Joshua by
Summary: A new commentary for today's world, The Story of God Bible Commentary explains and illuminates each passage of Scripture in light of the Bible's grand story. The first commentary series to do so, SGBC offers a clear and compelling exposition of biblical texts, guiding everyday readers in how to creatively and faithfully live out the Bible in their own contexts. Its story-centric approach is ideal for pastors, students, Sunday school teachers, and laypeople alike. Three easy-to-use sections designed to help readers live out God's story: LISTEN to the story: Includes complete NIV text with references to other texts at work in each passage, encouraging the reader to hear it within the Bible's grand story; EXPLAIN the story: Explores and illuminates each text as embedded in its canonical and historical setting; LIVE the story: Reflects on how each text can be lived today and includes contemporary stories and illustrations to aid preachers, teachers, and students.--Publisher.
Joshua by
Summary: The Teach the Text Commentary Series gives pastors the best of biblical scholarship and presents the information needed to move seamlessly from the meaning of the text to its effective communication. By providing focused commentary, this volume allows pastors to quickly grasp the most important information. Each unit of the commentary includes the big idea and key themes of the passage; sections dedicated to understanding, teaching, and illustrating the text; and full-color illustrations, maps, and photos. Joshua covers a critical period in the history of Israel, as God brings them out of the desert wanderings into the land he promised them, through a series of spectacular military maneuvers. Yet readers today may struggle with commands from God that offend modern sensibilities. And what does the conquest and division of the promised land have to do with the Christian life? Professor Kenneth Mathews helps teachers, preachers, and everyday readers understand this important Old Testament book in its original context and apply it for today. While Joshua is historical, it is also theological. The crucial lessons then and now are that God's word is truthful and authoritative and that he fulfills his promises. -- from the back cover.
Joshua by
Summary: This commentary attempts to understand and explain the book of Joshua on its own value and not as part of a larger literary creation as those theories are largely disputed. It includes the insights of modern scholarship, but also does not run a blind eye on earlier interpretations of the book. Joshua is arguably the most important biblical book when it comes to questions of historical geography of ancient Israel. Here this aspect is taken into account more than in some other modern commentaries; this can also be related to the fact that the author is a biblical scholar who lives in Israel having worked in the fields of archeology and historical geography.
Joshua by
Review: "In this volume Gordon McConville and Stephen Williams interpret the book of Joshua in relation to Christian theology, providing exegetical commentary and reflection on an often-troubling book that nonetheless plays a key role in the biblical drama of salvation. McConville and Williams address significant theological themes in Joshua, such as land, covenant, law, miracle, judgment (including the problem of genocide), and idolatry. They posit that the theological topics engaged in Joshua are not limited to the horizons of the author and first readers of the book, but that this ancient text is part of a much larger testimony that concerns readers yet today." ""What a marvelous book! Many commentaries on Joshua are disappointing and dispiriting; after using them, you wonder what the point was. This one helps you understand the book, helps you see the point, and sets you thinking energetically and constructively on the theological issues it raises."---John Goldingay, Fuller Theological Seminary" ""In the light of Qoheleth's tired comment---'Of making many books there is no end'---one can be forgiven for asking whether we need yet another English commentary on the book of Joshua. Having had opportunity to dive into this new one coauthored by Old Testament scholar Gordon McConville and systematic theologian Stephen Williams, I can only respond with another of Qoheleth's sayings: Two are better than one, for they have a good return for their labor.' This collaborative effort in theological exegesis is first-rate both as exegesis and as theological interpretation, brilliantly demonstrating the organic and necessary link between the two."---V. Philips Long, Regent College, Vancouver"--BOOK JACKET.
Joshua by
Following closely on the heels of the Exodus story, the book of Joshua recounts the mighty acts of God as he fulfills his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is, quite profoundly, a testimony to God’s awesome power and enduring faithfulness. Written to aid pastors in their preaching and churches in their reading, this accessible commentary guides us through the history of Joshua’s leadership in Israel and God’s direction of his covenant people to their promised “rest” in the land of Canaan. With warmth and wisdom, David Jackman ultimately encourages us to trust God’s promises more deeply and obey his commands more wholeheartedly―that we might fully enjoy all the blessings secured for us in and through our Joshua―Jesus Christ. Part of the Preaching the Word series.
