From its inception at the time of the Enlightenment until the mid-twentieth century, the historical-critical method constituted the dominant paradigm in Old Testament studies. In this magisterial overview, Niels Peter Lemche surveys the development of the historical-critical method and the way it changed the scholarly perception of the Old Testament. In part 1 he describes the rise and influence of historical-critical approaches, while in part 2 he traces their decline and fall. Then, in part 3, he discusses the identity of the authors of the Old Testament, based on the content of the literature they wrote, demonstrating that the collapse of history does not preclude critical study. Part 4 investigates the theological consequences of this collapse and surveys Old Testament and biblical theology in its various manifestations in the twentieth century. An appendix includes a history of Palestine from the Stone Age to modern times, constructed without recourse to the Old Testament.

For Francis Andersen, the Old Testament book about Job is one of the supreme offerings of the human mind to the living God, and one of the best gifts of God to humanity. "The task of understanding it is as rewarding as it is strenuous. . . . One is constantly amazed at its audacious theology and at the magnitude of its intellectual achievement. Job is a prodigious book in the vast range of its ideas, in its broad coverage of human experience, in the intensity of its passion, in the immensity of its concept of God, and not least in its superb literary craftsmanship. . . . From one man's agony it reaches out to the mystery of God, beyond words and explanations." The original, unrevised text of this volume has been completely retypeset and printed in a larger, more attractive format with the new cover design for the series. These commentaries are designed to help the reader of the Bible understand what the text says and what it means. The Introduction to each book gives a concise but thorough treatment of its authorship, date, original setting and purpose. Following a structural Analysis, the Commentary takes the book section by section, drawing out its main themes, and also comments on individual verses and problems of interpretation. Additional Notes provide fuller discussion of particular difficulties. The goal throughout is to explain the true meaning of the Bible and make its message plain.

The Bible tells the stories of many empires, and many are still considered some of the largest of the ancient and classical world: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and finally the Romans. In this provocative book, nine experts bring a critical analysis of these world empires in the background of the Old and New Testaments. As they explain, the Bible developed "against"the context of these empires, providing concrete meaning to the countercultural claims of Jews and Christians that their God was the true King, the real Emperor. Each chapter describes how to read the Bible as a reaction to empire and points to how to respond to the biblical message to resist imperial powers in every age.

Writing in a conversational rather than a scholarly tone, Paul Redditt assumes little or no prior knowledge of the Old Testament as he presents and introduces the Major and Minor Prophets in the canonical order of the English Bible. The chapters of Redditt's Introduction to the Prophets discuss the place of each book in the canon; the literary setting of each book; their structure, integrity, and authorship; the main genre(s) in each; special features of each book; basic emphases of each book; and problems -- theological, literary, or historical -- raised by a study of the book. Among other things, Redditt demonstrates that the prophets were both "foretellers" and "forthtellers," and he argues that the Old Testament prophets developed the concept of monotheism. Each chapter ends with questions for further reflection. Concluding the volume are a helpful glossary and several indexes.

In this first volume in the Library of Biblical Theology series, Walter Brueggemann portrays the key components in Israel's encounter with God as recorded in the Hebrew Bible. Creation, election, Torah, the divine hand in history; these and other theological high points appear both in their original historical context, and their ongoing relevance for contemporary Jewish and Christian self-understanding.

The Psalms are the best known and most widely used prayer texts of the Bible. But the prayers of the Israelite took another form: the prose prayers that we find embedded in biblical narrative. Prose prayer was spoken by persons of all ranks. Male and female, Israelite and foreigner, all enjoyed equal access to God. The pervasiveness and spontaneity of this prayer, independent as it was of the structure and taboos of formal worship, turned it into a criterion for sincerity both in relations with God and in those among human beings.
Greenberg finds in this rich life of private prayer a setting for the high religious ideas--and the scathing critique of worship--that characterized the "genius" of the prophets of the eighth and ninth centuries B.C. His compact and masterful study, originally the 1981-1982 Taubman Lectures at Berkeley, suggests an explanation for the unprecedented democratization of worship in post-biblical Judaism.

A perfect tool for busy preachers who want to faithfully proclaim God's Word The preparation of sermons on Old Testament texts confronts preachers time and time again with such questions as How can I connect an Old Testament text with the situation of my congregation today in a responsible way? and What is the role of Jesus in that connection? In this practical, scholarly guidebook Rein Bos tackles such questions and offers thoughtful answers. We Have Heard That God Is with You gives pastors a creative and innovative -grammar- to preach the Old Testament in a Christian context. Bos offers multiple examples from American sermons to illustrate how his model can be used in sermon preparation and how it can serve the practice of preaching. Each chapter is a rich meal for the busy preacher looking for creative, relevant options for sermons that are faithful to Scripture.

"Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah" is one of the best-known hymns in the world. Yet the book of numbers, whose story that hymn summarizes, is seldom read. Why? "Its very title puts the modern reader off," writes Gordon Wenham. "In ancient time numbers were seen as mysterious and symbolic, a key to reality and the mind of God himself. Today they are associated with computers and the depersonalization that threatens our society." In his effort to bridge the great gulf between the book and our age, Wenham first explains the background of Numbers, discussing its structure, sources, date and authorship as well as its theology and Christian use. A passage-by-passage analysis follows, which draws useful insights on Old Testament ritual from modern social anthropology. The original, unrevised text of this volume has been completely retypeset and printed in a larger, more attractive format with the new cover design for the series..

Life is pessimistic and has no lasting purpose unless a person looks above the sun. Everlasting hope and assurance fills everyone who reframes life with God in the center. (Biblical Studies)

Across the pages of 2 Chronicles a colourful cast of characters passes in breathless parade before the reader. The tales of the kings of Judah are told in sequence, from Rehoboam 'the Enlarger' (who on the contrary shrinks the kingdom) to Zedekiah 'the Righteous' (who equally contrariwise profanes the divine name). These motley monarchs are preceded by the unparalleled King Solomon of All Israel and succeeded by the imperial King Cyrus of Persia, and all the while the tellers of the tales weave an insistent ideological thread through the fabric of their stories. John Jarick's reading of Chronicles brings out the fascination and discomfort of handling an ancient scroll that presents itself as the authoritative account of how things were and how they ought to be.

The Psalms have long served a vital role in the individual and corporate lives of Christians, expressing the full range of human emotions, including some that we are ashamed to admit. The Psalms reverberate with joy, groan in pain, whimper with sadness, grumble in disappointment, and rage with anger. The church fathers employed the Psalms widely. In liturgy they used them both as hymns and as Scripture readings. Within them they found pointers to Jesus both as Son of God and as Messiah. They also employed the Psalms widely as support for other New Testament teachings, as counsel on morals, and as forms for prayer. Especially noteworthy was their use of Psalms in the great doctrinal controversies. The Psalms were used to oppose subordinationism, modalism, Arianism, Apollinarianism, Nestorianism, Eutychianism, and Monophysitism, among others. More than fifty church fathers are cited in the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture volume from Ambrose to Zephyrinus. From the British Isles, Gaul, and the Iberian Peninsula, we find Hilary of Poitiers, Prudentius, John Cassian, Valerian of Cimiez, Salvian the Presbyter, Caesarius of Arles, Martin of Bruga, Braulio of Saragossa, and Bede. From Rome and Italy, we find Clement, Justin Martyr, Callistus, Hippolytus, Novatian, Rufinus, Maximus of Turin, Peter Chrysologus, Leo the Great, Cassiodorus, and Gregory the Great. Carthage and North Africa are represented by Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, and Fulgentius. Fathers from Alexandria and Egypt include Clement, Origen, Dionysius, Pachomius, Athanasius, Cyril, and Poemen. Constantinople and Asia Minor supply the Great Cappadocians-Basil the Great and the two Gregorys, from Nazianzus and Nyssa-plus Evagrius of Pontus and Nicetas of Remesiana. From Antioch and Syria we find Ephrem, John Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyr, Philoxenus of Mabbug, Sahdona, and John of Damascus. Finally, Jerusalem, Palestine and Mesopotamia are represented by Eusebius of Caesarea, Aphrahat, Cyril, Jacob of Sarug, Jerome, and Isaac of Nineveh. Readers of these selections, some of which appear here for the first time in English, will glean from a rich treasury of deep devotion and profound theological reflection.

