This volume makes available both the most recent European scholarship on the Pentateuch and its critical discussion, providing a helpful resource and fostering further dialogue between North American and European interpreters. The contributors are Erhard Blum, David M. Carr, Thomas B. Dozeman, Jan Christian Gertz, Christoph Levin, Albert de Pury, Thomas Christian Roemer, Konrad Schmid, and John Van Seters.
This book on the Yahwist comes at the end of a long career of research on the Pentateuch in general and the Yahwist in particular. Van Seters’s interest in the Yahwist was stimulated by the 1964 presidential address of the Society of Biblical Literature, given by Professor Fredrick Winnett, “Rethinking the Foundations,” which focused on the Yahwist in Genesis. This interest followed a path of work on issues surrounding the Yahwist that culminated in three volumes, Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (1992), The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus–Numbers (1994), and A Law Book for the Diaspora: Revision in the Study of the Covenant Code (2003). Over the last few years, it has become clear to Van Seters that readers of the three volumes on the Yahwist, which total more than 1,000 pages, easily lose sight of the Yahwist’s work as a whole and the way in which it provides a historical prologue and framework for D and the DtrH. In this book, Van Seters seeks to provide a summary sketch of the J history and to make clear how the Priestly corpus has been composed as a supplement to the Yahwist with a radically different form and point of view that has obscured the Yahwist’s historical narrative and theological perspective. Part one lays out in simple terms the basic form, structure, and theological perspective of the Yahwist’s history, where it has been interrupted by the inclusions of P, and how it is integrated into DtrH. The essays in part two are intended to bring the scholarly discussion of Van Seters’s earlier books on the Yahwist more up to date, and their order corresponds roughly to the order of the narrative in the first part of the book. Some of these articles have been published previously, but others are new and quite recent, including “The Yahwist as Historian.
The present ecological crisis has created new interest in and criticism of biblical attitudes toward nature. In this book Theodore Hiebert offers a comprehensive examination of the ideology of a single biblical author--the Yahwist (J), writer of the oldest narrative sections of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers. Hiebert argues the importance of reading J in its ancient Near Eastern context. His analysis incorporates evidence concerning the ecologies, economies, and religions of the ancient Levant drawn from recent work in archaeology, history, social anthropology, and comparative religion. Hiebert finds that despite the limitations of J's world view (and the world in which it took shape), J's ideology is relevant to contemporary efforts to frame a theology of ecology. Particularly valuable are J's views of reality as unified and non-dualistic, humanity as limited and dependent, nature and humanity as interrelated and holding sacred significance, and agriculture as a context for an ecological theology.
In this fascinating study, John Van Seters makes a compelling case for a new reading of Genesis. According to Van Seters, the book of Genesis represents the prologue to a major literary work, conceived and constructed by a single writer--an intellectual and historian. Van Seters argues that the author was a true historian who wrote history in the tradition of the ancient antiquarian.
Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them.
This groundbreaking volume of the Five Books of Moses shows and explains how the source texts were compiled: “A fundamental resource” (Peter Machinist, Harvard University). For centuries, biblical scholars have worked on discovering how the Bible came to be. The consensus among a broad range of experts is known as The Documentary Hypothesis: the idea that ancient writers produced documents of poetry, prose, and law over many centuries, which editors then used as sources to fashion the books of the Bible that people have read for the last two thousand years. In The Bible with Sources Revealed, eminent scholar Richard Elliott Friedman offers a new, visual presentation of the Five Books of Moses—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—unlocking the complex and fascinating tapestry of their origins. Different colors and type styles allow readers to easily identify each of the distinct sources, showcasing Friedman's highly acclaimed and dynamic translation. This unique Bible provides a new means to explore the riches of scripture by: •Making it possible to read the source texts individually, to see their artistry, their views of God, Israel, and humankind, and their connection to their moment in history •Presenting the largest collection of evidence ever assembled for establishing and explaining the Documentary Hypothesis •Showing visually how the Bible was formed out of these sources •Helping readers appreciate that the Bible is a rich, complex, beautiful work as a result of the extraordinary way in which it was created.
Modern readers often assume that Genesis 1 depicts the creation of the earth and sky as we know it. Yet in an appeal for textual honesty, Steven DiMattei shows that such beliefs are more representative of modern views about this ancient text than the actual claims and beliefs of its author. Through a culturally contextualized and objective reading of the texts of Genesis 1 and 2, this study not only introduces readers to the textual data that convincingly demonstrate that Genesis' two creation accounts were penned by different authors who held contradictory views and beliefs about the origin of the world and of man and woman, but also establishes on textual grounds that what the author of Genesis 1 portrayed God creating was the world as its author and culture perceived and experienced it--not the objective world, but a subjective world, subject to the culturally conditioned views and beliefs of its author. In the end, this book clearly illustrates that the Bible's ancient texts do in fact represent the beliefs and worldviews of ancient peoples and cultures--not those of God, not those of later readers, and especially not those of modern-day Creationists.
