Intelligence work is a great deal like flying. While flying is hours of sheer boredom with moments of stark terror, intelligence work is weeks of sheer boredom with moments of stark panic. Ben Jourdon works an analyst at the National Security Agency, specializing in the Middle East. He hadn't sought the job, and he isnt sure he even wants it. As with many of the things in life, though, Ben has little choicethe job is an excellent cover. The only thing he ever really wanted was to be a career Air Force flying officer, but that was not to be. After six years of flying, he had been medically grounded, courtesy of a bullet in Vietnam, and had to seek a new direction. The next six years saw him working as a Signals Intelligence Officer, but that came to an end on a dark street in Athens some eight years before. As for his true avocation, though, he was a professional assassin. What a surprise it would be for the security people at the NSA to find out about this other job

This volume draws together eleven essays by scholars of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Greco-Roman religion and early Judaism, to address the ways that conceptions of identity and otherness shape the interpretation of biblical and other religiously authoritative texts. The contributions explore how interpreters of scriptural texts regularly assume or assert an identification between their own communities and those described in the text, while ignoring the cultural, social, and religious differences between themselves and the text's earliest audiences. Comparing a range of examples, these essays address varying ways in which social identity has shaped the historical contexts, implied audiences, rhetorical shaping, redactional development, literary appropriation, and reception history of particular texts over time. Together, they open up new avenues for studying the relations between social identity, scriptural interpretation, and religious authority.

The Czar's Last Soldier is the story of the search for the Star of Golconda a 42.5-carat diamond slightly smaller than the Hope diamond. Before he was killed, a marine buried the diamond in his foxhole on the island of Corregidor during World War II. Thirty-two years later, at a Nebraska post office, Sam Gibbons and Roscoe Barnes are removing the old post office boxes and replacing them with new ones. Both men are World War II veterans who teamed up as general contractors after the war. When the old post office boxes are removed a letter hidden between warped boards falls to the floor. The letter, dated 1942, is from the marine who died on Corregidor and gives the particulars of a jewel theft he committed at the Shanghai Officer's Club in 1941. As there are no members of the marine's family still alive, they read the letter. Shortly after the theft, the marine's regiment was transferred from China to the Philippines. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the regiment was tasked to defend Corregidor. When the order to surrender was given, not wanting the Japanese to gloom onto the stolen jewels, the marine buried them. Sam and Roscoe hunt for the jewels but are unaware they were stolen from a czarist officer and are thrust into the middle of an international legal battle.