Biblical History
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Jesus Ben Sira Of Jerusalem
$21.95Add to cartQuestions of vocation and character formation become important to students as they continue to receive higher education. Jesus Ben Sira combines secular wisdom from Near Eastern wisdom sources and divine revelations from the Hebrew Bible to create the Book of Sirach. By applying form criticism to Ben Sira’s book, Daniel J. Harrington provides students with historical information of the psychological and sociological context underlying Ben Sira’s teachings, as well as an understanding of how Ben Sira’s ancient wisdom can contribute to personal and social formation in the 21st century.
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Jonahs Journeys
$14.95Add to cartThe book of Jonah has been richly commented upon by centuries of Christians and Jews. Writers of prose and poetry have loved it as well as those interested in liturgy. Jonah is a small book, and yet it is placed with issues that have shown themselves existentially powerful over time and among readers of many types and cultures. In essence, Jonah’s journey’s among interpreters have had a great deal of territory to explore.
In Jonah’s Journey’s, Barbara Green, O.P., focuses on the character Jonah and explores the variety of ways in which the prophet and the book have been represented and understood by various interpreters. The question of how readers construct meaning is central to the text.
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Crucial Bridge : The Elijah Elisha Narrative As An Interpretative Synthesis
$16.95Add to cartThe Elijah-Elisha narrative (1 Kgs 16:29-2 Kgs 13) is the most underestimated text in the Bible. Far from being a disparate collection, it is actually a carefully crafted double drama that both mirrors life and synthesizes systematically the entire Primary History (Genesis-Kings). In a bold hermeneutical move it transforms the language of historiography-of patriarchs and kings-into the language of prophetic biography.
This prophetic biography, rooted in historiography, later becomes the evangelists’ primary literary model. The Elijah-Elisha narrative is the crucial bridge between the foundational narratives of Judaism and Christianity.
Since the 1970s there has been increasing evidence that Scripture texts that at first sight appear fragmented are in fact unified. Judges is a striking example of this. Because of the earlier exegetical models used, Judges was often regarded as a collection of rugged traditions that were independent of one another. Now, however, these apparently disconnected stories are intimately interconnected. Brodie explains that, as with earlier research on Judges, the quest for history-for underlying traditions-has tended to obscure the existing narrative account. In particular, the Elijah-Elisha narrative has often been read as consisting largely of two independent units, two cycles of traditions. The Elijah-Elisha narrative is indeed twofold-it clearly highlights two main prophets-but it is also a careful unity, as closely knit as Judges is now seen to be.
