This volume provides an introduction to the 'deconstuctive' criticism of Jacques Derrida, discussing its relevance to feminism in general, and to feminist interpretation of the Bible in particular. The first part of the book provides a critical overview of current trends in feminist exegesis, and proceeds with an outline of some key strategies in Derridean theory which could prove useful for feminist critical purposes. The theological implications of deconstructive biblical interpretation are considered, and the book's final chapter offers a reading of Genesis 2:4b-3:24 in which some of these...

On Gendering Texts is a wonderful book in a field that demonstrates its maturity by this publication. It discusses the important and traditional issue of authorship. Whereas the idea of a unique and divinely inspired biblical author has long been abandoned, the issue of authorship itself has not. The possibility that women might have contributed to the production of the Bible has not been taken seriously and yet the idea that everything is male unless otherwise proven is hardly acceptable. What can one do? The two authors of this book shrewdly displace the question. Rather than...

This volume examines the Fourth Gospel narrative in terms of its character portrayal, especially the portrayal of anonymous characters. It focuses on how characterization impacts readers, eliciting their involvement in the narrative, particularly the recognition of and response to Jesus' identity, and how anonymity facilitates that participation.
The first chapters examine the understanding of characterization in contemporary literary theory, then the author explores other contemporaneous narratives for the function of anonymous characters in those narratives. The final chapters examine...

This study deals with the structure, coherence and composition of the stories of Exodus 1 and 2 with a view to contributing to the interpretation of biblical narrative in general.
In the first chapter the author introduces the method and analytical procedures employed. In the subsequent chapters the method is applied to the literary architecture of the stories in Exodus 1 and 2. The last chapter presents a sample of the exegesis as a practical demonstration of how the method described can be integrated into the interpretative procedure.
The approach presented in this volume provides an...

Biblical Hebrew grammar was until recently concentrated on the morpho-syntax within sentence boundaries. In the past few decades text-syntactic theories have been developed. At the conference Narrative Syntax and the Hebrew Bible (Tilburg 1996) six eminent scholars presented both a paper on Hebrew syntax and a workshop in which Exodus 19-24 or 1 Samuel 1 was studied. Both kinds of contributions are collected in this volume. They tend to lead towards one conclusion: traditional sentence-grammar and text-syntactic studies should not exclude, but include each other. The verb forms,...

This collection of studies is published in honor of Professor James A. Sanders, a leading scholar in the fields of the canon of Scripture, textual criticism, and the relationship of the two Testaments. Contributors include leading scholars in these and related fields of study.
The studies investigate in what ways the early sacred tradition was interpreted and how this tradition takes new shape in the Jewish and Christian communities of faith. Included are studies of Jesus' understanding of Scripture, Paul's interpretation of Scripture, and the ways in which Scripture was interpreted by the...

This volume offers a fresh approach to an old issue: the question of Moses' authorship. Whereas traditional interpretation equated the "book" written by Moses (Deut 31:9,24) with Deuteronomy, and even with the Pentateuch, and while critical historical exegesis endeavors to identify Deuteronomy's successive redactors, this study assesses the literary claim of Deuteronomy as far as Moses' writing is concerned. The study first describes the process of communication in Deuteronomy's represented world (by Moses to the sons of Israel); it next characterizes the Book of Deuteronomy...

Aware of the fundamental criticism against mysticism in theological literature of this century, this volume radicalizes the tradition of Negative Theology and defines mysticism as the realization of non-duality. Interpreting the term by the religio-philosophy of the modern Japanese Zen-master Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, an outstanding point of comparison is found to test the Gospel of John for mysticism. The comparison is based on texts from John 13-16, their philological analysis and historical interpretations, but takes place in the hermeneutical reflections confronting systematically...

This narrative commentary systematically examines John's Apocalypse from a narrative critical perspective. After an introduction to narrative criticism, the volume focuses on point of view, setting, rhetoric, character, and plot in the Book of Revelation. The rhetorical and symbolic significance of numerals are discussed at length as are the multifaceted characters in the book such as demonic animals (locust, beasts, dragon, birds) and apocalyptic animals (lamb, four living creatures). The symbolic significance of topographical, architectural, agricultural, and other settings is emphasized....

This monograph contains an analysis of the text-internal reader in Isaiah 6-12. For that purpose, two modern literary methods are incorporated in Old Testament Exegesis. First, the research makes use of text-linguistics, so it is explicitly based on the idiom of Biblical Hebrew. Next, the domain analysis provides a means of outlining communicative situations between characters, implied author and implied reader, in accordance with various diagrams. This research shows that the implied reader is involved in the communication evoked by the text. Not only is...