Part of the Rose Bible Basics series, Parables and Other Bible Studies will help you see the love of God through some of your favorite Bible passages. Each chapter provides basic tools for interpreting and applying Scripture so you can learn how to walk in step with God’s plan for your life. Your small group or Sunday school class will enjoy studying these favorite biblical passages:Parables of Jesus: insights into God’s Kingdom lifeLife of Joseph: on the purpose of sufferingPsalm 23: comfort during difficult timesLife of David: God’s power in the lives of flawed peopleEsther: Answers the question, “Where is God when life is unfair?1 Corinthians 13: patience, kindness, perseverance Also includes a six-session study guide.

Jesus knew the power of stories to touch people's hearts, so he used parables to teach his followers about the kingdom of God. If you want to know God better, the keys are in the parables. This book provides short studies on every parable in the Bible. You'll learn what God wants us to know from the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, the lost sheep, the talents, the sower, and many more. Each study includes a summary of the parable, the Scripture reference where it can be found, information on the historical and cultural setting, and key points. At the end of each study are questions that open the door to discussion, reflection, or further investigation and help you get to the heart of the parable. A wonderful tool for small groups or to add variety to your personal devotions. Let these studies draw you nearer to God as they enhance your understanding of his Word.

Parables and Conflict in the Hebrew Bible examines the intimate relationship between parables and conflict in the Hebrew Bible. Challenging the scholarly consensus, Jeremy Schipper argues that parables do not function as appeals to change their audience's behavior. Nor do they serve to diffuse tensions in regards to the various conflicts in which their audiences are involved. Rather, the parables function to help create, intensify, and justify judgments and hostile actions against their audiences. In order to examine how the parables accomplish these functions, this book pays particular attention to issues of genre and recent developments in genre theory, shifting the central issues in the interpretation of Hebrew Bible parables.

In Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-creations, Gila Safran Naveh carefully charts the historical transformation of these deceptively simple narratives to reveal fundamental shifts in their form, function, and most significantly, their readers' cognitive processes. Bringing together for the first time parables from the Scriptures, the synoptic Gospels, Chassidic tales, and medieval philosophy with the mashal, the rabbinic parables commonly used to interpret Scripture, this book brilliantly contrasts the rhetorical strategies of ancient parables with more recent examples of the genre by Kafka, Borges, Calvino, and Agnon. By using an interdisciplinary approach and insights from current semiotic, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and gender theories, Naveh reveals a dramatic social, cultural, and political shift in the way we view the divine.

Over the centuries, New Testament texts have often been read in ways that reflect and encourage anti-Semitism. This book seeks to fashion a biblical hermeneutics that consciously works with memories of the Holocaust.

Jesus' parables in Luke weren't only addressing his audience. Rather, Luke used them to address his audience. In so doing, the worlds of both Jesus and Luke had many ways to understand these parables. This book explores some of those ways based on the way Jesus and Luke told these stories, as well as the first century backgrounds. The ultimate goal is to help both people who lead Bible studies and preach in the church to grasp firmly Luke's message for us today.

Peter Rhea Jones has spent the majority of his career studying and teaching the parables. Studying the Parables of Jesus is a primer on the historical and -literary approaches to biblical study. It informs and inspires in dialogue with contemporary methods and contemporary meanings. It provides an introduction to the methods of interpretation of the parables as well as an opening chapter on the recent history of interpretation. The chapters of exegesis approach a select group of parables for a more intensive analysis. While reserving much of the technical details for the endnotes, the text includes -discussion of critical issues and alternative opinions. Questions and exercises are appended at the close of each chapter for personal use or classroom -discussion.

Wesley Olmstead examines the parables of the Two Sons, the Tenants and the Wedding Feast against the backdrop of the wider Matthean narrative. He explores Matthew's characterization of the Jewish leaders, the people and the nations, and assesses the respective roles of Israel and the nations in the plot of Matthew's Gospel. Against the current of contemporary Matthean scholarship, Olmstead argues both that the judgement this trilogy announces falls upon Israel (and not only her leaders) and that these parables point to the future inclusion of the nations in the nation that God had promised to raise up from Abraham. Bringing both literary-critical and redaction-critical tools to bear on the texts at hand, Olmstead not only elucidates the intended meanings of this parabolic trilogy but also attempts to determine the responses they elicited from their first readers. Transcending Matthean scholarship, this book has implications for all Gospel studies.

Allegory in the parables of Jesus has never been addressed properly. By studying the allegorical features in parables and evaluating some former parable theories, current study hopes to bring insight to the hermeneutics of allegory in the parables of Jesus.

The contributors to this book pursue three important lines of inquiry into parable study, in order to illustrate how these lessons have been received throughout the millennia. The contributors consider not only the historical and material world of the parables' composition, and focusing on the social, political, economic, and material reality of that world, but also seek to connect how the parables may have been seen and heard in ancient contexts with how they have been, and continue to be, seen and heard. Intentionally allowing for a “bounded openness” of approach and interpretation, these essays explore numerous contexts, encounters and responses. Examining topics ranging from ancient harvest imagery and dependency relations to contemporary experience with the narratives and lessons of the parables, this volume seeks to link those very real ancient contexts with our own varied modern contexts.