Space, Land, Territory, and the Study of the Bible


Book Description

In this brief volume, Stephen C. Russell introduces biblical scholars to the interdisciplinary study of space and its related concepts, including land and territory. He summarizes several approaches to the study of space, focussing especially on the work of Henri Lefebvre.




T&T Clark Handbook of Anthropology and the Hebrew Bible


Book Description

This handbook presents an overview of the main approaches from social and cultural anthropology to the Hebrew Bible. Since the late 19th century, biblical scholarship has addressed issues and themes related to biblical stories from a perspective which could now be considered socio-anthropological. It is however only since the 1960s that biblical scholars have started to produce readings and incorporate analytical models drawn directly from social anthropology to widen the interpretive scope of the social and historical data contained in the biblical sources. The handbook is arranged into two main thematic parts. Part 1 assesses the place of the Bible in social anthropology, examines the contribution of ethnoarchaeology to the recovery of the social world of Iron Age Palestine and offers insights from the anthropology of the Mediterranean for the interpretation of the biblical stories. Part 2 provides a series of case studies on anthropological themes arising in the Hebrew Bible. These include kinship and social organisation, death, cultural and collective memory, and ritualism. Contributors also examine how the biblical stories reveal dynamics of power and authority, gender, and honour and shame, and how socio-anthropological approaches can reveal these narratives and deepen our knowledge of the human societies and cultural context of the texts. Bringing together the expertise of scholars of the Hebrew Bible and Biblical Archaeology, this ethnographic introduction prompts new questions into our understanding of anthropology and the Bible.




Identity and Territory


Book Description

Throughout history, the relationship between Jews and their land has been a vibrant, much-debated topic within the Jewish world and in international political discourse. Identity and Territory explores how ancient conceptions of Israel—of both the land itself and its shifting frontiers and borders—have played a decisive role in forming national and religious identities across the millennia. Through the works of Second Temple period Jews and rabbinic literature, Eyal Ben-Eliyahu examines the role of territorial status, boundaries, mental maps, and holy sites, drawing comparisons to popular Jewish and Christian perceptions of space. Showing how space defines nationhood and how Jewish identity influences perceptions of space, Ben-Eliyahu uncovers varied understandings of the land that resonate with contemporary views of the relationship between territory and ideology.




The Place of God at the Bookends of the Bible


Book Description

What if everything in the Bible has a larger outer context than is usually accounted for? Missional and biblical theologies suggest that the Bible presents a grand story like a play with multiple acts. The acts typically include creation, fall, redemption, and finally restoration. But what if the whole story itself occurs in another larger setting, occurring within a mission running in the background throughout the whole Bible? How might this aid our research, reading, and application? And why is this being proposed now? This book explores these questions. The larger context is the production of the place of God—a home and homeland wherein God, with his people, dwell on earth. Since place is underdeveloped in biblical studies, the book presents a new method for interpreting place. Then the book lays out the case that a grand mission to produce the place of God becomes the outer context for the whole Bible. Finally, the book defends this proposal with an in-depth placial commentary of the bookends of the Bible, since these bookends provide keys to unlock this message, thereby inviting further study on the rest of the Bible and on the implications for this transformative perspective.




The State of Old Testament Studies


Book Description

This book surveys the current landscape of Old Testament studies, offering readers a concise guide to contemporary academic discussions. Bringing together a diverse group of experts, it provides an informed introduction to the many fields of Old Testament research by recognized scholars, presents basic questions in each subfield, surveys the primary methods of answering these questions, engages prominent solutions, and evaluates relevant and up-to-date resources. It is an extensive guide to current research and an ideal supplemental textbook for a variety of courses on the Old Testament. Contributors include Samuel Boyd, Mark Brett, Aubrey Buster, M. Daniel Carroll R., Stephen Chapman, Stephen L. Cook, Matthew Coomber, Katherine Davis, Katharine Dell, Stephen Dempster, Christopher J. Fresch, Diedre Fulton, Rachelle Gilmour, Jamie Grant, H. H. Hardy II, Ralph Hawkins, Richard S. Hess, John W. Hilber, Brad E. Kelle, Will Kynes, David Lamb, Bo Lim, Drew Longacre, Tremper Longman III, Sandra Richter, Ken Ristau, Jordan Ryan, Cynthia Shafer-Elliott, Jason M. Silverman, Brent A. Strawn, C. A. Strine, Heath Thomas, Daniel Timmer, and Eric J. Tully.




