Ancient Hebrew Poetry

The relative unimportance of the questions biblical studies likes to address

The important things we believe or disbelieve, the truth of confessions of faith such as “Jesus is the light of the world” or “the entire Torah [from Moses to Moses via Aqiba, down to the present day] was given by God to Moses on Sinai,” are not dependent on Jesus having spoken of himself in those terms, or on Moses being able to understand the inner connection between the Torah associated with him in the Pentateuch and that same Torah as understood by Akiva.

A Review of Chapter Five of Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies

“Literary Criticism: Aesthetics as Apologetics.” Chapter Five of Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2007) 219-247.

 Avalos covers a lot of ground in this chapter. The texts he touches on include Isaiah 40, the Hebrew and Greek versions of the book of Jeremiah, Jonah, Psalm 68:21, Psalms 9-10; Psalm 35, and Psalm 137. The scholars whose work he passes in review include Robert Alter, Sakae Kubo and Walter Specht, Robert Lowth, David Noel Freedman and Frank Moore Cross, James Kugel, Jack Sasson, Stanley Gevirtz, Carroll Stuhlmueller, Hermann Gunkel, James Ackerman, Alan Cooper, Susan Niditch, Mitchell Dahood, and Phyllis Trible.