Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha
Matthew J. M. Coomber
Language: English
Pages: 1050
ISBN: 0800699165
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha presents a balanced synthesis of current scholarship, enabling readers to interpret Scripture for a complex and pluralistic world.
The contributors bring a rich diversity of perspectives to the task of connecting solid historical critical analysis of the Scripture with sensitivity to theological, cultural, and interpretive issues arising in our encounter with the text. The contributors represent a broad array of theological commitment—Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and others.
The introductory articles and section introductions in the volume discuss the dramatic challenges that have shaped contemporary interpretation of the Old Testament and Apocrypha. Individual book articles provide an introduction and commentary on key sense units that are explored through the lenses of three critical questions:
The Text in Its Ancient Context. What did the text probably mean in its original historical and cultural context?
The Text in the Interpretive Tradition. How have centuries of reading and interpreting shaped our understanding of the text?
The Text in Contemporary Discussion. What are the unique challenges and interpretive questions the text addresses for readers and hearers today?
The result is a commentary that is comprehensive and useful for preaching, teaching, and research.
the principal characters receive unequal space. A long narrative in DH recounting the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon is spread over two and a half books, namely, 1 Sam. 1:1–1 Kgs. 11:43. This account of the first three kings of Israel is a developed narrative, with plot, connected episodes, and vivid characters, whereas Joshua, Judges, and the remainder of post-Solomonic kings (1 Kings 12–2 Kings 17) are described by single stories, clusters of stories, or excerpts from royal archives, either
the other side of the racial and ethnic divide” (De La Torre 2007, 125). Nevertheless, serious contributions continue to challenge biblical scholars to take seriously the contributions of those who write Old Testament analysis from an openly acknowledged perspective. Gregory Lee Cuéllar, for example, compares passages of Isaiah to the Mexican and Mexican American folk music style known as the Corrido, not only to suggest ways that the biblical texts can be understood in contemporary Mexican
Mishnah tractate Ta‘anit m. Tamid Mishnah tractate Tamid m. Yad. Mishnah tractate Yadayim m. Yebam. Mishnah tractate Yebamot m. Yoma Mishnah tractate Yoma Num. Rab. Numbers Rabbah Pesiq. Rab. Pesiqta Rabbati Pesiq. Rab Kah. Pesiqta Rab Kahana S. ‘Olam Rab. Seder ‘Olam Rabbah Song Rab. Song of Songs Rabbah t. Hul. Tosefta tractate Hullin Tg. Onq. Targum Onqelos Tg. Jer. Targum Jeremiah y. Hag. Jerusalem Talmudic tractate Hagiga y. Pesaḥ Jerusalem Talmudic tractate
Isaiah in Handel’s Messiah.” BibInt 15:464–84. DeYoung, Curtiss Paul, Wilda C. Gafney, Leticia Guardiola-Saenz, George E. Tinker, and Frank M. Yamada, eds. 2009. The Peoples’ Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Franke, Chris A. 1991. “The Function of the Satiric Lament over Babylon in Second Isaiah (xlvii).” VT 41:408–18. ———. 1994. Isaiah 46, 47, and 48: A New Literary-Critical Reading. Biblical and Judaic Studies 3. Winona Lake, IN.: Eisenbrauns. ———. 2009. “ ‘Like a Mother I Have Comforted
nationalism (Blenkinsopp, 242). By pitting a nationalist prophet against his own god’s willingness to extend mercy to an enemy nation, the authors worked to promote a YHWH who was free from the sociopolitical constraints of the prophetic word. Such an interpretation can be taken in a couple of ways. One interpretation is to take the book of Jonah as a rejection of the exceptionalism that is promoted in much of Hebrew prophecy, encouraging readers to abandon their nationalist views. While