Bible as Literature

Modern western critical study of the Bible has radically altered the fabric of Christian belief. This book explains what interpretation is and what special issues arise in biblical interpretation. The authors analyze the development of traditional literary and historical criticism and more recent social, scientific, and literary approaches, focusing on the key figures from Reimarus to Gerd Theissen, and exposing the underlying theological issues. What emerges is a pattern in the relationship between religious interests in the texts and the rational methods used to interpret them, providing guidance for a theologically sensitive use of the Bible today. The book includes an annotated index with detailed information on over 250 biblical scholars and other interpreters.

The Bible in History will be the first comprehensive overview and synthesis of the latest archaeological research from the Middle East written for the general reader. Its often startling assertions will make for a powderkeg of a book. Among the author's conclusions are these:
-- There never was a "united monarch" (Saul, David, Solomon) in history
-- We can no longer talk about a time of the Patriarchs
-- The entire notion of "Israel" and its history is a literary fiction.

In his introduction to this book, McConnell describes the Bible as "less a book and more a living entity in the evolving consciousness of Western man." Until recently, studies of the Bible centered on finding sources for historical knowledge, theological insights, or ethical advice, overlooking the true beauty of the words in the "book of books." This collection of six essays by noted literary critics and biblical scholars--including Harold Bloom, Hans Frei, Frank Kermode, James Robinson, Donald Foster, and Herbert Schneidau--breaks new ground by exploring the Bible as poetry, rhetoric, and narrative. The authors treat such issues involved in biblical narrative as its genesis, its revisionist dynamic, its fictional character, its interpretive nature, and its contradictions, prejudices, and claims. McConnell's lively, readable introduction elucidates and unifies the book's themes.

Drawing on the theory of language developed by the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin, this book argues that the historically diverse writings of the Bible have been organized according to a concept of dialogue. The overriding concern with an ongoing communication between God and his people has been formally embodied, Reed shows, in the continuous conversation between one part of the Bible and another. Reed looks beyond the close readings of recent accounts of the Bible as literature to larger paradigms of communication in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. He considers the Bible in its different canonical states, distinguishing the genres of law, prophecy, and wisdom in the Hebrew Bible and describing how these earlier forms of divine and human communication are appropriated and answered by the New Testament genre of gospel. The dialogic character of the Bible is also discovered within individual books: patriarchal answers to primeval failures in Genesis, cross-talk between justice and providence in Job, and orchestration of judgment and worship in Revelation. Throughout this wide-ranging study, Reed demonstrates the surprising relevance of Bakhtin's ideas of literature and language to the biblical writings as they assume formal coherence within the canon.

The nation--particularly in Exodus and Numbers--is not an abstract concept but rather a grand character whose history is fleshed out with remarkable literary power. In her innovative exploration of national imagination in the Bible, Pardes highlights the textual manifestations of the metaphor, the many anthropomorphisms by which a collective character named "Israel" springs to life. She explores the representation of communal motives, hidden desires, collective anxieties, the drama and suspense embedded in each phase of the nation's life: from birth in exile, to suckling in the wilderness, to a long process of maturation that has no definite end. In the Bible, Pardes suggests, history and literature go hand in hand more explicitly than in modern historiography, which is why the Bible serves as a paradigmatic case for examining the narrative base of national constructions.

Pardes calls for a consideration of the Bible's penetrating renditions of national ambivalence. She reads the rebellious conduct of the nation against the grain, probing the murmurings of the people, foregrounding their critique of the official line. The Bible does not provide a homogeneous account of nation formation, according to Pardes, but rather reveals points of tension between different perceptions of the nation's history and destiny.

This fresh and beautifully rendered portrayal of the history of ancient Israel will be of vital interest to anyone interested in the Bible, in th

In this new study, James Brenneman confronts the issue of conflicting canons with full force, incorporating insights gained from both literary and biblical disciplines on the question of canon. He begins with an illuminating tour through contemporary literary theory from Hans Robert Jauss to Stanley Fish, and current discussions in theology about the canon. He goes on to a consideration of true and false prophesy, with a detailed examination of the three apparently conflicting versions of the Old Testament "swords into plowshares" prophesy, as found in Isaiah 2:2-4,5; Joel 4:9-12 (Eng. 3:9-12); and Micah 4:1-5. Suggesting that the dynamics controlling the process for negotiating between contradictory readings of prophetic texts are the same as those at work in adjudicating between canons in conflict, Brenneman concludes by pointing the way towards an integrative approach appropriate to the question of canon and authority in a "post-modern" pluralistic context.

The Creation of History in Ancient Israel demonstrates how the historian can start to piece together the history of ancient Israel using the Hebrew Bible as a source.