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The last act of Jeremiah’s eventful career takes place in the wake of Babylonian destruction, as he is part of a contingent left behind in the land of Judah after the invasion. Jer 40–44 is not among the most popular sections of the Hebrew Bible, but a remarkable story is contained in these chapters. Despite the trauma of Jerusalem’s collapse, the community who remain have every reason for cautious optimism about their future: they are provided with reasonable leadership, the Babylonians seem unexpectedly benevolent, and the prophet Jeremiah resides in their midst. But any sanguinity disintegrates in the midst of factionalism, unsubstantiated rumors of covert foreign involvement, and then, more darkly, murder, carnage, and a hostage crisis that results in an armed clash among the remnant. So, in these chapters there is an internal war after the external invasion, prompting the reader to ask how matters go so terribly awry. In this book the narrative of Jer 40–44 is subject to a literary reading that analyzes a powerfully composed story that features a host of stylistic devices and deftly sketched characters.

Nils Ole Oermann vividly describes the many-sided life of Albert Schweitzer (1975–1965), who achieved world renown through his selfless work as a doctor in the African jungle and as a pioneer of an ethical principle, Reverence for Life, that crosses all cultures and religions. This biography provides a fresh look at one the greatest icons of the twentieth century, from theologian and philosopher to musician and physician, husband, writer, and political activist. Though a mediocre student, he wrote a major theological work, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, and a path-breaking study of Johannes Sebastian Bach. But it was his ethical worldview of Reverence for Life, explored in three volumes on the philosophy of civilization, that was to be his most important intellectual achievement. His life’s work, an embodiment of the principle of Reverence for Life, was the hospital that, together with his wife, Helene, he built up in Lambarene, Gabon. Though he was revered in many quarters, he was also criticized for his paternalistic treatment of the indigenous people of Africa. Following the award of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1953, Schweitzer became a key voice in the nuclear debate, speaking out against the dangers of nuclear weapons. What Schweitzer tried to do was to live by the universal principle of Reverence for Life. And this was for him more important even than his hospital.

For the past two decades, the nature of ancient Israel’s origins has been debated heatedly. Much of this debate has concentrated on part of the book of Exodus and the book of Joshua. Little attention, however, has been given to the wilderness tradition, for example, the episodes set in Sinai (Exodus 16 through Numbers 20). The current study investigates the importance of the wilderness tradition to ancient Israel’s religious and social formation. The location of Mt. Sinai, Israel’s law or covenant, and the possible Egyptian origins of Israel’s desert sanctuary, the tabernacle, are explored in the light of Egyptian archaeological materials. The book further argues that the Torah’s narratives preserve accurate memories of the wilderness period as evidenced by the accuracy of geographical place names in Egypt and Sinai, and by the use of many personal names and technical terms that are of Egyptian etymology. These factors lend credibility to the authenticity sojourn in Egypt and the exodus traditions, rather than viewing them as purely ideological or literary fictions dating to 1,000 years after the events.

The purpose of this book is to tell the story of Israel’s nearest neighbors—not only discovering what the Bible has to say about them but also what we can know from archaeology, ancient inscriptions, and other sources. The Bible itself presents these neighbors in nuanced and conflicting ways; sometimes they are friends or even related to Israel at a family level, and sometimes they are enemies, spoken of as though they must die in order for Israel to live. We are left wondering how the biblical portrayal might have affected our thinking about these people as historical groups, on their own terms. How would an Aramaean have described her own religion? How would an Edomite have described conflict with Israel? This book explores both the biblical portrayal of the smaller groups surrounding Israel and what people can know about these groups through their own literature, archaeology, and other sources. By uncovering the identity of the Philistines as settlers along the coast at the same time that early Israel carved out their place in the land, for example, one can better understand the social turmoil and political maneuvering that lies just beneath the surface of the biblical narrative, and can see more clearly just how the authors of the Bible saw themselves in the face of others.

The Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) accept slavery, and Deuteronomy 22 requires a single female who has been raped to marry her rapist. Biblical laws, including these two examples, continue to influence Christian (especially Protestant) attitudes toward women, homosexuals, the poor, as well as those who are from different faiths or racial/ethnic origins. This book argues that such ancient laws and the corresponding contemporary attitudes ignore the harm caused to such groups and fail to consider that these groups may have different, yet valid, perspectives on the meaning of these texts. Specifically, this book argues that the Christian tradition has become inseparable from a privileged male perspective not reflecting the full range of persons found in its faith communities. Furthermore, it is this male norm that has historically established the accepted singular and determinative meaning of any given biblical text. Contemporary controversies about biblical interpretation, then, result from those other groups acknowledging that their realities differ from the putative norm and offering their own interpretations of problematic biblical texts. The book finds that inclusive biblical interpretation and its consideration of these normally excluded perspectives are consistent with the Christian tradition. This work advances support for inclusive interpretation from the Bible (both Old and New Testaments)—from the Protestant tradition itself, based on the writings of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Wesley—and from parallels with the interpretation and amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

An English translation of the oldest and most important early Christian non‐canonical writings. It is based on the earlier collection edited in 1924 by Montague Rhodes James. The book is divided into the conventional categories of gospels, acts, epistles, and revelatory texts. A long subsection deals with stories of Jesus’ infancy and childhood. Another section deals with fragmentary gospel texts on papyrus. The bulk of the book is given over to second‐century legends of individual apostles. Another section covers apocryphal acpocalypses. An appendix gives a selection of stories about the Virgin Mary's assumption and dormition. Each translated text is prefaced with an introduction and select bibliography. Full indexes of citations and themes are provided.

The letters of Paul are among the most commonly cited biblical texts in ongoing cultural and religious disputes about gender, sexuality, and embodiment. This book reframes these uses of the letters by reaching past Paul toward other, far more fascinating figures that appear before, after, and within the letters: androgynous females, castrated males, enslaved people, and barbaric foreigners. Each of these ancient figures deployed in these letters is situated within a specifically Roman imperial setting, an ambiance that cast them as complicated, debased, and dangerous. While the letters repeat and reinscribe the prevailing perspectives on this constellation of embodied figures, this project repositions them by implementing key insights from queer studies. In juxtaposing them against more recent figures of gender and sexual variation, also subject to vilification and marginalization, this project provides a series of alternative angles on these figures and the assemblies who spark and receive these letters, then or now. In staging a series of “touches across time,” Appalling Bodies defamiliarizes and reorients what can be known about both the historical figures active in these ancient communities and those rhetorical figures that continue to be activated in contemporary settings. The aim is not to claim, anachronistically, that these figures are somehow identical to each other; rather, it is through anachronistic juxtaposition that the book highlights contingent connections—partial, particular, but shared practices of gender, sexuality, and embodiment that depart from prevailing perspectives and demonstrate a range of unexpected impacts for the interpretation of politically and religiously loaded literature.

Aquinas and Calvin on Romans is a comparative study of John Calvin’s and Thomas Aquinas’s commentaries on the first eight chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Focusing on the role of human participation in God’s work of salvation, the book argues that Calvin’s critiques of the “schoolmen” arising from his reading of Romans fail to find a target in Aquinas’s theology while Calvin’s principal positive affirmations are embraced by Aquinas as well. Aquinas upholds many fundamental insights that Calvin would later also obtain in his reading of Romans, such as justification sola fide non merito (by faith alone and not by merit), the centrality of Christ for salvation, the ongoing imperfection of the sanctified life, the work of the Spirit guiding the believer along the path of sanctification, and the assurance of salvation that one obtains through the indwelling of the Spirit, to name only a few. Even more, numerous identical interpretations arising in their commentaries make it necessary to consider Calvin’s reading of Romans as appropriating a tradition of interpretation that includes Aquinas. At the same time, the nonparticipatory dimensions of Calvin’s reading of Romans become clear when set beside Aquinas’s reading, and these nonparticipatory dimensions create difficulties for Calvin’s interpretation, especially on Romans 8, that are not present in Aquinas’s account. The book therefore suggests how Calvin’s reading of Romans, especially as it pertains to justification and merit, should be augmented by the participatory framework reflected in Aquinas’s interpretation. The book concludes by revisiting Calvin’s criticisms of the Council of Trent in light of these suggestions.

