Song of Songs

Paul J. Griffiths

Brazos Press, 2011-06-01 - 320 pages

In this addition to the well-received Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible, Paul Griffiths offers theological exegesis of the Song of Songs. This commentary, like each in the series, is designed to serve the church--providing a rich resource for preachers, teachers, students, and study groups--and demonstrate the continuing intellectual and practical viability of theological interpretation of the Bible.Praise for the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible""The Brazos Theological Commentary offers just the right level of light to make illuminating the Word the joy it was meant to be.""--Calvin Miller, author of A Hunger for the Holy and Loving God Up Close

 

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Ecclesiastes

 

 William P. Brown

Westminster John Knox Press, 2011-08-16 - 143 pages

Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching is a distinctive resource for those who interpret the Bible in the church. Planned and written specifically for teaching and preaching needs, this critically acclaimed biblical commentary is a major contribution to scholarship and ministry.

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Colossians, Philemon

David E. Garland

Zondervan, 2009-05-19 - 400 pages

Most Bible commentaries take us on a one-way trip from the twentieth century to the first century. But they leave us there, assuming that we can somehow make the return journey on our own. In other words, they focus on the original meaning of the passage but don't discuss its contemporary application. The information they offer is valuable -- but the job is only half done! The NIV Application Commentary Series helps us with both halves of the interpretive task. This new and unique series shows readers how to bring an ancient message into a modern context. It explains not only what the Bible meant but also how it can speak powerfully today.

 

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Judges

Roger Ryan

Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007-10-30 - 221 pages 

In this new contribution to the Readings series of commentaries, Roger Ryan offers a challenge to the fashionable disdain for the heroes of the Book of Judges. As against the current consensus majoring on the supposed flaws in the characters of the judges, and denigrating them as participants in Israel's moral and religious decline, he paints a positive portrait of each of the book's judge-deliverers. The key element in all the stories of the judges is that each of them wins independence for oppressed Israelites against great odds-an element that should predispose readers to a favourable evaluation of the heroes. Ehud slaughters an enemy king when the only weapon he has is a homemade dagger. Barak resolutely charges downhill against enemy chariots reinforced with iron. Jael slaughters an enemy commander by improvising with a hammer and a tent peg. Gideon defeats hordes of nomadic invaders with a small token army. The lone hero Samson slaughters the Philistine foe in great numbers. The Book of Judges presents in this reading a dark story-world in which its characters take heroic risks as they resolve conflicts by violent means. Their stories are jubilantly told and readers are expected to be neither squeamish nor censorious.

 

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John

Gerard Sloyan

Westminster John Knox Press, 2009-07-15 - 239 pages

In this volume, Gerard Sloyan utilizes the lectionary approach to offer new insights into understanding the book of John. In so doing, he puts the Fourth Gospel in the Old Testament context within which the early church received the public readings of this Gospel. His emphasis on the use of John within first-century Christianity enables modern readers to grasp the meaning of the Gospel message. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching is a distinctive resource for those who interpret the Bible in the church. Planned and written specifically for teaching and preaching needs, this critically acclaimed biblical commentary is a major contribution to scholarship and ministry.

 

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Hebrews

Robert P. Gordon

Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008-02-29 - 215 pages

This commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews envisages the recipients of the letter as a community that has embraced the Christian message but is beginning to question its adequacy to meet their spiritual needs. They have given up the richness of Jewish ritual and cultic tradition for a way of life that lacks the venerable symbols and institutions they had previously valued. Gordon highlights the arguments and rhetorical strategies the author uses to counter this feeling of 'cultic deficit' as he draws attention to what they actually possess in consequence of their Christian commitment. The Letter to the Hebrews has particular contemporary relevance today because, in warning the community against 'going back', the author implies that Christianity has superseded their ancestral Jewish faith. That may seem a slight on the religion 'superseded', but Gordon points out that Judaism itself, as well as Christianity, represents a significant break with the religion of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Jewish-Christian dialogue would profit from being conducted in that light. For this Second Edition, the author has written an additional Introduction, and the pagination of this edition differs from that of the first.

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From Sermon To Commentary: Expounding The Bible In Talmudic Babylonia 

 

Eliezer Segal

Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2005 - 164 pages

 

The Bible has always been vital to Jewish religious life, and it has been expounded in diverse ways. Perhaps the most influential body of Jewish biblical interpretation is the Midrash that was produced by expositors during the first five centuries CE. Many such teachings are collected in the Babylonian Talmud, the monumental compendium of Jewish law and lore that was accepted as the definitive statement of Jewish oral tradition for subsequent generations.However, many of the Talmud's interpretations of biblical passages appear bizarre or pointless. From Sermon to Commentary: Expounding the Bible in Talmudic Babyloniatries to explain this phenomenon by carefully examining representative passages from a variety of methodological approaches, paying particular attention to comparisons with Midrash composed in the Land of Israel.Based on this investigation, Eliezer Segal argues that the Babylonian sages were utilizing discourses that had originated in Israel as rhetorical sermons in which biblical interpretation was being employed in an imaginative, literary manner, usually based on the interplay between two or more texts from different books of the Bible. Because they did not possess their own tradition of homiletic preaching, the Babylonian rabbis interpreted these comments without regard for their rhetorical conventions, as if they were exegetical commentaries, resulting in the distinctive, puzzling character of Babylonian Midrash.

