The book of Job is considered by many to be the crown jewel of biblical literature in its claim to speak about God. The word that defines the challenge for every reader of the book is ?struggle.? The struggle results from the fact that whatever Job's truth may be, he was neither the first nor the last to try to articulate it. In the midst of so many words in this world about God from writers within and outside the scriptural witness, this book offers a truly astonishing declaration about what it means to live in a world where order breaks down and chaos runs amok, where the innocent suffer and the wicked thrive, where cries for help go unanswered. This new commentary by biblical scholar Samuel Balentine leads readers on an in-depth and far-reaching look at the nature of the book of Jo & and the various attempts by the many who have sought to further explore Job's essential struggle.
An extensive history of how the Bible’s story of Job has been interpreted through the ages. The question that launches Job’s story is posed by God at the outset of the story: “Have you considered my servant Job?” (1:8; 2:3). By any estimation the answer to this question must be yes. The forty-two chapters that form the biblical story have in fact opened the story to an ongoing practice of reading and rereading, evaluating and reevaluating. Early Greek and Jewish translators emphasized some aspects of the story and omitted others; the Church Fathers interpreted Job as a forerunner of Christ, while medieval Jewish commentators debated conservative and liberal interpretations of God’s providential love. Artists, beginning at least in the Greco-Roman period, painted and sculpted their own interpretations of Job. Novelists, playwrights, poets, and musicians—religious and irreligious, from virtually all points of the globe—have added their own distinctive readings. In Have You Considered My Servant Job?, Samuel E. Balentine examines this rich and varied history of interpretation by focusing on the principal characters in the story—Job, God, the satan figure, Job’s wife, and Job’s friends. Each chapter begins with a concise analysis of the biblical description of these characters, then explores how subsequent readers have expanded or reduced the story, shifted its major emphases or retained them, read the story as history or as fiction, and applied the morals of the story to the present or dismissed them as irrelevant. Each new generation of readers is shaped by different historical, cultural, and political contexts, which in turn require new interpretations of an old yet continually mesmerizing story. Voltaire read Job one way in the eighteenth century, Herman Melville a different way in the nineteenth century. Goethe’s reading of the satan figure in Faust is not the same as Chaucer’s in The Canterbury Tales, and neither is fully consonant with the Testament of Job or the Qur’an. One need only compare the descriptions of God in the biblical account with the imaginative renderings by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Franz Kafka to see that the effort to understand why God afflicts Job “for no reason” (2:3) continues to be both compelling and endlessly complicated. “A tour de force of cultural interaction with the book of Job. He guides today’s reader along the path of Job interpretation, exegesis, adaptation and imagining revealing the sheer variety of themes, meanings, creativity and re-readings that have been inspired by this one biblical book. Balentine shows us that not only is there “always someone playing Job” (MacLeish, J.B.) but there’s always someone, past or present, reading this ever-enigmatic book.” —Katharine J. Dell, University of Cambridge “Balentine “considers Job” for the countless ways this biblical book, in all its rich complexities, has inspired readers over the centuries. . . . Balentine’s volume sparkles with insightful theological commentary and rigorous scholarship, and any exegetical course or study on Job would benefit from it.” —Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology
"A masterpiece of contemporary Bible translation and commentary."—Los Angeles Times Book Review, Best Books of 1999 Acclaimed for its masterful new translation and insightful commentary, The David Story is a fresh, vivid rendition of one of the great works in Western literature. Robert Alter's brilliant translation gives us David, the beautiful, musical hero who slays Goliath and, through his struggles with Saul, advances to the kingship of Israel. But this David is also fully human: an ambitious, calculating man who navigates his life's course with a flawed moral vision. The consequences for him, his family, and his nation are tragic and bloody. Historical personage and full-blooded imagining, David is the creation of a literary artist comparable to the Shakespeare of the history plays.
The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.
Shortly after Dr. Terrien had completed his illuminating book on 'The Psalms and Their Meaning for Today', he decided to write a book about Job. This book, like its predecessor, is intended for the general reader: to give him a fuller knowledge, clearer understanding, and deeper appreciation of the religious and literary values of a truly great dramatic poem. Job, more than any other book of the Bible, belongs to the literature of the world. Yet who reads this poem in our day? Classics bear the burden of greatness. They are celebrated and unknown. Of such is Job, today unknown even to those who claim no immunity to cultural urges. Incidentally, the fact that this classic happens to belong to the Bible does not explain its quality of 'terra incognita', for it is neglected also by synagogue and church goers who daily read other portions of Scripture. The ancient Hebrew poem is modern, for it proffers a plea for pure religion. The poet of Job did not attempt to solve the problem of evil, nor did he propose a vindication of the justice of God. For him, any attempt of man to justify God would have been an act of arrogance. But he knew and promoted in the immediacy of faith a mode of life and in the very pangs of insecurity a sense of triumph. He transmuted the taste of sorrow into the knowledge of joy - not in the shallowness of gaiety, to be sure, but the depth of a joy brought by the presence of one who moves and warms the worlds.
Knowable Word offers a foundation on why and how to study the Bible. Through a running study Genesis 1, this new edition illustrates how to Observe, Interpret, and Apply the Scripture-and gives the vision behind each step.
Do artists who deal with biblical scenes study the texts that inspire them? At the same time, do scholars pay attention to artists as biblical interpreters? Eminent biblical scholar Samuel Terrien seeks to answer these questions in this first ever comprehensive survey of Jobian iconography from the third century to modern times. Through an analysis of the varying depictions of Job he finds that artists were not usually subservient to directives of religious authorities; rather, they often contradicted or preceded the exegetical trends of these commentators. Terrien has selected more than 150 masterpieces from the approximate 800 images of Job that have escaped oblivion. His vast knowledge of the biblical text illumines the rich discussion, which ranges over artistic medium and time from the fresco of the Dura-Europos synagogue, the miniatures of the Patmos manuscript, the Doge Dandolo mosaic of the San Marco Baptistry in Venice, the mercy seats of Champeaux-en-Brie, the Sacra Allegoria of Giovannni Bellini in Florence, and Albrecht Dürer's Jabach Altarpiece in Cologne and Frankfurt, to the mystery soldier in Salvator Rosas Job in the Uffizi and the Job Geometricized à la Cimabuë by Marc Chagall in St.-Paul-de-Vence. This rich interdisciplinary work reveals for the first time that Jobian artists saw in the ancient hero not only the prophet of a new life or the model of revolt and faith but also--and surprisingly--the intercessor of sexual reprobates, the patron saint of musicians, and, in modern times, the existential man.