The narratives of Solomon and Jeroboam, of Elijah and Ahab, have fascinated readers for millennia. Even apart from questions of historical authenticity, they are gripping stories of richly drawn characters caught up in the complex tale of God's dealings with Israel. This study explores the narrative world created by 1 Kings' ancient Israelite author: the people who inhabit it, the lives they live, the deeds they do, and the face of God who is revealed in their stories.
An introduction explains the significance of 1 Kings as a historical narrative. Originally intended as a literal...
The narratives of Solomon and Jeroboam, of Elijah and Ahab, have fascinated readers for millennia. Even apart from questions of historical authenti...
Ezra-Nehemiah has been neglected in biblical studies, but it is important as one of the few windows into the Persian period of Israel's history, the setting for so much of the final shape of the Hebrew Bible. To know this period is to know what influenced these redactors. In "Ezra and Nehemiah" Gordon Davies provides that knowledge using rhetorical criticism, a methodology that reveals the full range and progress of the book's ideas without hiding its rough seams and untidy edges.
The purpose of rhetorical criticism is to explain not the source but the power of the text as a unitary...
Ezra-Nehemiah has been neglected in biblical studies, but it is important as one of the few windows into the Persian period of Israel's history, th...
Opening with the prophet Elijah's ascent into heaven and closing with the people of Judah's descent to Babylonia, 2 Kings charts the story of the two Israelite kingdoms until their destruction. This commentary unfolds the literary dimensions of 2 Kings, analyzes the strategies through which its words create a world of meaning, and examines the book's tales of prophets, political intrigue, royal apostasy, and religious reform as components of larger patterns.
2 Kings pays attention to the writers' methods of representing human character and of twisting chronological time for literary...
Opening with the prophet Elijah's ascent into heaven and closing with the people of Judah's descent to Babylonia, 2 Kings charts the story of the t...
At the 2006 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Prophetic Texts in their Ancient Contexts section devoted a session to the theme "The Aesthetics of Violence." Participants were invited to explore multiple dimensions of prophetic texts and their violent rhetoric. The results were rich-- engaging discussion of violent images in ancient Near Eastern art and in modern film, as well as advancing our understanding of the poetic skill required for invoking terror through words.
This volume collects those essays as well as others especially commissioned for its...
At the 2006 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Prophetic Texts in their Ancient Contexts section devoted a session to the th...