Through case studies of archaeological materials from local contexts, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul illuminates the social, political, economic, and religious lives of those whom the apostle Paul addressed. Roman Ephesos, a likely setting for the household of Philemon, provides evidence of the slave trade. An inscription from Galatia seeks to restrain traveling Roman officials, illuminating how the travels of Paul, Cephas, and others may have disrupted communities. At Philippi, a donation list from a Silvanus cult provides evidence of abundant giving amid economic limitations, paralleling practices of local Christ followers. In Corinth, a landscape of grief includes monuments and bones, a context that illumines Corinthian practices of baptism on behalf of the dead and the provocative idea that one could live “as if not” mourning. Rome and the Letter to the Romans are the grounds to investigate ideas of time and race not only in the first century, when we find an Egyptian obelisk inserted as a timepiece into Augustus’s mausoleum complex, but also of Mussolini’s new Rome. Thessalonikē demonstrates how letters, legend, and cult are invented out of a love for Paul, after his death. The book articulates a method for bringing together biblical texts with archaeological remains in order to reconstruct the lives of the many adelphoi—brothers and sisters—whom Paul and his co-writers address. It is informed by feminist historiography and gains inspiration from thinkers like Claudia Rankine, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Wendy Brown, and Katie Lofton.

If history is narrative, then Ezra-Nehemiah is only partly history. Well over half of Ezra-Nehemiah is not a narrative but rather a patchwork of cited texts that are frequently intervening in the story. The capacity of citations in Ezra-Nehemiah to offend the historiographical, aesthetic, and theological sensibilities of scholars invites the question of what citation accomplishes in this context. This book labels the citation style in Ezra-Nehemiah as “archival historiography.” It argues that the act of citation in Ezra-Nehemiah forms an alternative site of archiving and this hybrid literary form prioritizes the assembly and organization of documents over the production of a seamless narrative. The argument begins by comparing this literary form with archival institutions and practices across the landscape of the ancient Near East, contending that Ezra-Nehemiah adapts the symbolic power of these ancient collections. It then identifies the role of the imperial archive within the narrative of Ezra-Nehemiah, where it surfaces as an axial and ambivalent source of political power. By reviewing the cited documents in Ezra-Nehemiah, this book argues that the act of citation is not solely or even primarily in the business of authorizing this account or symbolizing the fulfillment of prophetic promises. Rather, citation in Ezra-Nehemiah is aimed at reestablishing a community by organizing memory into retrievable texts. Archival historiography thus constitutes an essential act of communal recovery and represents the cultural vitality of the Judean community after the losses of exile and while living in the long shadow of imperial rule.

Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets offers an innovative approach to gender and embodiment in the Hebrew Bible. The book argues that prophecy destabilizes the category of masculinity and alters the ways in which the Hebrew prophets overwhelmingly men experience their bodies. Furthermore the body of the prophet becomes a queer body. The book explores prophetic masculinity through critical readings of a number of prophetic bodies including Isaiah Moses Hosea Jeremiah and Ezekiel. In addition to close readings of the biblical texts this account engages with modern intertexts drawn from philosophy psychoanalysis and horror films: Isaiah meets the poetry of Anne Carson; Hosea is seen through the lens of possession films and feminist film theory; Jeremiah intersects with psychoanalytic discourses of hysteria; and Ezekiel encounters Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. The book also offers a careful analysis of the body of Moses. This method of reading highlights unexpected features of the biblical texts and illuminate the peculiar intersections of masculinity prophecyand the body in and beyond the Hebrew Bible. Attending to prophecy and to prophetic masculinity is an important task for queer reading. Biblical prophecy engenders new forms of masculinity and embodiment; Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets offers a valuable map of this still-uncharted terrain.

