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The contemporary renaissance of theological interpretation as an approach to reading the Bible has brought with it a host of questions. Most importantly, what is the relationship between theological interpretation and more traditional forms of historical inquiry characteristic of the field in the modern era? Does theological interpretation require that the church's faith determine the meaning of biblical texts? How does a theological hermeneutic navigate the conventional roles of author, text, and reader? What are the natural intellectual companions of theological interpretation?Essays in this volume tackle questions like these primarily by engaging directly with biblical texts, both in theological interpretation for its own sake and to see what the texts themselves might suggest about doing theological interpretation. The result is a much-needed exploration of theological interpretation in the hands of biblical scholars, theologians, and linguists occupied with exegesis.The volume arises from an international colloquium on the theological interpretation of the Bible held at Laidlaw College in Auckland, New Zealand, in August 2011.

How does sensitivity to current ecological and environmental issues impact on our hearing of the Gospels? About Earth's Child listens for the ecological sounds that are present in Luke's narrative symphony and offers a way for readers today to identify them.Michael Trainor approaches Luke's Gospel with a fresh engagement while respecting the evangelist's own purposes in addressing the social and cultural concerns of first-century followers of Jesus. Hearing the Gospel from an ecological perspective allows us to see how Luke presents Jesus as 'Earth's Child'. In the Gospel's early chapters, Jesus is presented as born of Earth, wrapped with Earth's cloth and laid in Earth's manger. In the final chapters, he is affixed to Earth's wood and laid in Earth's receptacle from where he is resurrected and meets his disciples.Between these opening and closing chapters a remarkable story of Earth unfolds. This concerns all Earth's members, human and non-human, organic and inanimate. It is about God, angels, demons, human beings, soil, seeds, mountains, waters, animals (even ravens, pigs and a couple of asses). Luke presents a fundamental truth about following Jesus: how one treats Earth and freely shares its fruits are central. An authentic disciple of Jesus is ecologically contemplative and environmentally respectful. About Earth's Child sparkles with surprising insights as Jesus' teaching and his meal and healing ministries take on new meaning for today's world faced with growing environmental challenges.

The poetic world of the Song of Songs is a famously heady and distortive landscape, filled with bright sunlit rills, nocturnal cityscapes, and fecund bodies laid out like kingdoms. But what does the Song's use and abuse of spatial relationships tell us about its subject matter, and what do its strange panoramas tell us about literary space more broadly? Directly challenging recent methodological trends in biblical spatial studies, Journeys in the Songscape uses a range of innovative critical tools to explore, map and critique poetic space in the Song of Songs.Taking the reader on a series of journeys across the Song's gendered, rural, urban and bodily spaces, Meredith argues that the worlds that spring up between the Song's lovers are all subtle reimaginings of the space between the biblical page and its own readers, and that at the heart of the Song is a (con)fusion of the dynamics of loving with the experience of reading. Love is at work in the Song, says Meredith, but it is not its subject so much as a sign under which collusions of power, textuality, space and subjectivity labour. The Song's world speaks not only to sexual relationships, then, but to the structure of language itself; textual spaces do not organize textual meaning but rather image its fundamental instability.Journeys in the Songscape is a bold new literary treatment of the Song of Songs, but it is also a rethinking of what we mean by the term 'literary space', and represents a playful incitement to reconsider how critical tools are put to use in apprehending space as a literary construct.

This volume brings together two years of papers read to the Megilloth Consultation Group at the Annual Meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature; it represents some of the most recent work being done by a group of international scholars on the collection of Hebrew Bible books known as the Megilloth.Although the individual books of the Megilloth have received ample academic attention in contemporary scholarship, relatively little has been done to situate them under this broader rubric. To this end, the present volume addresses a range of issues associated with studying the five scrolls, such as the internal relationship between the books themselves, intertextual connections between the five scrolls and other portions of the Hebrew Bible, gender and ethnic concerns in the five scrolls, and the theological commitments and contours of the collection. Several of the papers and the volume itself also intentionally wrestle with the viability of the category 'Megilloth' as a meaningful term in academic studies of these writings.In addition to papers on the Megilloth in general (Galvin, Stone, Fullerton Strollo), there are studies on Esther (Davis, Greenspoon, Avnery, Peters, three of them in relation to Ruth), Lamentations (Gruber and Yona, Flanders) and Qoheleth (Weeks).

What happens when explorations of sexuality, gender and the Bible go down under? This fascinating collection of essays, written by scholars located in the Antipodes, traverses the highly contested landscapes of sexuality, gender and biblical studies, revealing a myriad of sexual discourses voiced within both the biblical texts and their interpretative traditions. Recognizing that textual meaning is always shaped by the cultural and contextual baggage the reader brings to the interpretative task, contributors raise provocative questions about the meanings, identities and ideologies that surround biblical discourses of sexuality and gender, exploring how these have been and can be reshaped and reconceived.Deane Galbraith examines the theological reflections of Augustine and Paul on Adam's 'perfect penis' in Eden while Roland Boer explores the earthy biblical vocabulary used to depict female genitalia. Christina Petterson, meanwhile, examines the Moravian Brethren's celebration of a Christ who bore on his body male and female genitalia. Travelling beyond the sexualized human body, Emily Colgan considers the problematic language of gender violence against the land that is voiced in Jeremiah. Elaine Wainwright blurs and queers the binary categories of human and non-human in the Sermon on the Mount. Yael Klangwisan continues this blurring of boundaries through her creative reading of Song of Songs.Moving from the gendered body to the gendered voice, Alan Cadwallader probes Paul's rhetorical gender-bending in his 'masculinized' oral culture. Caroline Blyth and Teguh Wijaya Mulya empower Delilah to vocalize her queer potential in both the biblical narrative and popular culture. Gillian Townsley adds her own Kiwi voice to explore queer possibilities in Philippians 4.2-3 in the light of New Zealand's same-sex marriage legislation. The volume concludes with a queer reconsideration of the Antipodes themselves from the perspective of a northern-hemisphere biblical scholar, Hugh Pyper.This compelling collection will make a substantive contribution to the bookshelves of scholars and interested readers in such areas as biblical studies, religion and gender-queer studies.

