This book deals with Bible translation and its development from Antiquity to the Reformation. Helen Kraus compares and analyses those translated passages in Genesis 1-4 that deal with the male-female dynamic, tracing linguistic and ideological processes and seeking to determine the extent of interaction between contemporary culture and translation. In response to the challenge of late 20th-century 'second wave' feminist scholarship, Kraus considers the degree and development of androcentricity in these passages in both Hebrew and translated texts. The study is therefore something of a hybrid, comprising exegesis, literary criticism and reception history, and draws together a number of hitherto discrete approaches. After an introduction to the problems of translation, and exegesis of the Hebrew text, five translations are examined: The Septuagint (the first Greek translation, thought to date from the 3rd century BCE), Jerome's 4th-century CE Latin Vulgate version, Luther's pioneering German vernacular Bible of 1523, the English Authorized Version (1611), and the Dutch State Bible (1637). A brief study of contemporary culture precedes each exegetical section that compares translation with the Hebrew text. Results of the investigation point to the Hebrew text showing significant androcentricity, with the Septuagint, possibly influenced by Greek philosophy, emphasizing the patriarchal elements. This trend persists through the Vulgate and even Luther's Bible - though less so in the English and Dutch versions - and suggests that the translators are at least partly responsible for an androcentric text becoming the justification for the oppression of women.

In Hermeneutics and the Church, James A. Andrews presents a close reading of De doctrina christiana as a whole and places Augustine's text into dialogue with contemporary theological hermeneutics. The dialogical nature of the exercise allows Augustine to remain a living voice in contemporary debates about the use of theology in biblical interpretation. In particular, Andrews puts Augustine's hermeneutical treatise into dialogue with the theologians Werner Jeanrond and Stephen Fowl. Andrews argues on the basis of De doctrina christiana that the paradigm for theological interpretation is the sermon and that its end is to engender the double love of God and neighbor. With the sermon as the paradigm of interpretation, Hermeneutics and the Church offers practical conclusions for future work in historical theology and biblical interpretation. For Augustine scholars, Andrews offers a reading of De doctrina that takes seriously the entirety of the work and allows Augustine to speak consistently through words written at the beginning and end of his bishopric. For theologians, this book provides a model of how to engage theologically with the past, and, more than that, it offers the actual fruits of such an engagement: suggestions for the discipline of theological hermeneutics and the practice of scriptural interpretation.

Lieu examines theological and historical issues within the Johannine tradition.

In this book Barbara Green demonstrates how David is shown and can be read as emerging from a young naive, whose early successes grow into a tendency for actions of contempt and arrogance, of blindness and even cruelty, particularly in matters of cult. However, Green also shows that over time David moves closer to the demeanor and actions of wise compassion, more closely aligned with God. Leaving aside questions of historicity as basically undecidable Green's focus in her approach to the material is on contemporary literature. Green reads the David story in order, applying seven specific tools which she names, describes and exemplifies as she interprets the text. She also uses relevant hermeneutical theory, specifically a bridge between general hermeneutics and the specific challenges of the individual (and socially located) reader. As a result, Green argues that characters in the David narrative can proffer occasions for insight, wisdom, and compassion. Acknowledging the unlikelihood that characters like David and his peers, steeped in patriarchy and power, can be shown to learn and extend wise compassion, Green is careful to make explicit her reading strategies and offer space for dialogue and disagreement.

This volume discusses links between the exegetical trends current in various Second Temple Jewish circles and patterns of New Testament conversation with Jewish Scripture. The standard focus on Jewish background of Christianity is complemented here by an alternative direction: the "mapping" of New Testament evidence as the early witness to more general trends attested in their fully developed form only later, in rabbinic literature. The question that dominates much of the discussion is: How can the New Testament be used for creating a fuller picture of Second Temple Jewish exegesis? The book deals with a representative variety of samples from different layers of the New Testament tradition: Synoptic Gospels, Pauline Epistles and Acts.