Joshua by
In an age of fear and insecurity, in which ethnic nationalism continues to give rise to conflict and war, we dare not avoid critical engagement with biblical texts that have been used to justify colonialism, conquest, occupation, and ethnic cleansing. Building on the idea of Scripture as dialogue partner, Matties advocates for the book of Joshua even as he engages in a difficult conversation with it. In his commentary, the twenty-fifth volume in the Believers Church Bible Commentary series, Matties calls for an openness to the unexpected in the book of Joshua. He suggests that reading Joshua carefully will open windows into how and why we read Scripture at all.
Joshua by
The Bible is both a divine and a human book. It is the inspired word of God for his people, whether in biblical times or for the church today. It is also a fully human book, written by different people in a variety of cultural settings. Knowledge of biblical language and society is essential if the meaning of the human writer is to be grasped fully. The Apollos Old Testament Commentary aims to take with equal seriousness the divine and human aspects of Scripture. In this volume, Pekka Pitkänen shows the relevance of Joshua to modern readers. While he remains anchored in the world of the text throughout the commentary, Pitkänen brings contemporary geopolitical issues (like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) to bear on Joshua and the genocidal "Israelite conquest tradition."
Joshua, Judges, Ruth by
The Cornerstone Biblical Commentary series provides up-to-date, evangelical scholarship on the Old and New Testaments. Each volume is designed to equip pastors and Christian leaders with exegetical and theological knowledge to better understand and apply God’s Word by presenting the message of each passage as well as an overview of other issues surrounding the text. The commentary series has been structured to help readers understand the meaning of Scripture, passage-by-passage, through the entire Bible. The New Living Translation is an authoritative Bible translation, rendered faithfully into today’s English from the ancient texts by 90 leading Bible scholars. The NLT’s scholarship and clarity breathe life into even the most difficult-to-understand Bible passages―but even more powerful are stories of how people’s lives are changing as the words speak directly to their hearts. That’s why we call it “The Truth Made Clear.”
Joshua 1-12 by
Trent C. Butler's excellent commentary on Joshua is updated and revised. This new edition takes into account the most recent scholarly work on the book of Joshua. The commentary includes Butler's translation of the text, explanatory notes, and commentary to help any professor, student, or pastor with research and writing.
Joshua 13-24 by
Trent C. Butler's excellent commentary on Joshua is updated and revised. This new edition takes into account the most recent scholarly work on the book of Joshua. The commentary includes Butler's translation of the text, explanatory notes, and commentary to help any professor, student, or pastor with research and writing.
Conquering Character by
While recent Old Testament scholarship has seen a steady rise in the prominence of narrative approaches to the text, little such work has been done on the book of Joshua. This book offers a narrative treatment of the conquest accounts, with specific attention given to the characterization of Joshua. The method employed is eclectic, including poetic analysis, structural study, delimitation criticism, comparative literary analysis, and intertextual reading. Joshua's characterization has received inadequate scholarly attention to date, largely because he is seen as a pale character, a mere stereotype in the biblical history. This two-dimensional reading often leads to the conclusion that Joshua is meant to represent another character in the history. But this approach neglects the many aspects of Joshua's character that are unique, and does not address the text's presentation of his flaws. On the other hand, some scholars have recently suggested that Joshua's character is significantly flawed. This reading is similarly untenable, as those features of Joshua's leadership that it portrays as faulty are in fact condoned, not condemned, by the text itself. Close examination of the conquest narratives suggests that Joshua's character is both complex and reliable. To the degree that Joshua functions as a paradigm in the subsequent histories, this paradigm must be conceived more broadly than it has been in the past. He is not merely a royal, prophetic, or priestly figure, but exercises, and often exemplifies, the many different types of leadership that feature in the former prophets.
