Person.indd

“In both text criticism and the comparative study of oral traditions, the following important questions have emerged: What is a word? and How are words selected? I will demonstrate that these questions can best be answered when we draw extensively from insights made in conversation analysis on how word selection works in everyday conversation and in institutional talk. That is, these questions—What is a word? and How are words selected?—are questions that require a cognitive-linguistic approach to finding answers. I contend that conversation analysis provides an excellent (if not the best) cognitive-linguistic approach to the question about word selection, because it is based on a rigorous methodology of studying naturally occurring linguistic data.”

9781628373127_cvr.indd

“Paradox lies at the heart of traditional biblical scholarship’s notion of the role of the believer and the eschatological tension. The already-not-yet status is presented as a solution but shows instability that reveals the believer’s agency.”

Wilson-Wright.indd

“The experiences of Judahites living under Saite rule, I argue, left their mark on the book of Jeremiah. I develop this argument over the course of five chapters.”

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“This project is driven by the moral sensitivity of the prophet Micah as it provides a germane and viable platform for evaluating contemporary ethical and religious issues of faith and life in the Nigerian society. The message of Micah’s prophecies underscores the fact that the literary paradigm of preserving Micah’s oracles of various forms for the benefit of later readers serves to situate the book’s relevance beyond the original community or communities of readers to transhistorical readers with similar structural socioeconomic and religious ideologies and theology of resistance against oppression.”

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“Grammatically, however, a parallelism may be defined as a linguistic unit that constitutes one sentence through two lines. Here a sentence is understood as the basic thought unit. It can be either simple, compound, or complex. However, in a parallelism it is divided into two parallel lines by scansion.”

9781628374902_cvr.indd

“This study takes the body of Jairus’s daughter—the body of a dying, deceased, and restored female—as its focus. In so doing, I pose the question: What is the significance of the body in the raising of Jairus’s daughter and how might a hearer in the first century CE have constructed meaning about this story?”

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“The essays in this volume present my efforts to develop Jewish biblical theology in relation to methodological advances in biblical exegesis in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.”

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“I try to see and feel how the nonhumans are hissing at, crawling through, clawing back, and pollinating the pages of the Gospel of Mark.”

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“The present collection stands upon the form-critical work that preceded it, although these essays manifest a wide range of approaches to the text beyond form criticism. Furthermore, the present collection distinguishes itself by focusing on how the reading community interprets the dream or vision in question. This important hermeneutic has not been explored previously in any systematic way. The reading community is central because its construal of the dream or vision plays an integral role in establishing the authority of the text. The question is not simply what an image means, but what is at stake—and for whom—in its interpretation. There are complex hermeneutics in play when different parties 'read' dreams and visions in the religious literature of the ancient Near East, including but not limited to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.”

9781589835726_cvr.indd

“The present volume concentrates on the medieval Jewish reception and appropriation of several female biblical figures and narratives pertaining to women. Eve, Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Zipporah, Ruth, Esther, and Judith, a figure not present in the Hebrew canon, are treated here as well as the exceedingly popular postbiblical figure Lilith. Several essays also deal with the nameless woman of valor from Prov 31. Zion as a lamenting and yearning woman is also examined, and attention is given to the feminine voice in the Song of Songs.”

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“This book does not claim to describe who the scribes of the Torah were or the nature of their work. No one is in such a position.... We can offer evaluations of the logic of the history of scholarship, which sometimes yielded convincing results and sometimes led the discussion astray. We can weigh possible parallels from ancient Near Eastern cultures to help assess theories regarding the formation of the Pentateuch and the scribal culture that produced it. This is and will be an open discussion that has to include as much evidence as possible from various fields, such as literary history, comparative cultural history, historical linguistics, epigraphy, and archaeology.”

Masenya, Lavik, Cezula, and Nilsen.indd

“Western biblical scholarship has placed itself on top of the global interpretative hierarchy and limited the issue of context to the production of the books of the Bible. In the process, the contexts of Bible readers from the geopolitical South (e.g., African contexts, as in the present case) have been marginalized in the hermeneutical endeavors.”

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“As readers will readily note, all of the authors and respondents in this volume stress the contemporary urgency of their work on ancient sources. As editors, we aim to lay the groundwork for these contributions by thinking through the divides between these disciplines and the ethical and political issues that attend these barriers and their potential removal.”

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“What seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the portrayal of the united monarchy in Samuel–Kings, on the one hand, and the gradual and independent formation of Israel and Judah as two neighboring polities, on the other, constitutes the point of departure for the study presented in this book, which aims to bridge that gap. Accordingly, the present study has two main goals: first, to reconstruct the social and political developments that culminated in the formation of Israel and Judah as two territorial kingdoms, and second, in light of the first, to situate the stories of Saul and David in their accurate social and historical context, in order to illuminate the historical conception of the united monarchy and the pan-Israelite ideology out of which it grew.”

Tilford Murphy web

“One does not need to dig deep to see that the differences between biblical texts and science fiction are not as stark as they first appear. From the modern perspective, biblical texts relate events of the past, but from the perspective of those who first compiled and transmitted them, biblical texts also speculated about the future. Biblical prophets, for example, harshly criticized the religious practices of their day, spoke of a time to come when wickedness would be wiped away, and dreamed of a world in which the righteous would flourish. Biblical texts also contain alternate presents: stories such as the book of Jonah and the book of Judith (preserved in some Christian Bibles) are entertaining fictions designed to tell deeper religious truths.”