"The Messianic Aleph Tav Scriptures" (MATS) is a study bible which focuses on the study of the Aleph Tav character symbol used throughout the old testament (Tanakh) by both Moses and the Prophets and is the most exhaustive and unique rendition of its kind in the world. Over 5 years in the making, this English rendition reveals every place the Hebrew Aleph Tav symbol was used as a "free standing" character symbol believed to express the "strength of the covenant" in its original meaning. The Aleph Tav was believed also to be the "mark" of the "divine hand" for thousands of years by such famous rabbis as Nahum of Gimzo, Akiva, and R. S. Hirsch as well as the Apostle John. Also revealed in MATS is the use of the Aleph Tav as it is incorporated into the creation of hundreds of Hebrew words used thousands of times throughout the Tanakh and how the "mark" incorporates Y'shua haMashiach (Jesus the messiah), as well as all mankind and creation, which substantiates and expresses its divinity, thus taking our understanding of the scriptures to a whole new level. MATS comes in your choice of either Paleo or Modern Hebrew editions in a trim size of the regular 6"x9" or the large print edition 8.5"x11."

About the Author
William H. Sanford is a licensed Minister of Bet Ami, a Messianic Congregation in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and has been studying and preaching the gospel for over 40 years. William has several videos about "The Messianic Aleph Tav Scriptures" (MATS) on YouTube, and he may be contacted through his website www.AlephTavScriptures.com or on Facebook at Aleph Tav Scriptures.

The Book of Job functions as literature of survival where the main character, Job, deals with the trauma of suffering, attempts to come to terms with a collapsed moral and theological world, and eventually re-connects the broken pieces of his world into a new moral universe, which explains and contains the trauma of his recent experiences and renders his life meaningful again. The key is Job's death imagery. In fact, with its depiction of death in the prose tale and its frequent discussions of death in the poetic sections, Job may be the most death-oriented book in the bible. In particular, Job, in his speeches, articulates his experience of suffering as the experience of death. To help understand this focus on death in Job we turn to the psychohistorian, Robert Lifton, who investigates the effects on the human psyche of various traumatic experiences (wars, natural disasters, etc). According to Lifton, survivors of disaster often sense that their world has "collapsed" and they engage in a struggle to go on living. Part of this struggle involves finding meaning in death and locating death's place in the continuity of life. Like many such survivors, Job's understanding of death is a flashpoint indicating his bewilderment (or "desymbolization") in the early portions of his speeches, and then, later on, his arrival at what Lifton calls "resymbolization," the reconfiguration of a world that can account for disaster and render death - and life - meaningful again.

Considering the importance of pneumatological themes for interpreting Paul's argument of Galatians, Grant Buchanan explores how Paul draws from Jewish traditions of creation and the Spirit and presents a fresh cosmogony to the Galatian church. He suggests that Galatians outlines an epistemological shift in how Paul sees past, present, and future reality in light of Christ and the presence of the Spirit in the lives of the believers. Central to this new cosmogony is the centrality of the Spirit in Paul's argument in Galatians 3:1-6:17, with Buchanan's exegesis revealing that the Spirit, the Galatians' identity as children of God and the new creation motif are not merely elements of Paul's argument but central to it. Examining Galatians through a pneumatological lens, Buchanan demonstrates that Paul renders Jewish and Gentile identities no longer valid, instead revealing that God's favour and election is already with them by stating that those who have the promised Spirit are all children of God. He examines Jewish biblical and Second Temple extra-biblical texts that explicitly connect the Spirit to creation themes, including Genesis, Ezekiel, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Wisdom of Solomon. Taking Galatians 6:11-17 as the body-closing of the letter, the new creation motif directly implies the activity of the Spirit in the creation of Christian identity. Analysing 6:15 from this pneumatological perspective, Buchanan argues that the new creation motif represents a key aspect of Paul's generative cosmogony and pneumatology, denoting a far broader socio-cosmic transformation than previously assumed and becomes a key to understand Paul's argument.

