Based on an international colloquium held at the University of Sheffield, this collection represents the first book-length encounter between biblical studies and the proliferating and controversial field of cultural studies. A multidisciplinary team of contributors engage in a multifaceted examination of the Bible's place in culture, ancient and modern, 'high' and 'low'. Contributors include Alice Bach, Fiona Black, Athalya Brenner, Robert Carroll, David Clines, Margaret Davies, Philip Davies, Philip Esler, Cheryl Exum, Yael Feldman, Jennifer Glancy, Jan Willem van Henten, David Jasper, Francis Landy, Barry Matlock, Stephen Moore, Hugh Pyper, John Rogerson, Regina Schwartz, William Scott, and Erich Zenger.

In this new edition of a successful book (over 120,000 copies sold), now updated throughout, a leading expert on the social world of the Bible offers students a reliable guide to the manners and customs of the ancient world. From what people wore, ate, and built to how they exercised justice, mourned, and viewed family and legal customs, this illustrated introduction helps readers gain valuable cultural background on the biblical world. The attractive, full-color, user-friendly design will appeal to students, while numerous pedagogical features--including fifty photos, sidebars, callouts, maps, charts, a glossary of key terms, chapter outlines, and discussion questions--increase classroom utility. Previously published as Manners and Customs in the Bible.

Beginning with Jesus' birth, Ken Bailey leads you on a kaleidoscopic study of Jesus throughout the four Gospels, examining the life and ministry of Jesus with attention to the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, Jesus' relationship to women, and especially Jesus' parables. The work dispels the obscurity of Western interpretations with a stark vision of Jesus in his original context.

"Key contributions to scholarship in biblical studies that engages or is influenced by cultural studies are presented in this volume of critical readings. The volume focuses on harder to locate foundational pieces and presents them in line with more recent studies to situate and trace the revolution in biblical studies that led rise to the wealth of work in reception history and the study of cultural engagements with the bible. As a result the volume provides a grounding in key theoretical perspectives, and history of scholarship as well as an orientation to the discipline as it is now. As with other volumes in the Critical Readings series the volume features a general introduction, as well as introductions each section of the book: theoretical underpinnings, characters and passages in popular culture, motifs and methods, film and television. These introductions situate and frame the readings for readers and researchers. At the end of each section is an annotated bibliography of further readings, which will prompt further research and discussion."--

The Oxford Handbooks series is a major new initiative in academic publishing. Each volume offers an authoritative and up-to-date survey of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned essays from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates. Biblical studies is a highly technical and diverse field. Study of the Bible demands expertise in fields ranging from Archaeology, Egyptology, Assyriology, and Linguistics through textual, historical, and sociological studies to Literary Theory, Feminism, Philosophy, and Theology, to name only some. This authoritative and compelling guide to the discipline will, therefore, be an invaluable reference work for all students and academics who want to explore more fully essential topics in Biblical studies.

This volume presents the findings of an international research symposium, held at St Andrews University, Scotland, in July 2003. Contributors include both biblical scholars and anthropologists. The essays presented variously explore and review interdisciplinary links, innovations and developments between anthropology and biblical studies in reference to interpretation of both the OT and NT and pseudepigraphal works. Explored are methodological issues, the use of anthropological concepts in biblical studies (identity; purity boundaries; virtuoso religion; spiritual experience; sacred space) and more ‘field orientated’ work of bible translators in different cultures.

Until recently, biblical studies and studies of the written and material culture of the ancient Near East have been fragmented, governed by experts who are confined within their individual disciplines’ methodological frameworks and patterns of thinking. The consequence has been that, at present, concepts and the terminology for examining the interaction of textual and historical complexes are lacking. However, we can learn from the cognitive sciences. Until the end of the 1980s, neurophysiologists, psychologists, pediatricians, and linguists worked in complete isolation from one another on various aspects of the human brain. Then, beginning in the 1990s, one group began to focus on processes in the brain, thereby requiring that cell biologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, linguists, and other relevant scientists collaborate with each other. Their investigation revealed that the brain integrates all kinds of information; if this were not the case, we would not be able to catch even a glimpse of the brain’s processing activity. By analogy, van Wolde’s proposal for biblical scholarship is to extend its examination of single elements by studying the integrative structures that emerge out of the interconnectivity of the parts. This analysis is based on detailed studies of specific relationships among data of diverse origins, using language as the essential device that links and permits expression. This method can be called a cognitive relational approach. Van Wolde bases her work on cognitive concepts developed by Ronald Langacker. With these concepts, biblical scholars will be able to study emergent cognitive structures that issue from biblical words and texts in interaction with historical complexes. Van Wolde presents a method of analysis that biblical scholars can follow to investigate interactions among words and texts in the Hebrew Bible, material and nonmaterial culture, and comparative textual and historical contexts. In a significant portion of the book, she then exemplifies this method of analysis by applying it to controversial concepts and passages in the Hebrew Bible (the crescent moon; the in-law family; the city gate; differentiation and separation; Genesis 1, 34; Leviticus 18, 20; Numbers 5, 35; Deuteronomy 21; and Ezekiel 18, 22, 33).