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Abiding Words
The Use of Scripture in the Gospel of John
Alicia D. Myers
SBL Press, 2015

A collection of essays by experts from around the world

Like the other New Testament Gospels, the Gospel of John repeatedly appeals to Scripture (Old Testament). Preferring allusions and “echoes” alongside more explicit quotations, however, the Gospel of John weaves Scripture as an authoritative source concerning its story of Jesus. Yet, this is the same Gospel that is often regarded as antagonistic toward “the Jews,” especially the Jewish religious leaders, depicted within it.

Features:

  • Introduces and updates readers on the question of John’s employment of Scripture
  • Showcases useful approaches to more general studies on the New Testament’s use of Scripture, sociological and rhetorical analyses, and memory theory
  • Explores the possible implications surrounding Scripture usage for the Gospel audiences both ancient and contemporary
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Adam and Eve in the Armenian Tradition, Fifth through Seventeenth Centuries
Michael E. Stone
SBL Press, 2013
The Adam and Eve stories are a foundational myth in the Jewish and Christian worlds, and the way they were recounted reveals a great deal about those doing the retelling. How did the Armenians retell these stories? What values do these retellings express about men and women, their life in the world, sin and redemption? Presented here are twelve hundred years of Armenian telling of the Genesis 1–3 stories in an unparalleled collection of all significant narratives of Adam and Eve in Armenian literature—prose and poetry, homilies and commentaries, calendary and mathematical texts—from its inception in the fifth century to the seventeenth century. This seminal resource contributes to the lively current discussion of how biblical and apocryphal traditions were retold, embroidered, and transformed into the lenses through which the Bible itself was read.
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Adopting the Stranger as Kindred in Deuteronomy
Mark R. Glanville
SBL Press, 2018

Investigate how Deuteronomy incorporates vulnerable, displaced people

Deuteronomy addresses social contexts of widespread displacement, an issue affecting 65 million people today. In this book Mark R. Glanville investigates how Deuteronomy fosters the integration of the stranger as kindred into the community of Yahweh. According to Deuteronomy, displaced people are to be enfolded within the household, within the clan, and within the nation. Glanville argues that Deuteronomy demonstrates the immense creativity that communities may invest in enfolding displaced and vulnerable people. Inclusivism is nourished through social law, the law of judicial procedure, communal feasting, and covenant renewal. Deuteronomy’s call to include the stranger as kindred presents contemporary nation-states with an opportunity and a responsibility to reimagine themselves and their disposition toward displaced strangers today.

Features:

  • Exploration of the relationship of ancient Israel’s social history to biblical texts
  • An integrative methodology that brings together literary-historical, legal, sociological, comparative, literary, and theological approaches
  • A thorough study of Israelite identity and ethnicity
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Allusive Soundplay in the Hebrew Bible
Jonathan G. Kline
SBL Press, 2016

The first study to focus exclusively on the use in the Hebrew Bible of soundplay to allude to and interpret earlier literary traditions

This book focuses on the way the biblical writers used allusive soundplay to construct theological discourse, that is, in service of their efforts to describe the nature of God and God's relationship to humanity. By showing that a variety of biblical books contain examples of allusive soundplay employed for this purpose, Kline demonstrates that this literary device played an important role in the growth of the biblical text as a whole and in the development of ancient Israelite and early Jewish theological traditions.

Features:

  • Demonstrates that allusive soundplay was a productive compositional technique in ancient Israel
  • Identifies examples of innerbiblical allusion that have not been identified before
  • A robust methodology for identifying soundplay in innerbiblical allusions
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American Prophecy
Race and Redemption in American Political Culture
George Shulman
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

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Ancient Sisterhood
The Lost Traditions of Hagar and Sarah
Savina J. Teubal
Ohio University Press, 1997

In this fascinating piece of scholarly detective work, biblical scholar Savina J. Teubal peels away millenia of patriarchal distortion to reveal the lost tradition of biblical matriarchs. In Ancient Sisterhood: The Lost Traditions of Hagar and Sarah (originally published as Hagar the Egyptian), she shows that Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, was actually lady-in-waiting to the priestess Sarah and participated in an ancient Near Eastern custom of surrogate motherhood.

Ancient Sisterhood cites evidence that Hebrew women actually enjoyed the privileges and sanctity of their own religious practices. These practices, however, were gradually eroded and usurped by the establishment of patriarchal monarchies that were based on militaristic conquest and power. Teubal examines the figures of Hagar and Sarah from a feminist perspective that combines thorough scholarship with an informed and detailed understanding of the cultural and religious influences from which the mysterious biblical figure of Hagar emerged. She looks at Hagar’s important role in the genesis of Hebrew culture, her role as mother of the Islamic nations, and her power as a matriarch as opposed to her apparent status as a concubine.

Teubal posits two distinct sources for the Hagar episodes: Hagar as companion to Sarah and an unknown woman whom she refers to as the desert matriarch. She explores whether Hagar was a slave to Abraham or Sarah, the differences between Hagar and the desert matriarch, and the obscurantism of these important elements in biblical texts. Teubal sheds considerable light on two central figures of these world religions and “the disassociation of woman from her own female religious experience.”

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Armenian Apocrypha from Adam to Daniel
Michael E. Stone
SBL Press, 2021

In this collection of Armenian apocryphal texts, Michael E. Stone focuses on texts related to heaven and hell, angels and demons, and biblical figures from the Hebrew Bible and apocrypha. The texts, introductions, translations, annotations, and critical apparatus included in this volume make this collection a key resource for students and scholars of apocryphal and pseudepigraphical literature.

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Aseneth of Egypt
The Composition of a Jewish Narrative
Patricia D. Ahearne-Kroll
SBL Press, 2020

An exploration of Aseneth's beginnings

In Aseneth of Egypt: The Composition of a Jewish Narrative, Patricia D. Ahearne-Kroll challenges reliance on reconstructed texts in previous scholarship on the book of Joseph and Aseneth. After outlining the problems with previous prototypes of the Hellenistic narrative, she proposes a way to talk about the story in its initial setting without ignoring the manuscript evidence. Her thorough analysis of the evidence reveals how Joseph and Aseneth reflects the literary impulse of Greek-speaking Jewish writers to redescribe their identity in Egypt and Judean connections to the land of Egypt, while incorporating Ptolemaic strategies of legitimation of power. In the end, Ahearne-Kroll concludes that the base storyline preserved in all the copies of this story demonstrates that it was written for Jewish communities living in Hellenistic Egypt.

Features:

  • A focus on Hellenistic stories of heroic ancestors
  • A discussion of the possible lives of Jews in Hellenistic Egypt drawn from the narrative of Aseneth
  • An examination of the complexities involved in dating the composition of literary texts
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