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

The Book of Ecclesiastes, like many ancient and modern first-person discourses, generates ambivalent responses in its readers. The book's rhetorical strategy produces both acceptance of, and suspicion towards, the major positions argued by the author. 'Vain rhetoric' aptly describes the persuasive and dissuasive properties of the narrator's peculiar characterization. It also describes how the Book of Ecclesiates, with its abundant use of rhetorical questions, constant gapping techniques, and other strategies from the arsenal of ambiguity, is a stunning testimony to the power of the various...

A study of the significance of implied law in the Abraham narrative. Bruckner examines legal and juridical terminology in the text, with a close reading of legal referents in Genesis 18.16-20.18. He demonstrates that the literary and theological context of implied law in the narrative is creational, since the implied cosmology is based in Creator-created relationships, and the narrative referents are prior to the Sinai covenant. The narrative's canonical position is an ipso jure argument for the operation of law from the beginning of the ancestral community. The study suggests trajectories...

This collection of essays focuses on the book of Job, exploring the complex interplay of methodology and hermeneutics. There are two major parts: approaches that are primarily historical, i.e. the recovery of what the text 'meant'; and those that are contextual, i.e. that take seriously the context of reading. Both approaches engage the theological issue of how this reading helps us to better appropriate what the text 'means'. Contributors include the editors, Mark S. Smith, Douglas J. Green, Victoria Hoffer, Ellen F. Davis and Claire Matthews McGinnis.An introductory essay surveys the...

This book explores the phenomenon of shame in the Hebrew bible. It focuses particularly on the major prophets, because shame vocabulary is most prominent there. Shame has been widely discussed in the literature of psychology and anthropology; the book discusses the findings of both disciplines in some detail. It emphasises the social-anthropological honour/shame model, which a considerable number of biblical scholars since the early 1990s have embraced enthusiastically. The author highlights the shortcomings of this heuristic model and proposes a number of alternative critical...

The Companion to the Qumran Scrolls series offers comprehensive and accessible introductions to the corpus of texts from Qumran. This volume, devoted to the characteristic biblical commentaries, discusses their contents and history, as well as their generic relationship to both New Testament and rabbinic scriptural exegesis. As with all the books in this series, this Guide is ideal for undergraduate and graduate classes.This book introduces the reader to one of the most important genres of sectarian writing from Qumran: the Pesharim, or biblical commentaries. Timothy Lim systematically...

The purpose of this book is to illustrate that reading is a subjective process which results in multivalent interpretations. This is the case whether one looks at a text in its historical contexts (the diachronic approach) or its literary contexts (the synchronic approach). Three representative texts are chosen from the Law (Genesis 2-3), the Writings (Isaiah 23) and the Prophets (Amos 5), and each is read first by way of historical analysis and then by literary analysis. Each text provides a number of variant interpretations and raises the question--is any one interpretation superior?...

History, Literature and Theology in the Book of Chronicles presents a new way of approaching this key biblical text, arguing that the Book employs both multiple viewpoints and the knowledge of the past held by its intended readership to reshape social memory and reinforce the authority of God. The Book of Chronicles communicates to its intended readership a theological worldview built around multiple, partial perspectives which inform and balance each other. This is a worldview which emphasizes the limitations of all human knowledge, even of theologically "proper" knowledge. When...

The story of Jonah, often read as a simple children's story, is a multifaceted and elaborate narrative with serious intent. Treating the biblical book as a fictitious story based on real locations and recognizable persons, 'Jonah's World' examines the background to the story and draws on social science approaches to describe its imaginative world. The book explores the geography, theology, myth, human characters, natural landscape, and the ideology behind the story to uncover a vision of reality shaped by literary technique. Jonah's World will be invaluable to students and scholars seeking...

According to Kelso, the Book of Chronicles silences women in specific ways, most radically through their association with maternity. Drawing on the work of two feminist philosophers, Luce Irigaray and Michelle Boulous Walker, she argues that we may discern two principal strategies of silencing women in Chronicles: disavowal and repression of the maternal body. In its simplest form, the silencing of women takes place through both an explicit and implicit strategy of excluding them from the central action. Largely banished from the central action, they are hardly able to contribute to the...

According to Kelso, the Book of Chronicles silences women in specific ways, most radically through their association with maternity. Drawing on the work of two feminist philosophers, Luce Irigaray and Michelle Boulous Walker, she argues that we may discern two principal strategies of silencing women in Chronicles: disavowal and repression of the maternal body. In its simplest form, the silencing of women takes place through both an explicit and implicit strategy of excluding them from the central action. Largely banished from the central action, they are hardly able to contribute to the...

This feminist approach to the Gospel of John explores the issue of the role of women in the Johannine Christian community. The author first examines in detail the relationship between the Jewish figure of Wisdom, known by the Greek name Sophia, and the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel. Secondly, he investigates what effect the use of a female figure as a basis for christological reflection have on the way in which women were portrayed in the Gospel. The deliberate choice of the feminine name Sophia caused problems for the writer of the Fourth Gospel in seeking to identify the exclusively female...

The prophets Haggai and Zechariah, near contemporaries, were active at a critical period in Israel's history. The recently restored Jerusalem community had come through national downfall and exile. Its religious and sociopolitical identity in the Persian Empire had to be established. This volume offers a thematic study of the prophetic response to that situation. The prophets, their status and their styles of prophecy are compared with those of their predecessors, as are their attitudes towards Israel's religious traditions. Their theological understanding of proper leadership, divine...

A much-neglected prophet, Ezekiel is nevertheless a key figure in Old Testament religion. Standing where he does, at the great crisis point of Israel's history, the exile, he confronts the basic questions, can the nation survive?, and, should it? Ezekiel represents the priestly strand in Israel's thinking, which lays such weight on the temple as the place of the presence of God. How can the nation be sustained when it has been deprived of its traditional place of worship? Ezekiel's reply is that the presence of God is still available, even in the land of exile, but that the presence is yet...

Bolin analyses biblical and extra-biblical traditions and motifs in the book of Jonah, and argues that the book's portrayal of the relationship between God and humanity, much like those of Job and Ecclesiastes, emphasizes an absolute divine sovereignty beyond human notions of mercy, justice, or forgiveness. God is understood as free to forgive, yet he still punishes, and is unfettered by the constraints imposed by attributes of benevolence. The only proper human response to God is fear at his power and acknowledgment of him as the source of welfare and woe.