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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 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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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
[more]

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The Life of Adam and Eve in Greek
A Critical Edition
Johannes Tromp
SBL Press, 2016

A Brill classic now in paperback from SBL Press

This critical edition of the Life of Adam and Eve in Greek is based on all available manuscripts. In the introduction the history of previous research is summarized, and the extant manuscripts are presented. Next comes a description of the grammatical characteristics of the manuscripts’ texts, followed by a detailed study of the genealogical relationships between them, resulting in a reconstruction of the writing’s history of transmission in Greek. On the basis of all this information, the Greek text of the Life of Adam and Eve in its earliest attainable stage, is established.

Features:

  • Illustrations of textual relationships and variants
  • Indices for subjects, passages, words in the text, variants, and additions and revisions
  • Full critical apparatus with relevant evidence from the manuscripts
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The Life of Romeyn de Hooghe 1645-1708
Prints, Pamphlets, and Politics in the Dutch Golden Age
Henk van Nierop
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Romeyn de Hooghe was the most inventive and prolific etcher of the later Dutch Golden Age. The producer of wide-ranging book illustrations, newsprints, allegories, and satire, he is best known as the chief propaganda artist working for stadtholder and king William III. This study, the first book-length biography of de Hooghe, narrates how his reputation became badly tarnished when he was accused of pornography, fraud, larceny, and atheism. Traditionally regarded as a godless rogue, and more recently as an exponent of the Radical Enlightenment, de Hooghe emerges in this study as a successful entrepreneur, a social climber, and an Orangist spin doctor. A study in seventeenth-century political culture and patronage, focusing on spin and slander, this book explores how artists, politicians, and hacks employed literature and the visual arts in political discourse, and tried to capture their readership with satire, mockery, fun, and laughter.
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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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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 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

[more]

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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
[more]

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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
[more]


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