Rhetoric ad Social Justice in Isaiah applies a literary methodology to the book of Isaiah in order critically to explore the nature and sources of the social justice encoded in the world created by the text. After a close reading of Isaiah 1: 16, 17, Gray establishes grounds for a trajectory to Isaiah 58, preparatory to examining if it offers a deepening of the concept of social justice in the Isaianic corpus. Gray raises the issue of divine reliability to assess the impact on the theme of social justice of the rhetoric of universal punishment by the divine/prophetic voice. He evaluates the ways the stark Isaianic dichotomy between reliance on God and anything of human origin is affected by trust in God being destabilized: if trust in God is demonstrated to be difficult on account of legitimate doubts about divine justice, then the way is opened for retaining an active human role in the search for justice. Gray demonstrates the ways that social justice attains primacy in Isaiah, the ways that humanity if given a role in pursuing social justice, and the ways that Isaiah 58 impinges upon the idea of social justice within the book as a whole.

There are few texts as central to the mythology of Jewish literature as the Garden of Eden and its attendant motifs, yet the direct citation of this text within the Hebrew Bible is surprisingly rare. Even more conspicuous is the infrequent reference to creation, or to the archetypal first humans Adam and Eve. There have also been few analyses of the impact of Genesis 2-3 beyond the biblical canon, though early Jewish and Christian interpretations of it are numerous, and often omitted is an analysis of the expulsion narrative in verses 22-24. In Remembering Eden, Peter Thacher Lanfer seeks to erase this gap in scholarship. He evaluates texts that expand and explicitly interpret the expulsion narrative, as well as translation texts such as the Septuagint, the Aramaic Targums, and the Syriac Peshitta. According to Lanfer, these textual additions, omissions, and translational choices are often a product of ideological and historically rooted decisions. His goal is to evaluate the genetic, literary, and ideological character of individual texts divorced from the burden of divisions between texts that are anachronistic ("biblical" vs. "non-biblical") or overly broad ("Pseudepigrapha"). This analytical choice, along with the insights of classic biblical criticism, yields a novel understanding of the communities receiving and reinterpreting the expulsion narrative. In addition, in tracing the impact of the polemic insertion of the expulsion narrative into the Eden myth, Lanfer shows that the multi-vocality of a text's interpretations serves to highlight the dialogical elements of the text in its present composite state.

This book explores the accounts of communal meals and the metaphorical use of food and drink language in the narrative world of the Gospel of John. It argues that the Johannine community regularly gathered for communal meals in which the food and drink on the menu would have taken on a spiritual significance far exceeding the physical sustenance. The study employs a socio-rhetorical methodology and consequently moves from text to context. It tentatively describes the texts influence on the formation of early Christian identity and suggests that the Johannine meal accounts provide a way to imagine the demographic composition of the community and its historical context.

The reception of early Jewish/Israelite texts in early Christianity provides valuable insights into the hermeneutics of ancient authors and studies in this regard are vital for an understanding of their theology/ies. By focusing particularly on the reception of the Psalms through the hand of the unknown author of Hebrews, Old Testament and New Testament scholars combine forces in this collection to determine the shifts in interpretation of the Psalms that took place during the processes of (re)interpretation within the work of a particular early Christian writer. By paying careful attention to the original reading(s) of the text versions utilized as well as to the manner in which those texts were embedded in a later literary context by the author of Hebrews, they provide a window into the trajectories of the Psalm traditions. A contextual contribution illustrates the versification of the Psalms in a contemporary African language, Afrikaans, to illustrate how the Psalms' reception remains a vivid endeavor in current times.

Healing Verses of the Psalms is a must-have reference of excerpted verses of the Book of Psalms from the King James Version of the Bible that carries an impactful healing quality. It will serve as your ready reference to find verses that bring healing, relaxation and invigoration in times of stress or for life enhancement.Healing Verses of the Psalms includes beautiful illustrations and easy-to-understand suggestions for use along with insights, all of which can provide greater application and understanding for how this book can benefit you.It also comes complete with an index, making it easy to find a verse that applies to a specific need you may have.