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Reworking the Bible is a substantial account of the reception history of fourteen biblical stories-those of Eden, the Flood, Jacob and Esau, Moses and the Exodus, Joshua and Rahab, Samson, Nebuchadnezzar, Susanna, Esther, Jesus Christ, Salome, Lazarus, the Prodigal Son and the Descent into Hell. Full of fascinating detail of the afterlives of these biblical narratives, the book also offers a sophisticated theoretical analysis of the processes of reworking: major hypertexts from The Dream of the Rood to Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood come under the spotlight of the theories of Genette about rewriting and of Bakhtin about chronotopes and polyphony. In the final chapter, the material i...
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Written by a scholar of rhetoric, Persuading God demonstrates that the first-person psalms that make up over a third of the Book of Psalms were designed not simply to express the feelings of individual Israelites but to persuade God to act. The book casts a new light on the roles of all the players in the situations in which the psalms were composed and performed: the person represented by the speaker on whose particular troubles the psalm is based, the spectators and opponents who are sometimes addressed directly by the speaker, the poet-musicians who craft the speaker's case and occasionally undermine it, and, most of all, God as the direct addressee whose presumed openness to persuasion a...
The twentieth century has been described, not without justification, as the 'Century of Genocide'. Whole groups of people have been targeted for slaughter because of their ethnicity or religion, from Armenia to Rwanda. Against this background, how are we to understand the command in Deuteronomy to 'not leave alive anything that breathes' of the Canaanite nations present in the Promised Land (Deut 20.17-18)? In this penetrating study, Milner begins by asking if this passage has been used to justify genocidal violence (it has, but not nearly as much as some have thought). He then considers how such texts have been understood, demonstrating that most readers have taken the passage allegorically...
This remarkable new book, the first of its kind, is an analysis of a phenomenon that biblical scholars have scarcely taken notice of, much less studied critically-the use of the Bible in advertising. Focussing on the figure of Eve, Admen and Eve shows how she has become the ultimate postfeminist icon of female sexual and consumer power, promoting self-regarding individual choice over collective political action for today's 'I'm not a feminist but ...' generation. Contemporary advertising, Edwards shows, deploys a collage of images simultaneously reflecting and dictating the ideals and ideologies that inform much of Western culture. Exploiting the cultural mythology that surrounds Eve, advert...
Working from the conviction that Genesis can be read as a coherent whole, this commentary foregrounds the sophistication of Hebrew narrative art, in particular its depiction of plot and character, and the interpretative possibilities raised by its intertextuality. Apparently simple and independent episodes emerge as complex and interconnected, constantly challenging readers to readjust their assessments of characters and expectations of plot development. Approaching the text predominantly from a 'first-time' reader's perspective, the narrative's surprises, ironies and innovations are underscored.
Crisler suggests that the interplay between the laments crafted by Luke and laments from Israel's Scriptures produce highly suggestive Christological points of resonance. Crisler considers how echoes of lament shape our understanding of Lukan Christology and make a contribution to ongoing debates about earliest Christology.
Most characters in the Bible are men, yet they are hardly analysed as such. Masculinity and the Bible provides the first comprehensive survey of approaches that remedy this situation. These are studies that utilize insights from the field of masculinity studies to further biblical studies. The volume offers a representative overview of both fields and presents a new exegesis of a well-known biblical text (Mark 6) to show how this approach leads to new insights. By presenting the field of masculinity studies, the volume performs a service for those working in biblical studies and related disciplines, but have not explored this approach yet. At the same time, the volume shows, by surveying the past two decades of publications in the field, what results have been achieved so far and where open questions remain. In the exegesis of Mark 6, it becomes clear that one of these challenges, the often very specific and intersectional character of masculinity, can be addressed successfully when consciously combining approaches such as narrative and ritual analyses.