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La Violencia and the Hebrew Bible
The Politics and Histories of Biblical Hermeneutics on the America
Susanne Scholz
SBL Press, 2016

Exegetically noteworthy and culturally-theologically relevant

Violence in its wide range of horrifying expressions is real in people’s lives, and biblical interpreters must take violence in the world seriously to arrive at relevant ideas about the place of the Bible in the world. Each essay addresses people’s experiences of violence in the study of the Bible through the context of la violencia, the Spanish noun referring to the brutal, repressive, and murderous policies of state-sponsored violence practiced in many South and Central American and Caribbean countries during the twentieth century that external powers such as the USA often endorsed and fostered. The volume represents an important contribution to biblical studies and to the field of Latina/o studies. The contributors are Cheryl B. Anderson, Pablo Andiñach, Nancy Bedford, Lee Cuéllar, Steed V. Davidson, Serge Frolov, Renata Furst, Julia M. O’Brien, Todd Penner, José Enrique Ramírez, Ivoni Richter Reimer, and Susanne Scholz.

Features:

  • Twelve essays by scholars living and working on the American continent
  • Articles reveal the complex historical, political, and cultural conditions on the American continent that have contributed to our understanding of violence in the Bible
  • Focus on themes of racial, social, and cultural violence
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The Labor of Job
The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor
Antonio Negri
Duke University Press, 2009
In The Labor of Job, the renowned Marxist political philosopher Antonio Negri develops an unorthodox interpretation of the Old Testament book of Job, a canonical text of Judeo-Christian thought. In the biblical narrative, the pious Job is made to suffer for no apparent reason. The story revolves around his quest to understand why he must bear, and why God would allow, such misery. Conventional readings explain the tale as an affirmation of divine transcendence. When God finally speaks to Job, it is to assert his sovereignty and establish that it is not Job’s place to question what God allows. In Negri’s materialist reading, Job does not recognize God’s transcendence. He denies it, and in so doing becomes a co-creator of himself and the world.

The Labor of Job was first published in Italy in 1990. Negri began writing it in the early 1980s, while he was a political prisoner in Italy, and it was the first book he completed during his exile in France (1983–97). As he writes in the preface, understanding suffering was for him in the early 1980s “an essential element of resistance. . . . It was the problem of liberation, in prison and in exile, from within the absoluteness of Power.” Negri presents a Marxist interpretation of Job’s story. He describes it as a parable of human labor, one that illustrates the impossibility of systems of measure, whether of divine justice (in Job’s case) or the value of labor (in the case of late-twentieth-century Marxism). In the foreword, Michael Hardt elaborates on this interpretation. In his commentary, Roland Boer considers Negri’s reading of the book of Job in relation to the Bible and biblical exegesis. The Labor of Job provides an intriguing and accessible entry into the thought of one of today’s most important political philosophers.

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The Language of Canaan
Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists
Mason I. Lowance, Jr.
Harvard University Press, 1980

This is a study of New England figurative language from 1600 to 1850, from the English and Continental origins of Puritanism to the symbolic writings of Thoreau. It enriches our understanding of Puritan thought and expression and traces the influence of Puritanism on later American writing.

A common link among the writers of this period was a system of prophetic symbolism derived from Scripture. The Bible was the source of figures and types used to illustrate divine guidance in human affairs, and its prophetic language provided the Puritans with a method for explaining and projecting the course of history. Mason Lowance explores these modes of prophetic and metaphorical expression and the millennial impulse in American thinking. In the process he provides a cohesive approach to such diverse writers as Bradford, Cotton, Taylor, Increase and Cotton Mather, Edwards, Freneau, Barlow, Dwight, and Emerson. His book will be welcomed by all students of early American thought and literature.

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The Last Century in the History of Judah
The Seventh Century BCE in Archaeological, Historical, and Biblical Perspectives
Filip Čapek
SBL Press, 2019

An incomparable interdisciplinary study of the history of Judah

Experts from a variety of disciplines examine the history of Judah during the seventh century BCE, the last century of the kingdom’s existence. This important era is well defined historically and archaeologically beginning with the destruction layers left behind by Sennacherib’s Assyrian campaign (701 BCE) and ending with levels of destruction resulting from Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian campaign (588-586 BCE). Eleven essays develop the current ongoing discussion about Judah during this period and extend the debate to include further important insights in the fields of archaeology, history, cult, and the interpretation of Old Testament texts.

