The first textbook to engage with the crossover between the Bible and literature, covering all the key methods of literary criticism and presenting a truly inter-disciplinary approach.

The four companion volumes of Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions contribute to a contextual evaluation of the mutual influences between scriptural exegesis and hermeneutics on the one hand and practices or techniques of interpretation in natural philosophy and the natural sciences on the other. We seek to raise the low profile this theme has had both in the history of science and in the history of biblical interpretation. Furthermore, questions about the interpretation of scripture continue to be provoked by current theological reflection on scientific theories. We also seek to provide a historical context for renewed reflection on the role of the hermeneutics of scripture in the development of theological doctrines that interact with the natural sciences. Contributors are J. Matthew Ashley, Robert E. Brown, Elizabeth Chmielewski, Edward B. Davis, Henri Wijnandus de Knijff, Marwa Elshakry, Richard England, Menachem Fisch, George Harinck, Bernhard Kleeberg, Scott Mandelbrote, G. Blair Nelson, Alexei V. Nesteruk, Jitse M. van der Meer, Rob P. W. Visser, and William Yarchin.

David Wyn Williams presents a literary reimagining of the Suffering Servant of Second Isaiah through the lens of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, offering insight into how the servant's prophetic characterisation dismantled an exiled nation's ideologies of suffering and called the people to understand their plight as part of a redemptive story on behalf of the nations. While Williams devotes the first half of this volume to a close examination of the scriptural servant, the second half is given wholly to the experiences and thoughts of a contemporary 'suffering servant' whom Williams interviewed throughout his final days, setting up a dialogue between the two in order to raise important questions around our corporate and individual responses to suffering. This book is a timely reflection on how an ancient people responded in faith to a national calamity, and how a prophetic figure who features in but a handful of poems inspired the nation to endure and rewrite its own narrative of suffering. The servant's example in the midst of today's uncertainties could not be more poignant.

This two-part book traces the literary and historic study of the story of the 'Wooing of Rebekah' in the Hebrew Bible and its creative interpretations in Rabbinic Midrash. Part 1 treats such issues as the characterization of the narrative agents in the biblical story, the use of repetition as a narrative structuring device, and the question as to the roles of Rebekah and Isaac in this story as well as in the broader Isaac-Rebekah narratives. Part 2 follows several rabbinic interpretations of this story, dealing with, among other topics, the development of the motif of Rebekah's virginity in rabbinic aggadah and halakha as well as the reception of this theme in modern feminist studies of midrash. While treating these topics, this is at the same time a methodological inquiry into the dynamics of midrashic interpretation, treating rabbinic techniques such as 'gap-filling' and 'linkage', and its differences from modern biblical exegesis.

A “wonderful…highly comprehensive” (John Barton, author of A History of the Bible) global history of the world’s best-known and most influential book For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. Its eternal words are transmitted across the world by fallible human hands. Following Jesus’s departing instruction to go out into the world, the Bible has been a book in motion from its very beginnings, and every community it has encountered has read, heard, and seen the Bible through its own language and culture. In The Bible, Bruce Gordon tells the astounding story of the Bible’s journey around the globe and across more than two thousand years, showing how it has shaped and been shaped by changing beliefs and believers’ radically different needs. The Bible has been a tool for violence and oppression, and it has expressed hopes for liberation. God speaks with one voice, but the people who receive it are scattered and divided—found in desert monasteries and Chinese house churches, in Byzantine cathedrals and Guatemalan villages. Breathtakingly global in scope, The Bible tells the story of this sacred book through the stories of its many and diverse human encounters, revealing not a static text but a living, dynamic cultural force.

Revised and condensed from David Norton's acclaimed A History of the Bible as Literature, this book, first published in 2000, tells the story of English literary attitudes to the Bible. At first jeered at and mocked as English writing, then denigrated as having 'all the disadvantages of an old prose translation', the King James Bible somehow became 'unsurpassed in the entire range of literature'. How so startling a change happened and how it affected the making of modern translations such as the Revised Version and the New English Bible is at the heart of this exploration of a vast range of religious, literary and cultural ideas. Translators, writers such as Donne, Milton, Bunyan and the Romantics, reactionary Bishops and radical students all help to show the changes in religious ideas and in standards of language and literature that created our sense of the most important book in English.

It is regarded as a truism that the King James Bible is one of the finest pieces of English prose. Yet few people are aware that the King James Bible was generally scorned or ignored as English writing for a century and a half after its publication. The reputation of this Bible is the central, most fascinating, element in a larger history, that of literary ideas of the Bible as they have come into and developed in English culture; and the first volume of David Norton's magisterial two-volume work surveys and analyses a comprehensive range of these ideas from biblical times to the end of the seventeenth century, providing a unique view of the Bible and translation.