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.

The Peshitta is the Syriac translation of the Old Testament made on the basis of the Hebrew text during the second century CE. Much like the Greek translations of the Old Testament, this document is an important source for our knowledge of the text of the Old Testament. Its language is also of great interest to linguists. Moreover, as Bible of the Syriac Churches it is used in sermons, commentaries, poetry, prayers, and hymns. Many terms specific to the spirituality of the Syriac Churches have their origins in this ancient and reliable version of the Old Testament. The present edition, published by the Peshitta Institute in Leiden on behalf of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament, is the first scholarly one of this text. It presents the evidence of all known ancient manuscripts and gives full introductions to the individual books. This volume contains Apocalypse of Baruch and 4 Esdras.

In this fresh commentary, Deanna A. Thompson makes this important Old Testament book come to life. Recounting God's foundational relationship with Israel, Deuteronomy is set in the form of Moses' speeches to Israel just before entry into the promised land. Its instructions in the form of God's law provide the structure of the life that God wants for the people of Israel. Although this key Old Testament book is occasionally overlooked by Christians, Deuteronomy serves as an essential passing down to the next generations the fundamentals of faith as well as the parameters of life lived in accord with God's promises. Thompson provides theological perspectives on these vital themes and shows how they have lasting significance for Christians living in today's world. Thompson's sensitivity to the Jewish context and heritage and her insights into Deuteronomy's importance for Christian communities make this commentary an especially valuable resource for today's preacher and teacher.

The books of Chronicles have a certain fantasy quality about them. They create an imaginary world in which things happen just so, and in which any potentially untidy loose ends in their narrative of the past are tied together in a highly systematic way. This is storytelling with the didactic purpose of inculcating a particular ideology, bombarding the reader with a kaleidoscopic procession of heroes and villains and presenting a frontierland of danger and opportunity. John Jarick's focus on the literary world of Chronicles provides a fresh reading of the work, foregrounding the often unrecognized artistry in the telling of the tale-including at times a distinctly musical language and a careful mathematical precision. But at the same time he does not hide the dark underbelly of the writing, with its persistent note of conformity to the political and religious system advocated by the storytellers. This edition is a reprint of the original 2002 edition with different pagination. A companion volume on 2 Chronicles is published for the first time in 2007.

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.

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.

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 volume presents the Syriac text of the books of Chronicles as well as a critical apparatus in respect of the textual witnesses.

Thomas G. Long's insightful commentary on the Pastoral Epistles argues that these often-neglected letters are urgently important for readers today. Some of the issues faced by New Testament churches are ours as well: the lure and peril of "spirituality" for Christians, the character of authentic worship, the qualities needed for sound leadership, and the relationship between family life and the church. Long's interpretations of these books consider contemporary exegetical and theological outlooks and are presented through his seasoned homiletical and pastoral perspectives. Pastors will be strengthened by Long's view that the Pastoral Epistles can refresh our memory about what really counts in the Christian community and how important trustworthy leaders are.

The Interlinear Hebrerw Greek English Bible - Larger Print is the only complete Interlinear Bible available in English-and it's keyed to Strong's Exhaustive Concordance Thousands of pastors, students, and laypeople have found The Interlinear Bible to be a time-saving tool for researching the subtle nuances and layers of meaning within the original biblical languages. Featuring the complete Hebrew and Greek texts with a direct English rendering below each word, it also includes The Literal Translation of the Bible in the outside column. But what truly sets this resource apart are the Strong's numbers printed directly above the Hebrew and Greek words. Strong's numbers enable even those with no prior knowledge of Greek or Hebrew to easily access a wealth of language reference works keyed to Strong's-Greek/Hebrew dictionaries, analytical lexicons, concordances, word studies, and more. Only a small minority of Bible students ever achieve the ability to read the original biblical languages. This resource offers a non-threatening tool for those lacking language training to begin exploring the languages of Scripture. Offering a concise, literal translation of each Greek and Hebrew word, it's a great jumping off point for in-depth Bible study and text analysis. This Bible displays all the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek words of the Bible in the Masoretic Hebrew Text and the Received Greek Text, with literal, accurate English meanings placed directly under each original word in interlinear form, with Strong's Concordance numbers over each original word, enabling the Bible student (whether knowing the original languages or not) to refer to all lexicons and concordances that have also been coded with Strong's numbers. 2,936 pages, bound in a bonded leather over boards hardback edition. This new edition has been much improved by a new typesetting of the New Testament (Volume IV), with larger print, the left marginal column containing a newly revised Literal Translation of the Bible (2000), and a right marginal column containing the Authorized/King James Version (1769). Jay P. Green, Sr. (1918-) is Translator and Editor of The Interlinear Hebrew-Greek-English Bible and the translator of the Modern King James Version of the Holy Bible, The Teenage Version of the Holy Bible, and the Literal translation of the Holy Bible. He has written numerous books on textual criticism.

This book investigates the various paraphrastic techniques employed by Nonnus of Panopolis (5th century AD) for his poetic version of the Gospel of John. The authors look at Nonnus' Paraphrase, the only extant poetic Greek paraphrase of the New Testament, in the light of ancient rhetorical theory while also exploring its multi-faceted relationship with poetic tradition and the theological debates of its era. The study shows how interpretation, cardinal both in ancient literary criticism and in theology, is exploited in a poem that is exegetical both from a philological and a Christian point of view and adheres, at the same time, to the literary principles of Hellenistic times and late antiquity.