"This is a groundbreaking study, examining the theme of creation in 4 Ezra more thoroughly than has been done before. Moo reads the text with an exceptional alertness to data relating to creation and nature and notices details often overlooked." -- Edward Adams, Journal for the Study of the New Testament This exegetical study of creation and nature in 4 Ezra argues that this first-century Jewish apocalypse's profound pessimism concerning humankind and the present age is matched by a surprisingly robust belief in the goodness of the created order. 4 Ezra presents the natural world as standing with God over and against corrupt humankind, envisions substantial elements of continuity between the ages, and hints that those parts of the earth that remain unsullied by humankind still stand witness to God's sovereignty, love and justice and even serve as material pointers to the new creation. This study calls into question the persistent assumption that apocalypticism and the 'apocalyptic eschatology' of the historical apocalypses in particular necessarily entails a profound dualism. Emerging as it does from an experience of historical disaster and unresolved questions of theodicy, 4 Ezra especially is often considered an apocalypse in which the doctrine of the two ages has been radicalised to the extent that creation, history and life in this world have lost their meaning or significance. The results of this study, however, indicate that while 4 Ezra considers the world of humankind to be corrupted and corrupting, in the natural world the creator's sovereignty is not so obscured, and there his original intentions for creation can still be perceived. This study provides a fresh reading of 4 Ezra that takes seriously the book's unity and coherence. Its conclusions suggest that it may be best to abandon the label 'apocalyptic eschatology' given its potential to mast the interesting complexities and mix of continuity and discontinuity that attend the portrayal of creation, nature and hope in an apocalypse like 4 Ezra.

In this volume, Brian Charles DiPalma examines masculinities in the court tales of Daniel as a test case for issues facing the burgeoning area of gender studies in the Hebrew Bible. In doing so, it both analyses how the court tales of Daniel portray the characters in terms of configurations of masculinity in their socio-historical context, and also seeks to advance gender studies in the Hebrew Bible on theoretical, methodological, and political grounds. Masculinities in the Court Tales of Daniel is therefore of interest not only to scholars working on Daniel, but also biblical scholars studying gender in the Hebrew Bible more broadly, including those engaged in feminist criticism, queer criticism, and studies of masculinity, as well as anyone studying gender within an ancient Near Eastern context.

Among the most challenging biblical figures to understand is Jeroboam son of Nebat, the first monarch of northern Israel whose story is told in 1 Kings 11-14. This book explores the characterization of Jeroboam in the Hebrew text, and traces his rags to riches career trajectory. What are the circumstances whereby this widow's son is elevated to the position of king, with a conditional promise for a lasting dynasty? A close reading of the narrative reveals a literary achievement of great subtlety and complexity. Even though he becomes the negative standard for the rest of Israel's royal history, Jeroboam's portrait is far more nuanced than is often realized and yields a host of surprises for the engaged reader. Numerous issues are raised in the 1 Kings 11-14 material, including questions of power, leadership, and the role of the prophetic office in national affairs. Against the grain of conventional interpretation that tends to idealize or vilify biblical characters, Keith Bodner's study locates the arrival of Jeroboam's kingship as a direct response to scandalous activity within the Solomonic empire.

The Oxford Bible Commentary is a Bible study and reference work for 21st century students and readers that can be read with any modern translation of the Bible. It offers verse-by-verse explanation of every book of the Bible by the world's leading biblical scholars. From its inception, OBC has been designed as a completely non-denominational commentary, carefully written and edited to provide the best scholarship in a readable style for readers from all different faith backgrounds. It uses the traditional historical-critical method to search for the original meaning of the texts, but also brings in new perspectives and insights - literary, sociological, and cultural - to bring out the expanding meanings of these ancient writings and stimulate new discussion and further enquiry.
Newly issued in a series of part volumes, the OBC is now available in an affordable and portable format for the study of specific sections of the Bible. The Pentateuch, or Torah ('the law'), comprises the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis to Deuteronomy. The Commentaries are preceeded by introductions to the Old Testament and to the Pentateuch as a whole.

