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The Old Testament can seem strange and disturbing to contemporary readers. What should Christians make of Genesis 1-3, seemingly at odds with modern scientific accounts? Why does the Old Testament contain so much violence? How should Christians handle texts that give women a second-class status? Does the Old Testament contradict itself? Why are so many Psalms filled with anger and sorrow? What should we make of texts that portray God as filled with wrath? Combining pastoral insight, biblical scholarship, and a healthy dose of humility, gifted teacher and communicator Matthew Schlimm explores perennial theological questions raised by the Old Testament. He provides strategies for reading and appropriating these sacred texts, showing how the Old Testament can shape the lives of Christians today and helping them appreciate the Old Testament as a friend in faith.
In the first book of the Bible, every patriarch and many of the matriarchs become angry in significant ways. However, scholars have largely ignored how Genesis treats this emotion, particularly how Genesis functions as Torah by providing ethical instruction about handling this emotion's perplexities. In this important work, Schlimm fills this gap in scholarship, describing (1) the language surrounding anger in the Hebrew Bible, (2) the moral guidance that Genesis offers for engaging anger, and (3) the function of anger as a literary motif in Genesis. Genesis evidences two bookends, which expose readers to the opposite extremes of anger and its effects. In Gen 4:1-16, anger takes center stage when Cain kills his brother, Abel, although he has done nothing wrong. Fratricide is at one extreme of the spectrum of anger's results. In the final chapter of Genesis, readers encounter the opposite extreme, forgiveness. Here, Joseph and his brothers forgive one another after a long history of jealousy, anger, deception, and abuse. It is a moment of reconciliation offered just before the book closes, allowing readers to see Joseph as an anti-Cain--someone who has all the power and all the reasons to harm his brothers but instead turns away from anger and, despite the inherent difficulties, offers forgiveness. Although Genesis frames its post-Edenic narratives with two contrasting outcomes of anger--fratricide and forgiveness--it avoids simplistic moral platitudes, such as demanding that its readers respond to being angry with someone by forgiving the person. Genesis instead returns to the theme of anger on many occasions, presenting a multifaceted message about its ethical significance. The text is quite realistic about the difficulties that individuals face and the paradoxes presented by anger. Genesis presents this emotion as a force that naturally arises from one's moral sensitivities in response to the perception of wrongdoing. At the same time, the text presents anger as a great threat to the moral life. Genesis thus warns readers about the dangers of anger, but it never suggests that one can lead a life free from this emotion. Instead, it portrays many characters who are forced to deal with anger, presenting them with dilemmas that defy easy resolution. Genesis invites readers to imagine ways of alleviating anger, but it is painfully realistic about how difficult, threatening, and short-lived attempts at reconciliation may be.
How would you describe the Old Testament? Offensive, violent, patriarchal, archaic; difficult, boring, obsolete? Many Christians don’t bother with it anymore. Yet these ancient books were in Jesus’ lifeblood, and they provided the thought-world of those early followers who wrote about him in what became the New Testament. This book challenges those stereotypes of Israel’s Scriptures by exploring their significance in the apostolic writings and by demonstrating the importance of whole books for nuanced interpretation. It takes readers on a tour through four key books before considering the wider issues of interpretation that readers must consider in order to hear God’s Spirit speaking afresh to a range of contemporary concerns, including racism and the environment.
Why is there suffering? When will it end? Where is God in it? Despite how common suffering is, we still struggle to understand it, and even more to bear through it. Between Pain and Grace gets to the heart of this struggle. Its honest and detailed portrait of life challenges our assumptions about pain, emotion, and God himself. Born from a popular college course on suffering, this book answers critical questions like: Is God personally involved in our pain and suffering? How should Christians handle emotions like grief and anger? What does the Bible say about issues like mental illness, sexual abuse, and family betrayal? Striking an elegant balance between being scholarly and pastoral, Between Pain and Grace is useful in the classroom, churches, and for personal reading. The authors draw from Scripture, personal experience, and even psychological research to offer a well-rounded and trustworthy take on suffering. Between Pain and Grace will give you confidence in God’s sovereignty, comfort in His presence, and wisdom for life this side of paradise. It will also make you more tender and better prepared to respond to the suffering of others. Read it today for a richer, more realistic relationship with God.
Humans have emotional engagements with the natural world, such as fear of snakes and awe at the Grand Canyon. Biblical writers deploy creation to shape the emotions of the audience and motivate specific behaviors. This book analyzes how writers use language about creation to conjure emotions.
