A comparison of the shepherd metaphor in Matthew's Gospel with its use in early Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman writings, shedding light on Matthew's socio-religious location.
A forty day inspirational journey into biblical leadership lavishly illustrated with pictures of Bedouin whose insights bring color and life to passages on shepherd leadership.
An Introduction to Reading Biblical Wisdom Texts is designed for undergraduate students and laypersons who are studying Scripture. Part One poses fundamental questions addressed by the genre of wisdom literature, explores definitions of wisdom and folly from the biblical perspective, describes the characteristics and forms of wisdom poetry, and places Israel's wisdom tradition in a wider historical-cultural context. Part Two addresses the practical wisdom associated with Proverbs, treating both the contents and the academic questions that arise. Parts Three and Four focus on Ecclesiastes and Job, respectively, and on the interpretive challenges they raise. Finally, Part Five recognizes the place of Song of Songs in the wisdom tradition. This text is a highly accessible and engagingly written introduction to the Bible's wisdom literature and is built on a strong scholarly foundation. This highly accessible and engagingly written introduction to the Bible's wisdom literature is built on a strong scholarly foundation but also aims to nurture the reader's love for God, the source of wisdom and truth, and to help the reader wrestle in the context of his or her own faith journey with the love, fear, doubt, joy, anger, and ecstasy expressed by the biblical writers.
Walk from creation to eternity in a way guaranteed to change your view of the world. You'll finally understand the war Satan is waging against God and how that conflict has affected history, including the persecution of Jewish people and Christians.
Young S. Chae analyzes the puzzling association of the Son of David with Jesus' healing ministry in the First Gospel. This, along with the Gospel's rich shepherd/sheep images and the theme of the restoration of the lost sheep of the house of Israel, finds a significant clue in the picture of Jesus as the eschatological Davidic Shepherd according to the pattern of the Davidic Shepherd tradition in the Old Testament and Second Temple Judaism. As Matthew communicates the identity and mission of Jesus, he is conversant with this tradition, particularly Ezekiel 34 and 37 as well as Micah 2-5 and Zechariah 9-14. The story of the First Gospel is the story of the return of YHWH as the eschatological Shepherd for the lost sheep of Israel and also that of the one Davidic Shepherd-Appointee as the eschatological Teacher-Prince in the midst of his one eschatological flock.