Examines the dialectic relationship between the text, conceived as the vehicle of narrative communication, and the reader in an assemenent of the story of Rahab – the prostitute from Jericho – in Josuha 2. Toczyski uses his study to examine how this story has been read by various audiences across time, the different interpretive perspectives and methodologies that have thus been brought to the text and the influences this has had on the manner in which the story has been interpreted. In particular Toczyski focuses on internal literary analysis of Joshua 2 and the external historical approach and what this can say about the readers of the text. The purpose of such insight is to register how successive interpretations overlap and set the interpretative pattern for subsequent generations of readers. As a result of this conceptual framework, Toczyski presents the Rahab story in the broader context of the communicative process, which has been challenging the story's readers for centuries. This deep immersion into both internal and external contexts reveals the generally-overlooked thread within the Rahab story, namely “the power of storytelling”, which may prove relevant for contemporary readers by providing grounds for inter-cultural dialogue in the postmodern world.

Monasticism has a special position in the history of pastoral care. It produced innovations in various aspects of pastoral care despite, or more precisely, because of its isolation in legal or social terms from the secular world. The thirteen papers contained in this volume will reveal that there was a great variety in the ways pastoral care continued to be practised by monasticism, depending on time, space, and the nature of each religious order. Adopting a comparative approach, their historical and geographical range of investigation is not limited to medieval Europe but expands to the Americas and even to Japan in the early Modern Age. This volume bases on a conference held on 1 and 2 March 2019 at Okayama University, Japan, as part of the close collaboration between a Japanese research group on Christian/Buddhist religious movements and the Research Project "Monasteries in the High Middle Ages: Innovation Laboratories for European Life Designs and Regulatory Models" of the Saxon and the Heidelberg Academies of Sciences and Humanities, as well as the Research Center for Comparative History of Religious Orders (FOVOG, Dresden).

This book investigates issues of identity and narrativity in late Byzantine romances in a Mediterranean context, covering the chronological span from the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 to the 16th century. It includes chapters not only on romances that were written and read in the broader Byzantine world but also on literary texts from regions around the Mediterranean Sea. The volume offers new insights and covers a variety of interrelated subjects concerning the narrative representations of self-identities, gender, and communities, the perception of political and cultural otherness, and the interaction of space and time with identity formation. The chapters focus on texts from the Byzantine, western European, and Ottoman worlds, thus promoting a cross-cultural approach that highlights the role of the Mediterranean as a shared environment that facilitated communications, cultural interaction, and the trading and reconfiguration of identities. The volume will appeal to a wide audience of researchers and students alike, specializing in or simply interested in cultural studies, Byzantine, western medieval, and Ottoman history and literature.

This volume addresses the topics of collective memory and collective identity in relation to Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History. The articles gathered here portray the fascinating relationship between memory and identity, and between history within Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic historiography as well as its proximate context. They present fresh and illuminating perspectives that, it is hoped, will inspire future research.

John Goldingay is one of the most prolific and creative Old Testament scholars working today. In this book he draws on the best of biblical scholarship as well as the Christian tradition to offer a substantive and useful commentary on Joshua. The commentary is both critically engaged and sensitive to the theological contributions of the text. Goldingay treats Joshua as an ancient Israelite document that speaks to twenty-first-century Christians. He examines the text section by section--offering a fresh translation, textual notes, paragraph-level commentary, and theological reflection--and addresses important issues and problems that flow from the text and its discussion. This volume, the first in a new series on the Historical Books, complements other Baker Commentary on the Old Testament series: Pentateuch, Wisdom and Psalms, and Prophets. Each series volume is grounded in rigorous scholarship but is useful for those who preach and teach. The series editors are David G. Firth (Trinity College, Bristol) and Lissa M. Wray Beal (Wycliffe College, University of Toronto).

The Old Testament, particularly the Former Prophets, has been regarded as having a negative attitude towards foreigners. In this NSBT volume, David Firth argues that the Former Prophets subvert the exclusivist approach in order to show that the people of God are not defined by ethnicity but rather by their willingness to commit themselves to the purposes of Yahweh.

With a bold new thesis about the discovery of 'peoplehood,' this book revolutionizes our understanding of the Bible and its historical achievement.