1 and 2 Kings unfolds an epic narrative that concludes the long story of Israel's experience with institutional monarchy, a sequence of events that begins with the accession of Solomon and the establishment of the Jerusalem temple, moves through the partition into north and south, and leads inexorably toward the nation's destruction and the passage to exile in Babylon. Keith Bodner's The Theology of the Book of Kings provides a reading of the narrative attentive to its literary sophistication and theological subtleties, as the cast of characters - from the royal courts to the rural fields - are variously challenged to resist the tempting pathway of political and spiritual accommodations and instead maintain allegiance to their covenant with God. In dialogue with a range of contemporary interpreters, this study is a preliminary exploration of some theological questions that arise from the Kings narrative, while inviting contemporary communities of faith into deeper engagement with this enduring account of divine reliability amidst human scheming and rapaciousness.

The divine commands to annihilate the seven nations living in Canaan (to 'devote them to destruction', herem in Biblical Hebrew) are perhaps the most morally troubling texts of the Hebrew and Christian bibles. Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide: Christian Interpretations of Herem Passages addreses the challenges these texts pose. It presents the various ways in which interpreters from the first century to the twenty-first have attempted to make sense of them. The most troubling approach was no doubt to read them as divine sanction and inspiration for violence and war: the analysis of the use of herem texts in the crusades, the inquisition, and various colonial conquests illustrates this violent way of reading the texts, which has such alarming contemporary relevance. Three additional approaches can also be traced to antiquity, viz. pre-critical, non-literal, and divine-command-theory readings. Finally, critics of Christianity from antiquity via the Enlightenment to today have referenced herem texts: their critical voices are included as well. Christian Hofreiter combines a presentation of a wide range of historical sources with careful analysis that scrutinizes the arguments made and locates the texts in their wider contexts. Influential contributions of such well-known figures as Augustine, Origen, Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin are included, as well as those of critics such as Marcion, Celsus and Matthew Tindal, and less widely known texts such as crusading histories, songs and sermons, colonial conquest accounts, and inquisition manuals. The book thus sheds new light on the ways in which these texts have shaped the thoughts and actions of their readers through the centuries, and offers pertinent insights into how readers might be able to make sense of them today.

A Redactional Study of the Book of Isaiah 13-23 argues that a series of programmatic additions were made to the oracles concerning the nations in Isaiah 13-23 during the late-exilic period by the same circle of writers who were responsible for Isaiah 40-55. These additions were made to create continuity between the ancient oracles against the nations from the Isaiah tradition and the future fate of the same nations as the late-exilic redactor(s) foresaw. The additions portray a two-sided vision concerning the nations. One group of passages depicts a positive turn for certain nations while the other group of passages continues to pronounce doom against the remaining nations. This double-sided vision is set out first in Isaiah 14 surrounding the famous taunt against the fallen tyrant. 14:1-2, before the taunt, paints the broad picture of the future return of the exiles and the attachment of the gentiles to the people of Israel. After the taunt and other sayings of YHWH against his enemies, 14:26-27 extends the sphere of the underlying theme of 14:4b-25a, namely YHWH's judgement against boastful and tyrannical power(s), to all nations and the whole earth. The two sides of this vision are then applied accordingly to the rest of the oracles concerning nations in chapters 13-23. To the nations that have experienced similar disasters as the people of Israel, words of hope in line with 14:1-2 were given. To the nations that still possessed some prominence and reasons to be proud, words of doom in line with 14:26-27 were decreed.

