"Do you have wisdom to count the clouds?" asks the voice of God from the whirlwind in the stunningly beautiful catalogue of nature-questions from the Old Testament Book of Job. Tom McLeish takes a scientist's reading of this ancient text as a centrepiece to make the case for science as a deeply human and ancient activity, embedded in some of the oldest stories told about human desire to understand the natural world. Drawing on stories from the modern science of chaos and uncertainty alongside medieval, patristic, classical and Biblical sources, Faith and Wisdom in Science challenges much of the current 'science and religion' debate as operating with the wrong assumptions and in the wrong space. Its narrative approach develops a natural critique of the cultural separation of sciences and humanities, suggesting an approach to science, or in its more ancient form natural philosophy - the 'love of wisdom of natural things' - that can draw on theological and cultural roots. Following the theme of pain in human confrontation with nature, it develops a 'Theology of Science', recognising that both scientific and theological worldviews must be 'of' each other, not holding separate domains. Science finds its place within an old story of participative reconciliation with a nature, of which we start ignorant and fearful, but learn to perceive and work with in wisdom. Surprisingly, science becomes a deeply religious activity. There are urgent lessons for education, the political process of decision-making on science and technology, our relationship with the global environment, and the way that both religious and secular communities alike celebrate and govern science.

Originally published in 1914 for use in schools, this book contains the Revised Version text of the Second Book of Kings with critical annotations by G. H. Box, then lecturer in Rabbinical Hebrew at King's College, London. Box's introduction supplies an overview of the authorship and date of the book, as well as an examination of the book's sources. This volume will be of value to anyone with an interest in the Hebrew Bible or the history of education.

Originally published in 1911 for use in schools, this book contains the Revised Version text of Second Book of Samuel with critical annotations by R. O. Hutchinson, then vicar-choral of York Minster. Hutchinson's introduction supplies the historical context of the book's writing and a brief analysis. This volume will be of value to anyone with an interest in the Hebrew Bible or the history of education.

Originally published in 1935, this book presents an introduction to criticism of the Book of Ezekiel. The text focuses mainly on critiques from the beginning of the twentieth century up until the time of publication, with one chapter on criticism up until 1900. References are given to the Hebrew Bible, where the English version differs the English reference is given in brackets. Explanatory notes are incorporated throughout. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in biblical criticism and the Book of Ezekiel.

Originally published in 1932, this book contains Alexander Nairne's essay on the role of the Old Testament in the Church of England, with a suggested structure for a course of instruction for the faithful in the Testament's historical and theological context. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the use of the Hebrew Bible in Christianity.

Originally published in 1904, this book presents a critical discussion of the Book of Ecclesiastes, with additional notes on select passages and an English translation. The text was written with two key aims in mind: 'firstly, to disentangle the strands which go to form the 'three-fold cord' of the writing; and secondly, to estimate the position which Koheleth occupied with regard to the religious and philosophical thought of his day'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Ecclesiastes and biblical criticism.

This volume introduces ancient Israel's Scriptures, or the Hebrew Bible, commonly called the Old Testament. It also traces the legacy of monotheism first found in the pages of the Old Testament. Where pertinent to the message of the Old Testament, the book explores issues of history, comparative religions, and sociology, while striking a balance among these topics by focusing primarily on literary features of the text. In addition, frequent sidebar discussions introduce the reader to contemporary scholarship, especially the results of historical-critical research and archaeology. Along the way, the book explores how the Old Testament conceptualized and gave rise to monotheism, one of the most significant developments in history, giving this study a currency for twenty-first-century readers.

Viktor E. Frankl (1905-1997) war der Begrunder der Logotherapie, der sogenannten dritten Wiener Richtung der Psychotherapie. Zentral im Franklschen Denken ist die Idee, dass der Mensch den Sinn seines Lebens erkennen muss. Frankl war ein UEberlebender des Holocaust und sagte, seine Theorien seien in den Konzentrationslagern getestet worden. Da er Jude war und sich mit Fragen auseinandersetzte, die eng mit Religion verbunden sind, erhebt sich die Frage, ob und wieweit sein Gedankengebaude als ein Beispiel fur judisches Denken anzusehen ist. Obwohl er auch von Philosophen wie Martin Heidegger und Max Scheler beeinflusst war, sind viele seiner Ideen im Judentum verankert. Er zitiert in seinen Buchern haufig das Alte Testament und legt es oft geradezu wie ein Rabbiner aus.

