New Books in Biblical Studies

By Marshall PoeReligion & Spirituality Christianity

New Books in Biblical Studies episodes

April 20, 2016 Stern, et al., “The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee” (Penn State UP, 2015)
The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee (Penn State UP, 2015) is unique. The book, edited by David Stern, Christoph Markschies, and Sarit Shalev-Eyni, combines a gorgeous facsimile of a late 15th-century illuminated haggadah with a Latin prologue written by a Dominican Friar! Mystery abounds as a Jewish Passover text, written in Hebrew by a Jewish scribe, is found to include illustrations of Christian significance. Thanks to a special collaboration of multi-disciplinary experts from three continents and an element of serendipity, the manuscript of a haggadah from the 15th century, now at home in a state library in Munich, was discovered, translated, and its importance as a primary source for Christian Jewish relations during the late medieval and early modern period recognized.The prologue by fifteen-century Dominican Hebraist Erhard von Pappenheim includes the testimony of Jews tortured to testify to blood libel in 1475 in Trent. Recorded by von Pappenheim in a matter-of-fact tone, as though by an ethnographer, the testimony also becomes a primary source for Jewish ritual practice during this period in German lands. It also speaks to Christian understanding of Jewish ritual and tradition.Read the essays in this special volume for the thoughtful questions that the experts raise and address. Turn the pages of the Haggadah to experience its beauty.
During the interview we also discussed The Washington Haggadah (Harvard University Press, 2011), edited by David Stern. This elegant reproduction of the most beautiful haggadah in the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington reflects the work of the late 15th century southern German illustrator Joel ben Simeon. The illuminations that adorn the text are an ethnographers dream: they evidence the home ritual practices of the era and place. When the book was displayed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, objects from the Museums collection that are reflected on the pages of the haggadah accompanied the display. Essays by David Stern and art historian Katrin Kogman-Apel accompany the text of the Passover haggadah, providing a history of the haggadah for interested readers.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
1 hr
April 11, 2016 Susannah Drake, “Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)
In Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Susannah Drake, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College, investigates the representations of Jewish sexuality in early Christian writings. She argues that there was a close connection between accusations of Jews’ sexuality/carnality and their misguided textual interpretation. We can learn from this ancient case study about the ways in which the representation of a group as sexually heretical is used to justify the use of force against that group.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
32 min
March 28, 2016 David A. Lambert, “How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture” (Oxford UP, 2016)
In How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2016), David A. Lambert, assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that repentance, as a concept, was read into the Bible by later interpretive communities. He explains, for example, how ancient Israelite rituals, like fasting, prayer, and confession, had a different meaning in the Bible before they later viewed through what he calls the the “Penitential Lens.” Interested in authors as well as readers, Lambert’s approach to Biblical study integrates the critical use of biblical texts with that of post-biblical literature and interpretation.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
32 min
March 06, 2016 Benjamin D. Sommer, “Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition” (Yale UP, 2015)
In Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition (Yale University Press, 2015), Benjamin D. Sommer, Professor of Bible at The Jewish Theological Seminary, describes a “participatory theory of revelation,” which views the Bible as the result of a dialogue between God and the people of Israel. Sommer reads Biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern Jewish texts in conversation, explaining that engaging in the debate over what happened at Sinai is a deeply sacred act. For Sommer, biblical criticism is an important element of a modern Jewish approach to scripture and theology.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
33 min
February 22, 2016 Jason Mokhtarian, “Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran” (U of California Press, 2015)
In Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran (University of California Press, 2015), Jason Mokhtarian, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at the Indiana University, puts the Babylonian Talmud in its Persian context. He lays out a research program for Talmud studies that is contextual, rather than literary or exegetical. Analyzing references to Persians and Persian loanwords in the Talmudic text, as well as ancient seals and bowl spells, he argues that we need to understand ancient Iran, as a real historical force and an imaginary interlocutor, to fully understand rabbinic identity and culture.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
31 min
February 16, 2016 Aviya Kushner, “The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible” (Spiegel and Grau, 2015)
Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family, reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and debating its meaning over the dinner table. She knew much of it by heart–and was later surprised when, while getting her MFA from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, she took the novelist Marilynne Robinson’s class on the Bible and discovered she barely recognized the text she thought she knew so well. From differences in the Ten Commandments to a less ambiguous reading of the creation story, the English translation often felt like another book entirely from the one she had grown up with.
Kushner’s interest in the differences between the ancient language and the modern one gradually became an obsession. She began what became a ten-year project of reading different versions of the Hebrew Bible in English and traveling the world in the footsteps of the great biblical translators, trying to understand what compelled them to take on a lifetime project that was often considered heretical and in some cases resulted in their deaths.
In The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel and Grau, 2015) Kushner illustrates how the differences in translation affect our understanding of our culture’s most important written work. A fascinating look at language and the beliefs we hold most dear, The Grammar of God is also a moving tale about leaving home and returning to it, both literally and through reading.