This study considers the relationship of Deuteronomy 28 to the curse traditions of the ancient Near East. It focuses on the linguistic and cultural means of the transmission of these traditions to the book of Deuteronomy. Laura Quick examines a broad range of materials, including Old Aramaic inscriptions, attempting to show the value of these Northwest Semitic texts as primary sources to reorient our view of an ancient world usually seen through a biblical or Mesopotamian lens. By studying these inscriptions alongside the biblical text, Deuteronomy 28 and the Aramaic Curse Tradition increases our knowledge of the early history and function of the curses in Deuteronomy 28. This has implications for our understanding of the date of the composition of the book of Deuteronomy, and the reasons behind its production. The ritual realm which stands behind the use of curses and the formation of covenants in the biblical world is also explored, arguing that the interplay between orality and literacy is essential to understanding the function and form of the curses in Deuteronomy. This book contributes to our understanding of the book of Deuteronomy and its place within the literary history of ancient Israel and Judah, with implications for the composition of the Pentateuch or Torah as a whole.

Most studies on violence in the Hebrew Bible focus on the question of how modern readers should approach the problem. But they fail to ask how the Hebrew Bible thinks about that problem in the first place. In this work, Matthew J. Lynch examines four key ways that writers of the Hebrew Bible conceptualize and critique acts of violence: violence as an ecological problem; violence as a moral problem; violence as a judicial problem; violence as a purity problem. These four 'grammars of violence' help us interpret crucial biblical texts where violence plays a lead role, like Genesis 4-9. Lynch's volume also offers readers ways to examine cultural continuity and the distinctiveness of biblical conceptions of violence.

Exploring the lively polemics among Jews, Christians, and Muslims during the Middle Ages, Hava Lazarus-Yafeh analyzes Muslim critical attitudes toward the Bible, some of which share common features with both pre-Islamic and early modern European Bible criticism. Unlike Jews and Christians, Muslims did not accept the text of the Bible as divine word, believing that it had been tampered with or falsified. This belief, she maintains, led to a critical approach to the Bible, which scrutinized its text as well as its ways of transmission. In their approach Muslim authors drew on pre-Islamic pagan, Gnostic, and other sectarian writings as well as on Rabbinic and Christian sources. Elements of this criticism may have later influenced Western thinkers and helped shape early modern Bible scholarship. Nevertheless, Muslims also took the Bible to predict the coming of Muhammad and the rise of Islam. They seem to have used mainly oral Arabic translations of the Hebrew Bible and recorded some lost Jewish interpretations. In tracing the connections between pagan, Islamic, and modern Bible criticism, Lazarus-Yafeh demonstrates the importance of Muslim mediation between the ancient world and Europe in a hitherto unknown field. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"The Bible is the most important cultural and religious document in the Western world. Te three monotheistic faiths-Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-have all grown out of the traditions that we find in the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible. The Bible therefore has a natural place in a liberal arts curriculum."

-from the introduction

So begins Barstad in this comprehensive, student-friendly introductory textbook outlining the contours of the Old Testament literature in simple and straightforward prose. This text is an excellent primer as well as an invaluable reference book to which students will turn throughout their education.

