I've been buying this set a volume or two at a time. Which volumes do you find most useful i.e. which should I get next?
I have Wisdom of Solomon, 2 Peter & Jude, Jonah & Lamentations.
I've been buying this set a volume or two at a time. Which volumes do you find most useful i.e. which should I get next? I have Wisdom of Solomon, 2 Peter & Jude, Jonah & Lamentations.
What is your preferred interest in the bible? OT? NT? A particular book? A type of literature?
Actually I split my interest between liturgy and scripture in liturgy - I spent years training lay liturgical ministers, presiding in services in the absence of a priest and developing small-group lectionary based Bible studies. My personal "biases" that show up in the studies I develop are intertextual studies and literary-rhetorical analysis. The commentaries that I love to read are Rabbinic, Orthodox and Medieval. The Sheffield volume of 2 Peter & Jude which presents 2 Peter as a commentary/midrash on Jude is right up my alley.
I am partial to the volume on 1 and 2 Kings. In part this is because it was written by a professor of mine. In addition to that, though, how could you not love a book that starts off with a section called "Reading Winnie the Pooh"?
Here is an excerpt from the Introduction:
It may be that we have arrived at a time and a place where readers can no longer recognize humour in texts unless it jumps out and accosts them. If that is the case, let me hasten to reassure readers of this volume that the Marxist reading of the Pooh stories just described is not meant seriously. Humour is indeed intended. If it has been missed, that is probably because the reader either does not know the stories well enough to judge accurately the extent to which Tempralis’s account of them represents a preposterous misreading; or does not believe that texts themselves constrain readers to interpret them in certain ways, and therefore does not allow that such things as ‘misreadings’ truly exist. The remedy for the first complaint is straightforward enough, and involves a more creatively constructed reading list. The second complaint is unlikely to have been contracted in a serious form outside the confines of a modern university campus, since the virus which causes it can only survive in quite rarefied atmospheres (e.g. in departments of English Literature or Biblical Studies).
[:D]
