In this new edition of a successful book (over 120,000 copies sold), now updated throughout, a leading expert on the social world of the Bible offers students a reliable guide to the manners and customs of the ancient world. From what people wore, ate, and built to how they exercised justice, mourned, and viewed family and legal customs, this illustrated introduction helps readers gain valuable cultural background on the biblical world. The attractive, full-color, user-friendly design will appeal to students, while numerous pedagogical features--including fifty photos, sidebars, callouts, maps, charts, a glossary of key terms, chapter outlines, and discussion questions--increase classroom utility. Previously published as Manners and Customs in the Bible.
This is a valuable resourse book through the Bible, explaining many customs practiced in Bible times. Not only is it easy to understand, but it is also filled with many helpful illustrations.
This book provides a wealth of insight into life in Bible times, gathered from the biblical text, from important extra-biblical sources, as well as from the most recent archaeological findings. The book is enriched with abundant maps and illustrations.
"This work is an essential companion for understanding each book of the New Testament in its cultural context. It provides information and analysis on each biblical book, covering its cultural and historical background including the date of composition, the author and a fresh outline of each biblical book. From the life of Jesus in the Gospels, to the life of Paul in Acts, you’ll find the answers you are looking for here. Cultural and archaeological discoveries are provided throughout, helping to bring the Bible alive for any reader. It is beautifully illustrated with over 200 colorful, maps, timelines, charts, photographs, and illustrations. A helpful glossary defines technical terms, and extensive footnotes with hundreds of commentaries and books listed in the For Future Study section, as well as an extensive bibliography, provide an invaluable resource to readers seeking further study. An engaging resource intended for laypeople who want to know more about the New Testament, whether in seminary courses, college classrooms, church groups or personal study."--Back cover.
African Sacred Spaces: Culture, History, and Change is a collection of carefully and analytically written essays on different aspects of African sacred spaces. The interaction between the past and present points to Africans’ continuing recognition of certain natural phenomena and places as sacred. Western influence, the introduction of Christianity and Islam, as well as modernity, have not succeeded in completely obliterating African spirituality and sacred observances, especially as these relate to space in its various iterations. Indeed, Africans, on the continent and in the Diasporas, have responded to the challenges of history, environmentalism, and sustainability with sober and versatile responses in their reverence for sacred space as expressed through a variety of religious, historical, and spiritual practices, as this volume attempts to show.
John H. Walton and Victor H. Matthews provide an accessible passage-by-passage commentary on the archaeological and cultural background of the first five books of the Bible.
This unique commentary provides historical, social and cultural background for each passage of the Old Testament. From Genesis through Malachi, this single volume gathers and condenses an abundance of specialized knowledge, and includes a glossary, maps and charts, and expanded explanations of significant background issues.
While honoring the historical context and literary diversity of the Old Testament, Telling the Old Testament Story is a thematic reading that construes the OT as a complex but coherent narrative. Unlike standard, introductory textbooks that only cover basic background and interpretive issues for each Old Testament book, this introduction combines a thematic approach with careful exegetical attention to representative biblical texts, ultimately telling the macro-level story, while drawing out the multiple nuances present within different texts and traditions. The book works from the Protestant canonical arrangement of the Old Testament, which understands the story of the Old Testament as the story of God and God’s relationship with all creation in love and redemption—a story that joins the New Testament to the Old. Within this broader story, the Old Testament presents the specific story of God and God’s relationship with Israel as the people called, created, and formed to be God’s covenant partner and instrument within creation. The Old Testament begins by introducing God’s mission in Genesis. The story opens with the portrait of God’s good, intended creation of right-relationships (Gen 1—2) and the subsequent distortion of that good creation as a result of humanity’s rebellion (Gen 3—11). Genesis 12 and following introduce God’s commitment to restore creation back to the right-relationships and divine intentions with which it began. Coming out of God’s new covenant engagement with creation in Gen 9, this divine purpose begins with the calling of a people (who turn out to be the manifold descendants of Abraham and Sarah) to be God’s instrument of blessing for all creation and thus to reverse the curse brought on by sin. The diverse traditions that comprise the remainder of the Pentateuch then combine to portray the creation and formation of Israel as a people prepared to be God’s instrument of restoration and blessing. As the subsequent Old Testament books portray Israel’s life in the land and journey into and out of exile, the reader encounters complex perspectives on Israel’s attempts to understand who God is, who they are as God’s people, and how, therefore, they ought to live out their identity as God’s people within God’s mission in the world. The final prophetic books that conclude the Protestant Old Testament ultimately give the story of God’s mission and people an open-ended quality, suggesting that God’s mission for God’s people continues and leading Christian readers to consider the New Testament’s story of the Church as an extension and expansion of the broader story of God introduced in the Old Testament. The main methodological perspective that informs the book includes work on the phenomenological function of narrative (especially story’s function to shape the identity and practice of the reader), as well as more recent so-called “missional” approaches to reading Christian scripture. Canonical criticism provides the primary means for relating the distinctive voices within the Old Testament texts that still honor the particularity and diversity of the discrete compositions. Accessibly written, this book invites readers to enter imaginatively into the biblical story and find the Old Testament's lively and enduring implications.
