The Bible contains answers to the most pertinent and intriguing questions of our time. The book you are holding not only contains a highly comprehensive overview of the entire Old Testament but also proves that the prophets of the Bible made impossible and miraculous predictions and prophecies concerning future events, including our current era.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York. A child with no father. He passed away when I was one year old, but I went on with life. My mother has six kids. Yes, I was brought up in a group home till I was twelve, moved to Brooklyn to live with my biological mother, and have been with her ever since. Life was hard as a teenager. There were many drugs in my life, anger and resentment to all for the loss of my father, and the homelessness I had to endure. But God, amen, he called me to ministry service at the age of fourteen. I was brought up in the church but backslid for I wanted to live a life with women and drugs, so my nickname was Mr. Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. This life turned me into a bad person with a good heart. I was strung out on crack cocaine and alcohol for three years; but God stepped in, took me out of the abandoned buildings I was sleeping in, and now gave me more than I ever had, because God saw my heart and saved me in 1995 at the Helping Hands Ministry under Pastor Randolph Ferdinand. There I learned how to pray in the spirit, how to believe in God to remove my hurt. There I heard God teach me his laws, and he told me what he wanted me to do. So I grew in the Lord with wisdom, finished the program, obtained a job, worked hard, got married, and became a pastor of the House of Prayer under Apostle Gladis Dugue. There I was blessed by God with a ministry, and I became a Sunday school teacher. I have my associates degree in management and my bachelors degree in science in religion, and I prayed, and God showed me the words in the Bible. He said, You must teach on every word in the Bible before you leave this earth. I began reading the words, and the Holy Spirit guided me into understanding the meaning of the words in the Bible for everyday life. None of the meanings are from the dictionaryall from God to me to you. I would like to thank my wife, Noreen Bridgeforth, who inspired me, my son; Apostle Dugue; Apostle Tyrone Monroe; and House of Prayer, an anointed new beginning where I teach Sunday school. I would like to thank my grandfather Willie Bridgeforth Sr. and my father, Robert, and my mother, Marie Bridgeforth. Thank you to all my family and friends at Helping Hands Ministry and Pastor Randolph Ferdinand.

Biblical manuscripts from the Dead Sea and the Cairo Genizah have added immeasurably to our knowledge of the textual history of the Hebrew Bible. The papers collected in this volume compare the evidence of the biblical DSS with manuscripts from the Vienna Papyrus Collection, connected with the Cairo Genizah, as well as late ancient evidence from diverse contexts. The resulting picture is one of a dialectic between textual plurality and fixity: the eventual dominance of the consonantal Masoretic Text over the textual plurality of the Second Temple period, and the secondary diversification of that standardized text through scribal activity.

The Bible in the American Short Story examines Biblical influences in the post-World War II American short story. In a series of accessible chapters, Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg and Peter S. Hawkins offer close-readings of short stories by leading contemporary writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Allegra Goodman, Tobias Wolff and Kirstin Valdez Quade that highlight the biblical passages that they reference. Exploring episodes from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and both Jewish and Christian heritages, this book is an important contribution to understanding the influence of the Bible in contemporary literature.

This is a book about an ancient writer, the J writer—the Yahwist—who produced a work of political imagination. This work is embedded mainly in the first four books of the Bible, best known for some of the most popular and influential biblical stories in Genesis and Exodus. The purpose of the book is to represent the whole of the original story with attention to its own meaning, without the influence of the other literary strands with which it was later supplemented. Therefore the work includes a fresh, complete translation of the text of the J writer, who produced the Bible’s first history. The translation itself helps to establish more clearly than ever the integrity of the J writer. The concern here is WHEN and WHY this history was written, especially in light of the concerns for justice and prosperity. Throughout it is demonstrated HOW and WHY this history comes from the court of David; it is a royal history of David’s subjects as though they were descended from pastoral nomads such as Abram, Isaac, and Jacob. It is argued that the intended audience of the history was probably those bedouin who regularly visited the court of David in Hebron and Jerusalem. Here is a bold and brilliant representation of the J writer’s composition, perhaps as it was originally intended to be read or heard. This ancient tour de force takes on new life in the hands of these skilled interpreters.

Renowned Bible teacher Henrietta Mears had a dream: to make the Bible accessible to everyone. What the Bible Is All About realizes her dream, and that book has become an essential companion for students of the Bible for more than 50 years. What the Bible Is All About for Moms is the second devotional based on Dr. Mears’ classic study guide. These 66 readings, one for each book of the Bible, will bring God’s Word into the homes and hearts of moms of all ages. Each chapter includes mom-specific excerpts from Henrietta’s original text, suggested Scripture reading for daily or weekly study, a devotional reading to connect the day’s verses to the everyday lives of mothers, a few ideas about applying God’s Word to the reader’s life and a suggested thought or question for further reflection. Moms are in the Bible from beginning to end, and now the Bible can be in the hearts and minds of moms!

It is regarded as a truism that the King James Bible is one of the finest pieces of English prose. Yet few people are aware that the King James Bible was generally scorned or ignored as English writing for a century and a half after its publication. The reputation of this Bible is the central, most fascinating, element in a larger history, that of literary ideas of the Bible as they have come into and developed in English culture; and the first volume of David Norton's magisterial two-volume work surveys and analyses a comprehensive range of these ideas from biblical times to the end of the seventeenth century, providing a unique view of the Bible and translation.

Reading Heikki Räisänen’s hermeneutics in context, Timo Eskola explores the development of Western New Testament interpretation. Reclaiming a Wredean approach to the Scriptures, Räisänen focuses on tradition and interpretation. He builds on Weberian sociology, adopted through Peter Berger’s theories, and substitutes sacralized culturalism for biblical theology. After examining fourteenth century Quran-criticism and its impact on Reimarus, Eskola discusses the genesis of the revised history-of-religion theory that Räisänen developed when investigating the Quran’s relationship to the Bible. Sociology then becomes a link between standard historicism and poststructuralism as Räisänen reinterprets Berger’s sociology of knowledge. Räisänen’s sacralized culturalism finally becomes the theory from which his magnum opus The Rise of Christian Beliefs has been written.

This extract from the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible provides Prinslo’s introduction to and concise commentary on Psalms. The Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible presents, in nontechnical language, the best of modern scholarship on each book of the Bible, including the Apocrypha. Reader-friendly commentary complements succinct summaries of each section of the text and will be valuable to scholars, students, and general readers. Rather than attempt a verse-by-verse analysis, these volumes work from larger sense units, highlighting the place of each passage within the overarching biblical story. Commentators focus on the genre of each text—parable, prophetic oracle, legal code, and so on—interpreting within the historical and literary context. The volumes also address major issues within each biblical book—including the range of possible interpretations—and refer readers to the best resources for further discussions.