New Books in Biblical Studies

In The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (HarperOne, 2020), Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler take readers on a guided tour of the most popular Hebrew Bible passages quoted in the New Testament to show what the texts meant in their original contexts and then how Jews and Christians, over time, understood those same texts. Passages include the creation of the world, the role of Adam and Eve, the Suffering Servant of Isiah, the book of Jonah, and Psalm 22, whose words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” Jesus quotes as he dies on the cross.Comparing various interpretations – historical, literary, and theological - of each ancient text, Levine and Brettler offer deeper understandings of the original narratives and their many afterlives. They show how the text speaks to different generations under changed circumstances, and so illuminate the Bible’s ongoing significance. By understanding the depth and variety by which these passages have been, and can be, understood, The Bible With and Without Jesus does more than enhance our religious understandings, it helps us to see the Bible as a source of inspiration for any and all readers.Amy-Jill Levine is the Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita, and Professor of New Testament Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University.Marc Zvi Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

What does the Bible say about ecology? As people face huge ecological challenges-including growing hurricanes, floods, forest fires, and plastic pollution-the groundbreaking Yonatan Neril and Leo Dee's Eco Bible (Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development, 2020) dives into this question. Drawing on 3,500 years of religious ethics, it shows how the Bible itself and its great scholars embrace care for God's creation as a fundamental and living message. Eco Bible both informs the reader and inspires spiritual commitment and action to protect all of God's creation.This 'earth Bible' is a great read for those interested in Jewish and Christian social issues. It also represents an important contribution to eco theology, and to the spiritual ecology movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Where did the idea of sin arise from? In The Origin of Sin: Greece and Rome, Early Judaism and Christianity (Bloomsbury, 2022), David Konstan takes a close look at classical Greek and Roman texts, as well as the Bible and early Judaic and Christian writings. He argues that the fundamental idea of “sin” arose in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, although this original meaning was obscured in later Jewish and Christian interpretations.Through close philological examination of the words for “sin,” in particular the Hebrew hata’ and the Greek hamartia, he traces their uses over the centuries in four chapters and concludes that the common modern definition of sin as a violation of divine law indeed has antecedents in classical Greco-Roman conceptions, but acquired a wholly different sense in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

What are we to make of the Temple envisioned by Ezekiel? How can we better understand Ezekiel, chapters 40 through 48? One way, suggests Tova Ganzel, is by examining evidence from Babylonian sources. She argues that Neo-Babylonian temples provide a meaningful backdrop against which many unique features of Ezekiel's vision should be interpreted.Tune in as we speak with Tova Ganzel about her recent book, Ezekiel's Visionary Temple in Babylonian Context (de Gruyter, 2021).Tova Ganzel is a Senior Lecturer at the Multidisciplinary Department of Jewish Studies and is the Head of Cramim - the Jewish Studies Honors Program - at Bar-Ilan University. Her work is mainly on the Hebrew Bible in the context of the larger ancient Near Eastern world. Her recent research focuses on prophetic literature, ancient Near Eastern temples and second temple texts, the Jewish reception of biblical criticism from the eighteenth century to the present and on women as Halakhic Professionals.Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Today I talked to Elliott Rabin about his book The Biblical Hero: Portraits in Nobility and Fallibility (Jewish Publication Society, 2020).Approaching the Bible in an original way—comparing biblical heroes to heroes in world literature—Rabin addresses a core biblical question: What is the Bible telling us about what it means to be a hero?Focusing on the lives of six major biblical characters—Moses, Samson, David, Esther, Abraham, and Jacob—Rabin examines their resemblance to hero types found in (and perhaps drawn from) other literatures and analyzes why the Bible depicts its heroes less gloriously than do the texts of other cultures.Matthew Miller is a graduate of Yeshivat Yesodei HaTorah. He studied Jewish Studies and Linguistics at McGill for his BA and completed an MA in Hebrew Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. He works with Jewish organizations in media and content distribution, such as TheHabura.com and RabbiEfremGoldberg.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Drawing insights from gender studies and the environmental humanities, Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early Christian Culture (Oxford UP, 2022) analyze how ancient Christians constructed the Christian body through its relations to demonic adversaries. Through case studies of New Testament texts, Gnostic treatises, and early Christian church fathers, Travis W. Proctor notes that early followers of Jesus construed the demonic body in diverse and sometimes contradictory ways, as both embodied and bodiless, “fattened” and ethereal, heavenly and earthbound.Across this diversity of portrayals, however, demons consistently functioned as personifications of “deviant” bodily practices such as “magical” rituals, immoral sexual acts, gluttony, and pagan religious practices. This demonization served an exclusionary function whereby Christian writers marginalized fringe Christian groups by linking their ritual activities to demonic modes of (dis)embodiment. The tandem construction of demonic and human corporeality demonstrates how Christian authors constructed the bodies that inhabited their cosmos - human, demon, and otherwise as part of overlapping networks or “ecosystems” of humanity and nonhumanity. Through this approach, Proctor provides new resources for reimagining the enlivened ecosystems that surround and intersect with our modern ideas of “self.”Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