Features

  • A new chronological frame for the Iron Age IIB-IIC
  • Close examinations of archaeology, texts, and traditions related to the reigns of Hezekiah, Manasseh, and Josiah
  • An evaluation of the religious, cultic, and political landscape
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The Last of the Rephaim
Conquest and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel
Brian R. Doak
Harvard University Press
The figure of the giant has haunted the literatures of the ancient Mediterranean world, from the Greek Gigantomachy and other Aegean epic literatures to the biblical contexts of the ancient Near East. In The Last of the Rephaim, Brian Doak argues that the giants of the Hebrew Bible are a politically, theologically, and historiographically generative group, and through their oversized bodies, readers gain insight into central aspects of Israel’s symbolic universe. All that is overgrown or physically monstrous represents a connection to primeval chaos, and stands as a barrier to creation and right rule. Giants thus represent chaos-fear, and their eradication is a form of chaos maintenance by both human and divine agents. Doak argues that these biblical traditions participate in a broader Mediterranean conversation regarding giants and the end of the heroic age—a conversation that inevitably draws the biblical corpus into a discussion of the function of myth and epic in the ancient world, with profound implications for the politics of monotheism and monarchy in ancient Israel.
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Latino/a Biblical Hermeneutics
Problematics, Objectives, Strategies
Francisco Lozada Jr.
SBL Press, 2014

Engage essays that are profoundly theological and resolutely social

In this collection of essays, contributors seek to analyze the vision of the critical task espoused by Latino/a critics. The project explores how such critics approach their vocation as critics in the light of their identity as members of the Latino/a experience and reality. A variety of critics—representing a broad spectrum of the Latino/a American formation, along various axes of identity—address the question in whatever way they deem appropriate: What does it mean to be a Latino/a critic?

Features:

  • Essays from sixteen scholars
  • Articles bring together the fields of biblical studies and racial-ethnic studies
  • Conclusion addresses directions for future research
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Law and Wisdom in the Bible
David Daube's Gifford Lectures, Volume II
David Daube
Templeton Press, 2010

"That over forty years after they were delivered these famous but unavailable Gifford Lectures should be published is occasion for celebration. Once again we hear Daube’s voice, patient and probing, as he turns over, tests, pushes fresh inquiries, and finds new insights. No man has had such a subtle sense of scriptural texts matched by such a supple sense of the practices and peculiarities of human beings engaged in the legal process. Law and Wisdom in the Bible is classic Daube." mdash;John T. Noonan Jr., United States Circuit Judge

David Daube (1909–99) was known for his unique and sophisticated research on Roman law, biblical law, Jewish Law, and medical ethics. In Law and Wisdom in the Bible, the first published collection of his 1964 Gifford Lectures, Daube derives from his complex understanding of biblical texts both ancient and contemporary notions about wisdom, justice, and education.

In addressing these and other profound issues, Daube crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries and bridges the
gap between humanism and religion, especially with regard to Christianity and Judaism. With his sophisticated understanding of Talmudic law and literature, his thinking, which is on full display in these lectures, revolutionized prevailing perceptions about the New Testament.


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Legal Writing, Legal Practice
The Biblical Bailment Law and Divine Justice
Yael Landman
SBL Press, 2022
Prescriptive law writings rarely mirror the ways a society practices law, a fact that raises special problems for the social and legal historian. Through close analysis of the laws of bailment (i.e., temporary safekeeping) in Exodus 22, Yael Landman probes the relationship of law in the biblical law collections and law-in-practice in ancient Israel and exposes a vision of divine justice at the heart of pentateuchal law. Landman further demonstrates that ancient Near Eastern bailment laws continue to influence postbiblical Jewish law. This book advances an approach to the study of biblical law that connects pentateuchal and ancient Near Eastern law collections, biblical narrative and prophecy, and Mesopotamian legal documents and joins philological and comparative analysis with humanistic legal approaches, in order to access how people thought about and practiced law in ancient Israel.
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The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages
Lawrence Besserman
Harvard University Press, 1979

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Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism
Dvora E. Weisberg
Brandeis University Press, 2009
In this study, Weisberg uses levirate marriage (an institution that involves the union of a man and the widow of his childless brother) as described in biblical law and explicated in rabbinic Judaism as a lens to examine the status of women and attitudes toward marriage, sexuality, and reproduction in early Jewish society. While marriage generally marks the beginning of a new family unit, levirate comes into play when a family’s life is cut short. As such, it offers an opportunity to study the family at a moment of breakdown and restructuring. With her discussion rooted in rabbinic sources and commentary, Weisberg explores kinship structure and descent, the relationship between a family unit created through levirate marriage and the extended family, and the roles of individuals within the family. She also considers the position of women, asking whether it is through marriage or the bearing of children that a woman becomes part of her husband’s family, and to what degree a married woman remains part of her natal family. She argues that rabbinic responses to levirate suggest that a family is an evolving entity, one that can preserve itself through realignment and redefinition.
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Life in Kings
Reshaping the Royal Story in the Hebrew Bible
A. Graeme Auld
SBL Press, 2017

Follow the words with an expert

Building on a lifetime of research and writing, A. Graeme Auld examines passages in Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and Isaiah that recount the same stories or contain similar vocabulary. He advances his argument that Samuel and Kings were organic developments from a deftly crafted, prophetically interpreted, shared narrative he calls the Book of Two Houses—a work focused on the house of David and the house of Yahweh in Jerusalem. At the end of the study he reconstructs the synoptic material within Kings in Hebrew with an English translation.

