About the Book There are many texts that fit the description of "Bible." For example, Christian Bibles include dozens of books, and the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, contains 24 books, including the Torah, the Nevi'im, and the Ketuvim. The original Christian Bible is the Old Testament, and the New Testament, which includes the Canonical gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Book of Revelation. Bible studies topics covered include: Analysis of the Pentateuch, Books of the Old Testament, Old Testament Criticism, History of the Israelites, Old Testament Theology, Morality of the Old Testament, Prophesies of the Old Testament, Scripture and Science, The Book of Genesis, Books of Joshua, Judges and Ruth, Women of the Bible, Bible Class Handbooks, Leviticus, Jeremiah, Ezra, Solomon, Moses, History of the Maccabees, Psalms in History, Life of David, New Testament Revelation, Anglo-American Bible Revision, Bible dictionary, Theology of the Gospels, Luke the Historian, Acts of the Apostles, St Paul, and The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges. About us Trieste Publishing's aim is to provide readers with the highest quality reproductions of fiction and non-fiction literature that has stood the test of time. Our titles are produced from scans of the original books and as a result may sometimes have imperfections. To ensure a high-quality product we have: thoroughly reviewed every page of all the books in the catalog repaired some of the text in some cases, and rejected titles that are not of the highest quality. You can look up "Trieste Publishing" in categories that interest you to find other titles in our large collection. Come home to the books that made a difference

The author uses a literary-theological approach to argue that the main theme of the combined Gideon-Abimelech narrative is a theological one, where the narrator demonstrates Yahweh's supreme power and contrasts it with the absence of Baal, the representative of foreign gods. While the Gideon narrative focuses on Yahweh and the illustration of his power and contrasts it with Gideon's limited capacities, the Abimelech narrative demonstrates Baal's absence, Baalism's disastrous potential, and Yahweh's continued control over the events. Hence Gideon's victory over the Midianites and Abimelech's kingship serve only as the tangible instruments by which a single abstract theological theme becomes narratable.

Following the great periods of national leadership by Moses and Joshua, the book of Judges depicts the stewardship of various judges that rose to power to solve local religious and military challenges in the premonarchic period. This volume provides a close reading of the entire book of Judges, taking seriously the distinct elements of the book and how they are interconnected. Elie Assis explores the ways in which the ideology and theology of Judges unfold through a careful literary analysis. Moving beyond the cycle of sin, punishment, and salvation, Assis demonstrates how differences in the descriptive language applied to each judge, as well as the evaluations in the opening and concluding chapters, provide clues as to the organization and message of the text. Most works on Judges focus on the historical background of the period or the historical process of the book’s composition and seek to dissolve its stories into component parts. In contrast, Before There Were Kings points to the deep underlying unity of Judges and the function of the individual stories within the whole. New and carefully drawn insights related to the purpose of each section and the themes that shape the book as a whole make this a groundbreaking, programmatic contribution to research on the book of Judges. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible.

This book puts a creative new reading of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and literary genre theory to work on the problem of Scripture. Reading texts as Scripture brings two hermeneutical assumptions into tension: that the text will continually say something new and relevant to the present situation, and that the text has stability and authority over readers. Given how contested the Bible’s meaning is, how is it possible to ‘read Scripture’ as authoritative and relevant? Rather than anchor meaning in author, text or reader, Gadamer’s phenomenological model of hermeneutical experience as Spiel (‘play’) offers a dynamic, intersubjective account of how understanding happens, avoiding the dead end of the subjective–objective dichotomy. Modern genre theory addresses some of the criticisms of Gadamer, accounting for the different roles played by readers in different genres using the new term Lesespiel (‘reading game’). This is tested in three case studies of contested texts: the recontextualization of psalms in the book of Acts, the use of Hagar’s story (Genesis 16) in nineteenth-century debates over slavery and the troubling reception history of the rape and murder in Gibeah (Judges 19). In each study, the application of ancient text to contemporary situation is neither arbitrary, nor slavishly bound to tradition, but playful.

This groundbreaking volume presents a new translation of the text and detailed interpretation of almost every word or phrase in the book of Judges, drawing from archaeology and iconography, textual versions, biblical parallels, and extrabiblical texts, many never noted before. Archaeology also serves to show how a story of the Iron II period employed visible ruins to narrate supposedly early events from the so-called "period of the Judges." The synchronic analysis for each unit sketches its characters and main themes, as well as other literary dynamics. The diachronic, redactional analysis shows the shifting settings of units as well as their development, commonly due to their inner-textual reception and reinterpretation. The result is a remarkably fresh historical-critical treatment of 1:1-10:5.