English description: This volume consists of fifteen of the authors essays, including two that have never been published before. The essays date to the last decade and a half, and all reflect in some manner the authors ongoing interest in literary operations of classification and their social implications, particularly the production of distinctions which create social inequality in the world of the text, and have the potential to generate hierarchical social relationships in contexts where biblical texts might have had an impact on real people. In these essays, the author explores themes such as gender, sexuality, purity and pollution, sanctification, death and afterlife, foreignness, and disability with particular attention to the roles distinctions such as honored/shamed, feminine/masculine, mourning/rejoicing, unclean/clean, alien/native play in creating and perpetuating social differences in texts. Rites of status change such as circumcision, shaving, purification, burial or disinterment, sanctification and profanation of holiness are a focus of interest in a number of these essays, reflecting the authors on going interest in the textual representation of ritual. Most of the essays examine texts in their historical setting, but several also engage the early history of the interpretation of biblical texts, including the phenomenon of inner biblical exegesis. The essays are divided into five sections: Rites and Social Status; Gender and Sexuality; Disability; Holiness, Purity, the Alien; Death, Burial, Afterlife and their Metaphorical Uses. The author introduces each of the sections, contextualizing each essay in his larger scholarly project, reflecting on its development and reception and, in some cases, responding to his critics. German description: Der vorliegende Band beinhaltet 15, z.T. noch unveroffentlichte Aufsatze von Saul M. Olyan. Der Autor beschaftigt sich mit Klassifikationen in biblischen Texten und ihren sozialen Auswirkungen. Besonders widmet er sich den Klassifizierungen die Ungleichheiten in der Umwelt des Textes hervorrufen.Solche Unterschiede sind zum Beispiel mannlich/weiblich, tot/lebendig, fremd/einheimisch oder rein/unrein. Die Artikel beschaftigen sich dabei mit biblischen Texten, die von der Konigszeit uber das Exil bis hin zur romischen Epche datiert werden.Dabei legt Olyan ein besonderes Augenmerk auf die Menschen, die bei diesen Unterscheidungen die minderwertige Rolle spielen oder gar ganz von der Gemeinschaft ausgeschlossen sind. Einen weiteren Schwerpunkt stellen Ubergangsriten dar, die einen Wechsel des Status markieren, z.B. Beschneidung, Rasur, Bestattung.

In both modern fiction and the biblical texts of 1 Samuel 13-2 Samuel 1, the character of Jonathan serves as a key literary and theological figure. Throughout In Search of Jonathan, Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer interprets Jonathan's portrayal in traditional biblical literature and modern fiction. Each chapter provides first an analysis of Jonathan's characterization in 1-2 Samuel, followed by an examination of the depictions of Jonathan in modern fiction. Together, biblical and modern literature demonstrate how fictional retellings deepen and challenge the ways that scholars interpret Jonathan's character. Throughout the volume, Tiemeyer offers an interpretation of Jonathan as a plausible and psychologically consistent character while grappling with questions posed by his actions in the text. Tiemeyer asks, what kind of man is Jonathan who shows initiative and daring leadership ability, but who is also willing to lay down his crown before the usurper David's feet in humble submission? What kind of son is Jonathan who rebels against his father and takes David's part in the conflict between him and Saul, yet remains loyal to Saul until the bitter end on Mount Gilboa? To answer these questions, Tiemeyer considers depictions of Jonathan in modern fiction. Modern approaches, as Tiemeyer discusses, illuminate dormant yet integral aspects of the biblical texts. These modern retellings highlight, transform, and subvert the biblical portrayal of Jonathan. Posing these questions to the reader and other biblical scholars, Tiemeyer challenges the ways that scholars perceive Jonathan and his portrayals across biblical and modern literature.

How and when did Jesus and the Spirit come to be regarded as fully God? The Birth of the Trinity offers a new historical approach by exploring the way in which first- and second-century Christians read the Old Testament in order to differentiate the one God as multiple persons. The earliest Christians felt they could metaphorically overhear divine conversations between the Father, Son, and Spirit when reading the Old Testament. When these snatches of dialogue are connected and joined, they form a narrative about the unfolding interior divine life as understood by the nascent church. What emerges is not a static portrait of the triune God, but a developing story of divine persons enacting mutual esteem, voiced praise, collaborative strategy, and self-sacrificial love. The presence of divine dialogue in the New Testament and early Christian literature shows that, contrary to the claims of James Dunn and Bart Ehrman (among others), the earliest Christology was the highest Christology, as Jesus was identified as a divine person through Old Testament interpretation. The result is a Trinitarian biblical and early Christian theology.

Die Studie behandelt die Stellung der Witwe in der fruhen Kirche vom ersten bis zum funften Jahrhundert. Auf der Grundlage ausgewahlter Quellen wird die Witwenthematik sowohl im Kontext der profanen Umwelt als auch vor dem Hintergrund der biblischen Tradition problematisiert. Der Autor arbeitet den Zusammenhang der Institutionalisierung der Witwenversorgung und der AEmterentwicklung heraus. Witwen koennen jedoch nicht auf Versorgungsempfangerinnen christlicher Gemeinden reduziert werden, weshalb das Buch auch die Aufgaben der Witwen innerhalb der christlichen Gemeinden eingehend thematisiert. In diesem Zusammenhang wird die Entwicklung des kirchlichen Witwenstandes von seinen Anfangen bis hin zu seiner Etablierung aufgezeigt.

