preventing effects of the Hebrew world. The final section draws on this material to present a suicide prevention therapy. Historical in scope, the book offers a new psychological model linking culture to the suicidal personality and suggests an antidote, especially with regard to the treatment of the suicidal individual.

This book is about the difference between parables and riddles, and between different views and definitions of wisdom and various attitudes towards the possibility of its attainment. Both parables and riddles go beyond a simple rote presentation of facts, which may become tedious and likely to be tuned out or rejected. However, there is a major difference between the two. Parables are a dominant form of transmission of information in biblical writings, while riddles dominate those of ancient Greece. Parables transmit an underlying, useful life-message in a way that will not be rejected. Riddles, in contrast, are largely unintelligible, leaving one helpless, unable to derive any life-lesson. This book will be of intellectual value to educators, writers, therapists, story-tellers, clergy, and classicists, as well as anyone interested in the implications of ancient views of wisdom for modern education.