Critical spatial approaches — particularly those informed by the scholarship of Lefebvre, Foucault, and Soja — have significantly impacted biblical scholarship over the last twenty years. However, these spatial approaches have been limited due to the methodological challenges inherent in transposing the social-scientific approaches of the aforementioned scholars to the task of biblical interpretation. This volume adapts conceptual metaphor theory as a methodological bridge to address such constraints. The first half of the volume begins by surveying the field of critical spatiality in biblical studies, arguing for the need for fresh methodological development. Thereafter, the volume delineates a particular critical spatial approach, inspired by Lefebvre and Foucault, for which conceptual metaphor theory is proposed as a methodological bridge. The second half of the volume begins by proposing the Psalms of Ascents as a case study upon which the method could be applied. It is then argued that the proposed method – if efficacious – should provide insight on corpus' "Zion theology" and its so-called pilgrimage character. Using the proposed method in conjunction with conventional historical-grammatical tools of poetic analysis, each psalm is analysed with regard to its metaphor and spatiality. The volume concludes that the case study demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed methods by allowing a rich reading of each psalm, especially by explicating the spatial narratives and/or spatial metaphorical conceptualisations that underlie each text, and providing fresh insight on the collection as a whole.

Critical studies and analyses of space are becoming increasingly common in scholarship, although it is not always clear how such studies proceed, what theoretical works inform them, or what are their potential benefits for biblical studies. This volume helps address those questions, by including the work of biblical scholars working in a range of historical periods and locations, from Deuteronomy's idealized spaces to the Qumran community on the shores of the Dead Sea. Each of the scholars in this volume is actively involved in the critical study of space, having presented work on this topic in regional, national, or international meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. The essays included in this volume combine theoretical and interpretive concerns in the analysis of texts from the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholars in Biblical Studies, Archaeology, Religious Studies, and Anthropology will find this to be a valuable resource for gaining new understandings of the critical study of space in antiquity.

What if everything in the Bible has a larger outer context than is usually accounted for? Missional and biblical theologies suggest that the Bible presents a grand story like a play with multiple acts. The acts typically include creation, fall, redemption, and finally restoration. But what if the whole story itself occurs in another larger setting, occurring within a mission running in the background throughout the whole Bible? How might this aid our research, reading, and application? And why is this being proposed now? This book explores these questions. The larger context is the production of the place of God—a home and homeland wherein God, with his people, dwell on earth. Since place is underdeveloped in biblical studies, the book presents a new method for interpreting place. Then the book lays out the case that a grand mission to produce the place of God becomes the outer context for the whole Bible. Finally, the book defends this proposal with an in-depth placial commentary of the bookends of the Bible, since these bookends provide keys to unlock this message, thereby inviting further study on the rest of the Bible and on the implications for this transformative perspective.

Where in the world was Jesus when he prayed? Where is any one of us when we pray? Since we are embodied creatures, our prayer location can be mapped onto space-time coordinates. Since we are social creatures, our prayers are also situated within our social locations. But do these sets of coordinates exhaustively identify the place that prayer takes when truly entered into? Conversely, can either set totally prevent prayer from taking place there? The studies in When Prayer Takes Place explore dimensions of these issues traced in selected texts from both parts of the Christian Bible.

Scholars of Hebrews have repeatedly echoed the almost proverbial saying that the book appears to its reader as a "Melchizedekian being without genealogy". For such scholars the aphorism identified prominent traits of Hebrews, its enigma, its otherness, its marginality. Although Franz Overbeck might unintentionally have stimulated such correlations, they do not represent what his dictum originally meant. Writing during the high noon of historicism in 1880, Overbeck lamented a lack of historical context, one that he had deduced on the basis of flawed presuppositions of the ideological frameworks prevalent of his time. His assertion made an impact, and consequently Hebrews was not only "othered" within New Testament scholarship, its context was neglected and by some, even judged as irrelevant altogether. Understandably, the neglect created a deficit keenly felt by more recent scholarship, which has developed a particular interest in Hebrews’ contexts. Hebrews in Contexts, edited by Gabriella Gelardini and Harold W. Attridge, is an expression of this interest. It gathers authors who explore extensively on Hebrews’ relations to other early traditions and texts (Jewish, Hellenistic, and Roman) in order to map Hebrews’ historical, cultural, and religious identity in greater, and perhaps surprising detail.

There are two coexisting realities classified under New Testament eschatology: the temporal and spatial. While much scholarly attention has focused on the temporal, Luke Woo argues that the spatial aspect is either neglected or relegated to Platonic or cosmological categories. Woo thus seeks to provide a holistic understanding, by investigating these realities for believers under the heavenly tabernacle motif in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Woo posits that the author of Hebrews presents the heavenly tabernacle and all its high priestly activity in order to eschatologically situate, orient, and ground believers; thus enabling believers to actualize their heavenly, priestly identity by serving as priests on earth. Woo uses Edward Soja's Tripartite Critical Spatiality to analyze the heavenly tabernacle's Firstspace, Secondspace, and Thirdspace features found in Hebrews 4:14; 8:1–5; 9:1–14. He suggests that Christ, in his resurrection and ascension, enters an actualized, heavenly tabernacle, which allows believers to spiritually occupy that sanctuary space in the presence of God, establishing a spatial orientation for believers who can identify as heavenly priests and be motivated to serve as such as they live on earth.

Throughout the last several decades professional biblical scholars have adapted concepts and theories from the social sciences – particularly social and cultural anthropology – in order to cast new light on ancient biblical writings, early Jewish and Christian texts that circulated with the Scriptures, and the various contexts in which these literatures were produced and first received. The present volume of essays draws much of its inspiration from that same development in the history of biblical research, while also offering insights from other, newer approaches to interpretation. The contributors to this volume explore a wide range of broadly social-scientific disciplines and discourses – cultural anthropology, sociology, archaeology, political science, the New Historicism, forced migration studies, gender studies – and provide multiple examples of the ways in which these diverse methods and theories can shed new and often fascinating light on the ancient texts. The fruit of scholarly work that is both international in flavour and truly collaborative, this volume provides fresh perspectives not only on familiar portions of Jewish and Christian Scripture but also on select passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi library and previously untranslated French texts.

What role does place play in the Christian life? In this STA volume, Jennifer Allen Craft gives a practical theology of the arts, contending that the arts place us in time, space, and community in ways that encourage us to be fully and imaginatively present in a variety of contexts: the natural world, our homes, our worshiping communities, and society.

Like other constructs in biblical studies, the Deuteronomistic History has come under scrutiny in the 21st century. The books beginning with Joshua and concluding with 2 Kings were thought to be, at their core, a unified explication of Israel's demise in Deuteronomistic terms of sin and its consequences. Current scholarship views these books as more disparate and influenced by a number of different texts, not limited to Deuteronomy. God and Gods in Deuteronomistic History exemplifies the latest research on these Hebrew Scriptures. Each study focuses on the question of how God is disclosed in Israel's history. Contributors look at the topic in a single book to bring forth the richness and variety of the Deity's descriptions. The results show an array of understandings about the divine figure Yhwh, whose titles also include El, El the Living, and Yhwh God in heaven, to name but a few. A strength of this volume is the meticulous analysis of Mesopotamian and West Semitic sources, expressed both textually and in material culture. The biblical writers adopted and adapted these ancient Near Eastern sources to create various pictures of God in the Deuteronomistic History, at times mirroring the deities of the so-called idolatrous religions. This book brings forth portrayals of Israel's God as well as other regional deities in their contguity and complexity, across the Deuteronomistic History.