Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Biblical Criticism & Interpretation - Old Testament

In this unusual book, first published by The MIT Press in 1980 and now updated with a new chapter, Steven Brams applies the mathematical theory of games to the Hebrew Bible. Brams's thesis is that God and the human biblical characters acted rationally--that is, given their preferences and their knowledge of other players' preferences, they made strategy choices that led to the best attainable outcomes.Beginning with the Creation and focusing on those stories richest in conflict and intrigue, Brams uses elementary game-theoretic tools to elucidate the rational calculations of biblical...

Philip Yancey has a way of confronting our most cherished but misguided notions about faith. In The Bible Jesus Read, he challenges the perception that the New Testament is all that matters and the Old Testament isn't worth taking the time to read and understand. Yancey admits that, like many Christians, he usually avoided the Old Testament. After all, why bother with writings that can be so baffling, boring, even offensive to the modern mind? But a surprising discovery awaited Yancey when he began to explore how the Old Testament related to his life today. Those seemingly irrelevant...

This study is an investigation into the lexical meanings of Hebrew terms for the human life cycle in the Old Testament. The investigation differs from previous studies in that the terms are studied from the perspective of a specific semantic domain (age) and not in isolation from each other. In addition, other modern linguistic approaches are applies, including syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis.

This is a guide to the Hebrew Bible unlike any other. Leading us chapter by chapter through its most important stories--from the Creation and the Tree of Knowledge through the Exodus from Egypt and the journey to the Promised Land--James Kugel shows how a group of anonymous, ancient interpreters radically transformed the Bible and made it into the book that has come down to us today.

Was the snake in the Garden of Eden the devil, or the Garden itself "paradise"? Did Abraham discover monotheism, and was his son Isaac a willing martyr? Not until the ancient interpreters set to work....

In the history of nineteenth-century religious thought, William Robertson Smith occupies an ambiguous position. More than any other writer, he stimulated the theories of religion later advanced by Frazer, Durkheim, and Freud. Smith himself was not an original scholar, but was rather -clever at presenting other men's theories- within new and sometimes hostile contexts. Smith was an important contributor to two of the most serious challenges to Christian orthodoxy of the last century, the -Higher Criticism- of the Bible and the comparative study of religion, and was also the victim of the...