Features

  • aAcritique of the dominant approach to the narrative books in the Hebrew Bible
  • A solid challenge to the widely accepted relationship between Deuteronomy, cultic centralization, and King Josiah’s reform
  • Key evidence in the heated contemporary debate over the historical development of Biblical Hebrew
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Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
Echoes of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer
A. E. Elmore
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009
While it is common knowledge that Abraham Lincoln’s writings were influenced by the King James Bible, until now no full-length study has shown the precise ways in which the Gettysburg Address uses its specific language. This revealing investigation provides a new way to think about the speech and its author.
 
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L'influence de l'arameen sur les traducteurs de la LXX principalement sur les traducteurs grecs poste
Anne-Françoise Loiseau
SBL Press, 2016

Further your understanding of the methods and peculiarities of the ancient Greek translators and revisers of the Hebrew Bible

Loiseau presents examples of Greek translations of verses from the Hebrew Bible that clearly illustrate the influence of Aramaic or Late Hebrew on the semantics of the Septuagint translators. The author postulates that the Greek translators based their translations on Hebrew-Aramaic equivalents maintained as lists or even on proto-targumim such as those found at Qumran, both predecessors of the later Aramaic targumic translations. Loiseau's examples provide convincing explanations for different coincidences occurring between the Greek translations and the interpretative traditions found in the targumim and help elucidate a number of puzzling translations where two Aramaic words that are very similar graphically or phonetically were erroneously interchanged.

Features

  • Unique insight into ancient Jewish exegesis
  • English summary
  • The first extensive illustration of the influence of the Aramaic or Late Hebrew on the Septuagint
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The Literary Guide to the Bible
Robert Alter
Harvard University Press, 1986
Rediscover the incomparable literary richness and strength of a book that all of us live with an many of us live by. An international team of renowned scholars, assembled by two leading literary critics, offers a book-by-book guide through the Old and New Testaments as well as general essays on the Bible as a whole, providing an enticing reintroduction to a work that has shaped our language and thought for thousands of years.
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Liturgical Hermeneutics of Sacred Scripture
Marco Benini
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
The purpose of this book is to explore what a liturgical approach to the Bible looks like and what hermeneutical implications this might have: How does the liturgy celebrate, understand, and communicate Scripture? The starting point is Pope Benedict's affirmation that “a faith-filled understanding of sacred Scripture must always refer back to the liturgy” (Verbum Domini 52). The first part of the book (based on SC 24) provides significant examples to demonstrate: The liturgical order of readings intertextually combines Old Testament and New Testament readings using manifold hermeneutical principles, specifically how the psalms show the wide range of interpretations the liturgy employs. Prayers are biblically inspired and help to appropriate Scripture personally. The hymns convey Scripture in a poetic way. Signs and actions such as foot-washing or the Ephphetha rite enact Scripture. The study considers the Mass, the sacraments and the Liturgy of the Hours. In the second part, Benini systematically focuses on the various dimensions of liturgical hermeneutics of the Bible, which emerge from the first part. The study reflects the approaches the liturgy offers to Scripture and its liturgical reception. It explores theological aspects such as the unity of the two Testaments in Christ’s paschal mystery or the anamnesis as a central category in both Scripture and liturgy. The liturgy does not understand Scripture primarily as a document of the past, but celebrates it as a current and living “Word of the Lord,” as a medium of encounter with God: Scripture is sacramental. Liturgical Hermeneutics of Sacred Scripture seeks to contribute not only to the comparison of the Roman, Ambrosian, and Byzantine Rite regarding the Word of God, but most of all to the overall “liturgical approach” to Scripture. As such, it promotes an interdisciplinary dialogue of liturgical and biblical studies.
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Loaves of Torah
Exploring the Jewish Year through Challah
Rabbi Vanessa M. Harper
Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023
Braided and spiral loaves of challah have long been a delicious centerpiece of the Jewish table, but with a few extra twists, the beloved Shabbat bread can become a
work of art that teaches Torah. In Loaves of Torah, Rabbi Vanessa M. Harper— creator of the hit Instagram account @lechlechallah—shapes interpretive challot
for each weekly Torah portion and Jewish holiday. A creative journey through the Jewish year, the book pairs gorgeous color photographs with insightful commentary,
in-depth questions for reflection and discussion, as well as beautiful kavanot. Rabbi Harper also includes blessings, recipes, and tips for creating your own interpretive
challot. A fresh, contemporary commentary on our holiest text, Loaves of Torah will inspire you to think outside the braid and take Torah into your own hands.
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Love and Joy
Law, Language, and Religion in Ancient Israel
Yochanan Muffs and Thorkild Jacobsen
Harvard University Press, 1992
Studying the interplay of figurative language, law, and religious thought, Yochanan Muffs brings us a new understanding of both the Bible and ancient Near Eastern cultures. This first single-volume collection of the pivotal writings of this great religious humanist includes his studies of love and joy as metaphors, the laws of war in ancient Israel, the figurative nature of legal language, the role of the prophet and prophetic speech, and the expressions of belonging which united a culture.
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Love Between Women
Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism
Bernadette J. Brooten
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Love Between Women examines female homoeroticism and the role of women in the ancient Roman world. Employing an unparalleled range of cultural sources, Brooten finds evidence of marriages between women and establishes that condemnations of female homoerotic practices were based on widespread awareness of love between women.

