Carol A. Newsom

A Maker of Metaphors—Ezekiel's Oracles Against Tyre

A recognition of Ezekiels skill in manipulating the power of metaphor to illumine reality helps us to grasp the subtlety, meaning, and prophetic force of his oracles against Tyre.

Re-considering Job

Although recent scholarship on Job has tended to approach the book from interpretive stances that are at some distance from traditional historical-critical verities, the classic historical-critical questions about the unity of the book continue to dominate the way questions are posed. Hermeneutical disputes about the book focus on interpreters’ decisions to find a way to preserve a resistant Job, or to advocate for an interpretation of the divine speeches that makes comprehensible a Job who ‘sees’ in a new way, and so is willing to renounce his alienation. A new direction of Joban scholarship focuses on the reception history of the book.

Pairing Research Questions and Theories of Genre: A Case Study of the Hodayot

No single model of genre is adequate to inform all types of research questions. In this article six approaches to genre are briefly described. Then each is discussed in relation to how it has been or might be used in investigating the Qumran Hodayot.

“Resistance is Futile!”: The Ironies of Danielic Resistance to Empire:

This essay explores how the discourses of imperial power and of the subordinated peoples are worked out in relation to one another in the book of Daniel. In resisting the empires that dominated Israel, the book of Daniel draws on imperial imagery of power exercised by human rulers, and thus inadvertently re-inscribes the imperial cycle by reifying idolatrous human institutions. This essay considers the alternative image of the rock hewed out—not by human hands—that undermines idolatrous images of power. To break free of imperialism, one must be open a radical new idea that deconstructs imperialism.

Book Review: JobJobbyBalentineSamuel E. Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary. Smyth & Helwys, Macon, Ga., 2006. 750 pp.

OF THE MAKING OF COMMENTARIES there seems to be no end, and one often wonders if the reduplication of effort on the part of so many senior scholars is the best use of intellectual capital. But there can be no question that Samuel Balentines commentary on Job represents a major contribution, not only to studies of the book of Job but also to the project of renovating the biblical commentary as a locus for intellectually serious hermeneutical work.

65.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-15731-2067-8.

Two profound yet incompatible moral imaginations confront each other in the attempt to address Jobs experience of turmoil That of the friends is grounded in a deep sense of the moral nature of creation. Jobs moral imagination takes shape through an act of witness that attempts to create a community of answerability before God.