A tension between pious submission and defiant protest pervades responses to suffering and oppression in the Hebrew Bible. Though both positions are frequently encountered in the same books, even embodied in the same character, interpreters tend to dissociate them from one another and then privilege one over the other. The genius of the…[Read more]

David Clines once famously asked, ‘Why is there a book of Job, and what does it do to you if you read it?’ This chapter will ask a different yet related question: What is the book of Job, and how does that affect how you read it?

According to Gerhard von Rad, the book of Job provides examples of both how the wise took the offensive against God when individual suffering attacked the trust that they put in Yahweh’s ordering of the world and how they resolved their doubts by trusting in Yahweh’s mysterious and inexplicable ways. Though von Rad’s interpretation of Job is rarel…[Read more]

With increased interest in wisdom in the Hebrew Bible and beyond, new questions are being raised about the Wisdom Literature category, ranging from its setting to its boundaries and even its continued validity. Now, therefore, is an opportune time for the topic to receive the type of treatment that an Oxford Handbook will provide, in which a broad…[Read more]

This non-evaluative overview of God, Justice, and Society: Aspects of Law and Legality in the Bible summarizes Jonathan Burnside’s introduction to biblical law and his demonstration of its value as a resource for modern legal issues.

in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology

While previous works on parody in the Hebrew Bible have addressed the literary technique ad hoc in the service of the interpretation of specific texts, this article approaches the topic more broadly, attempting to understand the nature of the technique itself. Drawing on literary criticism, particularly the work of Linda Hutcheon, the commonly…[Read more]

Patrick Miller claims the Psalms “were composed, sung, prayed, collected, passed on because they have the capacity to articulate and express the words, thoughts, prayers of anyone, though they do not necessarily do that” (Miller 1986: 23, emphasis original). In this paper I trace the way Psalm 22, as its hyperbolic language explodes the bou…[Read more]

In the order of the Ketuvim in Baba Bathra 14b, the book of Job is preceded by the Psalms and followed by the “Wisdom” books Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. The connections between Job and the latter books have been discussed extensively, but its affinities with the Psalms have been largely overlooked. In The Prayers of Job and David, Ambrose wri…[Read more]

The intertextual connections between Isa 40–55 and the Hebrew Bible are well documented (Willey 1997, Sommer 1998, Schultz 1999). However, none of these studies deal with the parallels between Isaiah and Job, which is surprising because the two articles to deal explicitly with the subject (Pfeiffer 1927 and Terrien 1966) both suggest that Isaiah i…[Read more]

Applying the legal metaphor integral to the book of Job to reevaluate the evidence for Job’s innocence, this article discusses the various attempts made by Christian interpreters to come to terms with the final form of the book of Job, including its testimony to Job’s complaints. Though many interpreters simply ignore the complaints in their att…[Read more]

As originally formulated by Julia Kristeva in the 1960s, ‘intertextuality’ in its full theoretical version expressed the belief that all texts are composed of words that have already been said, and the emphasis on the meaning of texts being derived from and interpreted within textual surroundings effectively eclipsed the importance of the aut…[Read more]

Ecclesiastes 11:9 is a microcosm of the interpretive problems that plague the interpretation of the book. Put more positively, the voices which clash in this verse are the same which call readers inexorably back to be lost in their seemingly endless dialogue. First, Qoheleth’s joy declares, “Rejoice, young man, while you are young, and let you…[Read more]

Pages 11–38 in Was There a Wisdom Tradition?: New Prospects in Israelite Wisdom Studies. Edited by Mark Sneed. Ancient Israel and Its Literature. Atlanta: SBL, 2015.

This article unearths the origins of the “Wisdom Literature” category in nineteenth-century German biblical scholarship, identifying Johann Bruch, in his work Weisheits-Lehre der Hebräer, as the “Wellhausen of Wisdom.” It then demonstrates the distorting effect that the projection of the post-Enlightenment interests of scholars in that time and…[Read more]