This book offers the first comprehensive examination and analysis of the receipt, transmission, and interpretation of the Old Testament in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. In Orthodoxy, the Old Testament has commonly been equated with the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Jewish Bible attested by fourth- and fifth-century Christian manuscripts. As Eugen Pentiuc shows throughout this work, however, the Eastern Orthodox Church has never closed the door to other text-witnesses or suppressed interpreters' efforts to dig into the less familiar text of the Hebrew Bible for key terms or reading variants. The first part of the book examines the reception of the Old Testament by the early Eastern Orthodox Church, considering such matters as the nature of divine revelation, the paradox of the inclusion of the Jewish scriptures in the Christian Bible, and the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. Pentiuc's investigation is not limited to the historic-literary sources but extends to the visual, imaginative, and symbolic aspects of the Church's living tradition. In the second part of the book he looks at the various ways Orthodox Christians have sought to assimilate the Old Testament in the spiritual, liturgical, and doctrinal fabric of their faith community. Special attention is given to liturgy (hymnody, lectionaries, and liturgical symbolism), iconography (frescoes, icons, illuminations), monastic rules and canons, conciliar resolutions, and patristic works in Greek, Syriac and Coptic. This wide-ranging and accessible work will serve not only to make Orthodox Christians aware of the importance of the Old Testament in their own tradition, but to introduce those who are not Orthodox both to the distinctive ways in which that community approaches scripture and to the modes of spiritual practice characteristic of Eastern Orthodoxy.

Throughout the ages, interpreters of the Christian scriptures have been wonderfully creative in seeking to understand and bring out the wonders of these ancient writings. That creativity has often been overlooked by recent scholarship, concentrated as it is in the so-called critical period. In this study, Eugen J. Pentiuc illuminates the remarkable way in which the Byzantine hymnographers (liturgists) expressed their understanding of the Old Testament in their compositions, an interpretive process that he terms "liturgical exegesis." In authorship and methodology, patristic exegesis and liturgical exegesis are closely related. Patristic exegesis, however, is primarily linear and sequential, proceeding verse by verse, while liturgical exegesis offers a more imaginative and eclectic mode of interpretation, ranging over various parts of the Bible. In this respect, says Pentiuc, liturgical exegesis resembles cubist art. To illuminate the multi-faceted creativity of liturgical exegesis, Pentiuc has chosen the vast and rich hymnography of Byzantine Orthodox Holy Week as a case study, offering a detailed lexical, biblical, and theological analysis of selected hymns. His analysis reveals the many different and imaginative ways in which creative liturgists incorporated and interpreted scriptural material in these hymns. By drawing attention to the way in which the bible is used by Byzantine hymnographers in the living Orthodox tradition, Hearing the Scriptures makes a ground-breaking contribution to the history of the reception of the scriptures.

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.

Throughout the ages, interpreters of the Christian scriptures have been wonderfully creative in seeking to understand and bring out the wonders of these ancient writings. That creativity has often been overlooked by recent scholarship, concentrated as it is in the so-called critical period. In this study, Eugen J. Pentiuc illuminates the remarkable way in which the Byzantine hymnographers (liturgists) expressed their understanding of the Old Testament in their compositions, an interpretive process that he terms "liturgical exegesis." In authorship and methodology, patristic exegesis and liturgical exegesis are closely related. Patristic exegesis, however, is primarily linear and sequential, proceeding verse by verse, while liturgical exegesis offers a more imaginative and eclectic mode of interpretation, ranging over various parts of the Bible. In this respect, says Pentiuc, liturgical exegesis resembles cubist art. To illuminate the multi-faceted creativity of liturgical exegesis, Pentiuc has chosen the vast and rich hymnography of Byzantine Orthodox Holy Week as a case study, offering a detailed lexical, biblical, and theological analysis of selected hymns. His analysis reveals the many different and imaginative ways in which creative liturgists incorporated and interpreted scriptural material in these hymns. By drawing attention to the way in which the bible is used by Byzantine hymnographers in the living Orthodox tradition, Hearing the Scriptures makes a ground-breaking contribution to the history of the reception of the scriptures.