Jacqueline Vayntrub – författare

For over one hundred years International Critical Commentaries have had a special place among works on the Bible. They bring together all the relevant aids to exegesis - linguistic, textual, archaeological, historical, literary, and theological - to help the reader understand the meaning of the books of the Old and New Testaments. In this volume Jeremy Corley and Bradley Gregory provide an in-depth critical and exegetical commentary on Ben Sira 1-10. The volume’s begins by focusing on the author and book, exploring the historical and sociological context, followed by the sage’s view of women, the book’s teaching on social ethics, ending with the rediscovered Hebrew text and the early translations. The commentary sections each begin with bibliographies of relevant studies and include a double English translation: first of the Greek text and then of the Hebrew or the Syriac text. The exegesis aims to take note of relevant parallels in Second Temple Jewish writings, ancient Greek and Egyptian literature, and the New Testament.

Central to understanding the prophecy and prayer of the Hebrew Bible are the unspoken assumptions that shaped them—their genres. Modern scholars describe these works as “poetry,” but there was no corresponding ancient Hebrew term or concept. Scholars also typically assume it began as “oral literature,” a concept based more in evolutionist assumptions than evidence. Is biblical poetry a purely modern fiction, or is there a more fundamental reason why its definition escapes us?

Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms changes the debate by showing how biblical poetry has worked as a mirror, reflecting each era’s own self-image of verbal art. Yet Vayntrub also shows that this problem is rooted in a crucial pattern within the Bible itself: the texts we recognize as “poetry” are framed as powerful and ancient verbal performances, dramatic speeches from the past. The Bible’s creators presented what we call poetry in terms of their own image of the ancient and the oral, and understanding their native theories of Hebrew verbal art gives us a new basis to rethink our own.