A Bible Commentary on the Book of Hebrews. Sovereign grace emphasis suitable for personal study, devotional, study groups and sermon-help. Don Fortner is an experience Pastor and Teacher whose writings and preached sermons are highly regarded around the world.

Opening with the prophet Elijah's ascent into heaven and closing with the people of Judah's descent to Babylonia, 2 Kings charts the story of the two Israelite kingdoms until their destruction. This commentary unfolds the literary dimensions of 2 Kings, analyzes the strategies through which its words create a world of meaning, and examines the book's tales of prophets, political intrigue, royal apostasy, and religious reform as components of larger patterns.

2 Kings pays attention to the writers' methods of representing human character and of twisting chronological time for literary purposes. It also shows how the contests between kings and prophets are mirrored in the competing structures of regnal synchronization and prophecy-fulfillment. Much more than a common chronicle of royal achievements and disasters, 2 Kings emerges as a powerful history that creates memories and forges identities for its Jewish readers.

"2 Kings" is divided into four parts including Part One The Story of Elisha: 2 Kings 1:1-8:6"; Part Two "Revolutions in Aram, Israel, and Judah: 2 Kings 8:7-13:25"; Part Three "Turmoil and Tragedy for Israel: 2 Kings 14-17"; and Part Four "Renewal and Catastrophe for Judah: 2 Kings 18-25."

"Robert L. Cohn is professor of religion and holds the Philip and Muriel Berman Chair in Jewish studies at Lafayette College. Under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee, he lectured on Jewish interpretations of the Bible as the first American Jewish-scholar-in-residence at four Roman Catholic seminaries in Poland.""

"I know dogs in my life the way I know people and cats and trees and landscapes. Dogs help me shape my thoughts, feelings, and prayer life. Dogs have taught me attributes I feel in myself when reflecting and praying. "Dogs have shown me the spirit of being loyal, glad, overwhelmed, protective, committed, vigilant, patient, kind, energetic, discerning, forgiving. Unfolding these attributes of dog life opens my own spiritual being. My relationship with dog mirrors my relationship with God." In Dog Psalms the reader can use a dog's attributes to speak to God.

The language, themes and imagery of the Bible have been rewritten into texts across time. In the Revelation of John, the Hebrew Bible echoes and is reinvented, just as in James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) many explicit and implicit readings and interpretations of the Bible are offered. In Texts Reading Texts, these readings of the Bible, and the ways in which Revelation and Hogg's Confessions have themselves been read, are considered from the two postmodern perspectives of marginalization and deconstruction. By reading the two seemingly unrelated texts side by side from these perspectives, traditional readings of them both are disturbed and challenged.

Together in one special volume, selections from the best of beloved, bestselling author C. S. Lewis’s classic works for readers contemplating the ‘grand miracle’ of Jesus’s resurrection.

Preparing for Easter is a concise, handy companion for the faithful of all Christian traditions and the curious to help them deepen their knowledge and consideration of this holy season – a time of reflection as we consider Jesus’s sacrifice and his joyous rise from the dead.

Carefully curated, each selection in Preparing for Easter draws on a major theme in Lewis’s writings on the Christian life, as well as others that consider why we can have confident faith in what happened on the cross.

The first translation into English of all the extant Targums, together with introductions and annotations. Each volume examines the place of a particular Targum or group of Targums in Jewish life, liturgy and biblical interpretation. Each Targum is evaluated in the light of Jewish tradition and of modern linguistic and biblical research. The notes point to parallel passages in other Jewish and Christian biblical and liturgical texts. Each translated Targum has its own apparatus indicating the relationship between the English translation and the Aramaic original and every volume has a useful bibliography.

