Eloquence Divine: In Search of God's Rhetoric

While serious studies of the Bibles rhetoric have been written for academic readers . . . few have attempted to examine the persuasiveness of speeches directly assigned to the biblical God that so many believe in and worship. . . . Further no critic has yet tried to analyze how this God tries to invent and develop His arguments in the Bible as it has come down to us or how this God arranges those arguments or the styles He adopts to make them and the roles memory and delivery play in His arguments. . . . Eloquence Divine is one agnostics attempt at such a study. Those in the humanities educators and their students graduates and undergraduates interested in rhetoric persuasive language religion and the Bible are the ones most likely to be interested in this books explorations . . . in the hope that [these] readers whatever their beliefs or theoretical preferences can gain greater understanding of how one a fairly popular version of God strives through His eloquence to affect the human audiences in the Bible. --From the Introduction Arrington asks us to regard the Word of God as inalterably unrelievedly rhetorical and further asks what does this tell us about rhetoric--and about God--once we undertake a project like this one? . . . Whether they agree with his conclusions or not readers will certainly learn from this discussion and I think be surprised at the many good insights to be discovered here. --Frank Farmer author of After the Public Turn and Saying and Silence Phillip Arrington is Professor Emeritus of English and Rhetoric at Eastern Michigan University and is the author of the e-novel The Serpents Sage (2013) and Rhetorics Agons (2008).