Arguing with Aseneth shows how the ancient romance Joseph and Aseneth moves a minor character in Genesis from obscurity to renown, weaving a new story whose main purpose was to intervene in ancient Jewish debates surrounding gentile access to Israel’s God. With attention to the ways in which Aseneth’s tale “remixes” Genesis, wrestles with Deuteronomic theology, and adopts prophetic visions of the future, Arguing with Aseneth demonstrates that this ancient novel inscribes into Israel’s sacred narrative a precedent for gentile inclusion in the people belonging to Israel’s God. Aseneth is transformed from material mother of the sons of Joseph to a mediator of God’s mercy and life to future penitents, Jew and gentile alike. Yet not all Jewish thinkers in antiquity drew boundaries the same way or in the same place. Arguing with Aseneth traces, then, not only the way in which Joseph and Aseneth affirms the possibility of gentile incorporation but also ways in which other ancient Jewish thinkers, including the apostle Paul, would have argued back, contesting Joseph and Aseneth’s conclusions or offering competing strategies of inclusion. With its use of a female protagonist, Joseph and Aseneth offers a distinctive model of gentile incorporation—one that eschews lines of patrilineal descent and undermines ethnicity and genealogy as necessary markers of belonging. Such a reading of this narrative shows us that we need to rethink our accounts of how ancient Jewish thinkers negotiated who was in and who was out when it came to the people of Israel’s God.

The opening section of the book of Exodus is a powerful narrative and a striking example of the artistic qualities of the Pentateuch, a facet of the text that occasionally is neglected in high-level scholarship. But Exodus 1–2 is a finely choreographed work that compresses a vast amount of material onto a limited textual canvas, creating a story that appeals to readers of every age. Resuming where the book of Genesis leaves off—the last image of Genesis 50 is a coffin in Egypt, primed for a sequel—the first two chapters of Exodus combine a fast-moving plot with some unique shades of characterization: Israel’s growth in Egypt, the rise of a malevolent new king, the birth of a hero, and early experiences of adversity for the main character in the story to come. The burden of slavery and miracle of salvation are introduced in this sector of text, and become paradigmatic examples of divine redemption that reverberate throughout the Hebrew Bible and beyond. This book is a close reading of Exodus 1–2 that analyzes the story as a reasonably self-contained unit, but suggesting that major plot movements in the book of Exodus are foreshadowed and anticipated here. Applying a number of insights from literary theory, this study offers an illustration of further integration of biblical studies with cross-disciplinary narrative interpretation.

In 1961 archaeologists discovered a family archive of legal papyri in a cave near the Dead Sea where their owner, the Jewish woman Babatha, had hidden them in 135 CE at the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt. This book analyses the oldest four of these papyri to argue that underlying them is a hitherto undetected and surprising train of events concerning how Babatha’s father, Shim‘on, purchased a date-palm orchard in Maoza on the southern shore of the Dead Sea in 99 CE that he later gave to Babatha. The central features of the story, untold for two millennia, relate to how a high Nabatean official had purchased the orchard only a month before, but suddenly rescinded the purchase, and how Shim‘on then acquired it, in enlarged form, from the vendor. Teasing out the details involves deploying the new methodology of archival ethnography, combined with a fresh scrutiny of the papyri (written in Nabatean Aramaic), to investigate the Nabatean and Jewish individuals mentioned and their relationships within the social, ethnic, economic, and political realities of Nabatea at that time. Aspects of this context which are thrown into sharp relief by this book include: the prominence of wealthy Nabatean women and their husbands’ financial reliance on them; the high returns and steep losses possible in date cultivation; the sophistication of Nabatean law and lawyers; the lingering effect of the Nabateans’ nomadic past in lessening the social distance between elite and non-elite; and the good ethnic relations between Nabateans and Jews.

Bedouin culture, the culture of desert-dwelling nomads, has existed for 4,500 years, including the era when the texts of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, were composed. It is thus a good context for understanding much of the Bible’s often ambivalent content regarding economics, material culture, social values, social organization, legal practices, religious behavior, and oral traditions. The abundant and varied Bedouin materials in this book constitute a cultural document that supplements materials learned from other cultures of the Ancient Near East about the Bible. The plenitude of Bedouin materials in the Hebrew Bible, the common logic between Bedouin and biblical experiences, and the ancient proximity of Bedouin to what the Bible cites as Israelite abodes, ensure that the origin of almost all the biblical references presented in this book stemmed from Bedouin rather than other ancient cultures. This book, in detailing the profusion of Bedouin culture in the Bible, goes far toward establishing that the ancient Israelites did have a nomadic background, as they are portrayed. Through the prism of Bedouin culture we also gain fresh insights into our customary perspectives on prominent aspects of Judaism and their biblical origins, such as the Israelite god Yahweh (enunciated in Judaism as “Adonai”), the attribute of this god as unseen, the original significance of circumcision, the eating of unleavened bread during Passover, the dwelling in thatched booths during the Feast of Tabernacles, and the Jewish prohibitions against eating pork and other forbidden foods.

