Old Testament
The Christian lady preacher and the queer Jewish poet
If I could give every new pastor a gift in their first year of preaching, I’d give them a friend like Jessica Jacobs.
The most important American Old Testament scholar of the last century is Norman Gottwald
In the life of early Israel, Gottwald found a God of economic justice.
Lies about the Old Testament
Brent Strawn aims to debunk mistruths that come from biblical illiteracy and anti-Semitism.
by Sally Dyck
The Old Testament, the Tanakh, and the Hebrew Bible
Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler show how multiple traditions arise when different people read the same text.
Are Greg Boyd and I reading the same Old Testament?
Yes, there’s violence. But there’s also God’s faithfulness and care.
Reading the Bible with a sacramental sensibility
Hans Boersma sees scripture as more open to imaginative reading than our modern methods permit. The key is faith in Christ.
Novel exegesis
The lines between sacred history and contemporary life are wonderfully, miraculously blurred.
If it wasn't for the women
If it wasn’t for courageous women that dared to see beyond the lies.
Hermeneutics in a fragile land
The history of Palestinian Christian interpretation of the Old Testament reminds us of the nuanced, fragile nature of life in that region.
reviewed by Walter Brueggemann
Subversion and hope
In two pages, you go from a simple devotional habit to being sucked into the vortex of global power plays. You must be reading Brueggemann.
This Lent, preach sin—and the Old Testament
I've been enjoying CCblogger Rachel Hackenberg's Lenten sermon series posts. She offers several, separate ideas: on the question "Who do you say that I am?" (following the Narrative Lectionary's readings from John), on prayer practices, on "Lift High the Cross," on the paintings of Anneke Kaai.
But my favorite is Hackenberg's series on the Revised Common Lectionary's Old Testament readings.
Guns as the price for freedom?
President Obama’s speech in Newtown on December 17 included this pivotal question: “Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?” The president is bristling here at the way our political discourse reflexively leaps to claims about individual rights and freedoms.
Old Testament drama
My church's adult Sunday school class ended up doing a six-week study of one of John Ortberg’s inspirational and easy-to-read books. A member of the class loved the book and wanted to share and teach it—and who can argue with six weeks off as a teacher?
Before that, we’d been through many of N.T. Wright’s “For Everyone” study guides, and we'd organized a successful unit on Islam and Christianity, taught well by an instructor from our county college. We’ve read Adam Hamilton; we've added online conversation to our Lenten study. Now what?
Jeremiah, by Kathleen M. O’Connor
Kathleen O'Connor's daringly imaginative rereading of Jeremiah reveals a community experiencing the classic accents of trauma.
reviewed by Walter Brueggemann