This masterly book is the climax of over twenty-five years of study of the impact of Canaanite religion and mythology on ancient Israel and the Old Testament. It is John Day's magnum opus in which he sets forth all his main arguments and conclusions on the subject. The work considers in detail the relationship between Yahweh and the various gods and goddesses of Canaan, including the leading gods El and Baal, the great goddesses (Asherah, Astarte and Anat), astral deities (Sun, Moon and Lucifer), and underworld deities (Mot, Resheph, Molech and the Rephaim). Day assesses both what Yahwism assimilated from these deities and what it came to reject. More generally he discusses the impact of Canaanite polytheism on ancient Israel and how monotheism was eventually achieved.

The Greek grammar, newly revised and reset for the second edition, which is also available in paperback, can be used as an instructive handbook, as an intermediate level textbook and as a basic reference work to New Testament Greek. The major topics of Greek grammar are treated in a useful pedagodical sequence. Among the innovative treatments are those on tense and aspect, Mood and Attitude, conditional clauses, word order and clause structure, and discourse analysis. The grammar takes account both of the traditional categories of Greek grammar and of recent discussions on structural linguistics.

The Temple Scroll and Related Texts, one of the series Companion to the Qumran Scrolls, is a comprehensive roadmap to the Temple Scroll, the longest and one of the most complex of the manuscripts from Qumran. The central chapter contains a discussion of the contents of the Temple Scroll, including sections on the Temple and its courts, purity regulation, the festival calendar, and the Deuteronomic Paraphrase with the Law of the King. The Companion also includes a chapter on the Description of the New Jerusalem, as well as one on the relationship of the Temple Scroll to the Book of Jubilees, 4QMiqsat Ma'aseh ha-Torah, and the Damascus Document. Written in accessible language and featuring extensive bibliographies, this Companion is ideal for undergraduate and graduate classes.

This is a formidable collection of previously published essays by this distinguished Old Testament scholar. Three significant areas of biblical studies have been a focus of the author's attention throughout his career: the Bible in its ancient Near Eastern world, the Psalms, and Old Testament theology. In Part I, epigraphic discoveries are examined for the light they shed on biblical texts. In Part II, special attention is given to the theological significance of reading the Psalms as a collection. In Part III, a wide range of theological issues-creation, covenant, prayer, cosmology, canon, and especially the nature and character of God-are taken up in various essays that suggest how biblical theology can contribute to the larger theological enterprise.

Lambdin's Introduction to Biblical Hebrew has established itself as a standard textbook in colleges and universities as well as being frequently used by those who wish to teach themselves Biblical Hebrew. The lack of a key to the many exercises in the book has been widely regretted, but this lack is made good with the present publication. Having used Lambdin as a teaching aid for more than ten years, however, Williamson has become aware of some areas in which students still find difficulty. He has therefore supplemented his Key with many further comments and explanations drawn from his teaching experience with the aim of helping readers to a better understanding of both grammar and syntax.

An exciting collection of essays connecting postcolonialism and the Gospel of John, written by a group of international scholars, both established and new, from Hispanic, African, Jewish, Chinese, Korean and African-American backgrounds. It explores important topics such as the appropriation of John in settler communities of the United States and Canada, and the use of John in the colonisation of Africa, Asia, Latin America and New Zealand.The interpreters represent communities of borderland dwellers, women in colonised settings, minority ethnic groups within colonised centres and others. In an era of rapid globalisation, increased travel, rising diasporic communities and neo-colonialism, it is crucial that biblical scholars find ways to address this world with critical skill and sensitivity. This book fills this need.

While the book of Jonah is, in some ways, unique, it stands firmly in the Old Testament tradition. There have been various suggestions as to genre, the most likely being the (short) didactic story; but the aim of the author is not easy to discern. The authenticity of Jonah's message to the Ninevites is stressed, as is their repentance, and Yahweh's mercy. The purpose of the book must lie in a combination of these themes. Lamentations is a neglected book, perhaps because it was associated with the book of Jeremiah and considered almost as an appendix. On the question of genre it has the closest affinities with the psalms of lament; but, whereas it is very difficult to link a psalm with a specific historical event or period, the five chapters of Lamentations appear to have the Fall of Jerusalem as background. While gloom abounds, the careful reader discovers the faith of the author shining through. He is a practical monotheist who interprets the castastrophe of the fall of Jerusalem in the light of his faith.

Works on Old Testament historiography, the 'Conquest', and the origins of ancient Israel have burgeoned in recent days. But while others have been issuing new reconstructions this novel work presents a close reading of the biblical text. The focus is on the literary techniques that ancient writers employed in narrating stories of conquest, and the aim is to pinpoint their communicative intentions in their own contexts. This reading is enhanced by engagement with the important discipline of the philosophy of history. Ancient Conquest accounts, replete with extensive quotations from Assyrian, Hittite and Egyptian conquest accounts, is a learned and methodologically sensitive study of a wide range of ancient Near Eastern texts as well as of Joshua 9-12.

