Friday, December 05, 2014

[books i've been reading]


The Oxford History of the Biblical World. In this impressive volume, leading scholars offer compelling glimpses into the biblical world, the world in which prophets, poets, sages, and historians created one of our most important texts--the Bible. For more than a century, archaeologists have been unearthing the tombs, temples, texts, and artifacts of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean world. Using new approaches, contemporary scholars have begun to synthesize this material with the biblical traditions. The Oxford History of the Biblical World incorporates the best of this scholarship, and in chronologically ordered chapters presents the reader with a readable and integrated study of the history, art, architecture, languages, literatures, and religion of biblical Israel and early JUdaism and Christianity in their larger cultural contexts. [Amazon summary]

Israel & the Nations, F.F. Bruce. The story of Israel is one of the outstanding tales of human history. Israel, occupying a narrow strip of land between sea and desert, was positioned on an international highway of commerce and warfare. This was a people whose future would be intertwined with the stories of nations great and small. F.F. Bruce shapes the daunting complexities of this history, nearly fourteen hundred years from the exodus to the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, into straight prose that sparkles with clarity. More than half of the book is devoted to the postexilic history of Israel, the "intertestamental" period and the first-century history that forms the backdrop of the New Testament. [Amazon Summary]

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