Jacob Boehme was born in 1575. He received little if any formal education and was apprenticed to a shoemaker at Goerlitz in Saxony. From an early age he seems to have been devoted to the study of the Bible as well as to have had a growing, inner, sense of the reality of God. Walking one day in the fields, when he was twenty-five years old, the mystery of creation was suddenly opened to him, of which he later said that "in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years at the university . . . and thereupon I turned my heart to praise God for it." As experiences of this kind came more frequently, he puzzled much as to why such knowledge should be given to him, of all men, who sought only the love of God and was quite unlearned in the ordinary sense. Some ten years later he began to record what he received, as a help to his own memory, and thus was born The Aurora, his first book, finished in 1612. From then on he found both friends and enemies of his work. Due to persecution in his hometown, Boehme later settled in Dresden, where he died in 1624. Mysterium Magnum, written by Boehme the year before he died and at a time when his powers of expression had developed to their full, is perhaps central to his work in some thirty-one or thirty-two original volumes. Taking the general form of an interpretation of Genesis, it far outstrips such apparent confines, touching among other matters upon the meaning of the New Testament and, from the first sentence, leading to the heart of the universal experience of all mystics: When we consider the visible world with its essence, and consider the life of the creatures, then we find therein the likeness of the invisible, spiritual world, which is hidden in the visible world as the soul in the body; and we see thereby that the hidden God is nigh unto all and through all, and yet wholly hidden to the visible essence. Among those who have acknowledged the spiritual stature of Boehme are Hegel, William Law, St. Martin (le Philosophe Inconnu), Dean Inge, and Nicolas Berdyaev.

Jacob Boehme was born in 1575. He received little if any formal education and was apprenticed to a shoemaker at Goerlitz in Saxony. From an early age he seems to have been devoted to the study of the Bible as well as to have had a growing, inner, sense of the reality of God. Walking one day in the fields, when he was twenty-five years old, the mystery of creation was suddenly opened to him, of which he later said that "in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years at the university . . . and thereupon I turned my heart to praise God for it." As experiences of this kind came more frequently, he puzzled much as to why such knowledge should be given to him, of all men, who sought only the love of God and was quite unlearned in the ordinary sense. Some ten years later he began to record what he received, as a help to his own memory, and thus was born The Aurora, his first book, finished in 1612. From then on he found both friends and enemies of his work. Due to persecution in his hometown, Boehme later settled in Dresden, where he died in 1624. Mysterium Magnum, written by Boehme the year before he died and at a time when his powers of expression had developed to their full, is perhaps central to his work in some thirty-one or thirty-two original volumes. Taking the general form of an interpretation of Genesis, it far outstrips such apparent confines, touching among other matters upon the meaning of the New Testament and, from the first sentence, leading to the heart of the universal experience of all mystics: When we consider the visible world with its essence, and consider the life of the creatures, then we find therein the likeness of the invisible, spiritual world, which is hidden in the visible world as the soul in the body; and we see thereby that the hidden God is nigh unto all and through all, and yet wholly hidden to the visible essence. Among those who have acknowledged the spiritual stature of Boehme are Hegel, William Law, St. Martin (le Philosophe Inconnu), Dean Inge, and Nicolas Berdyaev.

First published in 1909, Daniel in the Critics' Den was Sir Robert Anderson's response to skeptics who believed the Book of Daniel to be a forgery. These "higher" critics pointed to alleged errors and anachronisms that cast doubt upon its authenticity. In this carefully argued polemic, Anderson refutes higher criticism and its adherents by articulating their objections one by one and thoroughly discrediting them. Meticulously documented and including no fewer than seven comprehensive appendices, this often-cited classic of Biblical scholarship will engage the modern pastor, religious historian, and lay person alike. While at Scotland Yard, Irish police official and religious scholar SIR ROBERT ANDERSON (1841-1918) helped investigate the Jack the Ripper murders, but he is best remembered for his works of Bible study, including The Coming Prince, Daniel in the Critics' Den, and The Silence of God.