Recent discussion of biblical law sees it either as a response to socio-economic factors or as an intellectual tradition. In either case it is viewed as the product of elites that form an international community drawing on a common culture. This book takes that fundamental discussion a step further by proposing that 'law' is an inappropriate term for the biblical codes, and that they represent, rather, the 'moral advice' of scribes working independently of the legal framework and appealing to Yahweh as authority. Only by prolonged exegesis and through the transformation of Judaean religion does this 'advice' take the form of divine law binding on Jews.>

Peng outlines a plausible structure for Romans 12.1 to 15.13. After a brief survey of scholars' opinions about the structure of this passage, three methodologies (structural exegesis, discourse analysis, and rhetorical criticism) are analysed. Having acknowledged that each of these methodologies has its own limitations, an eclectic approach, which is analogous with 'putting together a jigsaw puzzle without the final picture', is suggested. Peng also includes two appendices - the first is an assessment of the historical background of chapter 13.1 to 13.7 in light of the analysis presented; and the second is a short assessment of interpretations of the word 'pistis' in chapter 12.3 and 12.6, in which the rationale behind the interpretation of this term is discussed.

In Chapter 1 Paula Gooder discusses the problems of interpreting this text and looks at the major debates of its past interpreters. The most popular modern approach is to compare it with other texts of ascent in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, yet even a brief examination of these texts indicate that differences are present. In the remainder of the book Gooder evaluates the extent and significance of these differences. Part One consists of a detailed consideration of a range of texts which superficially seem closest to 2 Corinthians 12. Chapter 2 presents a history of scholarship on heavenly ascent. Chapters 3 to 8 each examine a text of ascent from a different period and background in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Chapter 9 draws out the points of similarity between these texts. Part Two considers the text of 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 in the light of the findings of Part One. In the detailed examination of the Pauline ascent in chapter 10, the extent of the differences between this text and the texts examined in Part One becomes clear. Chapter 11 proposes a new interpretation of the account of ascent, arguing that it reports a failed ascent into heaven. The chapter shows that this interpretation makes sense not only of 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 itself but also of chapters 10-13 which surround it. The account is one more example of weakness from the apostle in which he proves that weakness, not strength, is the sign of a true apostle.

The Psalms of Solomon, the most important early psalm book outside the canonical psalter, reflects the turmoil of events in the last pre-Christian century and gives an apparently eyewitness account of the first invasions of the Romans into Jerusalem. The Psalm of Solomon provides the most detailed expectation of the Jewish Messiah before the New Testament. Wright's critical edition is the first complete critical edition of the Greek texts of the Psalms of Solomon.

This wide-ranging investigation of the priestly cultic texts from Exodus 25 onwards explores the coherence and theology of the priestly writing, utilizing insights from anthropology and recent biblical scholarship. Through a carefully worked out set of laws and institutions, the priestly authors sought to order Israel's life before God in a sustainable and satisfying way. This is a valuable contribution to the growing number of studies concerned to understand and recover this neglected part of the Bible.>

The Old Testament Library provides an authoritative treatment of every major and important aspect of the Old Testament. This commentary on Lamentations furnishes a fresh translation and discusses questions of historical background and literary architecture before providing a theologically sensitive exposition of the text.

A fascinating intertextual study of the classic biblical tragedy of Saul, the first king of Israel, as first narrated in biblical narrative and later reworked in Lamartine's drama Saul: Trag+--die and Thomas Hardy's novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. Plot and characterization are each explored in detail in this study, and in each of the narrations the hero's tragic fate emerges both as the result of a character flaw and also as a consequence of the ambivalent role of the deity, showing a double theme underlying not only the biblical vision but also its two very different retellings nearer to our own times.

This is a book about the use of classical rhetoric in reading Paul. It begins with a useful review of the various strategies, and, in the light of the issues that emerge, it describes a rhetorical method which is then tested on 2 Corinthians 8-9. Here, the advice of the classical rhetorical manuals for constructing a text is used-in reverse order-so as to uncover the persuasive strategy being used by Paul in this case. This technique leads to a quite new reading of the two chapters, which O'Mahony then proceeds to test against the standard work in the field by Hans Dieter Betz.>

The primary problem that Mobley's book deals with is the odd character of Judges 13-16 and of its hero. Samson's special quality, noted by virtually all interpreters, is defined here as liminality. The liminal situation, which includes a movement away from society, the lack of social restraints, and the status of outsider, is a permanent condition for Samson. The secondary purpose of this book is to demonstrate the ways in which the Samson saga, which is often compared to the Greek Heracles tradition, makes use of ideas about wild men and warriors found in other biblical and Mesopotamian stories.