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This is the fourth of five chapters on the text of the Old Testament, and focuses on the Hebrew prose narrative of the Old Testament. It starts by discussing the various definitions of the term narrative (as a mode of discourse; as a vehicle of narrative communication; as definable text) and the difficulties of determining which particular definable biblical texts are narrative texts, and notes that the attempt by the critic–reader to define so simple a thing as the narrative text is fraught with issues that have as much to do with the reader as with the text. The author notes that the title of the chapter and its placement within the ‘text’ part of the division of the book into parts on readers, text, and authors, might suggest a singular objective entity (the text) produced by authors, read by readers, and conceptually separable from both, but that the reality is more complicated. The Old Testament is described as a fuzzy‐edged concept, not a fixed object, and its text not as one but as beyond number; furthermore, the concept is ideologically loaded (i.e. reader‐oriented) and much of the essay is quite specifically not about the (Christian) Old Testament (which is why the hybrid term Hebrew Bible has been used). It is the author's understanding that there is no such thing as the text of the Old Testament apart from its readers and it is in this context that he gives an account (which he labels as partial) of biblical narrative and literary criticism over the past three decades; this is presented as an account not of what is in the biblical narratives, but of what some readers have claimed to find in these texts, and how they have gone about finding it.

Job is an exemplar of an innocent person who suffers involuntarily. This chapter focuses on the biblical story of Job and gives a detailed philosophical examination of many parts of the story. Its aim is to illuminate the picture the story gives us of God's reasons for allowing Job's suffering, when we are attuned to the second-person character of the narrative, in all its complexity. The nested stories the book contains regarding relations between creatures and God present God's providence operating in a fractal way, to deal with each of God's creatures as an end in himself, even while interweaving all the individual stories into one larger narrative.

This chapter discusses Zora Neale Hurston's 1939 novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, characterizing the novel as a complex, sophisticated work influenced by biblical narrative, African‐American religion, and the social sciences. In the light of Hurston's near iconic status in some feminist circles, the importance of her identity as an African‐American woman for her representation of the exodus is considered. Hurston's anthropological training with Franz Boas, and consequent familiarity with the concept of cultural relativism, is also shown to be formative of her presentation of the biblical story as at once both unique and relative, the myth by which Americans live(d).

In this early‐seventeenth‐century collection of travel writings we can see tensions between Religion as Christian Truth on the one hand, and the beginnings of a generic concept of religions matched by an ambiguously modern secular ethnographic style on the other. This work of “pilgrimage” reflects the competition for trade and the processes of colonization, alongside the development of new ways of classifying the world and its contents. Purchas frames his whole work in Biblical terms, drawing explicitly on the expulsion of Adam and Eve, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel as explanatory concepts for the bewildering variety of newly discovered forms of human life. Yet an ironic and quite frequent application of “religions” to “superstitions” at times suggests an early if ambiguous generic modern usage, as if he is adopting a secular high ground. The world is most certainly “profane” in the sense of “fallen”; yet at the same time Purchas's concern with new knowledge of ships, maps, compasses, geography, as well as customs and superstitions, frequently suggests the early beginnings of something approaching modern nonreligious secularity.

This chapter investigates the interplay of cultural memory, historical realities, and narrative technique in the portrayal of Solomon and his kingdom. Of particular concern are the narratives of Solomon’s rise to power in 1 Kings 2 and his building activity in 1 Kings 9. Royal ideology and political controversy are keys to uncovering the relation between the historical Solomon and his biblical representation.

Abraham is an exemplar of a person who suffers because of what he has set his heart on. This chapter examines the problem of suffering in connection with the loss or deprivation of the desires of the heart. It concentrates on the biblical story of Abraham and gives a detailed philosophical examination of many parts of the story, but especially the part of the story involving the binding of Isaac. It argues against Kierkegaard's well-known interpretation of the story in Fear and Trembling, and suggests an alternative that emerges when the episode of the binding of Isaac is set in the whole context of Abraham's relations with the children he fathers and their mothers. So understood, the story illuminates the nature of faith as a response to the problem of suffering, and it sets a very high standard for acceptable solutions to the problem.

This chapter uses the narratives in the preceding chapters as well as the worldview of Aquinas outlined in earlier chapters to present Aquinas's theodicy. Taken in the context of the biblical narratives and encompassed in Aquinas's whole worldview but especially his account of love, Aquinas's theodicy is the heart of the defence promised at the outset of the book. On Aquinas's theodicy, God is justified in allowing the suffering of a mentally fully functional adult human person by one or the other or both of two possible benefits, where Aquinas's scale of value is the measure of the benefits. For a person whose suffering is entirely involuntary, suffering is defeated in virtue of its contributing to warding off a greater harm for her. For a person whose suffering is involuntary only in a certain respect, suffering is defeated in virtue of its contributing to providing a greater good for her. The chapter concludes with an argument that Aquinas's theodicy is incomplete as it stands and in need of further development.

