"This is a book about getting, and staying, involved with God-what it takes, what it costs, what it looks and feels like, why anyone would want to do it anyway. It is at the same time a book about reading the Old Testament as a source of Good News and guidance for our life with God. The key piece of Good News that the Old Testament communicates over and over again is that God is involved with us, deeply and irrevocably so." -from the Introduction With sound scholarship and her own vivid translations from the Hebrew, Old Testament professor Ellen Davis teaches us a spiritually engaged method of reading scripture. Beginning with the psalms, whose frank prayers can be a model for our own, Davis reflects on the stories of the patriarchs and the pastoral wisdom of the book of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs in helping us cultivate those habits of the heart that lead to a rich relationship with God.

In this fresh and expansive work, Ellen Davis offers a comprehensive interpretation of the prophetic role and word in the Christian scriptures. Davis carefully outlines five essential features of the prophetic role and then systematically examines seven representations of prophets and prophecies. Thoroughly theological, Davis's volume provides both instruction and insight for understanding prophecy in Christian tradition and discipleship. This volume concludes with a rich discussion of practical matters, including the relationship between Christian discipleship and prophetic interpretation and the role of biblical prophecy in interfaith contexts.

These books of the Bible, despite their differences, all treat the phenomenon of what it means to live wisely before God. In this readable commentary, Ellen Davis points out that the writers of these books considered wisdom--and the fruits of wisdom, a well-ordered life and a peaceful mind--to be within the grasp of anyone wholeheartedly desiring it.

Books in the Westminster Bible Companion series assist laity in their study of the Bible as a guide to Christian faith and practice. Each volume explains the biblical book in its original historical context and explores its significance for faithful living today. These books are ideal for individual study and for Bible study classes and groups.

The difficulty of interpreting the Bible is felt all over today. Is the Bible still authoritative for the faith and practice of the church? If so, in what way? What practices of reading offer the most appropriate approach to understanding Scripture? The church's lack of clarity about these issues has hindered its witness and mission, causing it to speak with an uncertain voice to the challenges of our time.

This important book is for a twenty-first-century church that seems to have lost the art of reading the Bible attentively and imaginatively. "The Art of Reading Scripture" is written by a group of eminent scholars and teachers seeking to recover the church's rich heritage of biblical interpretation in a dramatically changed cultural environment. Asking how best to read the Bible in a postmodern context, the contributors together affirm up front Nine Theses that provide substantial guidance for the church. The essays and sermons that follow both amplify and model the approach to Scripture outlined in the Nine Theses.

Lucidly conceived, carefully written, and shimmering with fresh insights, "The Art of Reading Scripture" proposes a far-reaching revolution in how the Bible is taught in theological seminaries and calls pastors and teachers in the church to rethink their practices of using the Bible.

Contributors: Gary A. Anderson
Richard Bauckham
Brian E. Daley
Ellen F. Davis
Richard B. Hays
James C. Howell
Robert W. Jenson
William Stacy Johnson
L. Gregory Jones
Christine McSpadden
R. W. L. Moberly
David C. Steinmetz
Marianne Meye Thompson

In this original study, Dr Davis argues that Ezekiel's place in the history of prophecy is overdue for reassessment. As against current views that Ezekiel represents the collapse of prophetism into priestly and scribal forms, she argues that something radically different in prophecy begins with Ezekiel. Ezekiel represents the creation of a new literary idiom for prophecy. He develops an archival speech form oriented less toward current events than to reshaping the tradition. He has taken a step backward from direct confrontation with an audience as the basic dynamic of communication, and has made the medium of prophecy not the person of the prophet but the text. Like the postexilic prophets, Ezekiel participated in the transformation of the social role of prophecy, and thereby saved himself from oblivion.

This book examines the theology and ethics of land use, especially the practices of modern industrialized agriculture, in light of critical biblical exegesis. Nine interrelated essays explore the biblical writers' pervasive concern for the care of arable land against the background of the geography, social structures, and religious thought of ancient Israel. This approach consistently brings out neglected aspects of texts, both poetry and prose, that are central to Jewish and Christian traditions. Rather than seeking solutions from the past, Davis creates a conversation between ancient texts and contemporary agrarian writers; thus she provides a fresh perspective from which to view the destructive practices and assumptions that now dominate the global food economy. The biblical exegesis is wide-ranging and sophisticated; the language is literate and accessible to a broad audience.

