Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rella Kushelevsky

Titel

The Stone That 'Transports Itself': A Comparative Study of Song of Songs Rabbah (1,4) and The Dialogue on Miracles (8,63) by Caesarius of Heisterbach: The Legend of Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa (Song of Songs Rabbah 1,4) The Consciousness of Time in the Story "The desert land of his town"--From Structure to Meaning On the Verge of Destruction Repairing the House of God The Stone as a Symbol A Stone that 'Transports Itself' Of the Citizen Charles, Who Offered Stones for the Foundations of the Apostles The Cornerstone of the Church of the Apostles The Symbolism of the Day of Judgment in the Icon of the Scales The Stone as a Symbol of Being The Anchor S

Ist Teil von

• Fabula, 2003-07, Vol.44 (3/4), p.237

Ort / Verlag

Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Erscheinungsjahr

2003

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The Jewish story about Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa and his donation to the temple appears in Song of Songs Rabbah, an exegetic Midrash of the sixth century, and in the later Ecclesiastes Rabbah. According to this tale, Rabbi Hanina was so poor that he was unable to provide the standard festival offerings to the temple, as was customary on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Instead, he managed to find a heavy stone which he chiseled and brought along with him. The narrative function of bringing weighty stones to holy places also appears in one of the exempla of Dialogus miraculorum which was written by Caesarius of Heisterbach in the thirteenth century. The protagonist of this tale, in apprehension of the gravity of his sins, decided to bring heavy stones to the local Church of the Apostles. On the approaching Day of Judgment, so he hoped, these stones would add to the weight of his good deeds and outweigh his sins. Literary materials and narrative functions tend to circulate across cultural and temporal boundaries, thus making it possible to view different stories that share these features as manifesting one single phenomenon. Their common narrative function expresses a similar, Judeo-Christian consciousness of the categories of 'stone' and 'holy place'. The individual cultural settings of these stories, however, establish different interrelations between these classifications.