Take your Bible reading to a deeper, more personal level with this thoughtfully designed journal. It offers three simple writing prompts that loosely guide you through The Bible Recap chronological reading plan. The open-ended nature of the questions--and the pattern they help you establish through daily repetition--is ideal for building your understanding of Scripture, section by section, day after day. With a lay-flat binding that provides a comfortable writing experience, this journal will help you get the most out of your time in God's Word. Getting to know Him will grow your faith and strengthen your joy, because He's where the joy is! Praise for The Bible Recap "I have grown closer to God in ways I couldn't expect." "It has helped me understand the Bible like never before." "More than a Bible study, it is a God study."

The books of Chronicles have a certain fantasy quality about them. They create an imaginary world in which things happen just so, and in which any potentially untidy loose ends in their narrative of the past are tied together in a highly systematic way. This is storytelling with the didactic purpose of inculcating a particular ideology, bombarding the reader with a kaleidoscopic procession of heroes and villains and presenting a frontierland of danger and opportunity. John Jarick's focus on the literary world of Chronicles provides a fresh reading of the work, foregrounding the often unrecognized artistry in the telling of the tale-including at times a distinctly musical language and a careful mathematical precision. But at the same time he does not hide the dark underbelly of the writing, with its persistent note of conformity to the political and religious system advocated by the storytellers. This edition is a reprint of the original 2002 edition with different pagination. A companion volume on 2 Chronicles is published for the first time in 2007.

Scholars generally see the aspiration of the Roman Empire and the imperial cult in Asia Minor as the great villain in "Revelation", treating the depiction of a cosmic conflict in the book mostly as metaphors that hold little or no explanatory power in the story. This book pursues the conviction that the cosmic conflict imagery is the primary and controlling element in the account. Such a reading puts the war-in-heaven theme in the foreground and calls on interpreters to pay more attention to the heavenly being whose attempt to subvert the truth about the divine government is the unremitting concern in "Revelation". This book redresses the distortion that results from leaving the larger conflict theme underexposed. Having first developed the story line, it aims is to show that the phrase 'Pistis Iesou' in "Revelation" is best understood when "Revelation" is read as a theodicy of God's handling of the reality of evil.

"Recognizing the Stranger" is the first monographic study of recognition scenes and motifs in the Gospel of John. The recognition type-scene ("anagn?risis") was a common feature in ancient drama and narrative, highly valued by Aristotle as a touching moment of truth, e.g., in Oedipus' tragic self-discovery and Odysseus' happy homecoming. The book offers a reconstruction of the conventions of the genre and argues that it is one of the most recurrent and significant literary forms in the Gospel. When portraying Jesus as the divine stranger from heaven, the Gospel employs and transforms the formal and ideological structures of the type-scene in order to show how Jesus' true identity can be recognized behind the half-mask of his human appearance.

The Book of Job functions as literature of survival where the main character, Job, deals with the trauma of suffering, attempts to come to terms with a collapsed moral and theological world, and eventually re-connects the broken pieces of his world into a new moral universe, which explains and contains the trauma of his recent experiences and renders his life meaningful again. The key is Job's death imagery. In fact, with its depiction of death in the prose tale and its frequent discussions of death in the poetic sections, Job may be the most death-oriented book in the bible. In particular, Job, in his speeches, articulates his experience of suffering as the experience of death. To help understand this focus on death in Job we turn to the psychohistorian, Robert Lifton, who investigates the effects on the human psyche of various traumatic experiences (wars, natural disasters, etc). According to Lifton, survivors of disaster often sense that their world has "collapsed" and they engage in a struggle to go on living. Part of this struggle involves finding meaning in death and locating death's place in the continuity of life. Like many such survivors, Job's understanding of death is a flashpoint indicating his bewilderment (or "desymbolization") in the early portions of his speeches, and then, later on, his arrival at what Lifton calls "resymbolization," the reconfiguration of a world that can account for disaster and render death - and life - meaningful again.

John Stott writes, 'During the gestation of this book I seem to have lived inside the second letter of Paul to Timothy. In imagination I have sat down beside Timothy and have tried myself to hear and heed this final charge from the ageing apostle ... 'On each occasion I have been impressed afresh by the timeliness for today of what the apostle writes, especially for young Christian leaders. For our era is one of theological and moral confusion, even of apostasy. And the apostle summons us, as he summoned Timothy, to be strong, brave and steadfast.'

