Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Biblical Studies - History & Culture

Lester L. Grabbe provides a concise and up-to-date introduction to the books of Kings, covering all the historical and interpretative issues. Grabbe pays particular attention to how the history of ancient Israel can be reconstructed (or not as the case may be) through the text, and introduces students to the key ways of reading the books of Kings as religious and political history.

Grabbe takes a chronological approach (according to the text) and provides overviews of the key periods of Israel's history. The nature of the 'Deuteronomistic History' and how well this theory of...

Michal's Moral Dilemma proposes that attention should be paid to the moral goods that feature in the text, before arguing that the family, a central feature of Old Testament morality, should be understood as a set of practices rather than an institution. Jonathan Rowe discusses the use of "models" of social action to comprehend the social world of the Bible, and suggests a modified version of Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossic voices can help readers appreciate how authors present a moral vision by approving some characters' actions whilst undermining others.

The discussion of...

Joseph Blenkinsopp provides a new commentary on Genesis 1-11, the so-called 'Primeval History' in which the account of creation is given.

Blenkinsopp works with the conviction that, from a biblical point of view, creation cannot be restricted to a single event, nor to two versions of an event (as depicted in Genesis 1-3) but, rather, must take in the whole period of creation arranged in the sequence: creation - uncreation - recreation (as can be derived from Genesis 1-11).

Through the course of the commentary, presented in continuous discussion rather than in a rigid...

The sixth and fifth centuries BCE were a time of constant re-identifications within Judean communities, both in exile and in the land; it was a time when Babylonian exilic ideologies captured a central position in Judean (Jewish) history and literature at the expense of silencing the voices of any other Judean communities.

Proceeding from the later biblical evidence to the earlier, from the Persian period sources (Ezra-Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Deutero-Isaiah) to the Neo-Babylonian prophecy of Ezekiel and Jeremiah, Exclusive Inclusivity explores the ideological...

Constructions of Space III engages space both as focus in the texts under discussion, but also as analytical perspective. It explores more specifically how the Bible does not contain one, or even several, notions of sacred/holy space, even if there are undoubtedly many spaces described as such. It rather tries to trace how the discourses of space and those of the sacred intersect and interact in various writings of the Bible, more like points in a diagram, resulting in highly different ways of conceptualizing the sacred.

A spatial-critical perspective can help us better...

Do Old Testament poetry and narrative, wisdom-writing and prophecy work on us in the same way as do nonbiblical literary texts? Competent readers over the centuries have arrived at conflicting answers to this question. Some (from Longinus on) have maintained that biblical books offer examples of supreme literary art; others have passionately rejected this approach, insisting that beauty and pleasure are not the Bible s business.

Poetry with a Purpose argues that, paradoxically, both views are right. Biblical poetics is marked by an unusual tension between aesthetic and nonaesthetic...

Volumes in the Library of Ancient Israel draw on multiple...