Job is perhaps the most difficult to understand of all books in the Bible. While a cursory reading of the text seems to relay a simple story of a righteous man whose love for God was tested through life's most difficult of challenges and rewarded for his faith through those trials, a closer reading of Job presents something far more complex and challenging. The majority of the text is a work of poetry that authors and artists through the centuries have recognized as being one of--if not the--greatest poem of the ancient world. In Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World's Greatest Poem, author Michael Austin shows how most readers have largely misunderstood this important work of scripture and provides insights that enable us to re-read Job in a drastically new way. In doing so, he shows that the story of Job is far more than that simple story of faith, trials, and blessings that we have all come to know, but is instead a subversive and complex work of scripture meant to inspire readers to rethink all that they thought they knew about God.

Teaching Outline + Study Guide for The Book of Job

The book of Ruth seems simple. It is the tale of a poor Moabite widow who relocates to Bethlehem and finds security there when she marries Boaz, a wealthy Israelite man. Although the plot is simple, the book’s message is elusive. Re(reading Ruth) demonstrates how careful attention to the book’s structure, allusions, wordplay, and location in the canon can reveal the dynamic ways that it engages with other biblical stories and how that engagement shapes its message.

This volume fills an important lacuna in the study of the Hebrew Bible by providing the first comprehensive treatment of intertextuality in Job, in which essays will address intertextual resonances between Job and texts in all three divisions of the Hebrew canon, along with non-canonical texts throughout history, from the ancient Near East to modern literature. Though comprehensive, this study will not be exhaustive, but will invite further study into connections between Job and these texts, few of which have previously been explored systematically. Thus, the volume's impact will reach beyond Job to each of the 'intertexts' the articles address. As a multi-authored volume that gathers together scholars with expertise on this diverse array of texts, the range of discussion is wide. The contributors have been encouraged to pursue the intertextual approach that best suits their topic, thereby offering readers a valuable collection of intertextual case studies addressing a single text. No study quite like this has yet been published, so it will also provide a framework for future intertextual studies of other biblical texts.

This book is divided into three sections. The first section deals with the general situation of Italian/American literature and its reception both in the United States and in Italy. It also discusses other social and cultural issues that pertain to Italian Americana. Section two consists of six chapters, each discussing a specific author; three dedicated to prose (Pietro di Donato, Mario Puzo, Luigi Barzini), three dedicated to poetry (Joseph Tusiani, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Rina Ferrarelli). Section three examines the current state of criticism dedicated to Italian/American literature, the second part focusing in on a number of specific works.

In Reading and Re-reading Scripture at Qumran, Moshe J. Bernstein gathers more than three decades of his work on diverse aspects of biblical interpretation in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The essays range from broad surveys of the genres of biblical interpretation in these texts to more narrowly focused studies and close readings of specific documents. Volume I focuses on the book of Genesis, with a substantial portion being dedicated to studies of the Genesis Apocryphon and Commentary on Genesis A. Volume II contains several historical and programmatic essays, with specific studies focusing on legal material in the DSS and the pesharim. Under the former rubric, the documents known as 4QReworked Pentateuch, 4QOrdinancesa, 4QMMT, and the Temple Scroll are discussed.

First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. ‘New Accents’ is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

This book, the newest volume in the CUA Studies in Early Christianity, presents original works by leading patristics scholars on a wide range of theological, historical, and cultural topics

For nearly three centuries Leonardo da Vinci's work was known primarily through the abridged version of his Treatise on Painting, first published in Paris in 1651 and soon translated into all the major European languages. Here for the first time is a study that examines the historical reception of this vastly influential text. This collection charts the varied interpretations of Leonardo's ideas in French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, Dutch, Flemish, Greek, and Polish speaking environments where the Trattato was an important resource for the academic instruction of artists, one of the key sources drawn upon by art theorists, and widely read by a diverse network of artists, architects, biographers, natural philosophers, translators, astronomers, publishers, engineers, theologians, aristocrats, lawyers, politicians, entrepreneurs, and collectors. The cross-cultural approach employed here demonstrates that Leonardo's Treatise on Painting is an ideal case study through which to chart the institutionalization of art in Europe and beyond for 400 years. The volume includes original essays by scholars studying a wide variety of national and institutional settings. The coherence of the volume is established by the shared subject matter and interpretative aim: to understand how Leonardo's ideas were used. With its focus on the active reception of an important text overlooked in studies of the artist's solitary genius, the collection takes Leonardo studies to a new level of historical inquiry. Leonardo da Vinci's most significant contribution to Western art was his interpretation of painting as a science grounded in geometry and direct observation of nature. One of the most important questions to emerge from this study is, what enabled the same text to produce so many different styles of painting?