Synopsis: Why and how should we read Old Testament narrative? This book
provides fresh answers to these questions. First, it models possible
readers of the Bible--religious and nonreligious, professional and
nonprofessional--and the reasons that might attract them to it. Second,
with the aid of Mediterranean anthropology, it sets out an approach that
helps us to interpret a selection of narratives with a cultural
understanding close to that of an ancient Israelite. Powerful stories,
such as those of Tamar and Judah in Genesis 38, Hannah in 1 Samuel 1-2,
Saul and David in 1 Samuel, David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 10-12, and
Judith, burst into new light when understood in closer relation to their
original audience. Interpreted in this way, these narratives allow us to
refresh the memory that links us with pivotal stories in Jewish and
Christian identities, they disclose more ample possibilities for being
human, they foster our capacity for intercultural understanding, and
they provide aesthetic pleasure from their embodying plots of great
imaginative power. Endorsements: "Esler shows us how to read afresh in
the ancient narratives of the Old Testament. He shows us that these
several plots of David and his traveling companions are saturated with
old social habits and old cultural presuppositions that summon us to
alertness and attentiveness. He offers us his deep learning of how
stories work, how folk society functions, and how texts reveal and
conceal. The outcome is a fresh invitation to textual materials that we
thought we had long since mastered an exhausted. This is a welcome
exercise in method that keeps its focus on plot and character in all
their thickness." -Walter Brueggemann Columbia Theological Seminary
author of A Pathway of Interpretation "Philip Esler has done much to
make biblical scholars aware of social-scientific approaches. In this
book he brings this perspective to a reading of Old Testament narrative
texts, showing just how much social science can illuminate the Bible.
The stories of wives, warriors, kings, and madmen are here read against
the backdrop of the real society in which they were first told, and so
become three-dimensional to the modern reader." -John Barton Oxford
University author of Reading of the Old Testament Author Biography:
Philip F. Esler is Principal and Professor of Biblical Interpretation at
St Mary's University College, Twickenham, London. He is the author of
Conflict and Identity in Romans (2003), and New Testament Theology
(2005), and the editor of Ancient Israel (2006).
