Michael B. Shepherd – författare

Learn how ancient readers interpreted the Bible’s prophetic literature—and why their views have enduring value  How Did They Read the Prophets? explores the world of ancient exegesis, focusing on how early Jewish and Christian readers understood the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic literature. In this illuminating study, Old Testament scholar Michael B. Shepherd takes modern readers on a guided tour through the earliest readings of key passages from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Book of the Twelve. He also surveys shifts in ancient conceptions of prophecy—shifts that reflect the dynamic and complex relationship between speaking, writing, and interpreting.   Shepherd’s well-researched study is distinctive in several respects. One is its focus on ancient readings of prophetic literature in particular, rather than biblical literature in general. Another distinguishing feature is its attention both to inner-biblical interpretation and to early post-biblical exegesis. Finally, the book stands out for its insights into the enduring value of ancient interpretation in the modern period. Rigorous yet accessible, How Did They Read the Prophets? is a remarkable resource for students and general readers interested in biblical studies and the history of interpretation.

Grammarians have been unable to provide a sufficient explanation for the verbal system of Biblical Aramaic by means of the standard categories of tense and aspect. Michael B. Shepherd exposes this situation and suggests a way out of the present impasse through distributional analysis by proposing that Biblical Aramaic has a primary verbal form for narration and a primary verbal form for discourse. This simple yet comprehensive proposal holds true not only for Biblical Aramaic but also for extra-Biblical Aramaic texts. This volume is an indispensable resource for courses in Biblical Aramaic and for anyone who wishes to read and understand the Biblical Aramaic corpus.

Commentators have long set the book of Daniel within the context of world history and the genre of apocalyptic literature. The present volume argues that the primary context for the book is the composition of the Hebrew Bible as a whole. Daniel in the Context of the Hebrew Bible has implications for every major hermeneutical issue in Daniel including the four kingdoms, the son of man, and the prophecy of seventy sevens. In the final analysis, the Hebrew Bible and the book of Daniel are decidedly messianic, eschatological, and faith-oriented.

It has been widely recognized that the Book of the Twelve, Hosea to Malachi, was considered a single composition in antiquity. Recent articles and monographs have discussed the internal clues to this composition, but there has been little effort to understand the way the New Testament authors quote from the Twelve in light of the compositional unity of the book. The Twelve Prophets in the New Testament contends that New Testament quotations from the Twelve presuppose knowledge of the larger whole and cannot be understood correctly apart from awareness of the compositional strategy of the Twelve.

Analysis of inner-biblical exegesis ordinarily involves examination of the intertextual relationship between two texts within the biblical corpus. But in many cases there is an often overlooked intertext that serves as a bridge between the two texts. Such an intermediary text reads the primary text in a manner similar to the way the tertiary text reads it and supplies a missing link in a very subtle yet identifiable manner. The direction of dependence between texts of this kind is not as important in the present study as the direction in which these texts were meant to be read by those who gave them their final shape.