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

Apart from Genesis, Tobit contains more information about marriage than any other biblical book. It reflects third-century beliefs and customs yet also serves a didactic function, teaching Diaspora Jews what they should value in their own marriages. This monograph elucidates these elements by asking four questions: 1) Whom should one marry? 2) How does one get married? 3) What role does God play in marriage? 4) What do actual marriages look like? By contextualizing Tobit in light of the Old Testament and relevant Ancient Near Eastern texts, one can appreciate the book's unique claims....

The book investigates Ben Sira's attitudes toward all matters pertaining to sexuality in the context of family relations and gender issues. The author's seemingly negative attitude to women, the anxiety expressed in the discussions of marital and extramarital relations, and the disciplining of children can lead to the assumption that the work has a negative attitude toward sexuality.
Ben Sira's book is a combination of carefully composed wisdom poems and of teachings on everyday issues, including marriage, family life, self-control, desires, and sexual promiscuity. The sage dedicates a...

Keefe's analysis dismantles the androcentric and theological assumptions which have determined the dominant reading of Hosea's metaphor of Israel as the adulterous wife of God. It shows how the projection of symbolic associations of women with nature, sexual temptation and sin have anachronistically determined this metaphor as referring to Israel's apostasy in a lurid 'fertility cult'. Against this reading, Keefe's study considers Hosea 1-2 in the context of the association of sexual transgression and social violence in biblical literature; in this light, Hosea's symbol of Israel as an...

The Hebrew Bible offers a metaphor of marriage that portrays men and women as complementary, each with their distinct and 'natural' roles. Queer Theory and the Prophetic Marriage Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible draws on contemporary scholarship to critique this hetero-normativity. The book examines the methodological issues involved in the application of queer theory to biblical texts and draws on the concept of gender performativity - the construction of gender through action and behaviour - to argue for the potential of queer theory in political readings of the Bible. The central role of...

The Books of Chronicles and Ben Sira 44-50 both rewrite previous biblical history in different ways. While the postexilic Books of Chronicles rewrite earlier narratives from Samuel and Kings, Ben Sira's Praise of the Ancestors offers a new presentation of biblical history from the Genesis patriarchs to Nehemiah, prior to the praise of the high priest Simon. Whereas older scholarship regarded the historiography of Chronicles and Ben Sira as secondary and derivative, today there is renewed interest in these works as significant theological and cultural documents. Both Chronicles and Ben Sira...