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“For those in the modern era who have never experienced warfare in their own homelands, it may be easy to overlook the extent to which the prophetic corpus presents an image of life in a war-torn region—not only in its combat imagery, but also in its descriptions of denuded lands, famine, pests, and pestilence.”

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“A significant proportion of these new texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, both sectarian and nonsectarian, have greatly enlarged the corpus of early Jewish apocalyptic literature and expanded our ideas of apocalyptic. 5 Works such as the pesharim, the Hodayot, and 4QInstruction, have challenged assumptions regarding the literary forms and contents of apocalyptic literature. Others, including the War Rule (1QM), the Community Rule (1QS), and the Son of God text (4Q246), have stretched views about themes such as cosmic dualism, the periodization of history, and expectations for messianic figures and a final eschatological battle.”

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“One of the ways that an intertextual approach is useful alongside gender study is that both studies recognize that there are many texts and intertexts at play when ascertaining a character’s gender and that character’s relationships to their surrounding gendered culture.”

Judicial_booth

“It is our hope that Judicial Decisions in the Ancient Near East will complement one of the most-used volumes from the Writings from the Ancient World series, Martha Roth’s Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (1995; second edition 1997). Where the history of law has often been taken to begin with these remarkable texts, which indeed warrant the attention they receive, the existence of law and the traces of its observance are already visible in the applications of justice assembled in our new volume.”

fresch-booth

“Comprehension of discourse is a complex process. At the most basic level, in oversimplified terms, a reader must understand the semantics of lexemes and constructions, the syntactic relationships between phrases and clauses, and how these two components of language interact and thereby result in the expression of meaningful information. But even then, such units do not occur in isolation. They are a part of larger discourses. A reader must not only comprehend words, phrases, and clauses in their own right but also how they relate semantically to the surrounding context and are relevant in the unfolding discourse.”

9781628373165_cvr.indd

“A sampling of their extant writings recalls the horrors of federally instituted enslavement and the hope of the Civil War victory for liberation and inclusion as full citizens in the homeland of their birth. Nineteenth-century African American women’s writings speak to the new disappointment accompanying the premature disinvestiture of Reconstruction efforts and the abandonment of the United States’ newly constituted African American citizenry to rogue white supremacist forms of southern ‘Redemption’ justice. White Redemptionist actors took aim at black communities that threatened to become too prominent, too successful, too independent, and too free.”

Lancaster.indd

“The God of Hosea has been an enigmatic and highly contested figure for centuries, largely due to the variety of Hosea’s metaphors. Is Yahweh essentially a loving father (11:1) or one who will snap Israel’s neck (10:2)? How can Hosea’s deity be a lion who will tear his people to shreds (5:14) and refreshing dew that will bring life to a languishing land (14:6)?”

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“One challenge for anyone considering Philo’s engagement with Scripture is ambiguity. This is a substantial issue for any intertextual endeavor, especially when discussing Jewish Scripture, as many verses in the Pentateuch are similar, sometimes identical.”

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“Some ancient Platonists asked questions about the soul that still might resonate today: What are the parameters of knowledge, of healing, of performing gender? Others concerned themselves with issues that are very difficult for contemporary academics to approach, as the concerns reach past our own accepted worldviews: What is the so-called (ethereal) vehicle of the soul; when is the best time to reincarnate; how does the soul relate to other ontological principles such as the so-called indefinite dyad; how does one effect the elevation of the soul in ritual practices?”

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“The guild has come a long way, but still has miles to go. Both this Society and society writ large need scholars who will ashamedly marry who-ness with what-ness for the sake of justice, love, and mercy. This volume, Remapping Biblical Studies, not only honors the four presidents who have helped lead the intellectual community that CUREMP fosters; it also recognizes the longstanding prowess of the committee and all those who participate in and advance its work.”

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“The cases in this study counter the narrative of the demise of allegory in the Enlightenment. They also demonstrate the ways religious identity and Jewish-Christian relations continued to shape biblical hermeneutics into modernity.”

9781628375367_cvr.indd

“Oneness and unity, variously defined by disparate writers and groups over the centuries, are not only political and sociological ideas. For most ancient thinkers and for many today, they are also theological ideas. In the tradition of the Abrahamic faiths, so influential on the emergence of later Western empires and on the development of the modern nation-state, the oneness and unity of a people correspond in some fashion with the oneness and unity of God. This collection of essays examines the connections between divine and social oneness and unity throughout a range of texts from a wide spectrum of cultural milieus.”

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“I weave the findings of exploring the inner texture and intertexture and the social and cultural, ideological, and sacred textures into what I consider to be the rhetorical force of the parable of the royal wedding feast, particularly the troubling expulsion of the individual not wearing wedding clothing. Concluding with articulation of rhetorical force follows the three-phase pattern that has developed in sociorhetorical interpretation, that is, beginning with a discussion of rhetography, moving through textural analysis, and concluding with a presentation of the rhetorical force of the text”

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“The special feature of the depiction of the history of ancient Israel presented here is that regional archaeological and extrabiblical sources are taken into account as widely as possible. The evidence cannot be unpacked in detail but always remains present in the background and changes the view of the history of events.”

Welcome to the 2023 SBL Press Annual Meeting

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