Bible Review opens the realm of Biblical scholarship to a non-academic audience. World-renown scholars detail the latest in Biblical interpretation and why it matters. These important pieces are paired with stunning art, which makes the text come to life before your eyes. Anyone interested in the Bible should read this seminal magazine.
Switching channels the other night, I came across the Christian Broadcasting Network during a fundraising campaign. CBN founder and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson was speaking earnestly about signs that Jesus may return soon, perhaps by the year 2007.1
War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence
Susan Niditch (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 192 pp., $29.95.
A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews in Antiquity
1. Which Egyptian woman was the grandmother of twelve princes, the grandchildren of Abraham?
2. Ishmaelite merchants sold a great-grandson of Abraham to which high official of Pharaoh in Egypt?
3. Which future ruler of the northern kingdom of Israel fled to Egypt for political asylum?
4. Which prophet was taken to Egypt by Judahites rebelling against Nebuchadnezzar?
5. Which child was carried to safety in Egypt by his parents in order to evade the evil intentions of murderous king?
The sudden chaotic end of the Late Bronze Agemarked by widespread destruction, social upheaval and cultural declinehas eluded explanation. Scholars have speculated that a series of invasions by northern barbarians, a breakdown of trade, or overly centralized economies, among other things, may have caused the upheaval. Something much more basic may lie at the bottom of this mystery, however. In Climate and Collapse, William H.
In the December 1993 BR we published a lengthy review of John Van Seters’s Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (Bible Books, BR 09:06). Our reviewer, Richard Elliot Friedman, of the University of California at San Diego, leveled numerous criticisms at the book, writing at one point, “There is therefore reason to doubt the soundness of method and reasoning in Van Seters’s work. In this scholarship the [Bible’s] text rarely speaks for itself …. Rather it is the scholar’s spin on the text that houses the point.” Van Seters’s rebuttal to Friedman’s critique follows this introduction; Friedman’s reply follows that.
Call it the case of a fictional falling man who threatens to cause the downfall of a real man, or call it a case of political correctness run amok. Whatever you call it, Graydon F. Snyder, a professor of New Testament at Chicago Theological Seminary, suddenly finds himself the most famous Bible scholar in the countryand dearly wishes he werent.
Sex has always been of greater interest to anthropologists than to students of the Bible. For that very reason, however, anthropology may offer an added dimension for understanding biblical texts.
