Books published by Society of Biblical Literature

The rationale of the order of Psalms is a puzzle at least as old as Augustine in the fourth century, and Grant (Biblical studies, Highland Theological College, Scotland) does not aspire to solve the whole thing here and now. Rather he bites off only one aspect, a particular paradigm that may have influenced the shape of the Psalms in certain ways.

Kannaday (religion and philosophy, Newberry College) asserts that apologetic interests influenced those who preserved and reproduced the early gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Working from variant readings from traditional texts, as well as from the contexts of early Christianity, Kannaday finds sufficient evidence to support his assertion

Diodore of Tarsus presided over the Antiochene school of interpretation in its heyday. In his sole surviving exegetical work on the Old Testament he formulated the principles of interpreting Scripture taught in that school. Available here for the first time in English is Diodores commentary on Psalms 151, with Robert C.

North American and European classicists explore the relationship between religion and the construction of cultural identity in the hero-cult dialogue Heroikos, contending that its religious interest are intimately related to Philostratus' interests in the literary act of re-creating a coherent Greek identity for the Greek elites of the Roman Empire

More akin to science than to art, biblical interpretation eats its dead--consigning its past heroes to oblivion once new paradigms have passed them by. The history of the field has emerged as a separate discipline, and the question pondered by theologians and philosophers here is whether that history has merit of its own, or serves merely as raw ma

The Apocalypse of Abraham is one of the most significant ancient documents to have been preserved solely in translation into Slavonic, says Kulik (Hebrew U. of Jerusalem), and its lost Hebrew, or perhaps Palestinian Aramaic, original may be the earliest mystical writing of Judeo-Christian tradition, and a missing link between early apocalyptic and

The problem Wakefield addresses is that the six references to scripture in the passage do more to obscure than clarify Paul's argument that the Galatians should not take up the law, and some even seem to counter it. He attributes the bewilderment of the many scholars who have grappled with the difficulty for these many centuries to their trying to

This book shifts the focus of biblical stories about David from historicity to popular culture, suggesting their origins in popular heroic literature of the later monarchy and Persian period and comparing them with Homeric and Arthurian heroic literature. Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org)

Tauberschmidt has slightly revised his 2001 Ph.D. dissertation in religious studies for the University of Aberdeen. In it he argues that the translator of LXX Proverbs frequently rendered Hebrew parallelism in a form that is more closely parallel than the Masoretic Text, that is the colons of couplets correspond more closely to each other semantica