Can the Bible be approached both as sacred scripture and as a historical
and literary text? For many people, it must be one or the other. How can
we read the Bible both ways? The Bible and the Believer brings
together three distinguished biblical scholars--one Jewish, one
Catholic, and one Protestant--to illustrate how to read the Hebrew
Bible/Old Testament critically and religiously. Marc Zvi Brettler, Peter
Enns, and Daniel J. Harrington tackle a dilemma that not only haunts
biblical scholarship today, but also disturbs students and others
exposed to biblical criticism for the first time, either in university
courses or through their own reading. Failure to resolve these
conflicting interpretive strategies often results in rejection of either
the critical approach or the religious approach--or both. But the
authors demonstrate how biblical criticism--the process of establishing
the original contextual meaning of biblical texts with the tools of
literary and historical analysis--need not undermine religious
interpretations of the Bible, but can in fact enhance them. They show
how awareness of new archeological evidence, cultural context, literary
form, and other tools of historical criticism can provide the necessary
preparation for a sound religious reading. And they argue that the
challenges such study raises for religious belief should be brought into
conversation with religious tradition rather than deemed grounds for
dismissing either that tradition or biblical criticism. Guiding readers
through the history of biblical exegesis within the Jewish, Catholic,
and Protestant faith traditions, The Bible and the Believer bridges an
age-old gap between critical and religious approaches to the Old
Testament.