In his essay on "Prebiblical Natural Order," Balthasar claims "that nature remains necessarily closed off before the moment when God breaks through the enclosure by divine revelation." (44) Is this claim true?
"Prebiblical ethics," he wrote, "which finds its norms in nature, can ask about the good that is proper to human nature (bonum honestum) by setting up an analogy with the good that is proper to infrahuman existing things.
In the first instance of seeing, Darwish declares a singular self that creates its private lexicon of sorrow and praise and transformation into the collective: a
prebiblical past, a Palestinian present, and a future where the self flies "just to fly," free from "the knot of symbols," to where compassion is "one in the nights" with "one moon for all, for both sides of the trench." In Eleven Planets, the self has vanished into its other, more elegiacally, and "flight" has reached 1492, the year of "the Atlantic banners of Columbus" and "the Arab's last exhalation" in Granada.
Their overall
prebiblical designs and the methods of construction show an "amazing continuity over the millennia," proof of the continuity of Palestinians and their ancestors on the land.
In its "
prebiblical form," says Smith, the Bible was "not a religious document," and in its present form it represents a "second-order text." It therefore rarely provides clear social loci for many of the "materials and traditions that became biblical" (pp.
Schwartz, in The Curse of Coin: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), sheds an interesting light on the right of refusal -- or the absence of it--in the covenants of biblical and
prebiblical times.
Tammuz was fascinated by biblical motifs and tried to unravel the
prebiblical origins of the local populace.