Marvin L. Chaney (San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union, 1969 to 2006) enjoys international recognition for his seminal role in defining and developing a social-historical approach to the Hebrew Scriptures. Among the 20 papers in this Festschrift, Phyllis Bird writes on Israelite women's religious activity outside the household, Robert Coote on the dating of J, William Dever on archaeology and the social world of Isaiah, Patricia Dutcher-Walls on queen mothers and royal politics in late-monarchic Judah, John H. Elliott on the semantics of envy, jealousy, and zeal in the Bible, Frank Frick on sexual imagery in Hosea 1-3, Norman Gottwald on the interplay of religion and ethnicity in biblical Israel, Ron Hendel on the anthropology of food in the priestly Torah, David Hopkins on agricultural labor in ancient Palestine, Richard Horsley on the political roots of early Judean apocalyptic texts, Carol Meyers on Iron II Judean pillar figurines, Richard Rohrbaugh on Zacchaeus as defender of Jesus' honor, Katharine Sakenfeld on postcolonial perspectives on Rahab, Ruth, and Jael, Luise Schottroff on the notions of world rule and serving God in traditions about Jesus, Keith Whitelam on mapping ancient Israel, Antoinette Wire on the God of Jesus in Mark, and Gale Yee on recovering marginalized groups in ancient Israel.

When published, this work on the Book of Lamentations opened a new wave of studies on that much neglected biblical book. After a fresh translation, followed by acute analyses of the acrostic form and literary genres, the author develops the two-fold theology of "doom" and "hope" that reverberates through the five laments composed during the exile to cope with the fall of Jerusalem. Created for public performance, the poems artfully alternate the voices of the poet and the community, personified by turns as a forlorn widow (Fair Zion) and as an afflicted man (Jacob/Israel). The book attributes the catastrophe in part to the moral and social failures of Judah's leadership, but it also finds the enormity of the suffering beyond moral or theological explanation.

In this volume, Norman Gottwald reconstructs the politics of ancient Israel within the larger political environment of the ancient Near East. He questions the prevailing view that the Hebrew Bible, supported by archeological evidence when necessary, should be the primary source to diagram the evolution of Israel's political history. Along with a thorough and nuanced discussion of the matrix of ancient Near Eastern politics, Gottwald suggests how the monarchies of Israel and Judah developed. With imaginative and masterful insight, Gottwald tackles head-on the problems of religion, power, and politics in the history of ancient Israel. Volumes in the Library of Ancient Israel draw on multiple disciplines--such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and literary criticism--to illuminate the everyday realities and social subtleties these ancient cultures experienced. This series employs sophisticated methods resulting in original contributions that depict the reality of the people behind the Hebrew Bible and interprets these insights for a wide variety of readers.