The Oxford Handbook of the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible PDF Download

Author: Brad E. Kelle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190074116
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 610

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible is a collection of essays that provide resources for the interpretation of the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. The volume is not exhaustive in its coverage, but examines interpretive aspects of these books that are deemed essential for interpretation or that are representative of significant trends in present and future scholarship. The individual essays are united by their focus on two guiding questions: (1) What does this topic have to do with the Old Testament Historical Books? and (2) How does this topic help readers better interpret the Old Testament Historical Books? Each essay critically surveys prior scholarship before presenting current and prospective approaches. Taking into account the ongoing debates concerning the relationship between the Old Testament texts and historical events in the ancient world, data from Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian culture and history are used to provide a larger context for the content of the Historical Books. Essays consider specific issues related to Israelite/Judean history (settlement, state formation, monarchy, forced migration, and return) as they relate to the interpretation of the Historical Books. This volume also explores the specific themes, concepts, and content that are most essential for interpreting these books. In light of the diverse material included in this section of the Old Testament, the Handbook further examines interpretive strategies that employ various redactional, synthetic, and theory-based approaches. Beyond the Old Testament proper, subsequent texts, traditions, and cultures often received and interpreted the material in the Historical Books, and so the volume concludes by investigating the literary, social, and theological aspects of that reception.

Author: Donn Morgan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190900520
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
This Oxford Handbook is a serious resource for the study of the literature of the Writings (Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Esther, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Ezra-Nehemiah, Chronicles, Daniel) of the Hebrew Bible, including its context and its scriptural/canonical shape and reception. A first section provides an overview of the post-exilic period in which much of the Writings was written, focusing on history, archeology, and the development of major literary traditions, all of which provide the context for understanding and interpreting this literature. A second section contains creative studies of the books in the Writings, focusing on structure, purpose, and distinctive characteristics of this very diverse literature. A third section looks at the Writings from larger and longer perspectives including the ancient Near East, developing Judaism and Christianity, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, music and the arts, and its canonization and reception by Judaism and Christianity. This handbook has a focus on the special character and shape of the Writings as scripture and canon, including the recurring issues of diversity and difference, dates of canonization, its special relationship to other scripture and canon (Torah, Prophets, New Testament), and its interpretation in religious and non-religious communities.

Author: Samuel E. Balentine
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190222115
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 589

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Book Description
"The conceit in the title of this volume is that ritual, however expansively it may be defined, is ineluctably tethered to religion and worship. It has a primal connection to the idea that a transcendent order - numinous and mysterious, supranatural and elusive, divine and wholly other - gives meaning and purpose to life. The construction of rites and rituals enables humans to conceive and apprehend this transcendent order, to symbolize it and interact with it, to postulate its truths in the face of contradicting realities and to repair them when they have been breached or diminished. The focus of this Handbook is on ritual and worship from the perspective of biblical studies, particularly on the Hebrew Bible and its ancient Near Eastern antecedents. Within this context, attention will be given to the development of ideas in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinking, but only insofar as they connect with or extend the trajectory of biblical precedents. The volume reflects a wide range of analytical approaches to ancient texts, inscriptions, iconography, and ritual artifacts. It examines the social history and cultural knowledge encoded in rituals, and explores the way rituals shape and are shaped by politics, economics, ethical imperatives, and religion itself. Toward this end, the volume is organized into six major sections: Historical Contexts, Interpretive Approaches, Ritual Elements (participants, places, times, objects, practices), Underlying Cultural and Theological Perspectives, History of Interpretation, Social-Cultural Functions, and Theology and Theological Heritage"--

Author: Paul C. Gutjahr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190258845
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
Early Americans have long been considered A People of the Book Because the nickname was coined primarily to invoke close associations between Americans and the Bible, it is easy to overlook the central fact that it was a book-not a geographic location, a monarch, or even a shared language-that has served as a cornerstone in countless investigations into the formation and fragmentation of early American culture. Few books can lay claim to such powers of civilization-altering influence. Among those which can are sacred books, and for Americans principal among such books stands the Bible. This Handbook is designed to address a noticeable void in resources focused on analyzing the Bible in America in various historical moments and in relationship to specific institutions and cultural expressions. It takes seriously the fact that the Bible is both a physical object that has exercised considerable totemic power, as well as a text with a powerful intellectual design that has inspired everything from national religious and educational practices to a wide spectrum of artistic endeavors to our nation's politics and foreign policy. This Handbook brings together a number of established scholars, as well as younger scholars on the rise, to provide a scholarly overview--rich with bibliographic resources--to those interested in the Bible's role in American cultural formation.

Author: Martin Goodman
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks Online
ISBN: 9780199280322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1060

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies reflects the current state of scholarship in the field as analyzed by an international team of experts in the different and varied areas represented within contemporary Jewish Studies. Unlike recent attempts to encapsulate the current state of Jewish Studies, the Oxford Handbook is more than a mere compendium of agreed facts; rather, it is an exhaustive survey of current interests and directions in the field.

