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The IJBF is the only regularly published, truly international, Festschrift bibliography. Since 1983, more than 940,000 articles from more than 42,000 Festschriften, published between 1977 and 2023, have been catalogued.

A Guide to Biblical Commentaries and Reference Works, 11th Edition by John F. Evans, summarizes and briefly analyzes all recent and many older commentaries on each book of the Bible, giving insightful comments on the approach of each commentary and its usefulness for biblical interpretation. The easy-to-use book provides analysis in canonical order and includes helpful appendices for compiling a personal research library. A Guide to Biblical Commentaries and Reference Works, 11th Edition, is a key reference tool for any student of the Bible--pastors, laity, and scholars alike.

This book uses three examples of violent biblical stories about women, explored through the lens of conceptual metaphor theory in relation to culinary language used within these texts, to examine wider issues of gender and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible.Utilising the tools of conceptual metaphor theory, feminist criticism, and classic textual analysis, Brownsmith interrogates some of the most troubling biblical passages for women—neither by redeeming them nor by condemning them, but by showing how they are intrinsically shaped by the enduring metaphor of woman as food in the Hebrew Bible, ancient Near East, and beyond. The volume explores three main case studies: the Levite's “concubine” (Judges 19); Tamar and Amnon (2 Sam 13); and the life and death of Jezebel (primarily 1 Kings 21 and 2 Kings 9). All depict violence toward a woman as perpetrated by a man, interwoven with culinary language that cues their metaphorical implications. In these sensitive but critical readings of violent tales, Brownsmith also draws on a broad range of interdisciplinary connections from Ricoeur to ancient Ugaritic epics to modern comic books. Through this approach, readers gain new insights into how the Bible shapes its narratives through conceptual metaphors, and specifically how it makes meaning out of women's brutalized bodies.Gendered Violence in Biblical Narrative: The Devouring Metaphor is suitable for students and scholars working on gender and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East more broadly, as well as those working on conceptual metaphor theory and feminist criticism.

In The Colonization of Land in Matthew's Gospel, Maziel Barreto Dani proposes that land is constructed as a colonized and subjugated entitl. Traditional scholarship claims that the Gospel of Matthew is detached from spatial-territorial discussions and that geographical land concerns are displaced with Christology. Dani, however, reinterprets multiple implicit and explicit references to land in the Gospel to show continuity, rather than discontinuity, with the Hebrew Bible's concerns with material land promises. She does so by engaging the Gospel within its broader Roman, Hellenistic, and Jewish contexts where the theme of land possession is pervasive. Central to the Gospel and the imperial contexts from which it emerges are contestations over the land and proclamations to whom the land belongs. Dani argues that while Judea and neighboring lands are under the firm control of Roman imperial power during the first century CE, Matthew's Gospel envisions Rome's demise and the control of land being transferred to an alternative empire governed by the sovereign rule of God. Though God liberates the land from Rome's oppressive grasp and restores land promises to the righteous poor at Jesus'return, the land fails to escape colonial control. That is, the world, while relinquished from Roman hegemony, is reasserted under God's power and domination. In arguing that Matthew's Gospel employs an imperializing agenda involving land reclamation, the Gospel may be a source for validating and justifying the modern colonization of foreign and occupied land under the guise of God's purposes. The Colonization of Land in Matthew's Gospel challenges colonial ideologies which oppress not only peoples but the lands which they inhabit.

The Syriac text entitled Neshana d-Aleksandros (also known as Syriac Alexander Legend) is a seminal text for late Christian and Muslim apocalyptic traditions. Containing the earliest recorded versions of literary motifs that would become central to the medieval apocalyptic tradition, it represents an early witness to an influential political ideology that guided both Byzantine and early Islamic imperial policies. While the scholarly consensus commonly dates the Neshana to the time of Heraclius (r. 610-641 CE), in this book author Tommaso Tesei argues that an earlier version of the text was produced during the reign of Justinian I (r. 527-565). This new historical contextualization of the text enables us to better delineate the role of the Neshana in the development of late antique, politicized, forms of apocalypticism, which assign to the Christian Roman Empire the task of establishing a cosmocratic rule in view of Jesus'Second Coming. In analyzing the contents and the ideology of this seminal text, this volume contributes to our understanding of the origins and developments of important literary motifs of Medieval literature worldwide, such as the characterization of Alexander as a pious prophet-king and the story of the gate that he erected to confine the eschatological nations of Gog and Magog. The Syriac Legend of Alexander's Gate sheds light on lesser-known aspects of political debates in the sixth-century Near East and offers historians a valuable insight into important aspects of Justinian's reign.

Although the Gospel of Matthew emphasizes Jesus as the son of David, no one has systematically investigated how 1-2 Samuel influence Matthew's portrayal of Jesus as the son of David. This work addresses that lacuna and shows how the sustained use of 1-2 Samuel in Matthew evokes the themes of mercy and righteousness as the hallmarks of a proper Davidic shepherd. The book's systematic intertextual and narrative approach offers another way to understand Matthew's Christology and portrayal of the kingdom of heaven. It helps the reader appreciate the justice-focused nature of Jesus'rule and its religious and political implications.

