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A new history of literary narration rooted in the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation.
 
We often identify secularization's characteristic literary form as the modern novel: out with divine scripture, in with human fictions. In Fictions of God, Raphael Magarik argues that this story overlooks the cultural upheavals of the Protestant Reformation. Early reformers imagined a Bible that was neither infallible nor inerrant but fictional, composed by a divine counterfactual: God crafted the text, they said, as if it had been written by the prophets. Early modern Protestants now found in their Bibles not a source of foundational truths but a model for unreliable narration, even fiction.

Fictions of God traces how this approach to literature passed from biblical commentators to poets like Abraham Cowley, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson amid the violent emergence of a new religious and political order—long before the eighteenth-century rise of the English novel. The result is a transformative account of the Reformation’s effect on imaginative literature and the secularization of the Bible itself.

The most up-to-date sourcebook on warfare in the ancient Near East

Fighting for the King and the Gods provides an introduction to the topic of war and the variety of texts concerning many aspects of warfare in the ancient Near East. These texts illustrate various viewpoints of war and show how warfare was an integral part of life. Trimm examines not only the victors and the famous battles, but also the hardship that war brought to many. While several of these texts treated here are well known (i.e., Ramses II's battle against the Hittites at Qadesh), others are known only to specialists. This work will allow a broader audience to access and appreciate these important texts as they relate to the history and ideology of warfare.

Features

• References to recent secondary literature for further study
• Early Greek and Chinese illustrative texts for comparisons with other cultures
• Indices to help guide the reader

A lifetime of essential scholarship from one of biblical archaeology’s most prolific scholars For Those Who Sleep in the Dust collects thirteen of William G. Dever’s best articles and essays on the archaeological history of ancient Israel. Dever’s work on a range of hotly debated topics, including the origins of the Israelite people, the development of the state, and Israelite religion, gives voice to the ordinary, anonymous Israelites and Judahites hidden in the shadows of the leaders, battles, and religious debates memorialized in the Hebrew Bible. These essays not only illuminate the ancient human experience but also make biblical archaeology accessible to anyone who needs a broad introduction to what archaeology can and cannot reveal about the Bible. William G. Dever is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and Professor Emeritus at the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona. Dever is the author of more than four hundred publications, including What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel (2001), Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (2003), The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel: Where Archaeology and the Bible Intersect (2012), Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah (2017), and My Nine Lives: Sixty Years in Israeli and Biblical Archaeology (2020).