Designed for the pastor and Bible teacher, the Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament features today's top Old Testament scholars and brings together commentary features rarely gathered together in one volume. With careful discourse analysis and interpretation of the Hebrew text, the authors trace the flow of argument in each Old Testament book, showing that how a biblical author says something is just as important as what they say. Commentary on each passage follows a clear structure to help readers grasp the flow and meaning of the text: The Main Idea of the Passage: A one- or two-sentence summary of the key ideas the biblical author seeks to communicate. Literary Context: A brief discussion of the relationship of the specific text to the book as a whole and to its place within the broader argument. Translation and Exegetical Outline: Commentators provide their own translations of each text, formatted to highlight its discourse structure and accompanied by a coherent outline that reflects the flow and argument of the text. Structure and Literary Form: An overview of the literary structure and rhetorical style adopted by the biblical author, highlighting how these features contribute to the communication of the main idea of the passage. Explanation of the Text: A detailed commentary on the passage, paying particular attention to how the biblical authors select and arrange their materials and how they work with words, phrases, and syntax to communicate their messages. Canonical and Practical Significance: The commentary on each unit will conclude by building bridges between the world of the biblical author and other biblical authors and with reflections on the contribution made by this unit to the development of broader issues in biblical theology--particularly on how later Old Testament and New Testament authors have adapted and reused the motifs in question. The discussion also includes brief reflections on the significance of the message of the passage for readers today. The Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament series is the go-to resource for pastors and Bible teachers looking for deep but accessible study that equips them to connect the needs of Christians today with the biblical text.

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.

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.

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.

Using personal anecdote, a witty and lively style, and drawing on his considerable theological knowledge, John Goldingay takes us deep into the unfolding story of the Old Testament.

In der Septuaginta, der zwischentestamentlichen Literatur und den rabbinischen Schriften taucht das entwickelte Phanomen des Proselytentums auf. Diese exegetische Untersuchung geht der Frage nach, welche Spuren der Entwicklung des Proselytentums in der ersttestamentlichen Literatur des 9.-3. Jahrhunderts v.u.Z. auffindbar sind. Dazu werden aus der sozialpsychologischen, soziologischen und religionswissenschaftlichen Konversionsforschung Kriterien erarbeitet und auf Texte aller drei Bereiche des Ersten Testaments (Tora, Propheten, Schriften) angewandt. Es werden verschiedene Phanomene der persoenlich-religioesen Veranderung zum Judentum hin aus vorexilischer, exilischer und fruhnachexilischer Zeit herausgearbeitet und fruhe Formen der Konversion im hellenistischen Judentum entdeckt.

An Invitation to Biblical Poetry is an accessibly written introduction to biblical poetry that emphasizes the aesthetic dimensions of poems and their openness to varieties of context. It demonstrates the irreducible complexity of poetry as a verbal art and considers the intellectual work poems accomplish as they offer aesthetic experiences to people who read or hear them. Chapters walk the reader through some of the diverse ways biblical poems are organized through techniques of voicing, lineation, and form, and describe how the poems' figures are both culturally and historically bound and always dependent on later reception. The discussions consider examples from different texts of the Bible, including poems inset in prose narratives, prophecies, psalms, and wisdom literature. Each chapter ends with a reading of a psalm that offers an acute example of the dimension under discussion. Students and general readers are invited to richer and deeper readings of ancient poems and the subjects, problems, and convictions that occupy their imagination.

Originally published in 1952, this book presents a study of the creation of the Gospel of Mark and the early Christian calendar. The text was written by Philip Carrington (1892-1975), a prominent Anglican figure who was Bishop of Quebec from 1935 to 1960. Illustrative figures and an index of passages from Mark are included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of Christianity and perspectives on the development of the New Testament.

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.

A political crisis erupts when the Persian government falls to fanatics, and a Jewish insider goes rogue, determined to save her people at all costs. God and Politics in Esther explores politics and faith. It is about an era in which the prophets have been silenced and miracles have ceased, and Jewish politics has come to depend not on commands from on high, but on the boldness and belief of each woman and man. Esther takes radical action to win friends and allies, reverse terrifying decrees, and bring God's justice into the world with her own hands. Hazony's The Dawn has long been a cult classic, read at Purim each year the world over. Twenty years on, this revised edition brings the book to much wider attention. Three controversial new chapters address the astonishingly radical theology that emerges from amid the political intrigues of the book.

John Day investigates disputed points of interpretation within Genesis 1-11, expanding on his earlier book From Creation to Babel with 11 stimulating essays. Day considers the texts within their Near Eastern contexts, and pays particular attention to the later history of interpretation and reception history. Topics covered include the meaning of the Bible's first verse and what immediately follows, as well as what it means that humanity is made in the image of God. Further chapters examine the Garden of Eden, the background and role of the serpent and the ambiguous role of Wisdom; the many problems of interpretation in the Cain and Abel story, as well as what gave rise to this story; how the Covenant with Noah and the Noachic commandments, though originally separate, became conflated in some later Jewish thought; and the location of 'Ur of the Chaldaeans', Abraham's alleged place of origin, and how this was later misinterpreted by Jewish, Christian and Islamic sources as referring to a 'fiery furnace of the Chaldaeans'. These chapters, which illuminate the meaning, background and subsequent interpretation of the Book of Genesis, pave the way for Day's forthcoming ICC commentary on Genesis 1-11.