For the Priestly writers, ritual was a fundamental form of theological reflection. This study analyses the conceptual categories of space, time and status in an effort to clarify the larger cultural and conceptual categories operative in the Priestly ritual system. Drawing on interpretative models derived from cultural anthropology, the author argues that Priestly creation theology forms a necessary context for understanding the Priestly rituals.

This book addresses a fundamental reality of our time: the great movement of people, for a variety of reasons, within and across countries and cultures. From this migration has emerged the 'diasporic intellectual': the state of dislocation and displacement has become a vantage point for reflection and interpretation. The same is true of theological studies in general and biblical criticism in particular. In this masterly treatment, Fernando Segovia focuses on the emerging transborder biblical interpreters from the Two-Thirds World now residing and working in the West, both in the United States and in Europe, and examines their multiple identities. He also explores how this state of 'in-betweenness' and homesickness affects, influences and informs biblical interpretation.

A comprehensive introduction to the critical issues raised by scholarship on both books of Samuel. The often intricate problems are dealt with clearly and engagingly; the chapters deal with the Deuteronomistic History, the Shiloh tradition, the Ark narrative, the rise of the monarchy, the reign of Saul, the story of David, the Davidic covenant, the Succession Narrative and the Samuel appendix. A first-rate guide for students, with annotated bibliographies and indexes.

In this original study, Dr Davis argues that Ezekiel's place in the history of prophecy is overdue for reassessment. As against current views that Ezekiel represents the collapse of prophetism into priestly and scribal forms, she argues that something radically different in prophecy begins with Ezekiel. Ezekiel represents the creation of a new literary idiom for prophecy. He develops an archival speech form oriented less toward current events than to reshaping the tradition. He has taken a step backward from direct confrontation with an audience as the basic dynamic of communication, and has made the medium of prophecy not the person of the prophet but the text. Like the postexilic prophets, Ezekiel participated in the transformation of the social role of prophecy, and thereby saved himself from oblivion.

The Earth Bible is an international project, including volumes on ecojustice readings of major sections of the Bible. The basic aims of
the Earth Bible project are: to develop ecojustice principles appropriate to an Earth hermeneutic for interpreting the Bible and for
promoting justice and healing for Earth; to publish these interpretations as contributions to the current debate on ecology, ecoethics and ecotheology; to provide a responsible forum within which the suppressed voice of Earth may be heard and impulses for healing Earth may be generated. The project explores text and tradition from the perspective of Earth, employing a set of ecojustice principles
developed in consultation with ecologists, suspecting that the text and/or its interpreters may be anthropocentric and not geocentric, but searching to retrieve alternative traditions that hear the voice of Earth and value Earth as more than a human instrument. The lead article in Volume V is a reflection in responses to the ecojustice principles employed in the hermeneutic of the project. Several articles offer insights into New Testament texts that seem to devalue Earth in favour of heaven. The final article by Barbara Rossing challenges the popular apocalyptic notion that in the new age Earth will be terminated. A feature of this volume is a dialogue between Norman Habel, who argues that John One seems to devalue Earth, and two respondents, Elaine Wainwright and Vicky Balabanski (who is coeditor of this volume with Norman Habel). 1

The second feminist volume volume on Johannine literature includes an Introduction by Amy-Jill Levine; Adele Reinhartz on Women in the Johannine Community: An Exercise in Historical Imagination; Satako Yamaguchi, 'I Am (I Do)' Sayings and Women in Context and Dorothy Lee, Abiding in the Fourth Gospel.Colleen Conway writes on Gender Matters in John; Adeline Fehribach on The Crucifixion in the Fourth Gospel: A Birthing Moment; Deborah Sawyer on Water and Blood: Birthing Images in John's Gospel; Harold Attridge on Don't Be Touching Me: Recent Feminist Scholarship on Mary Magdalene; and Jane Schaberg, Thinking Back through the Magdalene.

In this very significant work, translated from the Italian, Bovati examines in careful detail the practice of justice in ancient Israel, first the bilateral controversy (the rib), and then the legal judgement properly speaking. Re-establishing Justice is destined to become the standard reference work in the field. The contents deal with 1. The juridical dispute in general. 2 The accusation, 3 The response of the accused, 4 The reconciliation, 5. Judgement in court, 6.The acts and procedures preceding the debate, 7. The debate, 8. The sentence and execution.

Is the Bible a Hellenistic book? The essays in this volume respond to that challenging question, formulated by Niels Peter Lemche, and offer everything from qualified agreement to vociferous opposition. In so doing, they debate and illuminate the many features of Jewish writing in the Second Temple period, including not only the scriptures themselves and their own history, but the non-canonized literature of the late Second-Temple period. As with all the volumes in this pioneering series, the editor, Lester Grabbe, introduces and reflects upon the discussion and its implications for one of the most controversial topics in current biblical studies.