Classic IVP series now rejacketed and retypeset

Healing Verses of the Psalms is a must-have reference of excerpted verses of the Book of Psalms from the King James Version of the Bible that carries an impactful healing quality. It will serve as your ready reference to find verses that bring healing, relaxation and invigoration in times of stress or for life enhancement.Healing Verses of the Psalms includes beautiful illustrations and easy-to-understand suggestions for use along with insights, all of which can provide greater application and understanding for how this book can benefit you.It also comes complete with an index, making it easy to find a verse that applies to a specific need you may have.

This volume is the result of a symposium held at Baylor University in May of 2006, entitled "Baylor University Symposium on the Psalms." The participants were carefully selected to represent the diversity of approaches currently employed in the study of the Psalter. Although a number of volumes in print offer the reader introductory information related to the Psalter, perhaps even noting various methodological approaches, very few actually "model" the diversity of such approaches. This volume exposes readers to the variety of approaches as practiced by leading scholars in the field.

Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus proposes a provocative new theory regarding the date and circumstances of the composition of the Pentateuch. Gmirkin argues that the Hebrew Pentateuch was composed in its entirety about 273-272 BCE by Jewish scholars at Alexandria that later traditions credited with the Septuagint translation of the Pentateuch into Greek. The primary evidence is literary dependence of Gen. 1-11 on Berossus' Babyloniaca (278 BCE) and of the Exodus story on Manetho's Aegyptiaca (c. 285-280 BCE), and the geo-political data contained in the Table of Nations. A number of indications point to a provenance of Alexandria, Egypt for at least some portions of the Pentateuch. That the Pentateuch, drawing on literary sources found at the Great Library of Alexandria, was composed at almost the same date as the Septuagint translation, provides compelling evidence for some level of communication and collaboration between the authors of the Pentateuch and the Septuagint scholars at Alexandria's Museum. The late date of the Pentateuch, as demonstrated by literary dependence on Berossus and Manetho, has two important consequences: the definitive overthrow of the chronological framework of the Documentary Hypothesis, and a late, 3rd century BCE date for major portions of the Hebrew Bible which show literary dependence on the Pentateuch.

The story of Susanna and the Elders is one of the most interpreted and reproduced tales from the "Apocrypha". In its compact narrative, it touches on attempted rape, female sexuality, abuse of power, punishment for the wicked, and voyeurism. "The Good, the Bold, the Beautiful" argues that the story of Susanna was written in the first century BCE, and Clanton provides a brief description of that century. He performs a narrative-rhetorical reading of Susanna, and illustrates that the story uses sexual anxiety and desire to set up a moral dilemma for Susanna. That moral dilemma is resolved in two ways: Susanna's refusal to allow herself to be raped, and Daniel's intervention. Clanton argues that although the story has many mimetic features, it is the thematic function that is overriding, especially after Daniel's appearance. Put another way, the story's emphasis on Susanna, the Elders, and Daniel as "plausible people" is secondary to its stress on what those characters represent and the message it is relaying through those representations. Clanton analyzes chronologically selected aesthetic interpretations of the story found in the Renaissance. He shows that the prevailing artistic interpretation during the Renaissance focused on the mimetic, sexual aspects of the story because it deals with issues of patronage, and sex/gender that were current at the time. "The Good, the Bold, the Beautiful" argues that several Renaissance renderings provide counter readings that focus more on the value and themes in the story. These renderings provide models for readers to resist the sexually exploitative features of both the narrative and its interpretations. Clanton reflects on the need for the reader to resist potentially harmful interpretation, especially those that focus on the mimetic level of the story's rhetoric.

In Jeremiah 3.1-4.4 the prophet employs the image of Israel as God's unfaithful wife, who acts like a prostitute. The entire passage is a rich and complex rhetorical tapestry designed to convince the people of Israel of the error of their political and religious ways, and their need to change before it is too late. As well as metaphor and gender, another important thread in the tapestry is intertextuality, according to which the historical, political and social contexts of both author and reader enter into dialogue and thus produce different interpretations. But, as Shields shows in her final chapter, it is in the end the rhetoric of gender that actually constructs the text, providing the frame, the warp and woof, of the entire tapestry, and thus the prophet's primary means of persuasion.