This book sets out to provide a matrix for surveying the literary treatment of biblical tropes. It supplies an overview of the literary reception of the Bible from the earliest times right through to contemporary writers such as Jeanette Winterson and Colm Tóibín, traces the literary reception and treatment of the Book of Job; the figure of Uriah in the narrative of David and Bathsheba; the figure of Lilith; and Angels of Death and of Mercy. These are all handled as specimen histories. This is followed by an examination of the output of several specific early and later Twentieth-Century rewriters of the Bible. In the last chapters, three sets of other writers under particular headings ("the Great Disrupters" etc.) are grouped together with a view to finding common characteristics as well as unique features in their approach to biblical tropes and provide conclusions and suggestions for further research.

In Between Biblical Criticism and Poetic Rewriting, Samuel Tongue offers an account of the aesthetic and critical tensions inherent in the development of the Higher Criticism of the Bible. Different ‘types’ of Bible are created through the intellectual and literary pressures of Enlightenment and Romanticism and, as Tongue suggests, it is this legacy that continues to orientate the approaches deemed legitimate in biblical scholarship. Using a number of ancient and contemporary critical and poetic rewritings of Jacob’s struggle with the ‘angel’ (Gen 32:22-32), Tongue makes use of postmodern theories of textual production to argue that it is the ‘paragesis’, a parasitical form of writing between disciplines, that best foregrounds the complex performativity of biblical interpretation.

First Published in 1996. This study provides a political viewpoint on Israel and the Bible. It covers reading the Bible politically as well as considering if it has political reality. Part II extends to discuss Moses as a political leader and David as a builder of a state. Part III focuses more on the modern relevance of Biblical politics, Jewish vitality and the Case of Jerusalem.

Readers may be surprised at the complex course that many biblical texts traveled between original composition and inclusion in the Jewish or Christian canons of Scripture. Four different patterns of development are examined and evaluated in this study.

The present volume is one of the first to concentrate on a specific theme of biblical interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls, namely the book of Genesis. In particular the volume is concerned with the links displayed by the Qumranic biblical interpetation to the inner-biblical interpretation and the final shaping of the Hebrew scriptures. Moshe Bar-Asher studies cases of such inner biblical interpretative comments; Michael Segal deals with the Garden of Eden story in the scrolls and other contemporary Jewish sources; Reinhard Kratz analizes the story of the Flood as preamble for the lives of the Patriarchs in the Hebrew Bible; Devorah Dimant examines this theme in the Qumran scrolls; Roman Viehlhauer explores the story of Sodom and Gomorrah; George Brooke and Atar Livneh discuss aspects of Jacob’s career; Harald Samuel review the career of Levi; Liora Goldman examines the Aramaic work the Visions of Amram; Lawrence Schiffman and Aharon Shemesh discuss halakhic aspects of stories about the Patriarchs; Moshe Bernstein provides an overview of the references to the Patriarchs in the Qumran scrolls.

Solomon's image as a wise king and the founder of Jerusalem Temple has become a fixture of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literature. Yet, there are essential differences between the portraits of Solomon that are presented in the Hebrew Bible. In this volume, Isaac Kalimi explores these differences, which reflect divergent historical contexts, theological and didactic concepts, stylistic and literary techniques, and compositional methods among the biblical historians. He highlights the uniqueness of each portrayal of Solomon - his character, birth, early life, ascension, and temple-building - through a close comparison of the early and late biblical historiographies. Whereas the authors of Samuel-Kings stay closely to their sources and offer an apology for Solomon's kingship, including its more questionable aspects, the Chronicler freely rewrites his sources in order to present the life of Solomon as he wished it to be. The volume will serve scholars and students seeking to understand biblical texts within their ancient Near Eastern contexts.