Douglas A. Knight

The Meaning of the Bible

What the Jewish Scriptures and Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us

Talking Points

Douglas A. Knight is the Drucilla Moore Buffington Professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and the Graduate School of Religion and is also Professor of Jewish Studies in Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science. He has been active in the Society of Biblical Literature and other academic organizations and is co-founder of the Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives (ETANA). Major awards have come from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada. Vanderbilt University presented him with the Thomas Jefferson Award in 2005, and he has served as chair of Vanderbilt’s Graduate Department of Religion and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture. The author and editor of numerous books and articles, he has edited several publication series, including the Library of Ancient Israel. His most recent book is Law, Power, and Justice in Ancient Israel.

Amy-Jill Levine University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies, and Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, College of Arts and Science, Graduate Department of Religion, and Program in Jewish Studies. Professor Levine has been awarded grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has held office in the Society of Biblical Literature, the Catholic Biblical Association, and the Association for Jewish Studies. Her recent books include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (HarperOne), the edited collection, The Historical Jesus in Context (Princeton), and the fourteen-volume edited series, Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings (Continuum). She is currently editing with Marc Brettler the Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford). She has recorded “Introduction to the Old Testament,” “Great Figures of the Old Testament,” and “Great Figures of the New Testament” for the Teaching Company.

Description

The Hebrew Scriptures, or “Old Testament” as Christians call it, has given the world some of the greatest literature known. With this fresh introduction, cutting-edge biblical scholars Douglas A. Knight and Amy-Jill Levine bring ancient Israel to brilliant Technicolor life. Readers will learn of unlikely heroes and courageous women, royal intrigues and slave rebellions, doubtful prophets and lovesick poets, bloody battles and miraculous triumphs. These retellings will delight observant Jews, faithful Christians, world historians and readers of great literature. Passed down for centuries as spoken stories, compiled around 450 BCE, and finalized probably around the time of Jesus, the various books of the Hebrew Bible took shape under a variety of cultures and time periods, influencing the formation of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The authors open our eyes to this diverse history shedding new meaning on well-worn texts. They point out how the Hebrew Bible has continually shaped society, and how our own cultural circumstances influence how we interpret it today.