This volume of the new DSI series is the most comprehensive investigation of Hebrew and Greek translation equivalents in Ps 42-43 in the Psalter and in the Septuagint as a whole currently available. This detailed study does not only include the translation equivalents in the Septuagint, the semantic meanings of the Hebrew and Greek words are also discussed and parallels in the LXX as well as in the Hebrew Bible are included. A systematic investigation of the translator's method must be carried out before one can use the manuscripts in a proper way. Accordingly, the extensive translation-technical emphasis and the discussion of text-critical matters make it possible to present a more accurate Old Greek text and this book may thus contribute to a new critical edition of the Greek Psalter. The book is also in some respects in itself a text-critical study, since all variants in Rahlfs' edition of the Septuagint Psalms, with the addition of Papyrus Bodmer XXIV (Rahlfs 2110), as well as Hebrew variants, are referred to and studied. This includes suggestions and evaluations of the Hebrew Vorlage behind the Septuagint text. It is also a commentary on the Hebrew and the Greek texts of Ps 42-43. Like other commentaries, it describes the position of the psalm, it presents the unity and form of the psalm, its structure and its relation to the close context. As a commentary on both the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint, it gives an overall interpretation of the psalm in Hebrew and in Greek separately. The book can be read by the specialist in Septuagint studies as well as all scholars interested in translation, textual criticism, and in the book of Psalms, not least its use of metaphors and the reflection of temple theology.

Preaching's Preacher's Guide to the Best Bible Reference Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260--ca. 340), one of the early church's great polymaths, produced significant works as a historian (Ecclesiastical History), geographer (Onomasticon), philologist, exegete (commentaries on the Psalms and Isaiah), apologist (Preparation for and Demonstration of the Gospel) and theologian. His Commentary on Isaiah is one of his major exegetical works and the earliest extant Christian commentary on the great prophet. Geographically situated between Alexandria and Antioch, Eusebius approached the text giving notable attention to historical detail and possible allegorical interpretation. But above all, employing the anologia fidei, he drew his readers' attention to other passages of Scripture that share a common vocabulary and theological themes, thus allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture. Here, for the first time in English, Jonathan Armstrong provides readers with a highly serviceable translation of Eusebius's notably difficult Greek text, along with a helpful introduction and notes. Ancient Christian Texts are new English translations of full-length commentaries or sermon series from ancient Christian authors that allow you to study key writings of the early church fathers in a fresh way.

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.

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.

Originally published in 1902, this book contains a preliminary study of the differences between a number of Greek and Latin manuscripts containing the text of the Book of Amos. Oesterley puts key texts side by side in order to display more clearly the discrepancies in each original source and supplies a critical apparatus at the bottom of each page. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the transmission of biblical texts and historical theology.

The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Orthodox Christianity investigates the various ways in which Orthodox Christian, i.e., Eastern and Oriental, communities, have received, shaped, and interpreted the Christian Bible. The handbook is divided into five parts: Text, Canon, Scripture within Tradition, Toward an Orthodox Hermeneutics, and Looking to the Future. The first part focuses on how the Orthodox Church has never codified the Septuagint or any other textual witnesses as its authoritative text. Textual fluidity and pluriformity, a characteristic of Orthodoxy, is demonstrated by the various ancient and modern Bible translations into Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian among other languages. The second part discusses how, unlike in the Protestant and Roman-Catholic faiths where the canon of the Bible is "closed" and limited to 39 and 46 books, respectively, the Orthodox canon is "open-ended," consisting of 39 canonical books and 10 or more anaginoskomena or "readable" books as additions to Septuagint. The third part shows how, unlike the classical Protestant view of sola scriptura and the Roman Catholic way of placing Scripture and Tradition on par as sources or means of divine revelation, the Orthodox view accords a central role to Scripture within Tradition, with the latter conceived not as a deposit of faith but rather as the Church's life through history. The final two parts survey "traditional" Orthodox hermeneutics consisting mainly of patristic commentaries and liturgical interpretations found in hymnography and iconography, and the ways by which Orthodox biblical scholars balance these traditional hermeneutics with modern historical-critical approaches to the Bible.

"Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind . . . " Julian of Eclanum (c. 386-455) was the bishop of Eclanum, located in modern-day Italy. In this volume in IVP's Ancient Christian Texts series, Thomas Scheck provides a new translation of Julian's commentaries on the biblical books of Job and those of three Minor Prophets: Hosea, Joel, and Amos. Here, readers will gain insight into how early Christians read texts such as God's speech to Job, Hosea's symbolic representation of God's unending love for a faithless Israel, Joel's anticipation of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and Amos's call for social justice. While Julian was a well-known leader among the Pelagians, whose theology was famously opposed by Augustine of Hippo and ultimately determined to be outside the bounds of the church's orthodoxy, the Pelagian movement was a significant element within the early church. And although Julian's Pelagianism does not fundamentally affect the commentaries presented in this volume, Christians can gain insight into the truths of Scripture by reading the text alongside others, even when-or perhaps especially when-we might disagree with other aspects of their beliefs. Ancient Christian Texts are new English translations of full-length commentaries or sermon series from ancient Christian authors that allow you to study key writings of the early church fathers in a fresh way.