Simulating Aichele pays tribute to the title of George Aichele's 2011 book, Simulating Jesus. In contemporary biblical scholar-ship, Aichele is a notable leader whose writings explore the prob¬lems of meaning and referentiality in the Bible and in bibli¬cal texts found in non-biblical contexts. His close readings of canonical texts alongside 'the fantastic' in film, television and literature reveal the relationships between texts and inter-texts. Such juxtapositions expose gaps and liberate strange voices in the Bible and break the stranglehold of canonical ideolo¬gies. Aichele shows how the afterlives of biblical texts simul¬taneously produce present and past realities by simulat-ing both. These afterlives not only pull ancient texts into the pre¬sent but in the process also change the precursor text(s).This Festschrift presents some of the afterlives of Aichele's re-search in Bible, film, culture and theory. Exercises in intertextual¬ity and textual liberation include Yvonne Sher-wood's reading of Jacob and Esau alongside a Sierra Leone twin story 'Kanu and the Book'; Richard Walsh's pairing of Je-sus' final lament in Mark with Kafka's 'In the Penal Colony'; Tina Pippin's exploration of the afterlives of Jesus' baptism in Mark; Gary A. Phillips's ethical imagining of Martha as the Levinasian Other; and Scott S. Elliott's interpretation of 1 Corin¬thians 9 in light of Roland Barthes' 'Neutral'. Other con¬tributors explore Bible and film. Robert Paul Seesengood and Jennifer L. Koosed review recent apocalyptic films; Fred W. Burnett analyses the greatest contemporary slacker, the Dude, from The Big Lebowski; and Erin Runions compares the panoptic desire for complete knowledge found in 1 Corinthi-ans and A Scanner Darkly. Finally, Roland Boer looks at the unex¬pected afterlives of Hebrew and Christian scriptures in Lenin's speeches, and Stephen D. Moore offers a retrospective es¬say on postmodernism and biblical studies.

Publication of Meir Lubetski (pages 265-268).

Authority and violence exhibit a close and complex relationship in the social worlds depicted in biblical narratives as well as in ancient and modern societies. The perceived legitimacy or illegitimacy of authority and violence can hinge upon a number of factors. In the stories of Gideon and Abimelech in Judges 6-9, lethal actions are depicted as justified, regrettable, or reproachful based, in part, on assumptions regarding kinship, honor, and justice. These narratives form an intriguing interlude within Judges as they directly broach, for the first time in the flow of biblical history, the 'reality' of dynastic kingship within Israel while telling a tale of deadly and divinely motivated reversals of power.An interdisciplinary approach that blends social-scientific analysis driven by Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of social field, habitus, capital, and doxa with a close narrative analysis recommends new ways of understanding the biblical characters' motivations, skills, and social capital; the linguistic capital of the text's creators; and the social worlds from which the narratives emerged. By examining the narrated relations of power through a sociological lens, the study discerns and describes how political and religious power is attained, preserved, transmitted, resisted, endorsed, disguised, or divinized. Building upon this basis, concentration on narrated violence suggests how the stories might be purposed to endorse, legitimate, or resist authority in the ancient context. The study concludes with a synthesis of its results and a survey of scribalism in order to recommend historical settings for the origination of the narratives. The study demonstrates how the biblical text, as a cultural product, can both knowingly and unknowingly communicate information about a society's social relations, values, and concerns.This is the second volume in the sub-series The Bible and Social Science.

Eugene V. Gallagher, Rosemary Park Professor of Religious Studies at Connecticut College, writes: 'In a context where the general value of the Humanities has increasingly come under question by those who see a college education as necessarily being directly tied to the first job that students will have after they graduate, an ability to make a vigorous case about the contribution of studying the Bible to any college student's education is crucial for any teacher'.¿This second collection of essays edited by Jane Webster and Glenn Holland seeks not only to promote the role of biblical studies in an undergraduate liberal arts education, but also to suggest strategies and approaches for teaching the Bible in a range of academic situations. Combining the theoretical and the practical, this volume will be another useful source of guidance and support for teachers of biblical studies at any point in their professional careers.

Eugene V. Gallagher, Rosemary Park Professor of Religious Studies at Connecti¬cut College, writes: 'In a context where the general value of the Humani¬ties has increasingly come under question by those who see a college educa¬tion as necessarily being directly tied to the first job that students will have af¬ter they graduate, an ability to make a vigorous case about the contribution of study¬ing the Bible to any college student's education is crucial for any teacher'.This second collection of essays edited by Jane Webster and Glenn Hol¬land seeks not only to promote the role of biblical studies in an un¬dergraduate lib¬eral arts education, but also to suggest strategies and approaches for teaching the Bible in a range of academic situa-tions. Combining the theoretical and the practi¬cal, this volume will be another useful source of guidance and support for teachers of bibli¬cal studies at any point in their professional careers.