Books in the Society for Old Testament Study Monographs series

Gibeon, a site identified with el-Jib, which is very near Jerusalem, was a city of significance, particularly at the time of Saul, David and Solomon. Dr Blenkisopp examines and discusses this important site through the Bible, excavations at el-Jib and ancient Near Eastern non-biblical writings.

Students of theology, the Bible, and the Ancient Near East know that the biblical god acted destructively against his own client king and country. This book rereads familiar biblical psalms within their ancient contexts to determine if this theological vision was unique - or if other gods were just as vengeful.

Recent tools and findings from the cognitive sciences illuminate religious thought and behaviour in ancient Israel and the Bible. Primarily intended for scholars of the Bible and religion, it is also relevant to cognitive scientists, researchers, and graduate students interested in the intersection of cognition and culture.

Contributes to text-critical scholarship of the military campaigns of Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, against Babylon and Judah. Kahn uses close analysis of passages in Kings, Chronicles and Isaiah to detect repetitions, breaks in the narrative, and contradictions and inconsistencies in the texts, to argue for a re-examination of their timeline.

One of the most rewarding of recent approaches to the study of Deutero-Isaiah has been the attempt to understand his teaching against the background of his ministry to the second generation of Jewish exiles in Babylonia.

In the first two chapters of the book of Amos, the prophet denounces a number of neighbouring nations for committing atrocities in war and then declares Israel to be equally blameworthy in view of the social injustices prevailing in his time. The essential contribution of Amos to Old Testament theology is to be found in his radical criticism of Israel.

Dr Gooding offers a detailed analysis of two passages that may well hold the key to the major textual problems raised by the ancient Greek translation of 1 Kings demonstrating that these were either variant readings or alternative translations and interpretations of the Hebrew, carefully edited and arranged by some ancient scholar-exegete to form a discourse on two aspects of Soloman's reign.

The Old Testament accounts of the Exodus contain various indications of the routes taken by the Israelites and the so-called wilderness itineraries appear to be very precise. From the earliest times, students of the Bible have tried to relate references in the texts to place names known in their own day.

Royal illness as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible anticipates the failure of kingship resulting in the destruction of Israel and Judah. This is the first systematic study of royal illness in this context. It will be of interest to students and scholars of history in the ancient Near East, biblical studies, medical humanities, and disability studies.

This monograph is a study of the Hebrew word bama, which is used frequently in the Old Testament to describe cultic sites and has commonly been translated 'high place'. The word however occurs in a variety of contexts, which would indicate a wider range of meanings.

In this book, Katherine E. Southwood offers a new approach to interpreting Judges 21. Breaking away from traditional interpretations of kingship, feminism, or comparisons with Greek or Roman mythology, she explores the concepts of marriage, ethnicity, rape, and power as means of ethnic preservation and exclusion. She also exposes the many reasons why marriage by capture occurred during the post-exilic period. Judges 21 served as a warning against compromise - submission to superficial unity between the Israelites and the Benjaminites. Any such unity would result in drastic changes in the character, culture, and values of the ethnic group 'Israel'. The chapter encouraged post-exilic audiences to socially construct those categorised as 'Benjaminites' as foreigners who do not belong within the group, thereby silencing doubts about the merits of unity.

In the Book of Judges the narrator presents an image of the good parent YHWH whose enduring love and loyalty is offset by his wayward child Israel who defaults on the relationship repeatedly. Biblical scholars have largely concurred, demonstrating the many faults of Israel while siding with YHWH's privileged viewpoint. When object-relations theory (which examines how human beings relate to each other) is applied to Judges, a different story emerges. In its capacity to illuminate why and how relationships can be intense, problematic, rewarding, and enduring, object-relations theory reveals how both YHWH and Israel have attachment needs that are played out vividly in the story world. Deryn Guest reveals how its narrator engages in a variety of psychological strategies to mask suppressed rage as he engages in an intriguing but rather dysfunctional masochistic dance with a dominant deity who has reputation needs.

In this book, Daniel J. D. Stulac brings a canonical-agrarian approach to the Elijah narratives and demonstrates the rhetorical and theological contribution of these texts to the Book of Kings. This unique perspective yields insights into Elijah's iconographical character (1 Kings 17-19), which is contrasted sharply against the Omride dynasty (1 Kings 20-2 Kings 1). It also serves as a template for Elisha's activities in chapters to follow (2 Kings 2-8). Under circumstances that foreshadow the removal of both monarchy and temple, the book's middle third (1 Kings 17-2 Kings 8) proclaims Yhwh's enduring care for Israel's land and people through various portraits of resurrection, even in a world where Israel's sacred institutions have been stripped away. Elijah emerges as the archetypal ancestor of a royal-prophetic remnant with which the reader is encouraged to identify.