Aviya Kushner has worked as a travel columnist for The International Jerusalem Post, and her poems and essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Partisan Review, and The Wilson Quarterly. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago and is a contributing editor at A Public Space and a mentor for the National Yiddish Book Center.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
58 min
December 26, 2015 Heath W. Carter, “Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago” (Oxford University Press, 2015)
Heath W. Carter‘s new book Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford University Press, 2015) offers a bold interpretation of the origins of the American Social Gospel by highlighting the role of labor in both articulating key ideas and activism. He begins in antebellum Chicago with its modest frontier churches in which different classes came together as equals. The prosperity of the post-Civil War era redefined the relationship between labor, capital and the churches bringing new class divisions. Opulent churches of the well-to-do and highly compensated clergy were increasingly compromised in their appeal to the captains of industry. Viewing poverty as a personal failing, while success a measure of divine approval, drew working class resentment. It was in this gilded age that labor activist, with no support from leading seminaries or pulpits, advocated for themselves with appeals to the bible and theological innovation. The battle was between competing interpretations of Christianity in which a radical Jesus stood with the poor. Trade unionists advocated for the eight-hour workday, Sunday rest, just wages, and the abolishing of church pew rentals. Labor criticism, strikes, and demonstrations, brought anxiety to church leadership who were losing the loyalty of wage earners they had long enjoyed. They attempted a strategy to divide the labor movement by denouncing socialist and communist and approving of “sensible” wage earners. Continued pressure from below instigated reluctant middle-class church leaders to address the labor question in what became known as the Social Gospel. Carter has provided a corrective to how we think about the origins of the Social Gospel away from a middle-class progressive initiative to labor as advocates of their own interest.
Heath W. Carter is an assistant professor at Valparaiso University.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
1 hr 3 min
December 09, 2015 Mark A. Noll, “In the Beginning was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Mark A. Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His book, In the Beginning was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 (Oxford University Press, 2015), offers a rich and deep examination of the place of the bible, both as an object and a source of ideas, in the public life of early America. Noll sets out to show the evolution of the colonial relationship with the bible in the context of Christendom, anti-Catholicism and the British empire in which it was understood. Noll offers innumerable examples and references of New England as thoroughly immersed in scripture in which a broad biblicalism saturated the imagination, culture, and politics. Both fervent and lukewarm believers took the authority of the bible for granted providing analogies for interpreting immediate events, inductive instruction, and inspiration for a vast number of political and cultural projects. But the bible was also a double edge sword that could both unite and divide friends and foe. Noll teases out the often-subtle difference in views of the bible that had significant political consequence. Dissenters and religious radicals believed that the bible stood against Christendom and church establishment. Other issues were not only about the bible itself, and whether it was the sole or final authority, but also who could read it and understand it. Slaves, women, and common people under the sweep of revivals, increased literacy, and the tool of a versified text began to interpret the bible for themselves rather than look to the clergy for guidance. This worked to undermine Christendom and created a uniquely American attitude towards the bible. What remained was a providential rhetoric that replaced the empire with the nation, and ongoing debates over scriptural mandates on the economy, slavery, and arguments for or against the Revolution. Noll has demonstrated that it is virtually impossible to understand the colonial society without understanding the place, significance, and prominence of scripture in private and public life.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
1 hr 2 min
November 03, 2015 Mark S. M. Scott, “Pathways in Theodicy: An Introduction to the Problem of Evil ” (Fortress Press, 2015)
In his new book, Pathways in Theodicy: An Introduction to the Problem of Evil (Fortress Press, 2015), Dr. Mark S. M. Scott explores how people, largely within the Christian tradition, deal with the problem of evil and suffering. In clear prose, Dr. Scott both explains and critically examines ways Christians have deal with these issues and also proposes ways that this conversation can move forward, for instance, by greater attention to Biblical understandings of evil. This book would therefore be of interest both to specialists in this area and for a general readership interested in learning more about theodicy (or looking for a textbook that they can assign an undergraduate class).
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
1 hr
November 03, 2015 Roland Clark, “Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania” (Cornell UP, 2015)
Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press, 2015) is an in-depth study of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, one of the largest and longest lasting fascist social movements in Europe. Drawing on oral interviews, memoirs and the archives of the Romanian secret police, Roland Clark reveals the contribution of seemingly contradictory practices – deadly violence and charitable activities, intellectual and manual labor, political action and religious rituals – to fascist subjectivities in interwar Romania. Arguing against fascism as primarily an ideology, Clark focuses on everyday practices through which young men and women “became fascist.” As he explores the rise and fall of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, Clark places it in the broader political and social context of Romanian nationalism, 19th-century state-building and interwar European fascist movements.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
1 hr 4 min

About New Books in Biblical Studies

From the publisher's feed

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.