Samuel E. Balentine – författare

Ritual has a primal connection to the idea that a transcendent order - numinous and mysterious, supranatural and elusive, divine and wholly other - gives meaning and purpose to life. The construction of rites and rituals enables humans to conceive and apprehend this transcendent order, to symbolize it and interact with it, to postulate its truths in the face of contradicting realities and to repair them when they have been breached or diminished. This Handbook provides a compendium of the information essential for constructing a comprehensive and integrated account of ritual and worship in the ancient world. Its focus on ritual and worship from the perspective of biblical studies, as opposed to religious studies, highlights that the world of ritual and worship was a topic of central concern for the people of the Ancient Near East, including the world of the Bible. Given the scarcity of the material in the Bible itself, the authors in this collection use materials from the ancient Near East to provide a larger context for the practices of the biblical world, giving due attention to historical, anthropological, and social scientific methods that inform the context of biblical worship. The specifics of ritual and worship life-the sacred spaces, times, and actors in worship-are examined in detail, with essays covering both the divine and human aspects of the sacred dimension. The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible considers several underlying concepts of ritual practice and closes with a theological outlook on worship and ritual from a variety of perspectives, demonstrating a fruitful exchange between biblical studies, ritual theory, and social science research.

Ritual has a primal connection to the idea that a transcendent order - numinous and mysterious, supranatural and elusive, divine and wholly other - gives meaning and purpose to life. The construction of rites and rituals enables humans to conceive and apprehend this transcendent order, to symbolize it and interact with it, to postulate its truths in the face of contradicting realities and to repair them when they have been breached or diminished. This Handbook provides a compendium of the information essential for constructing a comprehensive and integrated account of ritual and worship in the ancient world. Its focus on ritual and worship from the perspective of biblical studies, as opposed to religious studies, highlights that the world of ritual and worship was a topic of central concern for the people of the Ancient Near East, including the world of the Bible. Given the scarcity of the material in the Bible itself, the authors in this collection use materials from the ancient Near East to provide a larger context for the practices of the biblical world, giving due attention to historical, anthropological, and social scientific methods that inform the context of biblical worship. The specifics of ritual and worship life-the sacred spaces, times, and actors in worship-are examined in detail, with essays covering both the divine and human aspects of the sacred dimension. The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible considers several underlying concepts of ritual practice and closes with a theological outlook on worship and ritual from a variety of perspectives, demonstrating a fruitful exchange between biblical studies, ritual theory, and social science research.

Ritual has a primal connection to the idea that a transcendent order - numinous and mysterious, supranatural and elusive, divine and wholly other - gives meaning and purpose to life. The construction of rites and rituals enables humans to conceive and apprehend this transcendent order, to symbolize it and interact with it, to postulate its truths in the face of contradicting realities and to repair them when they have been breached or diminished. This Handbook provides a compendium of the information essential for constructing a comprehensive and integrated account of ritual and worship in the ancient world. Its focus on ritual and worship from the perspective of biblical studies, as opposed to religious studies, highlights that the world of ritual and worship was a topic of central concern for the people of the Ancient Near East, including the world of the Bible. Given the scarcity of the material in the Bible itself, the authors in this collection use materials from the ancient Near East to provide a larger context for the practices of the biblical world, giving due attention to historical, anthropological, and social scientific methods that inform the context of biblical worship. The specifics of ritual and worship life-the sacred spaces, times, and actors in worship-are examined in detail, with essays covering both the divine and human aspects of the sacred dimension. The Oxford Handbook of Ritual and Worship in the Hebrew Bible considers several underlying concepts of ritual practice and closes with a theological outlook on worship and ritual from a variety of perspectives, demonstrating a fruitful exchange between biblical studies, ritual theory, and social science research.

James Barr is a Professor of the Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University, and was formerly Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford. This is a collection of essays in honour of his seventieth birthday by twenty-four leading figures in biblical studies and theology in Britain, North America and Europe. Barr's own work covers an enormous range, from highly detailed linguistic and textual study of the biblical languages and ancient versions, to broad issues in the interpretation of the Bible and its place in theology. The essays assembled here mirror the range of these interests, with essays on textual criticism, linguistics, biblical translation, theological themes in the Bible, and the history of biblical scholarship. There is also an evaluation of Barr's work by the editors.Contributors:Samuel Balentine, John Barton, Bertil Albrektson, Emanuel Tov, Jeremy Hughes, Robert Hanhart, Edward Ullendorff, Ernest Nicholson, Douglas Knight, John Emerton, Lothar Perlitt, Joseph Blenkinsopp, P. D. Miller, James L. Mays, Walter Harrelson, Hans Barstad, Michael Fishbane, William Scott Green, Jane Barr, Brevard Childs, Rudolf Smend, John McIntyre, Dietrich Ritschl, Maurice Wiles.

