The Death Wish In The Hebrew Bible

This book investigates the texts in the Hebrew Bible in which a character expresses a wish to die.

The poetry of the Old Testament articulates the painful experiences of being human. Vast as the Sea shows how texts like Job, Jeremiah, and the Psalms provide honest and healing expressions for life's struggles. This book is a rich resource for scholars and readers of the Bible, as well as for psychologists and pastoral counselors.

An innovative translation and commentary on the book of Jonah by a trio of award-winning scholars The book of Jonah, which tells the outlandish story of a disobedient prophet swallowed by a great fish, is one of the Bible’s best-known narratives. This tale has fascinated readers for millennia and has inspired countless interpretations. This commentary features a new translation of Jonah as well as an introduction outlining the major interpretive issues in the text. The introduction traces the composition history of the book, paying special attention to the psalm in the second chapter; and the authors explore new theories surrounding the time and place where Jonah delivers his message to Nineveh, as well as the city’s act of repentance. In addition to these features, this volume draws on a variety of critical approaches to biblical literature—including affect theory, animal studies, performance criticism, postcolonial criticism, psychological criticism, spatial theory, and trauma theory—to reveal the book’s many interpretive possibilities. An updated treatment of Jonah’s reception history includes analyses of the story in religious traditions, art and literature, and popular culture.

Postmortem existence in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament was rooted in mortuary practices and conceptualized through the embodiment of the dead. But this idea of the afterlife was not hopeless or fatalistic, consigned to the dreariness of the tomb. The dead were cherished and remembered, their bones were cared for, and their names lived on as ancestors. This book examines the concept of the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible by studying the treatment of the dead, as revealed both in biblical literature and in the material remains of the southern Levant. The mortuary culture of Judah during the Iron Age is the starting point for this study. The practice of collective burial inside a Judahite rock-cut bench tomb is compared to biblical traditions of family tombs and joining one's ancestors in death. This archaeological analysis, which also incorporates funerary inscriptions, will shed important insight into concepts found in biblical literature such as the construction of the soul in death, the nature of corpse impurity, and the idea of Sheol. In Judah and the Hebrew Bible, death was a transition that was managed through the ritual actions of the living. The connections that were forged through such actions, such as ancestor veneration, were socially meaningful for the living and insured a measure of immortality for the dead.

In recent decades, scholars have tended to interpret what Job says about death in one of two ways. They interpret it either as part of the broader reading of death in the Old Testament, or by imposing Ancient Near Eastern mythological concepts upon the text disregarding its nature as part of the Old Testament’s wisdom tradition. Varunaj Churnai attempts to redress the latter interpretation and treats the book of Job, and its development and understanding of death, contextually. Churnai specifically looks at how Job presents the two faces of God: God’s wrathful face and God’s gracious face. Beyond Justice demonstrates that the retribution principle allows humans to know the hidden God as it illuminates the relationship between individual and Creator. Through Job’s experiences and heartfelt outpouring of his soul before both God’s wrathful face and God’s gracious face we can know God more fully. Churnai shows how these faces of God are reconciled in the two divine speeches of YHWH, which invite both Job and the reader to move beyond retribution theology to trust in the graciousness of God.

The meaning of the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is studied through the ideals of a good death, beginning with burial customs. This book uses burial remains from Iron Age Judah to shed important light on the images of death found in biblical literature.

Designed for students undertaking their first systematic study of the Hebrew Bible, this text has two goals: to acquaint readers with the content and major themes of the biblical documents, and to introduce them to issues in biblical scholarship. Pedagogically rich and reader-friendly, this text was designed for conventional introductory courses using historical-critical methodology, and will also be useful in courses studying the Bible as literature, or as a reference text in the study of ancient religion.