The prophet Ezekiel speaks from a unique perspective: he resides in Babylonia, yet laments the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem; his prophecies range from furious messages of rebuke to comforting depictions of the future redemption of the Jewish people. Join as we speak with Tova Ganzel about her recent commentary, Ezekiel: From Destruction to Restoration (Maggid, 2020).Dr. Tova Ganzel received her PhD from the Department of Bible in Bar-Ilan, and has published widely on prophetic literature in the context of the larger ancient Near Eastern world. She was the Director of the Midrasha at Bar-Ilan University and is one the first trained women’s halakhic advisors.Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Manuscripts teem with life. They are not only the stuff of history and literature, but they offer some of the only tangible evidence we have of entire lives, long receded.Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers (Riverrun, 2021) tells the stories of the artisans, artists, scribes and readers, patrons and collectors who made and kept the beautiful, fragile objects that have survived the ravages of fire, water and deliberate destruction to form a picture of both English culture and the wider European culture of which it is part.Without manuscripts, she shows, many historical figures would be lost to us, as well as those of lower social status, women and people of colour, their stories erased, and the remnants of their labours destroyed.From the Cuthbert Bible, to works including those by the Beowulf poet, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Sir Thomas Malory, Chaucer, the Paston Letters and Shakespeare, Mary Wellesley describes the production and preservation of these priceless objects. With an insistent emphasis on the early role of women as authors and artists and illustrated with over fifty colour plates, Hidden Hands is an important contribution to our understanding of literature and history.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

In Brecht and the Bible: A Study of Religious Nihilism and Human Weakness in Brecht's Drama of Morality and the City (UNC Press, 2020), Father G. Ronald Murphy argues that Brecht, atheist and Marxist though he was, was also a sensitive reader and interpreter of the Bible. Murphy persuasively shows that Brecht's use of Biblical texts was not only satirical, but was at times deadly serious, particularly concerning the theme of death itself. For Brecht, the Bible provides eloquent reminders of the finitude of life and of the necessity of work, of eating by the sweat of one's brow. The conflict between work and life, for example in the case of Mother Courage's paradoxical dependence on the war for her survival even as it kills her precious children, proves a major theme in Brecht. This is a work that should appeal to scholars of German literature, but also to anyone interested in the interpretation of Brecht, whether for scholarly or artistic reasons.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Satan's transformation from opaque functionary to chief antagonist is one of the most striking features of the development of Jewish theology in the Second Temple Period and beyond. Once no more than an "accuser" testing members of the human community, Satan, along with his demons, is presented by Jewish apocalyptic texts and the New Testament as a main source of evil in the world. In Satan and the Problem of Evil, noted scholar Archie Wright explores this dynamic in both its historical and theological trajectories.Interactions with Zoroastrianism led Jewish and Christian writers of the Second Temple Period to separate God from responsibility for evil in the world. This led to the emergence of a heavenly being that is responsible for evil and suffering: Satan. Satan and the Problem of Evil charts the development of Satan traditions and the problem of evil from the Hebrew Bible and its various translations in the Greek Septuagint to Jewish literature from the Second Temple Period to the Greek New Testament. It concludes by examining the writings of the early church theologians, from the late first century through the fourth century CE. Wright argues that these latter writers present a shift in the understanding of Satan to one that is significantly different from the Jewish Scriptures, extrabiblical Jewish literature, and the New Testament.Accessibly written and comprehensive in scope, Satan and the Problem of Evil: From the Bible to the Early Church Fathers (Fortress Press, 2022) offers researchers, scholars, students, and even the general reader a definitive treatment of a perennial question.Archie T. Wright is interim executive director of the Catholic Biblical Association and visiting lecturer at the London School of Theology. He is the author of The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6:1-4 in Early Jewish Literature (Fortress, 2015).Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies