Book 10

This popular textbook regards the Pentateuch as a literary whole, with a single theme that binds it together. The overarching theme is the partial fulfilment of the promises to the patriarchs. Though the method of the book is holistic, the origin and growth of the theme is also explored using the methods of traditional source analysis. An important chapter explores the theological function of the Pentateuch both in the community for which the Pentateuch was first composed and in our own time. For this second, enlarged edition, the author has written an Epilogue reassessing the theme of the Pentateuch from a more current postmodern perspective.

Book 94

What Does Eve Do To Help?

by David J. A. Clines

Published 1 February 1990
Readerly questions are raised when readers are explicitly and programmatically brought into the process of interpreting texts. Traditionally, the reader and readerly interest and identities have been screened out when we have set about interpreting texts, and we have set our sights on attaining an interpretation that shouldbe as objective as possible. Things are rather different now. Not only is quest for objective interpretation seen as chiaera, but the rewards of unabashed readerly interpretations that foreground the process of reading and the context of the reader have now been shown to be very well worth seeking. That reader-response approach characterizes this collection of six essays, prefaces by an introduction to reader-response criticism. The essays for the most part read in their original form to meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, are: What Does Eve Do To Help? and other Irredeemably Androcentric Orienations in Genesis 1-3; What Happens in Genesis; The Ancestor in Danger: But Not the Same Danger; The Old Testament Histories: A Reader's Guide; Deconstructing the Book of Job; and Nehemiah Memoir: The perils of Autobigraphy...one of the livliest writers on the Old Testament.
What Does Eve Do To Help ? does not disappoint and at times is hailariously funny C S Rodd Expository Times

Book 205

Interested Parties

by David J. A. Clines

Published 1 March 1987

Book 293

For these volumes, the author has selected 50 articles and papers, ten of them not previously published, from his work as an Old Testament scholar over the last 30 years. Some of the papers, like The Evidence for an Autumnal New Year in Pre-exilic Israel Reconsidered, are far from postmodern in their outlook. But there is ample evidence here that the postmodern is indeed the direction in which his mind has been moving. The essays are organized in eight sections (Method, Literature, History, Theology, Language, Psalms, Job-and, for entertainment, Divertimenti). They include Reading Esther from Left to Right, Beyond Synchronic Diachronic, Story and Poem: The Old Testament as Literature and as Scripture, In Search of the Indian Job, and Philology and Power-as well as The Postmodern Adventure in Biblical Studies.

Book 297

Ash re-examines the question of the relationship between Egypt and Palestine during the time of David and Solomon. By analysing all the available evidence-epigraphical sources from Egypt, archaeological data from Palestine and the pertinent biblical texts-he concludes that relations and contacts between Egypt and the peoples inhabiting ancient Palestine at the time of David and Solomon were minimal. Any reconstructions of the history of relations and contacts between Egypt and Palestine, including ancient Israel, must take this study into consideration.