This translation of an Arabic commentary by Jephet ibn Ali (fl. late tenth century) was first published in 1889. Based on ten manuscripts, the text was carefully edited and rendered into English by David Samuel Margoliouth (1858 1940), Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford. Jephet was a leading Karaite scholar who wrote a number of biblical commentaries in his native Arabic. This was one of his mature works and perhaps the best example of his critical and exegetical powers. Based on the historical allusions in the commentary, Margoliouth estimated that it was composed between 990 and 1010. The work includes the Arabic text, with critical apparatus and a useful glossary of key words. Fiercely polemical against Islam, Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, the commentary has greatly contributed to our understanding of tenth-century religious controversies. It remains an important work of Karaite literature.

Originally published in 1913, this volume contains the complete text of the Old Testament's Song of Songs in English translation, together with a detailed introduction regarding its themes and structural elements. Aimed at the general reader, the introduction condenses much of the previous literature regarding the Song of Songs into an accessible and readable form. Detailed notes are provided throughout. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in biblical studies, theology and the Old Testament.

While recent Old Testament scholarship has seen a steady rise in the prominence of narrative approaches to the text, little such work has been done on the book of Joshua. This book offers a narrative treatment of the conquest accounts, with specific attention given to the characterization of Joshua. The method employed is eclectic, including poetic analysis, structural study, delimitation criticism, comparative literary analysis, and intertextual reading. Joshua's characterization has received inadequate scholarly attention to date, largely because he is seen as a pale character, a mere stereotype in the biblical history. This two-dimensional reading often leads to the conclusion that Joshua is meant to represent another character in the history. But this approach neglects the many aspects of Joshua's character that are unique, and does not address the text's presentation of his flaws. On the other hand, some scholars have recently suggested that Joshua's character is significantly flawed. This reading is similarly untenable, as those features of Joshua's leadership that it portrays as faulty are in fact condoned, not condemned, by the text itself. Close examination of the conquest narratives suggests that Joshua's character is both complex and reliable. To the degree that Joshua functions as a paradigm in the subsequent histories, this paradigm must be conceived more broadly than it has been in the past. He is not merely a royal, prophetic, or priestly figure, but exercises, and often exemplifies, the many different types of leadership that feature in the former prophets.

Originally published in 1875, this is the first publication of a previously missing fragment of some seventy verses from the seventh chapter of the fourth book of Ezra in the Old Testament (sometimes known as 2 Esdras in the Apocrypha). The text is reproduced in the original language with copious notes by Bensly, a highly respected biblical scholar and a member of the committee that translated the English Revised Version of the Bible in the late nineteenth century, as well as with a brief history of the discovery of the lacuna and of the missing text. This book will be of value to any student of the Bible and to anyone interested in paleography or the history of biblical translations.

A painstaking compiler of catalogues and indexes, the biblical scholar and bibliographer Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780 1862) first published his most famous work in 1818, having begun his research for it many years earlier in 1801. Reissued here is the expanded four-volume tenth edition of 1856, which includes revisions by the scholars Samuel Davidson (c.1806 98) and Samuel Prideaux Tregelles (1813 75). This monumental and influential work of nineteenth-century biblical scholarship remains a valuable resource for modern researchers. Volume 2, the work of Davidson, addresses the Old Testament and has been split into two parts for this reissue. Influenced by contemporary German scholarship, Davidson's contribution caused controversy, particularly around prophetic authorship and the role of divine inspiration, resulting in his resignation from Lancashire Independent College. Indeed, Horne distanced himself from this volume. Part 1 includes discussion of scriptural Hebrew, of Greek, Arabic, Latin and Syriac translations, and of textual history and interpretation."

Originally published in 1911, this book presents a comprehensive account of the Pentateuch, or Torah, and the book of Joshua, collectively known as the Hexateuch. The text gives a general account of critical problems concerning the Hexateuch as a whole. It is divided into two main parts: the first part provides a general introduction; the second part, which is much longer, is devoted to textual analysis. Numerous tables, appendices and notes are also included. This is a highly detailed book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in the Hebrew Bible and biblical theory.

Originally published in 1935, this book contains the text of the English Revised Edition translation of the book of Job. The text is presented with minimal notes and an introduction on the historical and theological background to the story of Job and his tribulations. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the Bible and biblical history.

First published in 1892, and intended for biblical scholars reading the text in the original languages, this book provides a detailed commentary on the Book of Daniel. Bevan accompanies his analysis with a discussion on the linguistic character of the book, as well as chronological tables of key events in the ancient Near East and an examination of the Palmyrene dialect of Hebrew. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of biblical studies or the Book of Daniel.

Originally published in 1908, this edition of 'The Interlinear Psalms' contains the authorised and revised versions, together with the marginal notes of the revised version. It will be of value to anyone with an interest in the Psalms and the development of Christianity.