This book reveals the landscape of scripture in an era prior to the crystallization of the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, and before the canonization of the Christian Bible. Most accounts of the formation of the Hebrew Bible trace the origins of scripture through source-critical excavation of the archaeological “tell” of the Bible or the text-critical analysis of the scribal hand on manuscripts, but the discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls have transformed our understanding of scripture formation. The book focuses not on the putative origins and closure of the Bible but on the reasons scriptures remained open, with pluriform growth in the Hellenistic-Roman period. Drawing on new methods from cognitive neuroscience and the social sciences as well as traditional philological and literary analysis, the book argues that the key to understanding the formation of scripture is the widespread practice of individual and communal prayer in early Judaism. The figure of the teacher as a learned and pious sage capable of interpreting and embodying the tradition is central to understanding this revelatory phenomenon. The volume considers the entwinement of prayer and scriptural formation in five books reflecting the diversity of early Judaism: Ben Sira, Daniel, Jeremiah/Baruch, 2 Corinthians, and the Qumran Hodayot (Thanksgiving Hymns). While not a complete taxonomy of scripture formation, the book illuminates performative dynamics that have been largely ignored as well as the generative role of interpretive tradition in understanding how the Bible came to be.

The relationship between the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas has become a hotly debated issue, with several scholars arguing that John and Thomas are gospels in conflict. The first part of this book argues that the two gospels were written about the same time, but without knowledge of each other. Their authors drew upon similar Jewish and early Christian traditions independently from each other. The second part is devoted to the enigmatic ‘disciple Jesus loved’ in the Gospel of John, arguing that this disciple was created not only to authenticate this gospel, but also to replace the brothers of Jesus. Hence, this figure was developed in the context of a conflict, but that conflict was not related to Thomasine Christianity but to Jewish Christianity.

Produced during the lifetime of William Shakespeare and John Donne, the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible has long been viewed as the most elegantly written and poetic of the many English translations. Now reaching its 400th anniversary, it remains one of the most frequently used Bibles in the English-speaking world, especially in America. This book offers an authoritative history of this renowned translation, ranging from the Bible's inception to the present day. The text tells the complex story of how this translation came to be commissioned, who the translators were, and how the translation was accomplished. The book does not end with the printing of that first edition, but also traces the textual history from 1611 to the establishment of the modern text by Oxford University Press in 1769, shedding light on the subsequent generations who edited and interacted with the text and bringing to life the controversies surrounding later revisions. In addition, the book examines the reception of the KJV, showing how its popularity has shifted through time and territory, ranging from adulation to deprecation and attracting the attention of a wide variety of adherents. Since the KJV is more widely read in America today than in any other country, the book pays particular attention to the history of the KJV in the United States. Finally, the volume includes appendices that contain short biographies of the translators and a guide to the 74-page preliminaries of the 1611 edition.

This groundbreaking book breaks with established canons and resists some of the stereotypes of feminist biblical studies. A wide range of contributors—from the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, East Africa, South Africa, Argentina, Israel, Hong Kong, the US, the UK, and Iran—showcase new methodological and theoretical movements such as feminist materialisms; intersectionality; postidentitarian ?nomadic? politics; gender archaeology; lived religion; and theories of the human and the posthuman. They engage a range of social and political issues, including migration and xenophobia; divorce and family law; abortion; ?pinkwashing?; the neoliberal university; the second amendment; AIDS and sexual trafficking; Tianamen Square and 9/11; and the politics of ?the veil?. Foundational figures in feminist biblical studies work alongside new voices and contributors from a range of disciplines in conversations with the Bible that go well beyond the expected canon-within-the-canon assumed to be of interest to feminist biblical scholars. Moving beyond the limits of a text-orientated model of reading, they look at how biblical texts were actualized in the lives of religious revolutionaries, such as Joanna Southcott and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In important interventions—made all the more urgent in the context of the Trump presidency and Brexit—they make biblical traditions speak to gun legislation, immigration, the politics of abortion, and Roe v. Wade.