Yahweh Fighting From Heaven

J. J. M. Roberts was graduated from Harvard University, taught at The Johns Hopkins University, and then spent the bulk of his teaching career at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he influenced and was well loved by several generations of students. Here, 21 colleagues and former students contribute essays that reflect Roberts' core interests.

In this volume twelve contributions discuss the relevance, accuracy, potential, and possible alternatives to a literary reading of ancient Jewish writings, especially the Hebrew Bible. Drawing on different academic fields (biblical studies, rabbinic studies, and literary studies) and on various methodologies (literary criticism, rhetorical criticism, cognitive linguistics, historical criticism, and reception history), the essays form a state-of-the-art overview of the current use of the literary approach toward ancient Jewish texts. The volume convincingly shows that the latest approaches to a literary reading can still enhance our understanding of these texts.

A fresh, systematic, and comprehensive examination of the Hebrew word BMH in biblical and post-biblical passages where it supposedly carries its primary topographical sense.

Bernard F. Batto spent the bulk of his career examining the ancient Near Eastern context of the Hebrew Bible, with particular interest in the influence of the surrounding cultures on the biblical creation stories. This collection gathers six of his most important previously published essays and adds two new contributions. Among the essays, Batto identifies various creation motifs prevalent in the ancient Near East and investigates the reflexes of these motifs in Genesis 1–11 and other biblical accounts of the primeval period. He demonstrates how the biblical writers adapted and responded to the creation ideas of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Ugarit, and elsewhere. The articles in the volume were written as independent essays. Nevertheless, they are united by theme. Throughout, Batto makes clear his understanding of the Hebrew Bible as a patently unique text, yet one that cannot possibly be understood independent of greater cultural sphere in which it developed. In the Beginning will serve as an indispensable resource for those interested in both the biblical ideas of creation and the mythology of the ancient Near East that influenced them.

David and Goliath, the call of Samuel, the witch of Endor, David and Bathsheba — such biblical stories are well known. But the books of 1 and 2 Samuel, where they are recorded, are among the most difficult books in the Bible. The Hebrew text is widely considered corrupt and sometimes even unintelligible. The social and religious customs are strange and seem to diverge from the tradition of Moses. In this first part of an ambitious two-volume commentary on the books of Samuel, David Toshio Tsumura sheds considerable light on the background of 1 Samuel, looking carefully at the Philistine and Canaanite cultures, as he untangles the difficult Hebrew text.

In Mapping Metaphorical Discourse in the Fourth Gospel, Beth M. Stovell examines the metaphor of Jesus as king throughout the Fourth Gospel using an interdisciplinary metaphor theory incorporating cognitive and systemic functional linguistic approaches with literary approaches.

In this book, Alec Basson examines the divine metaphors in a selection of biblical Hebrew Psalms of Lamentation from a cognitive-anthropological perspective. The study signals a move beyond the more traditional approaches to the Psalms and argues that the textual information in these poems is more than literary information as such; it is also a cognitive representation of the psalmist's world. The divine portrayals arise from the supplicant's cognitive organisation and utilisation of cultural information, which include the everyday experiences. In situations of affliction, the poet employs various cognitive strategies viz. cultural models, image-schemas and conceptual metaphors as a means of portraying the deity. The exploration illustrates the link between the psalmist's cultural experience, cognitive construal of reality and the metaphorical representations. The utilisation of the different cognitive tools gives rise to new and recurring images of the deity and accounts for the multiple depictions of Yahweh. The investigation arrives at the conclusion that, to appreciate fully the divine metaphors used in the Psalms of Lamentation, one has to examine the cognitive world of the poet.