Description: This commentary is the first major work on the book of Revelation in many years that expounds the historicist interpretation. The historicist school of interpretation was the dominant approach from Reformation times through most of the nineteenth century. The reasons for the current disaffection are too complex to address in a few words, but it is the author's conviction that from the standpoint of sound principles of biblical hermeneutics, the historicist inerpretation is still the most creditable approach for an accurate understanding of this, the last book of the Bible and the final prophecy of Jesus. Endorsements: Professor Collins has crafted a masterful yet readable contribution to New Testament scholarship. His faithful historicist view resonates with that of the original reformation theologians and specifies events in unfolding world history for corroboration. As the ideal introduction for the uninitiated or an exhaustive compendium for the defender of the historicist perspective, this volume is the definitive reference on the historicist interpretation of the Revelation of Jesus Christ. --Sidney T. Bradley, Executive and Academic Dean, Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary You've been waiting for this thorough, interesting and readable book For Christians confused by the popular blending of prophecy with clever fiction, Professor Collins offers a better way. In dialogue with the most knowledgeable commentators on the book of Revelation, he clarifies the book's message and points to its fulfilment in the actual events of world history. In the process he demonstrates the continuing value of the Protestant Reformer's approach to the Bible's predictions. This long overdue book will take its place as the best contemporary presentation of the historicist approach to interpreting the prophecy of Scripture. And I commend it to you for its exciting and informative challenge. --David A. Dean, Professor Emeritus, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary ""Dr. Collins has done well in writing a commentary on Revelation from the historicist perspective. The historical approach was well represented in the 19th century, but not now. Therefore, this commentary is a welcome and necessary addition in the 21st century. Personally I have learned much from reading this work and I am thankful for the labors the author devoted to this project."" --Simon Kistemaker, ThD, Professor of New Testament Emeritus, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando. ""The Historicist School of interpretation once dominated the realm of Revelation scholarship. Eclipsed now by the Preterist and Futurist models, historicism has become nearly forgotten, a turn of events much to be regretted. ""Professor Collins has brought to fruition a work that ends the long drought of scholarly literature from this perspective. The Final Prophecy of Jesus represents the very finest historical, exegetical, and interpretive method in addressing the message of the Apocalypse. Whether or not one agrees with his conclusions, there can be no doubt that his exhaustive treatment is destined to become the standard work on the subject within the historicist tradition."" --Eugene H. Merrill, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Old Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary. ""Oral Collins draws from decades of study, reflection and teaching to produce the first major commentary on Revelation in nearly a century from the time-honored historicist position. In arguing his case, he combines careful analysis of the relevant intertestamental and Roman sources, insightful exegesis of the biblical texts, broad examination of the history of scholarship, and pastoral sensitivity to application for life today. By restating the historical approach, Collins compels a new generation of students to look again at Revelation and at Jesus Christ, who is revealed in it. --Daniel J. Estes, Ph. D., Distinquished Professo

"Occasionally God gives to His Church a man of unusual gifts, deep piety, and true insight. Such a man was the late Robert Dick Wilson (1856-1930). Dr. Wilson lived at a time when the Old Testament was being subjected to some of the severest attacks and criticisms that it had ever received. He himself was a devout Christian and grieved over these attacks. He also had an insight into their nature and into the need for refuting them. And he had the God-given ability for standing up to the challenge which these attacks constituted, accepting it and seeking to give an answer." -from Introduction by E.J. Young

To the many people in hopeless situations today, especially in Central America, Tamez brings a message of hope and affirmation through the Book of Ecclesiastes.

The Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries provide compact, critical commentaries on the books of the Old Testament for the use of theological students and pastors. The commentaries are also useful for upper-level college or university students and for those responsible for teaching in congregational settings. In addition to providing basic information and insights into the Old Testament writings, these commentaries exemplify the tasks and procedures of careful interpretation to assist students of the Old Testament in coming to an informed and critical engagement with the biblical texts themselves.

The prophetic books gathered together in the book of the Twelve are sometimes called the "minor" prophets because of their relatively small size when compared with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. They are often neglected, at least partly because their words of judgment make the reader uncomfortable. Yet they have considerable theological and ethical value--for their call for social justice (especially Amos and Micah), their insights about the passionate love of God (in Hosea), God's grace and forgiveness (Jonah, Hosea, and elsewhere), and the finality of hope, even in the face of terrible catastrophes.

Book four of the Herein is Love series by Nancy Ganz

This volume brings together essays by an international group of biblical scholars on Old Testament topics, employing social-scientific methods: anthropology, macro-sociology, social psychology, and so forth.

In the past 25 years there has been an explosion of work focusing on women in the OT. Significant work has been done in attending to critical issues raised by the patriarchal nature of the texts, but the question of how to hear these texts as the word of God is often left unaddressed. Many Christians who call themselves feminist wonder if they can simultaneously maintain their faith in feminist principles of gender equality AND their faith that God is speaking to them and the church through the Scriptures. Jacqueline Lapsley addresses this issue, as she reads and interprets a number of narratives in which women are prominent in order to reflect critically on issues of gender but with the ultimate goal of considering how these stories may reflect God's word for us. Lapsley proposes three strategies: (1) attending to women's words; (2) attending to the narrator's perspective; and (3) attending to textual worldview--which she applies to specific tex