This book investigates the texts in the Hebrew Bible in which a character expresses a wish to die.

The poetry of the Old Testament articulates the painful experiences of being human. Vast as the Sea shows how texts like Job, Jeremiah, and the Psalms provide honest and healing expressions for life's struggles. This book is a rich resource for scholars and readers of the Bible, as well as for psychologists and pastoral counselors.

An innovative translation and commentary on the book of Jonah by a trio of award-winning scholars The book of Jonah, which tells the outlandish story of a disobedient prophet swallowed by a great fish, is one of the Bible’s best-known narratives. This tale has fascinated readers for millennia and has inspired countless interpretations. This commentary features a new translation of Jonah as well as an introduction outlining the major interpretive issues in the text. The introduction traces the composition history of the book, paying special attention to the psalm in the second chapter; and the authors explore new theories surrounding the time and place where Jonah delivers his message to Nineveh, as well as the city’s act of repentance. In addition to these features, this volume draws on a variety of critical approaches to biblical literature—including affect theory, animal studies, performance criticism, postcolonial criticism, psychological criticism, spatial theory, and trauma theory—to reveal the book’s many interpretive possibilities. An updated treatment of Jonah’s reception history includes analyses of the story in religious traditions, art and literature, and popular culture.

Postmortem existence in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament was rooted in mortuary practices and conceptualized through the embodiment of the dead. But this idea of the afterlife was not hopeless or fatalistic, consigned to the dreariness of the tomb. The dead were cherished and remembered, their bones were cared for, and their names lived on as ancestors. This book examines the concept of the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible by studying the treatment of the dead, as revealed both in biblical literature and in the material remains of the southern Levant. The mortuary culture of Judah during the Iron Age is the starting point for this study. The practice of collective burial inside a Judahite rock-cut bench tomb is compared to biblical traditions of family tombs and joining one's ancestors in death. This archaeological analysis, which also incorporates funerary inscriptions, will shed important insight into concepts found in biblical literature such as the construction of the soul in death, the nature of corpse impurity, and the idea of Sheol. In Judah and the Hebrew Bible, death was a transition that was managed through the ritual actions of the living. The connections that were forged through such actions, such as ancestor veneration, were socially meaningful for the living and insured a measure of immortality for the dead.

The meaning of the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is studied through the ideals of a good death, beginning with burial customs. This book uses burial remains from Iron Age Judah to shed important light on the images of death found in biblical literature.

Hanne Loland studies gendered god-language in the Hebrew Bible. She offers a theoretical framework that is helpful for the interpretation of biblical language used in reference to God and for the broader theological and scholarly debate on God and gender. One of the main questions Loland discusses is whether and how gende r is salient - that is, of significance - when gendered god-language occurs in a text. This is a new line of questioning in Hebrew Bible research, which so far has been mostly concerned with mapping the occurrences of feminine god-language. The question of gender significance is debated both in theoretical discussions on God, gender and language, and in three case studies (Isa 42:13-14, 46:3-4, and 49:14-15). These texts are chosen primarily because of today's research situation, where there has been a claim that Isa 40-55 (or 40-66) differs from the rest of the Hebrew Bible in its use of feminine god-language. Loland argues that there is in principle no difference between god-language formulated in similes or metaphors. Further, there is no significant difference between male and female god-language in the Hebrew Bible. These findings are also relevant for the contemporary debate concerning god-language in academia, church, and synagogue. This volume was recognized with the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise in 2008.