This invaluable study aid contains all five Books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Hebrew text is presented in full, with a lucid English translation and commentary digest based on the classical Jewish commentaries. Included are fascinating midrashic, philosophical, literary and mystical interpretations by such commentators as Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Rashbam, Nachmanides, Sforno, Kimchi and Gersonides. This translation has been acclaimed by Rabbis everywhere and is used worldwide.

This guide to the Jewish Bible explains what the Jewish Bible is, how it developed, its structure and differences between it and Christian Bibles. It also includes short histories of Bible translations and commentaries, a guide to characters and places, plus an introduction to Biblical poetry, storytelling, law and Bible study.

In his preface to this challenging book Jeff Watson describes biblical counseling as "a noble adjective married to a nervous noun." Believers are wise to be skeptical of much that is done in the name of counseling in secular settings. Even under the umbrella of "Christian counseling," one has heard horror stories of cases where God's Word has been misused. But Jeff Watson makes a strong case in this volume for the legitimacy of marrying "biblical" and "counseling." Christian counselors, says Watson, need to cultivate three fundamental skills in their patients: How to tell their stories; How to choose their goals wisely; and How to practice changes in their lives. Watson helps counselors achieve these goals by drawing on the interactions of Christ, the commands of Scripture, and the actions of the apostles and prophets. Thus he marries counseling and biblical principles. To those of us who are called on to counsel on any level, Charles Swindoll says, "This book will become an invaluable tool for you. I urge you to let it become your manual for proper counseling."

"This book includes a chronology and an introduction that presents an overview of all aspects of Judaism. Numerous cross-referenced dictionary entries detail important people, writings, institutions, concepts, Hebrew words, philosophy, theology, and religious law, and an extensive bibliography provides access for further study."--Jacket.

This study looks at the representation of gender issues in 'Genesis' 1-4 in five influential translations from the Hebrew original. Each chapter contains a textual analysis section that provides detailed and clearly structured analysis of specific verses.

Turning to the potent idea of political theology to recover the strange mix of political and religious thinking during the Renaissance, this bracing study reveals in the works of Shakespeare and his sources the figure of the citizen-saint, who represents at once divine messenger and civil servant, both norm and exception. Embodied by such diverse personages as Antigone, Paul, Barabbas, Shylock, Othello, Caliban, Isabella, and Samson, the citizen-saint is a sacrificial figure: a model of moral and aesthetic extremity who inspires new regimes of citizenship with his or her death and martyrdom. Among the many questions Julia Reinhard Lupton attempts to answer under the rubric of the citizen-saint are: how did states of emergency, acts of sovereign exception, and Messianic anticipations lead to new forms of religious and political law? What styles of universality were implied by the abject state of the pure creature, at sea in a creation abandoned by its creator? And how did circumcision operate as both a marker of ethnicity and a means of conversion and civic naturalization? Written with clarity and grace, Citizen-Saints will be of enormous interest to students of English literature, religion, and early modern culture.

Troubling Jeremiah presents essays by Jeremiah scholars who are troubled by the biblical book and give the scholarship on Jeremiah trouble in turn. Essays seek to move beyond the Duhm-Mowinckel source criticism of the book to address matters of metaphor, final form, intertextuality, and the relationship of the book to various audiences of readers. Taken together, the 24 essays in this volume press for an end to 'innocent' readings of Jeremiah inasmuch as current models prove inadequate for troubling the very Jeremiah they have already helped to reveal.

This book examines the ways in which the literary genre of hagiography and the hermeneutical paradigm of Biblical typology together entered into the construction of "the Renaissance” as a canon and period. It is not about saints’ lives in themselves, as either literary or historical phenomena, but instead addresses the structural effects of hagiography in the secular literature of the Renaissance. The central texts analyzed--Boccaccio’s Decameron, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale--all manifest key moments and aspects in the creation of a Renaissance canon for the post-Renaissance world. The epochal significance of these works, saturated in religious allusions as well as scenes of profane life and classical art, is shown to rest in neither the normative piety nor the subversive heresy of any of these writers, but rather in their crafting of myths of modernity precisely out of the religious material that formed such an important part of their daily vocabularies.

This work is a compilation of research designed to assist students researching the Bible and passing a program at a University in biblical studies. It covers a myriad of topics focusing primarily on the biblical text and contains deeper exposition on texts and themes commonly researched in an undergraduate, Graduate Christian studies, and Masters in Divinity programs that focus on the Bible. This text is divided by the Old and New Testament and further subdivided based on traditional category of the Bible.

Scholarship on the uses of the Old Testament in Luke-Acts has tended to focus upon the role played by the Old Testament in the development of the author's Christology. James Meek, however, draws out the theme of the Gentile mission in Acts as it relates to the Old Testament, and gives particular attention to four texts:13:47 (Isa 49:6); 15:16-18 (Amos 9:11-12); 2:17-21 (Joel 3:1-5 MT); 3:25 (Gen 22:18). The quotations in Acts 13 and 15 receive greater attention because they explicitly address the issue of the Gentile mission (the two earlier texts anticipate it) and because of particular interpretive questions raised by these texts. Meek argues that while there are similarities in the quotations in Acts with the Old Greek form of the cited texts, the argument never depends on distinctive readings of the Old Greek. He therefore rejects claims that the author's use of Old Testament texts is dependent entirely on the Old Greek. He also maintains that all four quotations are used in a manner consistent with their sense in their original contexts, contrary to the common assertion that the New Testament commonly cites Old Testament texts without regard for original sense or context. His third principal argument is that these Old Testament quotations function as "proof from prophecy," contrary to the argument of some. In particular, they are cited to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Gentile mission as conducted by the early church and of the Gentiles' place among the people of God, showing these ideas to be central to the author's purpose.