Sarah Emanuel. Humor, Resistance, and Jewish Cultural Persistence in the Book of Revelation: Roasting Rome. Cambridge University Press, 2020.... The Book of Revelation, Emanuel concludes, employs humor as a tool of Jewish persistence and aims to counteract oppression by satirizing central Roman figures, while simultaneously becoming a sort of mirror of Rome's own violent methods and mimicking the oppressor's "imperial gaze." In the midst of its often grotesque catachresis — “humiliating Rome via Rome’s own tactics” (16) — Emanuel maintains the view that the Apocalypse was composed as a response to trauma under imperialistic tyranny and encourages readers to recognize the potential of its reparative work. ...
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