The Bible and Feminism


Book Description

This groundbreaking book breaks with established canons and resists some of the stereotypes of feminist biblical studies. It features a wide range of contributors who showcase new methodological and theoretical movements such as feminist materialisms, intersectionality, postidentitarian 'nomadic' politics, gender archaeology, and lived religion, and theories of the human and the posthuman. The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field engages a range of social and political issues, including migration and xenophobia, divorce and family law, abortion, 'pinkwashing', the neoliberal university, the second amendment, AIDS and sexual trafficking, and the politics of 'the veil'. Foundational figures in feminist biblical studies work alongside new voices and contributors from a multitude of disciplines in conversations with the Bible that go well beyond the expected canon-within-the-canon assumed to be of interest to feminist biblical scholars. Moving beyond the limits of a text-orientated model of reading, this collection looks at how biblical texts were actualized in the lives of religious revolutionaries, such as Joanna Southcott or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It charts the politics of the Pauline veil in the self-understanding of Europe and reads the 'genealogical halls' in the book of Chronicles alongside acts of commemoration and forgetting in 9/11 and Tiananmen Square.




Israel and Judah Redefined


Book Description

In Israel and Judah Redefined, C. L. Crouch uses trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and social-scientific research on migration to analyse the impact of mass displacements and imperial power on Israelite and Judahite identity in the sixth century BCE. Crouch argues that the trauma of deportation affected Israelite identity differently depending on resettlement context. Deportees resettled in rural Babylonia took an isolationist approach to Israelite identity, whereas deportees resettled in urban contexts took a more integrationist approach. Crouch also emphasises the impact of mass displacement on identity concerns in the homeland, demonstrating that displacement and the experience of Babylonian imperial rule together facilitated major developments in Judahite identity. The diverse experiences of this period produced bitter conflict between Israelites and Judahites, as well as diverse attempts to resolve this conflict. Inspired by studies of forced migration and by postcolonial analyses of imperial domination, Crouch's book highlights the crucial contribution of this era to the story of Israel and Judah.




Pillars in the History of Biblical Interpretation, Volume 3


Book Description

This third volume, like its predecessors, adds to the growing body of literature concerned with the history of biblical interpretation. With eighteen essays on nineteen biblical interpreters, volume 3 expands the scope of scholars, both traditional and modern, covered in this now multivolume series. Each chapter provides a biographical sketch of its respective scholar(s), an overview of their major contributions to the field, explanations of their theoretical and methodological approaches to interpretation, and evaluations and applications of their methods. By focusing on the contexts in which these scholars lived and worked, these essays show what defining features qualify these scholars as “pillars” in the history of biblical interpretation. While identifying a scholar as a “pillar” is somewhat subjective, this volume defines a pillar as one who has made a distinctive contribution by using and exemplifying a clear method that has pushed the discipline forward, at least within a given context and time period. This volume is ideal for any class on the history of biblical interpretation and for those who want a greater understanding of how the field of biblical studies has developed and how certain interpreters have played a formative role in that development.




Joshua 13-24


Book Description

The second installment of Thomas B. Dozeman's authoritative commentary on the book of Joshua Following the Pentateuch in the traditional canon, the book of Joshua chronicles the conquest of the Canaanite nations, the distribution of the newly acquired land to the twelve tribes of Israel, and Joshua's death at the conclusion of the covenant ceremony at Shechem. The second half of the book traces the development of a burgeoning pan-Israelite identity as the tribes receive territorial assignments, form a political league, and unite in the worship of Yahweh, the God of Israel. In the second volume of his two-volume commentary on the book of Joshua, Thomas B. Dozeman provides an overview of critical debates surrounding the composition of the book, its function in relationship to the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets, and the role of geography in ancient literature. He shows how the book of Joshua originated as an independent Samarian myth of tribal conquest and land distribution, and outlines how it evolved into its role as an Israelite origin story. Complete with a thorough introduction and a new translation of these twelve chapters, this volume explores how the book of Joshua employs the twin themes of genealogy and geography to underscore both unity and difference among the tribes, conveying ancient Israelite beliefs about ownership, identity, and power.




A Poetics of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism


Book Description

Telling in current biblical postcolonial discourse that draws insights from the works of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and postcolonial theorists is the missing contribution of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the architect of Négritude. If mentioned at all, Senghor is often read through conclusions drawn by his critics or dismissed altogether as irrelevant to postcolonialism. Restored to its rightful place, Senghorian Negritude is a postcolonial lens for reading Scripture and other faith traditions with a view to reposition, conscientize, liberate, and rehabilitate the conquered, and enable them to reclaim their faith traditions and practices that once directed a mutual relationship between God, human, and nature—a delicate symbiosis before the French colonial advent in West Africa. A keen eye for cross-cultural analysis and contextualization enriched this volume with an intriguing reading of scripture, Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman texts in conversation with other faith traditions, particularly Senegalese Diola Religion. As a Poetics of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, Negritude is an optic through which people of faith may look around themselves, critically reread their sacred texts, reassess their vocation, and practice mutuality with God and nature on the heels of chilling climate change. Enshrined in this innovative argument is a call for introspection and challenge for people of faith to assume their vocation—human participatory agency.