Books in the Biblical Intersections series

Using a form of social-historical criticism this book provides a counter-reading of Lamentations that elucidates the impact and aftermath of siege warfare on Judah's peasants.

Assembles cutting-edge literary and critical readings of Atwood and the Bible.

In the nightstands of hotel rooms, kept under lock and key, in the poetry of a pre-apocalyptic environmental cult, and quoted by children, atheists, and murderers alike - the Bible is omnipresent in the work of Margaret Atwood.

David the king, when studied against the backdrop of existing material cultural remains from the ancient Middle East, scarcely seems to have been there. If he is mentioned at all by his contemporary monarchs against whom he would have fought it is only obliquely or only intimated by omissions or partial spellings in context.

Utilizing insights from trauma studies, Daughter Zion's Trauma advances the view that awareness of trauma's potential effects sheds light on many of the book of Lamentations' complex literary features, and suggests new interpretive possibilities.

From Jael's tent peg to Judith's sword, biblical interpreters have long recognized the power of the "lethal women" stories of the Hebrew Bible and related literature.

The biblical episode relating the encounter of the Queen of Sheba with Solomon and the apocryphal tale of Susanna, a Jewish woman slanderously accused of adultery by two judges and saved by Daniel, have become part of the collective imagination in West and East.

A selection of essays on magic and divination in relation to the biblical world, including Mesopotamian demonology, Akkadian literary influences, exorcism, healing, calendars, astrology, bibliomancy, dreams, ritual magic, priestly divination, prophecy, magic in the Christian Apocrypha and the New Testament, magic in rabbinic literature, and Jewish Aramaic magic bowls.

Job finds himself in a situation similar to one experienced by everyone at some point in his or her life. He wants answers to questions concerning what has happened to him, since he lived his life according to the traditional wisdom and rules of conduct, asking what has gone wrong and why.

The less-discussed character in the Bible is the woman: two talking animals therein have sometimes received more page space. Biblical women are compared to mythical characters from the wider Middle East or from contemporary literature, and feminist/womanist perspectives are discussed alongside traditional and theological perspectives.

Were issues like economic and political oppression, holy wars, resistance literature, hate-speech, xenophobia and other 21st-century realities already present among the civilizations of the ancient Near East? Prophetic literature and specifically the Book of Nahum in the Old Testament provide a unique perspective on these issues.

The narrative of Noah's flood in Genesis draws perennial interest from scholars and the general public. This volume takes the influential nature of the flood story as an ideal opportunity to bring some of these methods into dialogue.

On the basis of Christiane Nord's functionalist theory of translation, the author of this book formulated a Participatory Approach to Bible Translation and experimented with it in translating the book of Jonah into Sabaot, a Kenyan language.

This anthology on Eve brings together an international group of scholars to discuss how this character has been interpreted by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. A venerated figure by many modern feminists and a denigrated figure by those who blame her for original sin, no reader will leave these pages indifferent to the first woman.

In this innovative book Simon Lasair explores some of the potentials of applying narratology to the Pentateuch Targums. Lasair argues that when the targums present coherent narratives, they largely carry the major structures of the Pentateuch over into an Aramaic context.

Using societal patterns of exploitation that are evidenced in agrarian societies from the Bronze Age to modern-day corporate globalization, Re-Reading the Prophets offers a new approach to understanding the hidden contexts behind prophetic complaints against economic injustice in eighth-century Judah.

The papers in this anthology represent the proceedings of the Anthropology and the Bible session from the European Association of Biblical Studies Annual Meeting held in Lincoln, UK (July 2009).

Lazarus compares and discusses comic elements used for didactic purposes in two separate literary traditions: Old Testament narrative and Aristophanic Comedies.

This ground-breaking study offers a reassessment of Moses' book of the law from a narrative theory perspective. Deuteronomy's simulcast of Moses' book invites external readers to compare and evaluate their readings with story-world readers who access the same text within the Bible's Primary Narrative.