Author: J. W. Rogerson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191568996
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 915

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbooks series is a major new initiative in academic publishing. Each volume offers an authoritative and up-to-date survey of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned essays from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates. Biblical studies is a highly technical and diverse field. Study of the Bible demands expertise in fields ranging from Archaeology, Egyptology, Assyriology, and Linguistics through textual, historical, and sociological studies to Literary Theory, Feminism, Philosophy, and Theology, to name only some. This authoritative and compelling guide to the discipline will, therefore, be an invaluable reference work for all students and academics who want to explore more fully essential topics in Biblical studies.

Author: Danna Nolan Fewell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199967725
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
Comprised of contributions from scholars across the globe, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative is a state-of-the-art anthology, offering critical treatments of both the Bible's narratives and topics related to the Bible's narrative constructions. The Handbook covers the Bible's narrative literature, from Genesis to Revelation, providing concise overviews of literary-critical scholarship as well as innovative readings of individual narratives informed by a variety of methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks. The volume as a whole combines literary sensitivities with the traditional historical and sociological questions of biblical criticism and puts biblical studies into intentional conversation with other disciplines in the humanities. It reframes biblical literature in a way that highlights its aesthetic characteristics, its ethical and religious appeal, its organic qualities as communal literature, its witness to various forms of social and political negotiation, and its uncanny power to affect readers and hearers across disparate time-frames and global communities.

Author: Julia M. O'Brien
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190673214
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the Minor Prophets provides a clear and engaging one-volume guide to the major interpretative questions currently engaging scholars of the twelve Minor Prophets by collecting 40 essays by both established and emerging scholars who explore a wide range of methodological perspectives. Divided into four sections, the first group of essays is devoted to historical studies which consider the manuscript evidence for these books and overview debates about how, when, and by whom they were composed. Essays dealing with literary explorations consider the genres and rhetorical style of the material, key themes, and intertextual connections with other sections of the Jewish and Christian canons. A large section on the history of interpretation traces the ways in which past and present confessional communities, scholars, and artists have understood the Minor Prophets. In the final section, essays on individual books of the twelve Minor Prophets explore the structure, themes, and contested issues of each book.

Author: Carolyn Sharp
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199859566
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 726

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Book Description
The Latter Prophets--Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Book of the Twelve--comprise a fascinating collection of prophetic oracles, narratives, and vision reports from ancient Israel and Judah. Spanning centuries and showing evidence of compositional growth and editorial elaboration over time, these prophetic books offer an unparalleled view into the cultural norms, theological convictions, and political disputes of Israelite communities caught in the maelstrom of militarized conflicts with the empires of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia. Instructive for scholar and student alike, The Oxford Handbook of the Prophets features wide-ranging discussion of ancient Near Eastern social and cultic contexts; exploration of focused topics such as the persona of the prophet and the problem of violence in prophetic rhetoric; sophisticated historical and literary analysis of key prophetic texts; issues in reception history, from these texts' earliest reinterpretations at Qumran to Christian appropriations in contemporary homiletics; feminist, materialist, and postcolonial readings engaging the insights of influential contemporary theorists; and more. The diversity of interpretive approaches, clarity of presentation, and breadth of expertise represented here will make this Handbook indispensable for research and teaching on the Latter Prophets.

Author: Michael Lieb
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019164918X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 742

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Book Description
In recent decades, reception history has become an increasingly important and controversial topic of discussion in biblical studies. Rather than attempting to recover the original meaning of biblical texts, reception history focuses on exploring the history of interpretation. In doing so it locates the dominant historical-critical scholarly paradigm within the history of interpretation, rather than over and above it. At the same time, the breadth of material and hermeneutical issues that reception history engages with questions any narrow understanding of the history of the Bible and its effects on faith communities. The challenge that reception history faces is to explore tradition without either reducing its meaning to what faith communities think is important, or merely offering anthologies of interesting historical interpretations. This major new handbook addresses these matters by presenting reception history as an enterprise (not a method) that questions and understands tradition afresh. The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible consciously allows for the interplay of the traditional and the new through a two-part structure. Part I comprises a set of essays surveying the outline, form, and content of twelve key biblical books that have been influential in the history of interpretation. Part II offers a series of in-depth case studies of the interpretation of particular key biblical passages or books with due regard for the specificity of their social, cultural or aesthetic context. These case studies span two millennia of interpretation by readers with widely differing perspectives. Some are at the level of a group response (from Gnostic readings of Genesis, to Post-Holocaust Jewish interpretations of Job); others examine individual approaches to texts (such as Augustine and Pelagius on Romans, or Gandhi on the Sermon on the Mount). Several chapters examine historical moments, such as the 1860 debate over Genesis and evolution, while others look to wider themes such as non-violence or millenarianism. Further chapters study in detail the works of popular figures who have used the Bible to provide inspiration for their creativity, from Dante and Handel, to Bob Dylan and Dan Brown.