"Shai Held is one of the most important teachers of Torah in his generation." --Rabbi David Wolpe, author of David: The Divided Heart In The Heart of Torah, Rabbi Shai Held's Torah essays--two for each weekly portion--open new horizons in Jewish biblical commentary. Held probes the portions in bold, original, and provocative ways. He mines Talmud and midrashim, great writers of world literature, and astute commentators of other religious backgrounds to ponder fundamental questions about God, human nature, and what it means to be a religious person in the modern world. Along the way he illuminates the centrality of empathy in Jewish ethics, the predominance of divine love in Jewish theology, the primacy of gratitude and generosity, and God's summoning of each of us--with all our limitations--into the dignity of a covenantal relationship.
Feminist biblical interpretation has reached a level of maturity that now makes possible a commentary series on every book of the Bible. It is our hope that Wisdom Commentary, by making the best of current feminist biblical scholarship available in an accessible format ... will aid readers in their advancement toward God's vision of dignity, equality, and justice for all. - Book jacket.
Modern study of biblical prophecy frequently defines prophecy as a message from God and has focused almost exclusively on prophets' words. But prophecy was always also embodied. Anathea E. Portier-Young insists on the synergy of word and body in biblical prophecy. Prophets did more than reveal knowledge: the prophetic body connected God and people, making them present to one another, channeling divine power, traveling between realms. Drawing insights from disciplines ranging from neurobiology to cultural studies, the author examines stories of prophetic commissioning, bodily transformation, asceticism and ecstasy, mobility and immobility, affect and emotion, revealing the body's centrality to prophetic mediation.
How should we understand the significance of the story of Joseph within redemptive history? This NSBT volume from Samuel Emadi offers a comprehensive canonical treatment of the Joseph narrative, considering Genesis 37–50 in its own literary and theological context and culminating in the New Testament's portrayal of Jesus as an antitypical, new and final Joseph.
The book of Genesis portrays the character Jacob as a brazen trickster who deceives members of his own family: his father Isaac, brother Esau, and uncle Laban. At the same time, Genesis depicts Jacob as YHWH’s chosen, from whom the entire people Israel derive and for whom they are named. These two notices produce a latent tension in the text: Jacob is concurrently an unabashed trickster and YHWH’s preference. How is one to address this tension? Scholars have long focused on the implications for the character and characterization of Jacob. The very question, however, at its core raises an issue that is theological in nature. The Jacob cycle (Gen 25–36) is just as much, if not more, a text about God as it is about Jacob, a point startlingly absent in a great deal of Genesis scholarship. Anderson argues for the presence of what he has dubbed a theology of deception in the Jacob cycle: YHWH operates as a divine trickster who both uses and engages in deception for the perpetuation of the ancestral promise (Gen 12:1–3). Through a literary hermeneutic, emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between how the text means and what the text means, and a keen eye to the larger task of Old Testament theology as literally “a word about God,” Anderson examines the various manifestations of YHWH as trickster in the Jacob cycle. The phenomenon of divine deception at every turn is intimately tethered in diverse ways to YHWH’s unique concern for the protection and advancement of the ancestral promise, which has cosmic implications. Attention is given to the ways that the multiple deceptions—some previously unnoticed—evoke, advance, and at times fulfill the ancestral promise. Anderson’s careful and thoughtful interweaving of trickster texts and traditions in the interest of theology is a unique contribution of this important volume. Oftentimes, scholars who are interested in the trickster are unconcerned with the theological ramifications of the presence of material of this sort in the biblical text, while theologians have often neglected the vibrant and pervasive presence of the trickster in the biblical text. Equally vital is the necessity of viewing the Old Testament’s image of God as also comprising dynamic, subversive, and unsettling elements. Attempts to whitewash or sanitize the biblical God fail to recognize and appreciate the complex and intricate ways that YHWH interacts with his chosen people. This witness to YHWH’s engagement in deception stands alongside and paradoxically informs the biblical text’s portrait of YHWH as trustworthy and a God who does not lie. Anderson’s Jacob and the Divine Trickster stands as a stimulating and provocative investigation into the most interesting and challenging character in the Bible, God, and marks the first true comprehensive treatment of YHWH as divine trickster. Anderson has set the stage to continue the conversation and investigation into a theology of deception in the Hebrew Bible.