The recent separation in the church of biblical interpretation and preaching, argues Duke Divinity professor Ellen Davis, has obscured the fact that the two are interconnected. This separation ignores the fact that the purpose of interpretation is to edify the church, and that, historically, preaching has been the platform for the majority of Christian biblical interpretation. In her book, based on the 2003 Beecher Lectures, Davis begins with the assertion that the Old Testament is an urgent and speaking presence for preaching, not a difficult text separated from us by a vast theological, moral, and historical chasm. By exploring preachers such as, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Donne, and Lancelot Andrewes, Davis makes the point that preaching is an art. In these chapters, she shows these artists at work and lets us see how they deal with problems and puzzles that the text presents, and try to learn from them basic principles of biblical interpretation and communication. Her interest throughout is practical: what can ordinary preachers like ourselves learn from these masters of the art? Included are some of her own sermons, not as models but as contemporary examples of how the traditio

Preaching The Luminous Word features insights from one of the most distinctive and eloquent scholar-preachers of our time. Inviting serious theological engagement with texts from all parts of the Christian Bible, noted preacher Ellen F. Davis offers fifty-one engaging sermons. A brief preface sets each sermon in its geographic and liturgical context, highlights distinctive themes, and draws attention to elements of structure and rhetorical style. The sermons are arranged in canonical order and cover a wide scope of texts - Torah, Prophets, Writings (including Psalms, Proverbs, Lamentations, Song of Songs, and Job), Gospels, Epistles, and Revelation. Also included in the volume are five choice essays by Davis that discuss various aspects of biblical preaching. At once accessible, theologically informed, and richly instructive, these sermons will engage Christian readers at any stage of their faith journey.

Opening Israel's Scriptures is a collection of thirty-six essays on the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Chronicles, which gives powerful insight into the complexity and inexhaustibility of the Hebrew Scriptures as a theological resource. Based on more than two decades of lectures on Old Testament interpretation, Ellen F. Davis offers a selective yet comprehensive guide to the core concepts, literary patterns, storylines, and theological perspectives that are central to Israel's Scriptures. Underlying the whole study is the primary assumption that each book of the canon has literary and theological coherence, though not uniformity. In both her close readings of individual texts and in her broad demonstrations of the coherence of whole books, Davis models the best practices of contemporary exegesis, integrating the insights of contemporary scholars with those of classical theological resources in Jewish and Christian traditions. Throughout, she keeps an eye to the experiences and concerns of contemporary readers, showing through multiple examples that the critical interpretation of texts is provisional, open-ended work-a collaboration across generations and cultures. Ultimately what she offers is an invitation into the more spacious world that the Bible discloses, which challenges ordinary conceptions of how things "really" are.

"Justice and Rights" is a record of the fifth "Building Bridges" seminar held in Washington, DC in 2006 (an annual symposium on Muslim-Christian relations cosponsored by Georgetown University and the Church of England). This volume examines justice and rights from Christian and Muslim perspectives -- a topic of immense relevance for both faiths in the modern world, but also with deep roots in the core texts of both traditions.

Leading scholars examine three topics: scriptural foundations, featuring analyses of Christian and Muslim sacred texts; evolving traditions, exploring historical issues in both faiths with an emphasis on religious and political authority; and the modern world, analyzing recent and contemporary contributions from Christianity and Islam in the area of freedom and human rights.

This book examines the theology and ethics of land use, especially the practices of modern industrialized agriculture, in light of critical biblical exegesis. Nine interrelated essays explore the biblical writers' pervasive concern for the care of arable land against the background of the geography, social structures, and religious thought of ancient Israel. This approach consistently brings out neglected aspects of texts, both poetry and prose, that are central to Jewish and Christian traditions. Rather than seeking solutions from the past, Davis creates a conversation between ancient texts and contemporary agrarian writers; thus she provides a fresh perspective from which to view the destructive practices and assumptions that now dominate the global food economy. The biblical exegesis is wide-ranging and sophisticated; the language is literate and accessible to a broad audience.