What is a question? Kenneth Craig poses this query in the introductory chapter of his innovative study on the function of interrogatives in the Hebrew Bible. He describes a question as "a special literary phenomenon. A question is an opening that seeks to be closed, and its rhetorical play derives from how it disposes its energies: how it invites opening, how it imposes closure" (p. 2). Carefully analyzing texts from Genesis, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, Haggai and Zechariah, Craig demonstrates the nuanced and multifaceted ways in which the Hebrew Bible's interrogatives function to advance...

With warm tears in his eyes, Patroclus, obviously distressed and troubled, turns to his friend Achilles, and says something like, 'Who can do anything with you?' An expression similar to this one from the Iliad might occur to anyone who writes about Jonah. With such a large number of books and articles available, what more can be or needs to be said about that popular prophetic book? (from the author's preface).With these words, Kenneth Craig acknowledges that (1) Jonah is indeed a puzzlement and that (2) a profusion of investigators, ancient and modern, have attempted to untangle the Gordian...