"An extraordinary accomplishment. . . . A definitive source for all future discussion of homoeroticism and the Bible."—Mary Rose D'Angelo, Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review

"[Brooten's] convincing analysis . . . not only profoundly reshapes our understanding of the past, but it should also shape the way in which that past, particularly the early Christian texts with their immense normative weight, will be used for the future."—Anne L. Clark, Journal of Lesbian Studies

"Love Between Women gives contemporary debates on sexuality a carefully delineated past. It boldly insists upon a different future, one informed by history but not tyrannized by it."—Susan Ackerman, Lambda Book Report

"Fascinating, provocative and lucid. . . . Brooten has made a fundamental contribution to women's and gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and classics."—Elizabeth A. Castelli, Women's Review of Books

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Studies Book, 1997

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Lucifer of Cagliari and the Text of 1-2 Kings
Tuukka Kauhanen
SBL Press, 2018

The most up-to-date study of the text history of 1 and 2 Kings

In this book, Tuukka Kauhanen approaches the challenging case of the textual history of 1 and 2 Kings through citations of the text found within the writings of the fourth-century bishop of Sadinia, Lucifer of Cagliari. Kauhanen presents evidence that Lucifer's Latin text sheds important light on lost Hebrew and Greek pieces of the textual puzzle in Kings. In doing so, he compares all of Lucifer's extensive quotations of Kings to extant Greek witnesses as well as Old Latin witnesses where available and subsequently analyzes the probable reasons for textual variations. In each instance he attempts to choose the best possible candidate for the Old Greek reading and where that reading might reflect a now-lost Hebrew text.

Features

  • Use of the most current research into the text of the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint, including the Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition series and the forthcoming Göttingen Septuagint edition of King
  • An appendix listing readings from the analysis sections arranged according to agreement patterns and other meaningful criteria
  • Charts comparing readings
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LXX Isaiah 24
1-26:6 as Interpretation and Translation: A Methodological Discussion
Wilson de Angelo Cunha
SBL Press, 2014

Explore how interpretation affects translation

In this volume Cunha argues that the differences found between the Septuagint text of Isaiah and the Hebrew of the Masoretic Text must be weighed against the literary context in which they are found. The author demonstrates that LXX Isa 24:1–26:6 can be seen as a coherent ideological composition that differs greatly from the way scholars have interpreted MT Isa 24:1–26:6. This coherence comes across through the use of certain lexemes and conjunctions throughout the passage. The book lays the case that a scribe or translator already had an interpretation before he started the process of translation that shaped his translation of the Hebrew text into Greek.

Features:

  • An introduction sketching the history of research on LXX Isa 24:1–26:6
  • A focused comparision of the Masoretic Text to the Septuagint
  • A thorough discussion of the coherence of LXX Isa 24:1–26:6
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Lydia as a Rhetorical Construct in Acts
Alexandra Gruca-Macaulay
SBL Press, 2016

A new sociorhetorical study of Acts

In Lydia as a Rhetorical Construct in Acts, Gruca-Macaulay explores the sociorhetorical function of the story of Lydia, a named Lydian woman ancient interpreters would have associated with cultural stereotypes of Lydians. As a rhetorical figure, Lydia both influenced and was influenced by the ideology of the surrounding text in Acts 16, as well as the approach Luke–Acts as a whole takes to people who are somehow like Lydia.

 

Features:

  • Displays the rhetorical-cultural portrayal of women in Luke-Acts from the perspective of a first-century Mediterranean audience as compared with the history of scholarship, specifically through a sociorhetorical interpretation of the role of Lydia in Acts
  • Investigates the rhetorical function of Mediterranean social-cultural topoi in qualitative argumentation, with a focus on Greco-Roman physiognomy generally, and Lydian ethnography especially
  • Introduces the rhetorical use of conceptual blending, particularly its application for gaining insight into the function of military discourse in developing the rhetorical force of the Lydia episode in Acts
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