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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Non-Christian sacred works & liturgy > Sacred texts > Criticism & exegesis of sacred texts
Throughout the last several decades professional biblical scholars
have adapted concepts and theories from the social sciences -
particularly social and cultural anthropology - in order to cast
new light on ancient biblical writings, early Jewish and Christian
texts that circulated with the Scriptures, and the various contexts
in which these literatures were produced and first received. The
present volume of essays draws much of its inspiration from that
same development in the history of biblical research, while also
offering insights from other, newer approaches to interpretation.
The contributors to this volume explore a wide range of broadly
social-scientific disciplines and discourses - cultural
anthropology, sociology, archaeology, political science, the New
Historicism, forced migration studies, gender studies - and provide
multiple examples of the ways in which these diverse methods and
theories can shed new and often fascinating light on the ancient
texts. The fruit of scholarly work that is both international in
flavour and truly collaborative, this volume provides fresh
perspectives not only on familiar portions of Jewish and Christian
Scripture but also on select passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls,
the Nag Hammadi library and previously untranslated French texts.
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