Augsburg Fortress Old Testament Studies Collection (8 vols.)

“The remarkable thing about the Old Testament is the persistence of its visions of a better humanity and a better world.” Rather than seek to establish “what people may or may not once have believed in ancient Israel,” John W. Rogerson addresses “the human condition in today’s world,” asking what interpreters are doing today when they invoke the biblical texts. He draws on the insights of modern thinkers, including Benjamin and Bloch, Adorno and Horkheimer, Assmann and Habermas, to explore the dynamics of cultural memory in human communication.

In the texts of ancient Israel, Rogerson distinguishes “hot” cultural situations, alive to the remarkable potential of narratives that describe unfulfilled human aspirations to open up horizons of change, from “cold” cultural situations, where those potentialities are closed down to reinforce the institutional structures of the status quo. Moving throughout narrative, legal, wisdom, and prophetic corpora and offering fresh and compelling insights at every step, A Theology of the Old Testament draws out powerful visions of human nature and of the world’s future. Throughout Rogerson poses the challenge: Do these visions require a theological basis to be compelling in today’s world, or can they speak as powerfully beyond the confines of religious belief?

In this masterwork, one of America’s leading biblical scholars takes a fresh look at the theology of the Old Testament. Anderson cuts his own path and provides us with creative new insights on all the major sections of the Old Testament. He illuminates the nuances of the various covenants and theological shifts in a highly readable style. His conversation partners include the formative contributors from both the Christian community (Eichrodt, von Rad, Childs) and the Jewish community (Heschel, Herberg, Levenson) while interacting with the most recent developments in the field, especially Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament.

The Texts @ Contexts series gathers scholarly voices from diverse contexts and social locations to bring new or unfamiliar facets of biblical texts to light. Exodus and Deuteronomy focuses attention on two books of the Torah that share themes of journey and of diverse experiences in or upon the land; the echoes of the exodus across time, space, and culture; of different understandings of (male and female) leadership; and of the promise, and problem, posed by various aspects of biblical law. These essays de-center the often homogeneous first-world orientation of much biblical scholarship and open up new possibilities for discovery.

Whether dealing with collective catastrophe or intimate trauma, recovering from emotional and physical hurt is hard. Kathleen O’Connor shows that although Jeremiah’s emotionally wrought language can aggravate readers’ memories of pain, it also documents the ways an ancient community-and the prophet personally-sought to restore their collapsed social world. Both prophet and book provide a traumatized community language to articulate disaster; move self-understanding from delusional security to identity as survivors; constitute individuals as responsible moral agents; portray God as equally afflicted by disaster; and invite a reconstruction of reality.

The reigning assumptions in 1970s and 1980s scholarship on 1 and 2 Kings, and indeed on all of the Deuteronomistic history, have come under serious question. How can differing views of that history be reconciled? What sources were available to the authors? Should we call them “authors”? How well do the Books of Kings fit into the larger history of which they are a part; just who composed that history, toward what end, and in what context? How do the assumptions of contemporary interpreters influence the answers we give to those questions? In Soundings in Kings, international scholars pursue these and related questions by examining 1 and 2 Kings as an independent work, identifying new methods and models for envisioning the social location of the authors (or redactors) of Kings, the nature of the intended audience or audiences, and the political and rhetorical implications of its construction. Soundings in Kings demonstrates the role of Kings as a cornerstone work within the Hebrew Bible, a crossroads between prophecy, poetry, wisdom, ancestral and national narrative, and ritual instruction.

The many introductions to the psalms available to readers tend to focus on various types and forms of psalms but overlook different theological approaches to the Psalter. This volume brings together leading psalms scholars from Catholic and Protestant traditions and takes into account recent scholarship on the shape and shaping of the Psalter and on the rhetorical interpretation of the Psalms.

Noting that the legacy of the prophets remains a powerful element in contemporary society, Jack R. Lundbom explores the contours of prophetic speech in ancient Israel. He surveys the elements of each prophet’s message, describes the characteristics of prophetic rhetoric and symbolic behavior, and discusses the problem of authenticity: how did individuals make the claim to speak as prophets, and how did their audiences recognize their claims? The Hebrew Prophets offers an authoritative introduction to the phenomenon of ancient prophetic speech for the contemporary reader—and hearer.

No one can read far in the Old Testament without encountering numerous acts of violence that are sanctioned in the text and attributed to both God and humans. Over the years, these texts have been used to justify all sorts of violence: from colonizing people and justifying warfare, to sanctioning violence against women and children. For those who read the Bible as Scripture, these depictions of “virtuous” violence pose tremendous moral and theological challenges. What can be done to stop people from using the Old Testament in such destructive ways, and how might these violent texts be read more faithfully?

Eric Seibert faces these challenges head-on by confronting the problem of “virtuous” violence and urging people to engage in an ethically responsible reading of these troublesome texts. He offers a variety of reading strategies designed to critique textually sanctioned violence, while still finding ways to use even the most difficult texts constructively, thus providing a desperately needed approach to the violence of Scripture that can help us live more peaceably in a world plagued by religious violence.