Samuel L. Boyd's Babel and Eric Reymond's Nimrodia
We are pleased to learn Eric Reymond's poetry collection Nimrodia [New Texture] is cited in Samuel L. Boyd's Babel: Political Rhetoric of a Confused Legacy [Fortress Press]. From the Fortress Press website:
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.
...
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.
Nimrodia appears via an epigraph in Babel's third chapter, "Words Have Consequences":
"A tower can be made with only two bricks or two words."
Its footnote reads:
Eric Reymond, "Similitudes of Nimrod," in Nimrodia (New Texture, 2018). See further Reymond's ability to capture the constructive possibility of words and the building of the tower:
Congratulations to Professor Reymond, and kudos to Professor Boyd for his good taste and recognition of Reymond's achievement.
About Nimrodia:
Nimrodia, pronounced /nim-raw-di-a/ or /nim-row-di-a/, is the title of an imagined body of literature about the biblical king who is said to have constructed the Tower of Babel. The longest poem of the book imagines the king’s perspective on his famous tower, as well as that of his underlings, exploring the egotistical and altruistic inspirations for it. While visual art and ancient history are the starting point for most of the poems in this collection, the contemporary world intersects with these domains again and again. We are reminded that though language, culture, and time may divide us, these are also the forces that link us together.
Preview and buy Nimrodia from Amazon HERE.
