This is an enormously instructive and practical hands-on introduction for students of the Bible as literature, by one of the world’s leading exponents of Hebrew narrative technique. Issues covered include: introduction to the art of reading, the narrator and his characters, narrative structure, narrative devices.

Based on a series of lectures given in Israel, Amit introduces the reader to the subtle ways of the biblical narrators. Covering issues of character, plot development, catchword association, narration, and dialog, she brings the biblical text to life, helping the reader enter the stories from new vantage points.

Narrator, characters, action, hero, quest, plot, time and space, entrances and exits--these are the essential components of all narrative literature. This authoritative and engaging introduction to the literary features of biblical narrative and poetry will help the reader grasp the full significance of these components, allowing them to enter more perceptively into the narrative worlds created by the great writers of the Bible.

How do children read the Bible? This book makes a major contribution to this underexplored area by analyzing how children interpret Bible stories, focused around an empirical investigation of one group of eleven- to fourteen-year-old children, and their readings of the Gospel of Luke. The first section of the study establishes the nature of the text and the readers in this project: exploring the Gospel of Luke as a narrative of Jesus' birth, life, death, and resurrection, and then looking at the developmental traits of children as readers. The next section offers a model account of how biblical scholars can investigate empirical readings of Scripture, by describing the methods used to bring together one group of child readers and Luke. The third section then analyzes the resulting multitude of interpretations that the children offered in their reading of the book, concentrating on the key trends in their interpretive strategies. It critiques the children's readings of Luke, but it also points to some of the surprising and beneficial results of reading Luke using the interpretive strategies of a child.

This book provides the ideal entry-point to the process of reading, understanding, and assessing what many recognize to be the important and powerful literature of the Bible. The book introduces the tools of literary analysis, including: language and style, the formal structures of genre, character study, and thematic analysis.

Comprised of contributions from scholars across the globe, The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative is a state-of-the-art anthology, offering critical treatments of both the Bible's narratives and topics related to the Bible's narrative constructions. The Handbook covers the Bible's narrative literature, from Genesis to Revelation, providing concise overviews of literary-critical scholarship as well as innovative readings of individual narratives informed by a variety of methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks. The volume as a whole combines literary sensitivities with the traditional historical and sociological questions of biblical criticism and puts biblical studies into intentional conversation with other disciplines in the humanities. It reframes biblical literature in a way that highlights its aesthetic characteristics, its ethical and religious appeal, its organic qualities as communal literature, its witness to various forms of social and political negotiation, and its uncanny power to affect readers and hearers across disparate time-frames and global communities.

A companion to Reading Biblical Narrative provides a holistic introduction to biblical poetry, offering literary examples of how the poets of the bible created their works. Original.

Inherent in every story is a view of death that reflects the human struggle of ending well, a Freudian thanatos inscribed within narrative. As a story draws to a close, the view of death found within the structure of the story's narrative will influence the ending that is produced. To examine the view of death and the closing strategies employed within a narrative, this study proposes a literary category called «narrative mortality.» Narrative mortality compares the degree of finality given to death with the amount of closure the reader experiences within the narrative. The narrative mortality of three differing biblical stories are studied within this work: The Gospel of John, the Book of Job, and the Book of Jonah. Each story employs a differing rhetorical strategy that reflects its own unique view of death and narrative closure.

This book is a beginner's guide to biblical Hebrew. It serves as a tool for ministers and ministers-in-training who want to become more effective preachers and instructors. The book's uniqueness is in its tool-based approach; it includes a list of abbreviations of Biblical Books and an appendix of the basics of Hebrew. The lesson in Hebrew is practical; the author first answers basic questions about biblical Hebrew and then takes the reader through a series of analyses that discuss learning the language -- from words, to figures of speech, to Hebrew writing - both narrative and poetry, and finally, to broader issues of culture and communication. Using Biblical Hebrew in Ministry is an excellent and resourceful text for ministers, as well as Seminaries and Bible colleges that offer courses such as "Biblical Hebrew for English Speakers," "Using Biblical Resource Tools," Biblical Hebrew, and Hebrew exegesis.