Ancient literature was generally written by and produced for elite men. That fact creates specific challenges to modern interpreters of gender roles in the ancient world, especially once contemporary understandings of gender as construction and performance are embraced. In Gender and Second-Temple Judaism, world-renowned scholars take on these challenges with regard to ancient Judaism (here including early Christianity and early rabbinic Judaism as well), at once examining the ancient evid...

Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah are among the so-called deuterocanonical books of the Bible, part of the larger Catholic biblical canon. Except for a short article in the Women’s Bible Commentary, no detailed or comprehensive feminist commentary on these books is available so far. Marie-Theres Wacker reads both books with an approach that is sensitive to gender and identity issues. The book of Baruch—with its reflections on guilt of the fathers, with its transformation of wisdom...

From the social philosopher and New York Times–bestselling author of The Sane Society: An analysis of the Old Testament as a revolutionary humanist work.The Old Testament is one of the most carefully studied books in the world's history. It is also one of the most misunderstood. This founding text of the world's three largest religions is also, Erich Fromm argues, an impressive radical humanist text. He sees the stories of mankind's transition fro...

Analyzes the various New Testament conceptions of God and suggests how they can best contribute to a contemporary constructive theology.In this important new volume in the Library of Biblical Theology, Larry W. Hurtado introduces the different understandings of God that arise in the books of the New Testament, and explores the ramifications of those views for contemporary theology.Questions covered include:Why has the subject of God received comparatively little atte...

The Psalms are the most-read part of the Old Testament, but their importance for ethics has often been overlooked. However, the Psalms offer some of the most potent ethical instruction in the Bible. In this book internationally renowned Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham examines the source of the Psalms' power, reflects on their main ethical themes, and shows how they function as prayers that change us. Wenham makes an important contribution to biblical scholarship and breaks new ground ...

This paperback edition of Creation and the Persistence of Evil brings to a wide audience one of the most innovative and meaningful models of God for this post-Auschwitz era. In a thought-provoking return to the original Hebrew conception of God, which questions accepted conceptions of divine omnipotence, Jon Levenson defines God's authorship of the world as a consequence of his victory in his struggle with evil. Classic doctrines of God's creation of the universe from the void do ...

For well over two centuries the question of the composition of the Pentateuch has been among the most central and hotly debated issues in the field of biblical studies. In this book, Joel Baden presents a fresh and comprehensive argument for the Documentary Hypothesis. Critically engaging both older and more recent scholarship, he fundamentally revises and reorients the classical model of the formation of the Pentateuch. Interweaving historical and methodological chapters with detailed tex...

One of the most widely praised studies of Jewish apocalyptic literature ever written, The Apocalyptic Imagination by John J. Collins has served for over thirty years as a helpful, relevant, comprehensive survey of the apocalyptic literary genre.After an initial overview of things apocalyptic, Collins proceeds to deal with individual apocalyptic texts — the early Enoch literature, the book of Daniel, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and others — concluding with an examination of apocal...

A comprehensive and accessible guide to the Hebrew BibleThis book brings together some of the world's most exciting scholars from across a variety of disciplines to provide a concise and accessible guide to the Hebrew Bible. It covers every major genre of book in the Old Testament together with in-depth discussions of major themes such as human nature, covenant, creation, ethics, ritual and purity, sacred space, and monotheism. This authoritative overview sets each...

The authoritative new account of the Bible’s origins, illuminating the 1,600-year tradition that shaped the Christian and Jewish holy books as millions know them today.The Bible as we know it today is best understood as a process, one that begins in the tenth century BCE. In this revelatory account, a world-renowned scholar of Hebrew scripture joins a foremost authority on the New Testament to write a new biography of the Book of Books, reconstructing Jewish and Ch...

Sommer utilizes a lost ancient Near Eastern perception of divinity according to which a god has more than one body and fluid, unbounded selves. Though the dominant strains of biblical religion rejected it, a monotheistic version of this theological intuition is found in some biblical texts. Later Jewish and Christian thinkers inherited this ancient way of thinking; ideas such as the sefirot in Kabbalah and the trinity in Christianity represent a late version of this theology. This book for...

In this concise volume, a team of fresh Old Testament voices explores the theological dimensions of the Pentateuch and provides specific examples of critically engaged theological interpretation. This Pentateuch text is unique in that it emphasizes theological reading, serving as an affordable supplement to traditional introductory Pentateuch texts. Each chapter introduces theological themes and issues in interpretation then offers exegesis of one or two representative passages to model th...