Images of Joshua in the Bible and Its Reception by
The central theme of the book is the relationship between a hero or cultural icon and the cultures in which he or she is venerated. On one hand, a hero cannot remain a static character if he or she is to appeal to diverse and dynamic communities. On the other hand, a traditional icon should retain some basic features in order to remain recognizable. Joshua son of Nun is an iconic figure of Israelite cultural memory described at length in the Hebrew Bible and venerated in numerous religious traditions. This book uses Joshua as a test case. It tackles reception and redaction history, focusing on the use and development of Joshua's character and the deployment of his various images in the narratives and texts of several religious traditions. I look for continuities and discontinuities between traditions, as well as cross-pollination and polemic. The first two chapters look at Joshua's portrayal in biblical literature, using both synchronic (literary analysis) as well as diachronic (Überlieferungsgeschichte and redaction/source criticism) methodologies. The other four chapters focus on the reception history of Joshua in Second Temple and Hellenistic Jewish literature, in the medieval (Arabic) Samaritan Book of Joshua, in the New Testament and Church Fathers, and in Rabbinic literature.
Joshua by
From F.B. Meyer's outstanding biographies series of the great Biblical figures of faith, here is the exciting story of Joshua. Meyer shows the readers that the story of Joshua's life can serve to strengthen readers in their faith in God. Seeing God deliver Joshua from his enemies will encourage believers to also look to God for deliverance.
The Joshua Delusion?: Rethinking Genocide in the Bible by
Many Christians wrestle with biblical passages in which God commands the slaughter of the Canaanites - men, women, and children - and the book of Joshua in particular showcases the genocidal violence which saturates the Old Testament. The issue of the morality of the God portrayed in these passages is one of the major challenges for faith today, leading many Christians to cast doubt over what, if any, theological value can be gleamed from such accounts and how they can even be called Holy Scripture. In this bold and innovative book Douglas Earl grasps the bull by the horns and guides readers to new and unexpected ways of looking at the book of Joshua.
Reading Joshua by
Reading Joshua was written for anyone who wishes to engage critically one of the most, if not the most, problematic and troublesome books in the Bible. Using the best of current historical-critical studies by mainstream biblical scholars, and the most recent archaeological discoveries and theorizing, Laughlin questions both the historicity of the stories presented in the book as well as the basic theological ideology presented through these stories: namely that Yahweh ordered the indiscriminate butchery of the Canaanites. This ideology is criticized for what it is: a xenophobic and genocidal approach to the issue of how human beings should act toward one another in a multi-cultural world. Read against the backdrop of the Babylonian Exile (sixth century BCE), these stories may have served well the purpose(s) of their author(s). Thus these troubling accounts may have had their time and place, but that time and place is not the twenty-first-century world in which we now find ourselves.
Reading Joshua As Christian Scripture by
The book of Joshua has been received and used as Christian Scripture throughout Christian history. The challenge today, however, is how Christians should appropriately continue to read Joshua as Scripture, not least in the light of well-known historical and ethical difficulties with the narrative. In Reading Joshua as Christian Scripture, Douglas Earl draws on conceptual resources offered by recent anthropological approaches to myth and combines this with a close literary reading of the text, in order to argue that Joshua is misconstrued when it is treated as a historical account of conquest. Instead, in its ancient Israelite context Joshua functioned to reshape accepted norms of community identity, as reflected in the book of Deuteronomy, by forming a new'cultural memory.'Furthermore, Earl reconsiders the traditional notion of the'spiritual sense'of Scripture in terms of a rich account of symbol and also makes use of the narrative hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. The result is a fresh and unexpected reading of Joshua as Christian Scripture that develops the original function of the narrative in a way that resonates with classic premodern readings and is also challenging to contemporary Christian understandings of identity and faithfulness
The Book of Joshua by
The Book of Joshua contains the papers of the Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense 2010 on the Book of Joshua and the Land of Israel. Not for the sake of plurality as such, but as a signal of the state of the art in Joshua research in the post-Noth era this volume functions as a platform for different approaches in exegetical and historical studies. Text-critical, redaction-critical and compositional studies, as well as final text reading are offered. The papers are grouped together in six thematic clusters: Text, Versions and Terminology; Tradition, Composition and Context; History, Archaeology and Geography; Crossing the Jordan; Jericho and Violence; History of Reception. Starting with the question which text we read (MT, LXX, 4QJosha) the book engages not only in the recent Pentateuch-Hexateuch debate, but also in the problematic fields of (divine) violence and the land. Therefore an important section deals with the history of reception, starting with the Book of Maccabees, Philo, Josephus, the New Testament and ending up with two examples of reception in recent times.
