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The book of Lamentations is a challenge to its readers. Its ambiguous theology, strident protestations against its deity, and haunting imagery confound interpreters. This monograph engages the enigma of Lamentations by assessing its theology. It does so, however, neither by tracing a single theological perspective through the book nor by reconstructing the history of the composition of the book. Rather, Heath Thomas assesses the poetry of Lame...

When the Lukan Jesus stands up to read in the Nazareth synagogue, he unrolls and rolls up a scroll. At this moment-which scholars have read as programmatic for the Gospel of Luke-the material text frames the written and spoken word. Here reading is an engagement with the senses of touch, sight and hearing. The organs of sense-skin, eyes, ears and mouth-function as mediators of the material text.By contrast, our contemporary practices of readin...

Left Behind - twelve novels that dramatize one evangelical perspective on the end of the world - is now established as the best-selling fictional series in American literary history. But it has been met with a range of critical receptions. This volume gathers essays by new and established critics of the series to interrogate the series' significance and its cultural and commercial success, and includes, for the first time, a response to these ...

In the twenty-first century, religious belief is undergoing change, driven in part by new communication technologies. Such technologies have often given rise to notable changes in religion, some of the most revolutionary of them being apocalyptic in character. What, then, is the nature of the changes in religious belief created or enabled by the Internet? In this collection, the first of its kind, nine scholars consider whether the empowerment...

This reading of Hosea explores the book from a feminist, psychoanalytical and poetic perspective. What is God doing with a prostitute? How does the theme of prostitution relate to the abjection of the woman as the other, and the fantasy of sexual ecstasy, precisely because she escapes patriarchal order? Where is the prophet situated in the dialectic of rage and desire that both seduces and condemns Israel? His voice is both masculine and femin...

This reading of Hosea explores the book from a feminist, psychoanalytical and poetic perspective. What is God doing with a prostitute? How does the theme of prostitution relate to the abjection of the woman as the other, and the fantasy of sexual ecstasy, precisely because she escapes patriarchal order? Where is the prophet situated in the dialectic of rage and desire that both seduces and condemns Israel? His voice is both masculine and femin...

The quest for the historical Jesus has invariably tried to make senseof his world by constructing what it considers to be the historiclandscapes that he inhabited. These essays explore how we do notcreate an actual past or rediscover an actual landscape with its townsand villages but 'imaginary homelands' that allow us to inhabit andpossess the past.The papers in this volume explore the ways in which constructionsof the Holy Land as homeland h...

As readers, we are captivated by the resemblance of literary characters to actual persons. But it is precisely this illusion that allows characterization to play host to dominant ideologies of both 'literature' and 'the self'. This is especially true when we confuse narrative figures and historical persons.Over the last thirty years, New Testament narrative criticism has developed into a major methodological approach in Biblical Studies. But f...

This study pioneers the use of insights from cognitive sciences, such as evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and developmental psychology, as heuristic tools for interpreting ancient texts. The approach could be described as 'psycho-biological'. The focus is on emotions in the various Pentateuchal legal collections. Kazen discusses the role of disgust, empathy, fear, and a sense of justice, for particular moral and ritual issues: purity and ho...

In this immensely wide-ranging and fascinating study, Avalos critiquesthe common claim that the abolition of slavery was due in large part tothe influence of biblical ethics. Such a claim, he argues, ischaracteristic of a broader phenomenon in biblical scholarship, whichfocuses on defending, rather than describing, the ethical normsencountered in biblical texts.The first part of Avalos's critique explores how modern scholars havepraised the su...

How does sensitivity to current ecological and environmental issues impact on our hearing of the Gospels? About Earth's Child listens for the ecological sounds that are present in Luke's narrative symphony and offers a way for readers today to identify them.Michael Trainor approaches Luke's Gospel with a fresh engagement while respecting the evangelist's own purposes in addressing the social and cultural concerns of first-century followers of ...

Study of the book of Isaiah has in recent times been strongly marked by a tension between synchronic and diachronic approaches. The first is favoured mainly by English-speaking, the second by German-speaking scholars. Berges's book attempts to mediate between the two poles, arguing that the final form analysis and the tracing of the development of that form are deeply interdependent.This new research paradigm is applied here to the entire text...

It has long been recognized that the Persian period is crucial to the history of the formation of the biblical corpora. The essays presented in this volume explore this critically important era, reconstructing the socio-economic shifts that took place aswell as the religio-theological environment of the Judean community and its neighbours.The topics of this volume, sociological, archaeological and theological, include: ethnicities and administ...

I am that I am' (Exodus 3.14) has been an exegetical puzzle tomany generations of biblical scholars as well as theologians: is itabout the present or the future, is it about God's presence or hishiddenness? Den Hertog argues that such exegetical questionshave been framed too narrowly, and that this deeply suggestivestatement about God needs to be set in a broader context.First, the statement must be understood within the narrative ofMoses' cal...

This volume honours the distinctive contribution to HebrewBible studies over four decades by Cheryl Exum, ProfessorEmerita of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield. Herspecial interests have lain, first, in the modern literarycriticism of the Hebrew Bible, where her key work wasTragedy and Biblical Narrative: Arrows of the Almighty.Asecond area has been feminist criticism of the Hebrew Bible, here her notable contributions were Fragm...

Few people realize that the first character in the Bible (after theheadline sentence of Genesis 1.1) is Earth. What if we read thecreation story and the primal myths of Genesis from the perspective ofthat key character, rather than from the anthropocentric perspective inwhich our culture has nurtured us?This is the project of Norman Habel's commentary, resisting the longhistory in Western culture of devaluing, exploiting, oppressing andendange...

This book is an ambitious attempt to produce an interdisciplinary reading of a set of relatively recent Hollywood films that appear to make references to the biblical genre of apocalyptic and associated ideas of Christian martyrdom and eschatology: End of Days, Armageddon, Alien3, The Rapture, The Seventh Sign. It is a 'preposterous' reading (Mieke Bal's term), reversing a common-sense impulse to view what comes first chronologically (the bibl...

Popular music is no stranger to apocalyptic discourse.Whether focusing on biblical or secular apocalypses, musicians often want to tell us things about the end of theworld we may not have wanted to know in ways we may nothave thought about before. This volume seeks to introducereaders to some of these messengers and their anthems ofapocalypse.Roland Boer's discussion of Nick Cave indicates thatreferences to the portents and monsters of the apo...

This collection is based on the premise that apocalyptic imagery and themes pervade not only cultural products that employ specifically biblical imagery but are also found in media that do not purport to impart biblical or even religious messages. Comic books and graphic novels are the focus here because, it is suggested, they are the medium that comes the closest to the imaginative malleability found in the history of biblical interpretation....

Yairah Amit is a leading Israeli scholar of the Hebrew Bible who has published some of her articles only in Hebrew. Most of them are here translated for the first time.As she compiled the volume, she discovered that this collection of 19 essays had a common denominator: they are all about the process of editing that has gone on in the creation of the Hebrew Bible, a process that Amit looks on with some favour. Hence her title, In Praise of Edi...