The Hidden God The Hiding of the Face of God in the Old Testament

The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology (OEBT) is a new encyclopedic treatment of major theological issues and themes in the Bible that surpasses all similar reference works in scope and significance. Leading scholars provide extensive overviews of key topics, offering analyses of the trajectory and reception history of theological issues as well as critical assessment of Near Eastern and Greco-Roman antecedents for Old and New Testament perspectives. While many entries address the Bible's historical context, including traditional theological perspectives on creation, sin, covenant, grace, and forgiveness, others are more rooted in modern issues, featuring biblical perspectives on contemporary concerns such as wealth and poverty, gender/race discrimination, and market economics. The two-volume OEBT contains 168 entries ranging in length from 2,000 to 8,000 words. With bibliographic references and suggestions for further reading, each entry affords students and scholars a comprehensive topical and methodological summary of the topic that serves as both a go-to reference and a starting point for original research. The OEBT's distinctive approach and range of entries make it a unique resource that fills a void in biblical scholarship.

This volume in the popular Interpretation series presents the book of Leviticus. It focuses on the history of Israel during this time when Israel's life was marked by the various ritual sacrifices and observances commanded by God for the ordering of the nation's life.Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching is a distinctive resource for those who interpret the Bible in the church. Planned and written specifically for teaching and preaching needs, this critically acclaimed biblical commentary is a major contribution to scholarship and ministry.

This volume in the popular Interpretation series presents the book of Leviticus. It focuses on the history of Israel during this time when Israel's life was marked by the various ritual sacrifices and observances commanded by God for the ordering of the nation's life.Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching is a distinctive resource for those who interpret the Bible in the church. Planned and written specifically for teaching and preaching needs, this critically acclaimed biblical commentary is a major contribution to scholarship and ministry.

An extensive history of how the Bible’s story of Job has been interpreted through the ages.The question that launches Job’s story is posed by God at the outset of the story: “Have you considered my servant Job?” (1:8; 2:3). By any estimation the answer to this question must be yes. The forty-two chapters that form the biblical story have in fact opened the story to an ongoing practice of reading and rereading, evaluating and reevaluating. Early Greek and Jewish translators emphasized some aspects of the story and omitted others; the Church Fathers interpreted Job as a forerunner of Christ, while medieval Jewish commentators debated conservative and liberal interpretations of God’s providential love. Artists, beginning at least in the Greco-Roman period, painted and sculpted their own interpretations of Job. Novelists, playwrights, poets, and musicians—religious and irreligious, from virtually all points of the globe—have added their own distinctive readings.In Have You Considered My Servant Job?, Samuel E. Balentine examines this rich and varied history of interpretation by focusing on the principal characters in the story—Job, God, the satan figure, Job’s wife, and Job’s friends. Each chapter begins with a concise analysis of the biblical description of these characters, then explores how subsequent readers have expanded or reduced the story, shifted its major emphases or retained them, read the story as history or as fiction, and applied the morals of the story to the present or dismissed them as irrelevant.Each new generation of readers is shaped by different historical, cultural, and political contexts, which in turn require new interpretations of an old yet continually mesmerizing story. Voltaire read Job one way in the eighteenth century, Herman Melville a different way in the nineteenth century. Goethe’s reading of the satan figure in Faust is not the same as Chaucer’s in The Canterbury Tales, and neither is fully consonant with the Testament of Job or the Qur’an. One need only compare the descriptions of God in the biblical account with the imaginative renderings by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Franz Kafka to see that the effort to understand why God afflicts Job “for no reason” (2:3) continues to be both compelling and endlessly complicated.“A tour de force of cultural interaction with the book of Job. He guides today’s reader along the path of Job interpretation, exegesis, adaptation and imagining revealing the sheer variety of themes, meanings, creativity and re-readings that have been inspired by this one biblical book. Balentine shows us that not only is there “always someone playing Job” (MacLeish, J.B.) but there’s always someone, past or present, reading this ever-enigmatic book.” —Katharine J. Dell, University of Cambridge“Balentine “considers Job” for the countless ways this biblical book, in all its rich complexities, has inspired readers over the centuries. . . . Balentine’s volume sparkles with insightful theological commentary and rigorous scholarship, and any exegetical course or study on Job would benefit from it.” —Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology

This collection of eighteen essays addresses critical theological and ethical issues in the book of Job: (1) Prologue: From Eden to Uz; (2) Job and His Friends: “What Provokes You that You Keep on Talking?”; (3) Job and the Priests: “Look At Me and Be Appalled;” (4) Traumatizing Job: “God Has Worn Me Out;” (5) Out of the Whirlwind: “Can You Thunder with A Voice Like God’s?”; (6) Preaching Job and Job’s God: “Listen Carefully to My Words;” (7) Epilogue: “All’s Well That Ends Well” … or Is it? The lead essay raises the question that lingers over the entire book: What are we to think of a God who is complicit in the death of seven sons and three daughters “for no reason”?