 

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Genesis

Walter Brueggemann

Westminster John Knox Press, 1982 - 384 pages

In his clear and readable style Walter Brueggemann presents Genesis as a single book set within the context of the whole of biblical revelation. He sees his task as bringing the text close to the faith and ministry of the church. He interprets Genesis as a proclamation of God's decisive dealing with creation rather than as history of myth. Brueggemann's impressive perspective illuminates the study of the first book of the Bible.
Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching is a distinctive resource for those who interpret the Bible in the church. Planned and written specifically for teaching and preaching needs, this critically acclaimed biblical commentary is a major contribution to scholarship and ministry.

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'And The Two Shall Become One Flesh': A Study of Traditions in Ephesians 5: 21-33

J. Paul Sampley

Cambridge University Press, 2004-12-02 - 188 pages

In this detailed exegesis of Ephesians 5: 21-33 Dr Sampley not only elucidates the meaning of this difficult and historically important passage, but he also discusses and describes the background and sources of the Epistle. In particular he traces the history of the traditions incorporated in it and demonstrates convincingly that the writer of Ephesians drew heavily on certain passages in Genesis and Leviticus. Ephesians can be seen as a mosaic of traditions ingeniously arranged and employed to express the new message of the early church. This book should be of interest to all Old and New Testament scholars.

 

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Ephesians 

Martin Kitchen

Taylor & Francis, 1994-10-18 - 147 pages

This study approaches the Epistle of the Ephesians in a radically different way from traditional commentaries. Rather than analyzing each individual verse, Martin Kitchen examines the complete text within the framework of contemporary Biblical criticism. He acknowledges the debt which Biblical studies owes to historical method, while also recognizing the need to view the epistle against the background of recent literary approaches to New Testament texts. The book shows why most commentators now think that Ephesians was not the work of Paul himself and suggests a context in which the epistle might have been written. Covering recent developments in New Testament theology,Ephesians discusses the early history of the church and the hermeneutical questions concerning the significance of religious texts which date from a past age.

 

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Reading Ephesians: Exploring Social Entrepreneurship in the Text

Minna Shkul

Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010-02-10 - 279 pages

 

Minna Shkul examines how Ephesians engages in social entrepreneurship - the deliberate shaping of emerging Christian Identity through provision of ideological and social paradigms for the fledgling Christian community. Shkul uses social entrepreneurship as an umbrella for a variety of social processes reflected in the text. This eclectic theoretical framework and deutero-Pauline reading position has two key aims. The first is to offer a theoretically informed social-scientific reading which demonstrates the extensive socio-ideological shaping within the text, and displays the writer's negotiation of different group processes throughout the letter. The second is to examine emerging Christian identity in the text, testing its ideological and social contours and its reforms upon Jewish traditions. Crucially this is done without the theological presupposition that something was wrong with the Judaism practised at the time, but rather by focusing upon the divine 'legitimating' of the Christian group and its culture.
These readings of Ephesians examine how the writer engages in a self-enhancing discourse that reinforces basic components of communality. These include the construction of a positive in-group identity and the provision of ideological and social legitimating for the community. Shkul also discusses the textual reflection of communal relations in other groups in Greco-Roman antiquity. She examines how Christ-followers are positioned in a Jewish symbolic universe, which is forced to make room for Christ and his non-Israelite followers. Finally, she explores the attitude toward non-Israelites within Ephesians, and their need for re-socialization.

 

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Jews, Gentiles, and Ethnic Reconciliation: Paul's Jewish Identity and Ephesians

Tet-Lim N. Yee

Cambridge University Press, 2005-03-10 - 302 pages

Much scholarship has focused on Paul's insistence on Gentile membership of the people of God equally with Jews. Dr Yee's study of Ephesians 2 reveals how the distinctively Jewish world view of the author of Ephesians underlies this key text. He explores how the Ephesians' author provides a resolution to one of the thorniest issues regarding two ethnic groups in the earliest period of Christianity: can Jew and Gentile, the two estranged human groups, be one (people of God) and if so, how? Setting Ephesians 2 as fully as possible into its historical context, he describes some of the relevant Jewish features and demonstrates them, revealing many explosive but hidden issues. This book provides an important contribution to the continuing reassessment of Christian and Jewish self-understanding in regard to each other during the critical period of the latter decades of the first century CE.

 

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