Bautch argues that the return from the Exile is presented as an opportunity for Jews, primarly those in Judah, to interpret anew the relationship between God and Israel.

In biblical and theological studies, fresh perspectives and novel approaches can breathe new life into familiar subjects. Remembering the Covenants in Song reconsiders the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenant relationship through the unique biblical and canonical lens of a postexilic song. In Psalm 105, the psalmist’s intriguing intertextual engagement with both of Israel’s great covenant traditions provides a rare glimpse into the covenant-understanding of a postexilic biblical writer interacting with the Torah. Remembering the Covenants in Song entails an intertextual study of Psalm 105 that brings the psalmist’s rhetorical design and covenant references into a dialogue with the Torah’s seminal covenant texts. The examination of the psalmist’s use of covenant references and allusions represents an innovative approach to assessing the rhetorical significance of intertextuality in biblical writings.

The book's point of departure is the return from the Exile, which is presented as an opportunity for Jews, primarly those in Judah, to interpret anew the relationship between God and Israel. The relationship had traditionally been thought of as a covenant, and central to the book's thesis is that post-exilic writers used a paradigm that was essentially that of the pre-exilic Mosiac covenant, i.e. a pact between God and humanity conditioned by the latter's observance of the law. The first part of the book describes the process whereby the Mosaic covenant was renovated and its content brought up to date. In this discussion, familiar topoi of Second Temple Judaism such as penitential prayer, creation theology, and kinship ethos are shown to be integral to a contemporary concept of creation. The second part of the book explores a paradox. On the one hand, the fact that the Mosaic covenant was articulated in the discourse of kinship marked it with an insularity that in turn made this covenant attractive to sectarian groups. Here, evidence is adduced largely from the Dead Sea Scrolls. On the other hand, as the dominant paradigm the Mosaic covenant had ascribed to it a high level of normativity, as seen in the work of tradents such as the Priestly editors and the author of Jubilees. Ultimately, the Mosaic covenant was invoked at the center and the periphery as both a normative theological concept and a cipher to sectarian self-identity. The book concludes that by the end of the Second Temple period, although the Mosiac covenant was normative in terms of a covenantal nomism that was incumbent upon the Jews, the covenant's sectarian tendenz made its precepts non-binding and optional.

The current state of scholarship on the book of Ezekiel, one of the three Major Prophets, is robust. Ezekiel, unlike most pre-exilic prophetic collections, contains overt clues that its primary circulation was as a literary text and not a collection of oral speeches. The author was highly educated, the theology of the book is "dim," and its view of humanity is overwhelmingly negative. In The Oxford Handbook of Ezekiel, editor Corrine Carvalho brings together scholars from a diverse range of interpretive perspectives to explore one of the Bible's most debated books. Consisting of twenty-seven essays, the Handbook provides introductions to the major trends in the scholarship of Ezekiel, covering its history, current state, and emerging directions. After an introductory overview of these trends, each essay discusses an important element in the scholarly engagement with the book. Several essays discuss the history of the text (its historical context, redactional layers, text criticism, and use of other Israelite and near eastern traditions). Others focus on key themes in the book (such as temple, priesthood, law, and politics), while still others look at the book's reception history and contextual interpretations (including art, Christian use, gender approaches, postcolonial approaches, and trauma theory). Taken together, these essays demonstrate the vibrancy of Ezekiel research in the twenty-first century.

Life and Death: Social Perspectives on Biblical Bodies explores some of the social, material, and ideological dynamics shaping life and death in both the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel and Judah. Analysing topics ranging from the bodily realities of gestation, subsistence, and death, and embodied performances of gender, power, and status, to the imagined realities of post-mortem and divine existence, the essays in this volume offer exciting new trajectories in our understanding of the ways in which embodiment played out in the societies in which the texts of the Hebrew Bible emerged.

You are what you love. But you might not love what you think. In this book, award-winning author James K. A. Smith shows that who and what we worship fundamentally shape our hearts. And while we desire to shape culture, we are not often aware of how culture shapes us. We might not realize the ways our hearts are being taught to love rival gods instead of the One for whom we were made. Smith helps readers recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices. He explains that worship is the "imagination station" that incubates our loves and longings so that our cultural endeavors are indexed toward God and his kingdom. This is why the church and worshiping in a local community of believers should be the hub and heart of Christian formation and discipleship. Following the publication of his influential work Desiring the Kingdom, Smith received numerous requests from pastors and leaders for a more accessible version of that book's content. No mere abridgment, this new book draws on years of Smith's popular presentations on the ideas in Desiring the Kingdom to offer a fresh, bottom-up rearticulation. The author creatively uses film, literature, and music illustrations to engage readers and includes new material on marriage, family, youth ministry, and faith and work. He also suggests individual and communal practices for shaping the Christian life.

The 22 essays in this new and comprehensive study explore how notions of covenant, especially the Sinaitic covenant, flourished during the Neo-Babylonian, Persian, and early Hellenistic periods. Following the upheaval of the Davidic monarchy, the temple’s destruction, the disenfranchisement of the Jerusalem priesthood, the deportation of Judeans to other lands, the struggles of Judeans who remained in the land, and the limited returns of some Judean groups from exile, the covenant motif proved to be an increasingly influential symbol in Judean intellectual life. The contributors to this volume, drawn from many different countries including Canada, Germany, Israel, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States, document how Judean writers working within historiographic, Levitical, prophetic, priestly, and sapiential circles creatively reworked older notions of covenant to invent a new way of understanding this idea. These writers examine how new conceptions of the covenant made between YHWH and Israel at Mt. Sinai play a significant role in the process of early Jewish identity formation. Others focus on how transformations in the Abrahamic, Davidic, and Priestly covenants responded to cultural changes within Judean society, both in the homeland and in the diaspora. Cumulatively, the studies of biblical writings, from Genesis to Chronicles, demonstrate how Jewish literature in this period developed a striking diversity of ideas related to covenantal themes.