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This volume explores the aesthetic dimensions of biblical poetry, offering close readings of poems across the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Composed of essays by fifteen leading scholars of biblical poetry, it offers creative and insightful close readings of poems from across the canon of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (Psalms, wisdom poetry, Song of Songs, prophecy, and poetry in biblical narrative). The essays build on recent advances in our understanding of biblical poetry and engage a variety of theoretical perspectives and current trends in the study of literature. They demonstrate the rewards of careful attention to textual detail, and they provide models of the practice of close reading for students, scholars, and general readers. They also highlight the rich aesthetic value of the biblical poetic corpus and offer reflection on the nature of poetry itself as a meaningful and enduring form of art.
“My Lord! There is no one like you among the gods!” Attempting to describe the nature of God often prompts the exclamation of the psalmist—that God is unlike anyone or anything else. And yet the claim is not simply the overflow of an adoring heart: God’s incomparability is a truth lodged deep within Christian Scripture. In The Incomparable God, Old Testament scholar Brent Strawn offers thoughtful insight into this theological mystery. This volume collects eighteen of Strawn’s most provocative essays on the nature of God, several of which are published for the first time here. Strawn covers the following topics: • the complex portrayal of God in Genesis • God’s mercy in Exodus • poetic description of God in the Psalms • the Trinity in both testaments • pedagogy of the Old Testament • integration of faith and scholarship Encompassing close readings of Scripture, biblical-theological argument, and considerations of praxis, The Incomparable God is essential reading for Old Testament scholars and students.
This book shows that Isaiah 1-39 contains one of the most remarkable and provocative poetic voices in the Hebrew Bible, and that attention to its poetic style makes a significant difference to the interpretation of the text.
Although disability imagery is ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible, characters with disabilities are not. The presence of the former does not guarantee the presence of the later. While interpreters explain away disabilities in specific characters, they celebrate the rhetorical contributions that disability imagery makes to the literary artistry of biblical prose and poetry, often as a trope to describe the suffering or struggles of a presumably nondisabled person or community. This situation contributes to the appearance (or illusion) of a Hebrew Bible that uses disability as a rich literary trope while disavowing the presence of figures or characters with disabilities. Isaiah 53 provides a wonde...
Isaiah is one of the longest and strangest of the books of the Hebrew Bible, with an immense influence on the histories of Judaism and Christianity. Francis Landy's book concerns the response of poetry to catastrophe, the collapse of a civilization with all its associated structures of power and meaning.
This concise commentary on the Prophets, excerpted from the Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha, engages readers in the work of biblical interpretation. Contributors from a rich diversity of perspectives connect historical-critical analysis with sensitivity to current theological, cultural, and interpretive issues. Each chapter (Isaiah through Malachi) includes an introduction and commentary based on three lenses: ancient context, the interpretative tradition, and contemporary questions and challenges. The Prophets introduces fresh perspectives and draws students, preachers, and interested readers into the challenging work of interpretation.
Tina M. Sherman offers a first-of-its-kind, detailed analysis of prophetic passages that depict people as plants—from grasses and grains to fruit trees and grapevines—examining how the biblical authors exploited these metaphors to portray the condemnation and punishment of Israel and Judah in terms of the everyday work of crop farming and plant husbandry. Additionally, she explores how the prophetic authors employed plant imagery to construct national identities that emphasize the people’s collective responsibility for the kingdoms’ fate. Plant Metaphors in Prophetic Condemnations of Israel and Judah demonstrates the usefulness of combining conceptual metaphor theory with aspects of frame semantics in the analysis of patterns of thought and expression in biblical metaphor.
With the twelve-volume series Feasting on the Word, Westminster John Knox Press offers one of the most extensive and well-respected resources for preaching on the market today. When complete, the twelve volumes will cover all of the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with moveable occasions. The page layout is truly unique. For each lectionary text, preachers will find brief essaysÂ--one each on the exegetical, theological, pastoral, and homiletical challenges of the text. Each volume will also contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers may make use of its contents. The printed volumes for Ordinary Time include the complementary stream during Year A, the complementary stream during the first half of Year B, the semicontinuous stream during the second half of Year B, and the semicontinuous stream during Year C. Beginning with the season after Pentecost in Year C, the alternate lections for Ordinary Time not in the print volumes will be available online at feastingontheword.net.
An Invitation to Biblical Poetry is an accessibly written introduction to biblical poetry that emphasizes the aesthetic dimensions of poems and their openness to varieties of context. It demonstrates the irreducible complexity of poetry as a verbal art and considers the intellectual work poems accomplish as they offer aesthetic experiences to people who read or hear them. Chapters walk the reader through some of the diverse ways biblical poems are organized through techniques of voicing, lineation, and form, and describe how the poems' figures are both culturally and historically bound and always dependent on later reception. The discussions consider examples from different texts of the Bible, including poems inset in prose narratives, prophecies, psalms, and wisdom literature. Each chapter ends with a reading of a psalm that offers an acute example of the dimension under discussion. Students and general readers are invited to richer and deeper readings of ancient poems and the subjects, problems, and convictions that occupy their imagination.