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This practical, "how-to" literary introduction to Isaiah as a poem is based upon the English text and focuses upon parallelism, figurative language, and the use of imagery.
This book joins the notion that Second Isaiah is a poetic text with the task of interpreting it as a unified whole. In so doing, it makes methodological suggestions for applying a lyric poetic approach to biblical texts. The practical application of this approach shows Second Isaiah to be characterized by tension, conflict, and juxtaposition. The lyric model shows these conflicts, such as the presence of searing indictments in the ‘book of comfort,’ to be integral elements of the mode by which Second Isaiah addresses its audience. This book highlights the tonalities of the divine voice as central to Second Isaiah’s particularly poetic mode of cohesion and essential to the conflicted comfort Second Isaiah offers its reader.
Much of the drama, theological paradox, and interpretive interest in the Book of Samuel derives from instances of God's violence in the story. The beginnings of Israel's monarchy are interwoven with God's violent rejection of the houses of Eli and of Saul, deaths connected to the Ark of the Covenant, and the outworking of divine retribution after David's violent appropriation of Bathsheba as his wife. Whilst divine violence may act as a deterrent for violent transgression, it can also be used as a model or justification for human violence, whether in the early monarchic rule of Ancient Israel, or in crises of our contemporary age. In Divine Violence in the Book of Samuel, Rachelle Gilmour ex...
This book investigates the relationship between cult and ethics in the book of Isaiah. Part I attempts to revise some of the common Old Testament views on prophets and cult. After inspecting cultic concepts such as sacrifice, purity and impurity, holiness, and the Promised Land, it suggests that the priestly and prophetic understandings of the role of the Ancient Israelite cult were essentially the same. This general proposition is then tested on the book of Isaiah in Part II: each chapter there analyses the key passage on cult and ethics in the three main parts of the book, namely, Isa 1:10–17; 43:22–28; and 58:1–14 and concludes that, even though the role of cult and ethics in each p...
How does a Christian render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's? This book is the result of the Bingham Colloquium of 2007 that brought scholars from across North America to examine the New Testament's response to the empires of God and Caesar. Two chapters lay the foundation for that response in the Old Testament's concept of empire, and six others address the response to the notion of empire, both human and divine, in the various authors of the New Testament. A final chapter investigates how the church fathers regarded the matter. The essays display various methods and positions; together, however, they offer a representative sample of the current state of study of the notion of empire in the New Testament.
Traditionally, biblical studies has been an academic discipline with roots deeply embedded in historical inquiries about the genesis of texts. It should come as no surprise that a significant amount of scholarly attention has been on the formation of the "book" of Isaiah, especially since the compelling imagination of Isaiah comprises an anthology of prophetic voices, each with its own historical context. At the same time, it is well known that the chasteness of ancient texts discloses precious little specific information to aid with this reconstructive task. How Isaiah Became an Author tackles this historical irony head-on. David Davage begins by describing two contrasting ways authorship w...
The Wisdom Background and Parabolic Implications of Isaiah 6:9-10 in the Synoptics seeks to understand the divine act of fattening in Isaiah 6:9-10 and how it shapes one's understanding of parables in the Synoptic Gospels. The author approaches the topic from within a wisdom matrix and lays an historical-exegetical foundation for understanding these and other critical passages in the New Testament. Readers will follow the Isaian text through varied traditions revealing a marvelous unity in terms of the divine action and the human condition. College and seminary courses focusing on hermeneutics, wisdom outside the wisdom corpus, and the Synoptic Gospels will find this book innovative, challenging, and provocative.
Through careful reading of the stories at the end of Judges and in 1 Samuel, Reconciling Violence and Kingship demonstrates that events surrounding Saul have significance independent of David and preceding David's kingship. Michelson argues that Saul's kingship is uniquely important in establishing the person of the king, who was inaugurated in order to minimize violence.
Provides theological rationale for Paul's Old Testament reading that moves beyond pigeon-holing Paul either into his religious-historical situation or into modern conventions about the sensus literalis.
Isaiah's servant songs reveal a true and better Adam In Charged with the Glory of God, Caroline Batchelder provides a synchronic, theological, and canonical reading of the four Servant Songs in Isaiah (42:1–9; 49:1–13; 50:3–11; 52:13–53:12), showing how they relate to one another and the message of the prophetic book. Reading Isaiah as a compositional unity in conversation with other texts such as Genesis results in a coherent presentation of the mysterious servant. The polemic against idolatry reveals rebellious Israel to be false imagers of God. In contrast, Isaiah's servant is an ideal embodiment of Yahweh's image and likeness. Thus, the servant is a paradigm for those who wish to recapture and realize God's good creation purposes for all humanity. The servant poems are not only a call to reorient oneself as a servant towards God and his creation, but also a map and means for doing so. In this study, Batchelder offers fresh insights from Isaiah for understanding God's true image and its idolatrous counterfeits.