Deeply rooted in the story of Jesus of Nazareth is a concern for people mired in debt. Debt was a central control mechanism for the administration of the Roman Empire. Client states such as those of the Herods in Palestine were entrusted with maintenance of the established order, the Pax Romana, and their patronage entailed legions of the indebted. Debt kept peasants at their plows and contributed to the suffering bodies and tortured minds that Jesus attempted to heal. His parables and central prayer feature the forgiveness of money debts. In the end, his praxis to liberate people from...

""Elijah, Yahweh, and Baal is a masterpiece presented with authority by a twentieth-century accomplished and unsurpassed exegete. It is now translated by a disciple, whose elegant rendition sounds as if Hermann Gunkel had originally written himself the book in English."" --Andre LaCocque, The Chicago Theological Seminary, Chicago, IL ""Written a century ago for a church audience eager to learn how the best scholarship of the day could illuminate one of the Bible's most absorbing stories, this little book shows Gunkel at the height of his powers of critical perspicuity, explanatory finesse,...

Biblical faith is passionately and relentlessly material in its accent. This claim is rooted in the conviction that the creator God loves and cares for the creation and summons creation to be in sync with the will of the creator God. This collection of essays is focused on the bodily life of the world as it is ordered in all of its problematic political and economic forms. The phrase of the title, ""all flesh,"" in the flood narrative of Genesis 9, refers to all living creatures who are in covenant with God--human beings, animals, birds, and fish--as recipients of God's grace, as dependent...

Description: ""Walter Brueggemann is the master of finding fresh and compelling dimensions of meaning in texts so familiar they barely scratch the surface of our consciousness. In this exciting collection, Brueggemann finds that when we admit we are dust, we can be liberated. Why? Because we are free from acting like God. We are free to choose obedience to the one living, true Sovereign. The idols lose their grip on us and we live faithfully and in authentic joy."" --Ronald J. Allen, Christian Theological Seminary ""According to Walter Brueggemann, the autonomy, secularity, and individualism...

About the Contributor(s): Walter Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. He is past President of the Society of Biblical Literature and the author of numerous books, including Truth-Telling as Subversive Obedience, David and His Theologian, Praying the Psalms, A Pathway of Interpretation, and Ichabod toward Home.

Contents 1. Social Criticism and Social Vision in the Deuteronomic Formula of the Judges 2. A Poem of Summons (Isa 55:1-3), a Narrative of Resistance (Dan 1:1-21) 3. Psalms 9-10: A Counter to Conventional Social Reality 4. Prophetic Imagination toward Social Flourishing 5. A Royal Miracle and Its Nachleben 6. The Living Afterlife of a Dead Prophet: Words That Keep Speaking 7. The Tearing of the Curtain: Matthew 27:51 8. Five Strong Rereadings of the Book of Isaiah ""These buried nuggets of interpretive wisdom from earlier years, by a scholar whose intellectual career could only be described...

Franz Delitzschs lectures in 1902 and 1903 set off the Babel-Bible controversy, which rocked Europe and North America. In this searing critique of Delitzsch, Gunkel provides his own analysis of the relationship between ancient Israel and Babylon. In this edition, Gunkels original work is newly translated, with a new Foreword, notes, bibliographies, and indexes.

""Hansons new translation and edition of Gunkels classic response to the Delitzschs views of the Babel-Bible controversy is a welcome addition to the growing work on the relationship of Mesopotamia and Israel in antiquity. The new...