The Fire and the Cloud is a non-supersessionist biblical Christology developed from close readings of Israel's Scriptures. In this work, the second in a trilogy that began with All Things Beautiful: An Aesthetic Christology, Chris E. W. Green tracks the recurrent and interwoven themes of exile, journey, and return across the canonical order, beginning with the story of Cain's exile and ending with the homecoming of Naomi and Ruth. He examines crucial passages and their significance in later Jewish and Christian interpretations, reckoning honestly with the history of Christian anti-Jewishness and reminding us of the good news that the nations are being grafted into the people of God. Beginning to end, Green's figural--indeed, mystical--Christology lays itself open to the mysterious and transformative power of imaginative exegesis, seeking both to honor Israel's unique, ongoing vocation as the people of God and to honor the church's faith in and witness to Jesus, striving not to impose a dead image of him onto the ancient texts but to recognize his living likeness in their Spirit-inspired movements. Green believes such interpretation is necessary and necessarily difficult, requiring us to read both with and against the grain of our convictions and commitments, expecting and allowing the biblical texts to teach us what we did not know we needed to learn differently. This is so, he argues, because a biblical Christology, if it is to be true to its purposes, must be capable of surprising us as the living word of the living Christ--confronting us in judgment, decentering us in praise, and sweeping us up into the covenant-making work of the Spirit for the sake of the nations.

King Manasseh of Judah is one of the most intriguing characters in the Bible. 2 Kings presents him as the wickedest of monarchs. In 2Kgs 24:3–4, he is accused of having provoked God to destroy Judah on account of the innocent blood he had shed in Jerusalem (cf. 2Kgs 21:16). In his study Krzysztof Kinowski investigates this accusation, viewing it against the biblical and ancient Near East backgrounds, and casts a new light upon Manasseh's role in the fall of Jerusalem. The mention of bloodshed in this affair appears to be the outcome of a process of scapegoating of Manasseh, ongoing in 2 Kings and reflecting both the legal and the cultic paradigms governing the biblical historiography. The link between Manasseh's bloodshed and the destruction of Judah on account of the cultic land's blood-defilement points towards a group of priestly scribes involved in the production of the 2Kgs 21 and 24 narratives. This assumption lies behind the scholarly discussion about the Priestly-like strata and priestly touches in the Books of Kings.

Seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg hat die katholische Theologie in den USA Zug um Zug ein ganz eigenes, unverwechselbares Profil gewonnen: Indem sie die Glaubenslehre unter Einbeziehung der gesellschaftlichen und kirchlichen Wirklichkeit in den Vereinigten Staaten reflektiert, ist sie zugleich amerikanisch und katholisch. Im deutschsprachigen Raum sind bislang lediglich einzelne theologische Entwürfe bekannt. Eine umfassende Darstellung, die auch kulturelle, geschichtliche und politische Faktoren einbezieht, fehlt dagegen. Das Buch von Benjamin Dahlke schließt diese Lücke. Auf kundige Weise zeichnet der Autor die großen Entwicklungslinien der katholischen Theologie in den USA seit 1945 nach und bietet einen kompakten Überblick über eine bedeutende, eigenständige theologische Landschaft mit weltweiter Ausstrahlungskraft.

This is a detailed investigation into the nature of Nebuchadnezzar's animalising affliction in Daniel 4 and the degree to which he is depicted as actually becoming an animal. PeterAtkins examines two predominant lines of interpretation: either Nebuchadnezzar undergoes a physical metamorphosis of some kind into an animal form; or diverse other readings that specifically preclude or deny an animal transformation of the king. By providing an extensive study of these interpretative opinions, alongside innovative assessments of ancient Mesopotamian divine-human-animal boundaries, Atkins ultimately demonstrates how neither of these traditional interpretations best reflect the narrative events. While there have been numerous metamorphic interpretations of Daniel 4, these are largely reliant upon later developments within the textual tradition and are not present in the earliest edition of Nebuchadnezzar's animalising affliction. Atkins'study displays that when Daniel 4 is read in the context of Mesopotamian texts, which appear to conceive of the human-animal boundary as being indicated primarily in relation to possession or lack of the divine characteristic of wisdom, the affliction represents a far more significant categorical change from human to animal than has hitherto been identified.

Mit seiner Arbeit füllt David Bindrim eine Forschungslücke, deren Zustandekommen eigentlich unerklärlich ist: Obwohl gerade im alltäglichen Gemeindeleben aller christlichen Denominationen das Thema der Liebe theologisch reflektiert wird und das Doppelgebot der Liebe häufig sogar als der wesentliche Kern des Christentums dargestellt wird, hat eine umfassende Untersuchung der Liebe im Alten Testament, die Kern- und Ausgangspunkt der neutestamentlichen Liebesrede ist, bisher auf sich warten lassen. David Bindrim betrachtet daher alle Stellen, an denen'Liebe'(אהב) im Alten Testament vorkommt, um das dahinterliegende Konzept von Liebe zu ergründen. Ausgangspunkt ist die scheinbar simple Frage:'Ist das Liebe, wie wir sie verstehen?'Diese Untersuchung zeigt sowohl große strukturelle Gemeinsamkeiten als auch tiefgreifende Unterschiede auf. Der Autor betrachtet in seinem Werk sämtliche Belege und fokussiert nicht von vorneherein die theologischen Texte. Zudem zieht er die Emotionsforschung zurate, die fruchtbare Erträge bei der Betrachtung einer Emotionsvokabel mit sich bringt.