Results by title

The biblical narrative of Israel’s only daughter Dinah is steeped in deception and violence, vengeance and destruction, and a silence that has posed interpretive problems for readers for more than two millennia. Carrie A. Cifers takes up the retellings of Genesis 34 in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, the book of Jubilees, and Joseph and Aseneth to explore how later authors tried to clarify the assumedly implicit ethical message of Dinah’s story. Through narrative ethics and socionarratology, Cifers demonstrates that biblical stories are a space of encounter where texts make claims on readers and where readers have an ethical responsibility as witnesses to the text. Dangerous Tales is a call for contemporary readers to engage biblical narratives in ways that mitigate interpretive violence and maximize each text’s ethical potential.

A reexamination of the people and movements associated with Qumran, their outlook on the world, and what bound them together

Dead Sea Scrolls, Revise and Repeat examines the identity of the Qumran movement by reassessing former conclusions and bringing new methodologies to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The collection as a whole addresses questions of identity as they relate to law, language, and literary formation; considerations of time and space; and demarcations of the body. The thirteen essays in this volume reassess the categorization of rule texts, the reuse of scripture, the significance of angelic fellowship, the varieties of calendrical use, and celibacy within the Qumran movement. Contributors consider identity in the Dead Sea Scrolls from new interdisciplinary perspectives, including spatial theory, legal theory, historical linguistics, ethnicity theory, cognitive literary theory, monster theory, and masculinity theory.

Features

• Essays that draw on new theoretical frameworks and recent advances in Qumran studies
• A tribute to the late Peter Flint, whose scholarship helped to shape Qumran studies

Explore how the past came to address the present and the future and why it became important for emerging Jewish identity.

Experts explore the themes and topics that made Deuteronomy and the Former Prophets appealing to ancient readers leading ultimately to those texts becoming authoritative for Persian and Hellenistic readers. This unique collection of essays focuses on what larger impact these texts might have had on primary and secondary audiences as part of emerging Torah. Contributors include Klaus-Peter Adam, Yairah Amit, Thomas M. Bolin, Philip R. Davies, Serge Frolov, Susanne Gilmayr-Bucher, E. Axel Knauf, Christoph Levin, James R. Linville, and Thomas Römer, and Diana V. Edelman.

Features:

• Essays focused on why texts became authoritative instead of when they were written or their historicity
• Two scholars examine each book providing a range of views
• Coverage of the socio-religious function of emerging Torah in the Persian and early Hellenistic periods

Using a cognitive-functional linguistic framework and cross-linguistic research on discourse markers, Christopher J. Fresch investigates the use of five discourse markers in the documentary papyri of the third to first centuries BCE and the Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible. Through this analysis, Fresch proposes linguistically grounded descriptions for how each discourse marker uniquely functions to guide readers in how they process and comprehend the text. Based on these descriptions, he examines the instances of these discourse markers in the Greek translation of the Minor Prophets and how the translator used them to render the Hebrew text. Fresch presents a picture of a translator who selected discourse markers based on their own understanding of the structure, flow, and meaning of the underlying Hebrew text. Their use attests to a translator who was contextually aware and who desired to produce a translation in idiomatic Koine.

A reevaluation of the concept of the soul based on the latest evidence

Biblical scholars have long claimed that the Israelites “could not conceive of a disembodied nefesh [soul].” Steiner rejects that claim based on a broad spectrum of textual, linguistic, archaeological, and anthropological evidence spanning the millennia from prehistoric times to the present. The biblical evidence includes a prophecy of Ezekiel condemning women who pretend to trap the wandering souls of sleeping people. The extrabiblical evidence suggests that a belief in the existence of disembodied souls was part of the common religious heritage of the peoples of the ancient Near East.

Features

• A re-examination of the evidence for and against disembodied souls in the Hebrew Bible
• A new look at the nature and behavior of disembodied souls in the Hebrew Bible
• A new study of the meaning and sociolinguistic background of the Katumuwa inscription

A fresh literary analysis of political polemic in the Bible

The Book of Judges ends with a bizarre narrative of sex and violence that starts with a domestic tiff and ends with the decimation of a tribe that is restored by means of abduction and rape. Cynthia Edenburg applies a fresh literary analysis, recent understandings of historical linguistics, and historical geography in her exploration of the origin of the anti-Benjamin polemic found in Judges 19–21, the growth and provenance of the book of Judges, and the shape of the Deuteronomistic History. Her study exposes how Judges 19–21 function as political polemic reflecting not the pre-monarchic period but instead the historical realities of the settlement of Benjamin during the Babylonian and Persian period.

Features:

• Methodological discussions that open each chapter
• Charts and tables
• Engagement with current research produced by scholars from around the world

This volume brings together scholars from New Testament studies and classics, whose fields of study have much in common but are not often in in conversation. The contributors explore how the ancient works they study can be resources for thinking critically and creatively about issues that matter today. The essays address our obligation to take positive moral stands on divisive issues of both the past and the present, including empire, racial/ethnic and religious difference, economic inequality, gender and sexuality, slavery, and disability. Contributors include Douglas Boin, Denise Kimber Buell, Gay L. Byron, Allen Dwight Callahan, Joy Connolly, Jennifer A. Glancy, Shelley P. Haley, Caroline Johnson Hodge, Katherine Lu Hsu, Timothy Joseph, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Yii-Jan Lin, Dominic Machado, Joseph A. Marchal, Thomas R. Martin, Candida R. Moss, Laura Salah Nasrallah, Jorunn Økland, and Abraham Smith.

Advance your understanding of divination’s role in supporting or undermining imperial aspirations in the ancient Near East

This collection examines the ways that divinatory texts in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East undermined and upheld the empires in which the texts were composed, edited, and read. Nine essays and an introduction engage biblical scholarship on the Prophets, Assyriology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the critical study of Ancient Empires.

Features:

• Interdisciplinary approaches include propaganda studies
• Essays examine how biblical and other ancient Near Eastern texts were shaped by political and theological empires
• Index of ancient sources

A unique study of lectionaries and graphic design as a site of biblical reception

How artists portrayed the Bible in large canvas paintings is frequently the subject of scholarly exploration, yet the presentation of biblical texts in contemporary graphic designs has been largely ignored. In this book Amanda Dillon engages multimodal analysis, a method of semiotic discourse, to explore how visual composition, texture, color, directionality, framing, angle, representations, and interactions produce potential meanings for biblical graphic designs. Dillon focuses on the artworks of two American graphic designers—the woodcuts designed by Meinrad Craighead for the Roman Catholic Sunday Missal and Nicholas Markell’s illustrations for the worship books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—to present the merits of multimodal analysis for biblical reception history.

The essays in Dreams and Visions in the Bible and Related Literature focus on how the reading community interprets dreams or visions and what is at stake for whom in a dream or vision’s interpretation. Contributors explore the hermeneutics of readership, the relationship between reading and intertextuality, and the interplay of affect and emotion within dreams and visions in religious texts. A variety of methodologies are employed, including rhetorical analysis, critical theory, trauma studies, the analysis of space and society, and the history of emotions. Contributors are Richard J. Bautch, Genevive Dibley, Roy Fisher, Gina Hens-Piazza, Joseph McDonald, Deborah Prince, Jean-François Racine, Andrea Spatafora, and Rodney A. Werline.