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In this guide, Jill Middlemas introduces students to the Book of Lamentations by examining the book's structure and characteristics, covering the latest in biblical scholarship on Lamentations, including historical and interpretive issues, and considering a range of scholarly approaches. In particular, the guide provides students with an introduction to Hebrew poetry as it relates to Lamentations and includes insights from the field of trauma and postcolonial studies. With suggestions of further reading at the end of each chapter, this guide will be an useful accompaniment to study of Lamentations.

This commentary on Greek Lamentations is based on the Codex Vaticanus, and includes an introduction, Greek text and English translation. LamLXX presents a new interpretation of the past, creating its own conceptual idea about loss and destruction, grief and suffering. In varied vivid images, metaphors and pictures, LamLXX retells past experiences as present life, invoking conditions reminiscent of Exodus. Hope is reduced to a limited amount, suffering seems endless. Only through prophet Jeremiah’s mediation, a new perspective for future life appears at the horizon. Contemporary readers, or readers of any period, may find therein representations of their own experiences in life.

Covering a landscape of literary, theological and cultural creativity, the authors explore the variety of interpretations inspired by Lamentations. The book explores a examples ranging from the Dead Sea Scrolls; Yehudah Halevy; John Calvin; and composer, Thomas Tallis; through to the interpretations of Marc Chagall; contemporary novelist, Cynthia Ozick; and Zimbabwean junk sculpture. It deploys "reception exegesis", a new genre of commentary that creatively blends reception history and biblical exegesis. --From publisher's description.

This volume interprets Lamentations as a systematic and carefully structured work, rather than randomly expressed theological positions.

The Hebrew versions of the five poems in the book of Lamentations are riddled with debated readings. Debated readings are words, phrases, or sentences whose forms and meanings modern readers find difficult or objectionable. In this book, Gideon R. Kotze adopts a text-critical approach to the interpretation of such readings and suggests that some of them make sense as expressions of images and ideas that circulated widely in the cultural and intellectual environment of Lamentations. After surveying examples of passages in Lamentations where the Hebrew wordings show remarkable resemblances to the images and ideas exhibited by cultural products from all over the ancient Near East, the author discusses five case studies of debated readings that can be explained along similar lines. On this interpretation, the readings in question are not corrupt and do not have to be emended for that reason.

In The Qumran Manuscripts of Lamentations, Gideon Kotzé draws on text-critical analyses to establish how the content of the biblical book differs in the four Lamentations manuscripts from Qumran when compared to the Masoretic text and the ancient translations.

This volume on feminist, postcolonial and queer biblical interpretation gathers perspectives from a global body of researchers; in offering innovative interpretations of key texts from the Hebrew Bible, both established and emerging biblical scholars consider the question of how commonplace interpretative practices may be considered to be transgressive in nature. Utilizing innovative strategies, they read against the grain of the text and in support of the marginalized, the subordinated or subaltern others both in the text and in our world today. Important questions regarding power and privilege are constantly raised: whose voices are being heard, and whose interests are being served? Knowing all too well the harm that stereotypical constructions of the Other can do in terms of feeding racism, sexism, homophobia and imperialism in their respective interpretative communities, the essays in this volume interrogate constructions of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and class, both in the text as well as in their respective contexts. By means of these thought-provoking interpretations, the contributors show their commitment not merely the sake of scholarship but to a scholarly ethos, which in some shape or form contributes to the cultivation of more just, equitable societies.

Bier proposes here a strong new understanding of the Book of Lamentations, drawing on Bakhtinian ideas of multiple voices to analyse the poetic speaking voices within the text; examining their theological perspectives, and nuancing the interaction between them. Bier scrutinises interpretations of Lamentations, distinguishing between exegesis that reads Lamentations as a theodicy, in defense of God, and those that read it as an anti-theodicy, in defense of Zion. Rather than reductively adopting either of these approaches, this book advocates a dialogic approach to Lamentations, reading to hear the full polyphony of pain, penitence, and protest.

Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament (JESOT) is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the academic and evangelical study of the Old Testament. The journal seeks to fill a need in academia by providing a venue for high-level scholarship on the Old Testament from an evangelical standpoint. The journal is not affiliated with any particular academic institution, and with an international editorial board, open access format, and multi-language submissions, JESOT cultivates and promotes Old Testament scholarship in the evangelical global community. The journal differs from many evangelical journals in that it seeks to publish current academic research in the areas of ancient Near Eastern backgrounds, Dead Sea Scrolls, Rabbinics, Linguistics, Septuagint, Research Methodology, Literary Analysis, Exegesis, Text Criticism, and Theology as they pertain only to the Old Testament. JESOT also includes up-to-date book reviews on various academic studies of the Old Testament.