Mirrors of the Divine brings into focus how four influential authors of the late ancient world-Tertullian of Carthage, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine of Hippo-employ language of vision and of mirrors in their discursive struggles to construct Christian agency, identity, and epistemology. Early Christian authors described the vision of God through the Pauline verse 1 Corinthians 13:12: "For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face." Yet each author interpreted this verse differently, based on a diverse set of assumptions about how they understood seeing and mirrors to function: does vision occur by something leaving or entering the eye? Is one impacted by seeing or by being seen? Do mirrors offer trustworthy knowledge? Spanning the second through fourth centuries CE in both Eastern and Western Christianity, Mirrors of the Divine analyzes these four authors' theological writings on vision and knowledge of God to explore how contradictory theories of sight shaped their cosmologies, theologies, subjectivities, genders, and discursive worlds. As Emily R. Cain demonstrates, how the authors portray eyes reveals how they envisioned one's relationship to the world, while how they portray mirrors reveals how they imagined the unknown. Both have dramatic impacts on how one interprets what it means to see God through a mirror dimly. She shows that arguments about the phenomenon of visual perception are deeply intertwined with broader debates about identity, agency, and epistemology, and uncovers some of the most self-conscious ways that late ancient Christians thought of themselves, their worlds, and their God.

El fin del mundo y la vida despues de la muerte son cuestiones que inquietan el corazon de los hombres desde tiempos inmemoriales. Los cristianos contemporaneos de Pablo ya se preguntaban ?como resucitan los muertos? (1 Cor. 15,35), interrogandose no solo por el destino del hombre despues de la muerte sino por el sentido que tiene vivir una vida en este mundo como ciudadanos del cielo (cf. Ad Diognetum 5,9), en un mundo que esta condenado a la destruccion, segun la doctrina cristiana tradicional. La Biblia ofrece respuestas puntuales a tales interrogantes ... los problemas vienen cuando se descrubre que un mismo texto biblico puede ser entendido no solo en modo diverso sino hasta contradictorio. El presente volumen analiza la interpretacion de dos pasajes clave de la I ad Corinthios en textos pertenecientes a la literatura cristiana antigua, tratando de esclarecer tematicas que no encuentran aun respuestas satisfactorias.

Few pastors continue to read their Hebrew Old Testament after seminary. One reason is that it is too time-consuming, since many words have to be looked up in the dictionary. The Reader's Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament, now for the first time complete in one volume, enables the pastor and the student to read the Hebrew Old Testament with relative ease. Listed in sequence by chapter and verse are all words that occur fewer than fifty times in the Old Testament, complete with translation (based on Brown, Driver, and Briggs' Lexicon) and numbers indicating how often the word occurs in the particular book and in the Old Testament as a whole. At the end of each entry is the page number in Brown, Driver, and Briggs' Lexicon where a discussion of the word can be found. Appendixes list all Hebrew words occurring more than fifty times in the Old Testament and all Aramaic words occurring more than ten times.

Los libros de Daniel y Apocalipsis, emocionantes y transformadores, no solo muestran como Dios logra sus benevolos propositos con la humanidad y la creacion, sino tambien hasta que punto el mundo invisible de la realidad espiritual es mas cierto que el visible.

Volume XXXI contains the editio princeps of the first group of Aramaic texts (4Q529-549) from Cave 4 which were originally assigned to Père Jean Starcky. They are primarily parabiblical and pseudepigraphical compositions reflecting the interest in biblical themes characteristic of Second Temple Judaism. The commentary is in French.