History and Hope examines the rhetorical function of Isaiah 28-35, a relatively overlooked series of six woe oracles, in relation to reading the book of Isaiah as a whole. These eight chapters rely on the language of agrarian wisdom to transport the reader from prior reflections on historical destruction into a vision of ultimate hope. Stulac's study, therefore, offers new insight into the book of Isaiah, but perhaps more importantly, it does so through two methodological innovations that promise to enhance biblical research at large. First, History and Hope develops an interpretive strategy based on ancient Israel's agro-ecological past. Through comparisons to the thought and practice of several contemporary agrarian thinkers (such as Wendell Berry), it draws attention to the holistic, traditional worldview of the people who created the Bible and develops an "agrarian hermeneutic" that is then used to examine the book of Isaiah. This interpretive strategy, which introduces a variety of observations consistent with ancient Israel's subsistence culture, offers a new lens on the Bible that is historically and phenomenologically appropriate to its premodern character. Second, the study applies modern narratology to the book of Isaiah in its final form, a move that allows for a careful delineation of the differences in knowledge that stand between the book's characters and its implied reader. When combined with an agrarian hermeneutic, narratological precision opens understanding of Isaiah's written rhetoric to the associative, soil-bound logic by which it is constructed. In the past, many scholars have regarded Isaiah 28-35 as little more than a fragmentary reiteration of ideas already found in prior parts of the book. Now, through exegetical analysis of Isaiah 28-35 from an agrarian perspective, these eight chapters are interpreted as a rhetorical key to the overall book's coherent vision of destruction and hope.

In the Book of Judges the narrator presents an image of the good parent YHWH whose enduring love and loyalty is offset by his wayward child Israel who defaults on the relationship repeatedly. Biblical scholars have largely concurred, demonstrating the many faults of Israel while siding with YHWH's privileged viewpoint. When object-relations theory (which examines how human beings relate to each other) is applied to Judges, a different story emerges. In its capacity to illuminate why and how relationships can be intense, problematic, rewarding, and enduring, object-relations theory reveals how both YHWH and Israel have attachment needs that are played out vividly in the story world. Deryn Guest reveals how its narrator engages in a variety of psychological strategies to mask suppressed rage as he engages in an intriguing but rather dysfunctional masochistic dance with a dominant deity who has reputation needs.

Ecclesiasticus is a religious work, written in Hebrew in the second century BCE by the Jewish scribe Jesus ben Sirach. Although it was not accepted into the Hebrew Bible and the original version is lost, its Greek translation is found in the Septuagint. The focus of this study by Cambridge scholar J. H. A. Hart (1876 1952) is on the Greek text of Ecclesiasticus from a fourteenth-century codex, written in a miniscule cursive hand. First published in 1909, the book contains the text in transcription, based on the work of Charles Taylor, who had previously published a study of the text. Hart next investigates its relationship to surviving fragments of the Hebrew version, and the results of his research are included in his textual commentary. He provides a thorough analysis of the Greek translator's prologue and compares variant Greek versions of the work. Hart's edition remains of use to biblical scholars today.

Middle school students are exposed to a lot of outside influences they don t necessarily understand. It s important to establish moral guidelines and role models early on, so they can grow with a strong understanding of Christian values. Where better to look for these role models than in the godly heroes of the Bible? The Talksheets series returns with another year of thought-provoking stories from the Old Testament to discuss with your youth group or bible studies. David Lynn shares discussion topics and questions written specifically with middle school students in mind, promoting meaningful and thought-provoking conversations. The stories in these pages highlight pure moral principles and practices for teenagers to learn about and emulate. Each of the 52 epic bible stories is easy to use and fit to your lesson plan, including hints and tips to facilitate conversation. These lessons also include optional activities, giving teenagers the opportunity to actively participate and have fun while they learn."

Thomas Henry Sprott (1856 1942) was an eminent Anglican priest who held the position of Bishop of Wellington, New Zealand, between 1911 and 1936. In this volume, which was originally published in 1909, Sprott explores the development of Old Testament criticism, reaching conclusions based upon the relationship between critical insight and divine inspiration. The Bible, it is argued, cannot be interpreted in the same way as other works because it contains fundamental elements of truth that cannot be changed, or derived, by the reader. From this perspective the fresh interpretations generated by modern criticism of the Old Testament are seen as resulting from 'a special operation of the spirit of God'. This is a concise and highly readable book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in biblical exegesis and theological history.

Originally published in 1928, this volume gathers together seven essays on various aspects of the Old Testament. Through the rigorous textual analysis of hints and statements scattered over its several books, a composite picture of the development of the religion of Israel is developed. This reconstructive historical analysis is also informed by a refined knowledge of contemporary theological developments, and a list of the key authors consulted is provided at the end of the text. Additional material includes a detailed index of scriptural passages quoted or referred to. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in theology and religious history.