Conquering Character by
While recent Old Testament scholarship has seen a steady rise in the prominence of narrative approaches to the text, little such work has been done on the book of Joshua. This book offers a narrative treatment of the conquest accounts, with specific attention given to the characterization of Joshua. The method employed is eclectic, including poetic analysis, structural study, delimitation criticism, comparative literary analysis, and intertextual reading. Joshua's characterization has received inadequate scholarly attention to date, largely because he is seen as a pale character, a mere stereotype in the biblical history. This two-dimensional reading often leads to the conclusion that Joshua is meant to represent another character in the history. But this approach neglects the many aspects of Joshua's character that are unique, and does not address the text's presentation of his flaws. On the other hand, some scholars have recently suggested that Joshua's character is significantly flawed. This reading is similarly untenable, as those features of Joshua's leadership that it portrays as faulty are in fact condoned, not condemned, by the text itself. Close examination of the conquest narratives suggests that Joshua's character is both complex and reliable. To the degree that Joshua functions as a paradigm in the subsequent histories, this paradigm must be conceived more broadly than it has been in the past. He is not merely a royal, prophetic, or priestly figure, but exercises, and often exemplifies, the many different types of leadership that feature in the former prophets.
Joshua 1-12 by
An acknowledged expert on the Hebrew Bible, Thomas Dozeman offers a fresh translation of the Hebrew and Greek texts of the book of Joshua and explores the nature, function, and causes of the religious violence depicted therein. By blending the distinct teachings of Deuteronomy and the Priestly literature, Dozeman provides a unique interpretation of holy war as a form of sacred genocide, arguing that, since peace in the promised land required the elimination of the populations of all existent royal cities, a general purging of the land accompanied the progress of the ark of the covenant. This essential work of religious scholarship demonstrates how the theme of total genocide is reinterpreted as partial conquest when redactors place Joshua, an independent book, between Deuteronomy and Judges. The author traces the evolution of this reinterpretation of the central themes of religious violence while providing a comparison of the two textual versions of Joshua and an insightful analysis of the book’s reception history.
Joshua and Judges by
The Texts @ Contexts series gathers scholarly voices from diverse contexts and social locations to bring new or unfamiliar facets of biblical texts to light. Joshua and Judges focuses attention on themes and tensions at the beginning of Israel’s story in the Bible. How do these books represent conquest, war, trauma, violence against women and their marginalization? How does God appear to relate to these realities? And what do contemporary men and women do with biblical ambivalence? Like other volumes in the Texts @ Contexts series, these essays de-center the often homogeneous first-world orientation of much biblical scholarship and open up new possibilities for discovery.
Reading Joshua by
Reading Joshua was written for anyone who wishes to engage critically one of the most, if not the most, problematic and troublesome books in the Bible. Part of the Reading the Old Testament series. Using the best of current historical-critical studies by mainstream biblical scholars, and the most recent archeological discoveries and theorizing, Laughlin questions both the historicity of the stories presented in the book as well as the basic theological ideology presented through these stories: namely that Yahweh ordered the indiscriminate butchery of the Canaanites. This ideology is criticized for what it is: a xenophobic and genocidal approach to the issue of how human beings should act toward one another in a multi-cultural world. Read against the backdrop of the Babylonian Exile (sixth century BCE), these stories may have served well the purpose(s) of their author(s). Thus these troubling accounts may have had their time and place, but that time and place is not the twenty-first-century world in which we now find ourselves.
Women of War, Women of Woe by
The stories of such women as Rahab, Deborah, Jael, Delilah, Jephthah's daughter, and the Levite's concubine raised thorny questions for nineteenth-century female biblical interpreters. Could a Victorian woman use her intelligence to negotiate like Rahab? Was the seemingly well-educated Deborah an appropriate role model? Or did Jephthah's daughter more correctly model a pious woman's life as she submitted to her father's vow? This unique volume gathers select writings by thirty-five nineteenth-century women on the stories of several women in Joshua and Judges. Recovering and analyzing neglected works from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many others, Women of War, Women of Woe illuminates the biblical text, recovers a neglected chapter of reception history, and helps us understand and apply Scripture in our present context.
