This volume examines and discusses selected Bible documentaries and academically informed dramatizations of the Bible. The major focus is UK mainline television, and on recent productions (mostly within the past 15 years) but there is also engagement with productions from the USA.

After a critical introduction by the editors, charting and reflecting on the use of the Bible on television in recent years, the book falls into three sections. In the first section, a number of influential filmmakers and producers, including Ray Bruce and Jean-Claude Bragard, discuss their work in...

This volume on intercultural biblical interpretation includes essays by feminist scholars from Botswana, Germany, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United States. Reading from a rich variety of socio-cultural locations, contributors present their hermeneutical frameworks for interpretation of Hebrew Bible texts, each framework grounded in the writer's journey of professional or social formation and serving as a prism or optic for feminist critical analysis.

The volume hosts a lively conversation about the nature and significance of biblical interpretation in a global...

Drawing on research from the field of narrative ethics, The Storied Ethics of the Thanksgiving Psalms argues that story and storytelling function as important instruments in a given community's ethical shaping. While this argument has gained some traction in the field of Old Testament ethics, it has yet to inform an ethical reading of non-narrative texts, such as the Psalter. However, because the thanksgiving psalms are characterized by their inclusion of the worshipper's story, they stand to benefit from the application of a narrative ethical approach.

In the present study,...

Karalina Matskevich examines the structures that map out the construction of gendered and national identities in Genesis 2-3 and 12-36. Matskevich shows how the dominant 'Subject' - the androcentric ha'adam and the ethnocentric Israel - is perceived in relation to and over against the 'Other', represented respectively as female and foreign. Using the tools of narratology, semiotics and psychoanalysis, Matskevich highlights the contradiction inherent in the project of dominance, through which the Subject seeks to suppress the transforming power of difference it relies on for its...

This study focuses on the Chronicler's special interest in Levite singers. It takes into consideration the socio-ideological milieu of the Jerusalem temple community in the Persian period and the Mesopotamian elite professional norms and practices that nourished the singers and their music. It also explores the conception of the earthly temple as representative of its heavenly counterpart, and looks at the way in which this shaped the Chronicler's theological frame of reference.

The work is divided into two parts. Part I examines the Mesopotamian scribal-musical background, to which...

The story of Samson and Delilah in Judges 16 has been studied and retold over the centuries by biblical interpreters, artists, musicians, filmmakers and writers. Within these scholarly and cultural retellings, Delilah is frequently fashioned as the quintessential femme fatale - the shamelessly seductive 'fatal woman' whose sexual treachery ultimately leads to Samson's downfall. Yet these ubiquitous portrayals of Delilah as femme fatale tend to eclipse the many other viable readings of her character that lie, underexplored, within the ambiguity-laden narrative of Judges 16 -...

How do we begin to carry out such a vast task-the examination of three millennia of diverse uses and influences of the biblical texts? Where can the interested scholar find information on methods and techniques applicable to the many and varied ways in which these have happened?

Through a series of examples of reception history practitioners at work and of their reflections this volume sets the agenda for biblical reception, as it begins to chart the near-infinite series of complex interpretive 'events' that have been generated by the journey of the biblical texts down through the...

In Going Up and Going Down Yitzhak Peleg argues that the story of Jacob's dream (Genesis 28.10-22), functions as a mise en abyme ('as a figure, trope or structure that somehow reflects in compact form, in miniature, the larger structure in which it appears', Greenstein). Close examination reveals that focusing on the vision of Jacob's dream and understanding it as a symbolic dream facilitates an explanation of the dream and its meaning.

Scholars have historically classified the dream as theophany, the purpose of which is to explain how Beth-El became a sacred place,...

An examination of the presence of theophanic scenes in the final form of the Pentateuch, which argues that rather than there being a single, over-arching theophanic "type-scene" there are multiple such scenes which reflect the individual theological tendencies of the biblical books within which they appear.

The Genesis type-scene revolves around YHWH's promises in crisis situations (i.e., YHWH only appears when there is a crisis or threat to the Abrahamic promise). The Exodus type-scene typically includes the appearance of YHWH's dangerous fiery presence (Kabod Adonai), a communal...