This volume presents the main lectures of the 23rd Congress of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament (IOSOT) held in Aberdeen, United Kingdom, in August 2019.

Walter Moberly is a top Old Testament theologian known for his creative, accessible, and provocative writing. His Old Testament Theology has been well received. This book, written in a similar vein, combines biblical criticism with constructive theology and engages both Jewish and Christian interpretations. Moberly offers robust readings of eight pivotal Old Testament passages that unpack the nature of God in Christian Scripture, demonstrating a Christian approach to reading the Old Testament that holds together the priorities of both scholarship and faith.

An exegetical and diachronic survey of messianic texts from the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition up through the first millennium CE. Jewish messianism can be traced back to the emerging Kingdom of Judah in the tenth century BCE, when it was represented by the Davidic tradition and the promise of a future heir to David’s throne. From that point, it remained an important facet of Israelite faith, as evidenced by its frequent recurrence in the Hebrew Bible and other early Jewish texts. In preexilic texts, the expectation is for an earthly king—a son of David with certain ethical qualities—whereas from the exile onward there is a transition to a pluriform messianism, often with utopic traits. Warrior, King, Servant, Savior is an exegetical and diachronic study of messianism in these texts that maintains close dialogue with relevant historical research and archaeological insights. Internationally respected biblical scholar Torleif Elgvin recounts the development and impact of messianism, from ancient Israel through the Hasmonean era and the rabbinic period, with rich chapters exploring messianic expectations in the Northern Kingdom, postexilic Judah, and Qumran, among other contexts. For this multifaceted topic—of marked interest to Jews, Christians, and secular historians of religion alike—Elgvin’s handbook is the essential and definitive guide.

The Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon, is an unusual book to find in the Bible. As the Bible's only love poem, the Song offers a unique picture of relations between the sexes in biblical times. Unlike other biblical books, it consists entirely of dialogue. It looks at love from both a woman's and a man's point of view, and shows the reader what love is like exclusively through what lovers say about it. There are few issues in Song of Songs interpretation that are not open to debate, which makes it a fascinating book to study. In this Guide, Cheryl Exum provides a concise survey of the principal questions encountered in Song of Songs scholarship. She also takes the discussion beyond the traditional research questions to introduce readers to new and ongoing areas in Song of Songs research. Bibliographies and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter provide additional resources for readers interested in pursuing specific topics and exploring new directions in the study of the Song of Songs.

Outside of the Bible, all of the known Near Eastern law collections were produced in the third to second millennia BCE, in cuneiform on clay tablets, and in major cities in Mesopotamia and in the Hittite Empire. None of the major sites in Syria that have yielded cuneiform tablets has borne even a fragment of a law collection, even though several have produced ample legal documentation. Excavations at Nuzi have also turned up numerous legal documents, but again, no law collection. Even Egypt has not yielded a collection of laws. As such, the biblical texts that scholars regularly identify as law collections represent the only "western," non-cuneiform expressions of the genre in the ancient Near East, produced by societies not known for their political clout, and separated in time from "other" collections by centuries. Making a Case: The Practical Roots of Biblical Law challenges the long-held notion that Israelite and Judahite scribes either made use of "old" law collections or set out to produce law collections in the Near Eastern sense of the genre. Instead, what we call "biblical law" is closer in form and function to another, oft-neglected Mesopotamian genre: legal-pedagogical texts. During their education, Mesopotamian scribes studied a variety of legal-oriented school texts, including sample contracts, fictional cases, short sequences of laws, and legal phrasebooks. When biblical law is viewed in the context of these legal-pedagogical texts from Mesopotamia, its practical roots in a set of comparable legal exercises begin to emerge.

This volume lays theoretical and methodological groundwork for the analysis of Mesopotamian literature. A comprehensive first chapter by the editors explores critical contemporary issues in Sumerian and Akkadian narrative analysis, and nine case studies written by an international array of scholars test the responsiveness of Sumerian and Akkadian narratives to diverse approaches drawn from literary studies and theories of fiction. Included are intertextual and transtextual analyses, studies of narrative structure and focalization, and treatments of character and characterization. Works considered include the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic and many other Sumerian and Akkadian narratives of gods, heroes, kings, and monsters.