This chapter covers a range of biblical narratives and looks particularly at the challenges faced by narrators when engaging with the figure of John. The first section considers narratives based on the Gospels, paying particular attention to Der saelden hort, a verse romance drawing partly on the tradition that John and Mary Magdalene were to have been married at the wedding in Cana. It is argued that the narrator's perspective on the figure of John provides a key to understanding this work's almost experimental deployment of different narrative styles (veering from mystical/ascetic to courtly) and the narrator's stated ambition of out-performing the classical courtly authors of the past. The chapter also argues that narrators of texts which recount the contents of the Apocalypse consistently seek to usurp the authority of John's narrative voice and to appropriate to themselves his visionary experiences.

This chapter begins with a significant moral problem raised by the Book of Joshua: Is there any way to justify the Israelites seizing of the land of another people (in this instance the Canaanites)? This chapter discusses some of the historical issues involved (archeology shows that the conquest as described did not happen) but spend most of my time with the texts themselves. This chapter begins by articulating the unique relationship Israel has to her land. The chapter then turns to the way in which Genesis 15 sets the canonical framework for reading the Book of Joshua. In brief, God is justified in evicting the Canaanites because of their sinful behavior that has gone on for centuries. God will use the same moral principles to judge Israel later in the biblical narrative.

This introductory chapter discusses the evidence for Prudentius' career against the background of the increasingly Christianized Roman empire of the late fourth and early fifth centuries ad. The biographical evidence of the Praefatio is evaluated. Prudentius' poetic output is surveyed, as well as genre, themes, literary influences, symbolism, uses of biblical narrative, metre, and poetics in the Cathemerinon. There are sections on the textual tradition of the poems, and on editions and modern critical studies, as well as on the verse translation provided.

This chapter finishes the defence of the defence that is the object of the book by considering possible objections to the developed Thomistic theodicy and the evidence by which it can be supported. In particular, it discusses some results from psychological research on human reactions to trauma, which can include adversarial growth or post-traumatic growth. With this defence of the defence, Aquinas's theodicy, developed in the context of biblical narratives and examined using the methodology argued for in the first section of the book, is complete as a defence against the argument from evil.

Samson is an exemplar of a person who suffers greatly but whose suffering stems from his own wrongdoing. This chapter examines the problem of suffering as regards not the victims of human evil but as regards the perpetrators of it, whose own lives are wrecked in consequence of the evil they do. It concentrates on the biblical story of Samson and gives a detailed philosophical examination of many parts of the story. In the process, the chapter also explores Milton's understanding of the story in his Samson Agonistes, as well as Sophocles's portrayal of an analogous case in his Oedipus at Colonus. The chapter shows that in the story what redeems Samson's suffering for him is the role of his suffering in bringing him into relationship with God.

According to Spinoza, the Dutch Reformed Church and other confessions defend doctrines that serve to promote superstition and obstruct a proper understanding of the relation between religion and philosophy. Its views about three topics—ceremonies, biblical narratives and miracles—are particularly damaging, and Spinoza sets out to show how they inhibit the growth of philosophical understanding. This chapter examines the philosophical grounds on which he argues that ceremonies are inessential to true religion. It explores his claim that narratives such as those in Scripture are designed to teach the divine law in an imaginative form and encourage devotion in ordinary people. It explicates his contentions that there are no miracles in the sense of interruptions of the natural order. True religion, Spinoza concludes, can dispense with ceremonies and should modify its conception of miracles, despite the contrary views of established religions.

In this chapter, a detailed depiction is offered of the development of specific biblical figures and narratives in the Qur’an. Each figure reflects the Qur’anic reframing of the role of prophecy in general and the biblical figuration of prophecy and Prophets in specific. The depictions of these figures are set against the background of their evidence in the preceding Late Antique religious and literary traditions, including Alexander legends, Christian homilies, and the Jewish accounts of Josephus.

The evaluation of the felix culpa view requires detail about the nature of God in order to consider what fulfills the image of God in a human being. On Christian doctrine, God is love; and the love of God is most manifest in Christ’s passion. The story of the passion of Christ thus needs to be examined next. But it is presented in a biblical story, and there are serious methodological questions about the way in which a biblical story can be used as evidence in philosophical theology. How is the text of the story of Christ’s passion to be determined? How does any narrative transmit knowledge? And what counts as veridicality in a narrative?

This chapter focuses on the process of communal formation in the middle and late Meccan time and the way the Qur’an reflects this process. This involves the construction of a “text world” whereby the stories of “God’s people” are told in relation to their predecessors among the earlier religious communities of the Jews and the Christians, as well as the emergence of anti-pagan polemic as a major theme in the proclamation. It also involves the alteration of existing mythic narrative paradigms and the emergence of new homiletic instruments, namely, the usage of parables and the distinctive Qur’anic simile or “likeness,” the mathal.