God's chosen family, Jacob's dozen, is dysfunctional and fractured. The odds of them being used to fulfill God's covenant promises to Abraham are not looking good! How will God solve this dilemma? Come with us on an amazing journey as God sovereignly and providentially places young Joseph in a foreign country. There, through an unbelievable series of events, he will be prepared and used to reconcile and reunite Jacob's broken family. In addition to reconciling and reuniting the family, God will isolate and preserve them in the cocoon of Egypt, assuring the future fulfillment of his promises to Abraham. This may be the finest story to ever emerge from the ancient world! It is a story of family dysfunction, parental favoritism, blood-soaked clothes, a prostitute's veil, multiple wives, slavery, lust, false charges, and prison. This is a story with shocking twists and turns. We will see prophetic dreams, sterling character, great promotions, unimaginable wealth, a family reunion, forgiveness, and reconciliation. And God will use our hero to save a world that is starving in a global food crisis. God's sovereign control will obviously direct every detail in this story! Yet every character will do exactly as he pleases. It is a great mystery how this can happen. This magnificent story is for anyone who wants to witness God's great grace and mercy to Jacob, to Joseph, to the eleven brothers and their families, to Pharaoh, to the nation of Egypt, and to the people of the world. You cannot make up this kind of story! It actually happened!

Rife with incest, adultery, rape, and murder, the biblical story of Jacob and his children must have troubled ancient readers. By any standard, this was a family with problems. Jacob's oldest son Reuben is said to have slept with his father's concubine Bilhah. The next two sons, Simeon and Levi, tricked the men of a nearby city into undergoing circumcision, and then murdered all of them as revenge for the rape of their sister. Judah, the fourth son, had sexual relations with his own daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, jealous of their younger sibling Joseph, the brothers conspired to kill him; they later relented and merely sold him into slavery. These stories presented a particular challenge for ancient biblical interpreters. After all, Jacob's sons were the founders of the nation of Israel and ought to have been models of virtue. In The Ladder of Jacob, renowned biblical scholar James Kugel retraces the steps of ancient biblical interpreters as they struggled with such problems. Kugel reveals how they often fixed on a little detail in the Bible's wording to "deduce" something not openly stated in the narrative. They concluded that Simeon and Levi were justified in killing all the men in a town to avenge the rape of their sister, and that Judah, who slept with his daughter-in-law, was the unfortunate victim of alcoholism. These are among the earliest examples of ancient biblical interpretation (midrash). They are found in retellings of biblical stories that appeared in the closing centuries BCE--in the Book of Jubilees, the Aramaic Levi Document, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and other noncanonical works. Through careful analysis of these retellings, Kugel is able to reconstruct how ancient interpreters worked. The Ladder of Jacob is an artful, compelling account of the very beginnings of biblical interpretation.

A NEW YORKER “ESSENTIAL READ” “Just as awe-inspiring as the Nobel judges claimed.” – The Washington Post “Olga Tokarczuk is one of our greatest living fiction writers. . . This could well be a decade-defining book akin to Bolaño’s 2666.” –AV Club “Sophisticated and ribald and brimming with folk wit. . . The comedy in this novel blends, as it does in life, with genuine tragedy.” –Dwight Garner, The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, TIME, THE NEW YORKER, AND NPR The Nobel Prize–winner’s richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel yet follows the comet-like rise and fall of a mysterious, messianic religious leader as he blazes his way across eighteenth-century Europe. In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will traverse the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires with throngs of disciples in his thrall as he reinvents himself again and again, converts to Islam and then Catholicism, is pilloried as a heretic and revered as the Messiah, and wreaks havoc on the conventional order, Jewish and Christian alike, with scandalous rumors of his sect’s secret rituals and the spread of his increasingly iconoclastic beliefs. The story of Frank—a real historical figure around whom mystery and controversy swirl to this day—is the perfect canvas for the genius and unparalleled reach of Olga Tokarczuk. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries—those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is—The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change, searching for certainty and longing for transcendence. In a nod to books written in Hebrew, The Books of Jacob is paginated in reverse, beginning on p. 955 and ending on p. 1 – but read traditionally, front cover to back.

Imagine the charter city of Ur in which there are no taxes, no forced regulation, and no laws except one-harm no one. It would be a libertarian paradise-a productive, free-market utopia with no equal on Earth. But would it work? Would people behave or fall into a chaotic dog-eat-dog arena in which the strong would simply crush the weak? Jacob Tanner is about to find out. He will take his life-saving pharmaceutical company to Ur in order to escape an overbearing government bureaucracy. But just when Jacob's drug company becomes profitable, he is confronted with financial dilemmas and a shocking truth about his industry and his business partners. He can prevent the deadly epidemic his drug treats, but in order to do so, he must overcome a corporate conspiracy that stands to profit from the disease. "Chaos and Kingdom" plunges the reader into the cutthroat world of the modern industrialist struggling to create a valuable product between the extremes of constrictive government regulation and unfettered capitalism. Website: https: //JSBMorse.com

Windmills were ubiquitous in seventeenth-century Holland and they remain the best-known symbol of the Dutch landscape. Jacob van Ruisdael first depicted them as a precocious teenager and continued to represent all types in various settings until his very last years. Water mills, in contrast, were scarce in the new Dutch Republic, found mainly in the eastern provinces, particularly near the border with Germany. Ruisdael discovered them in the early 1650s and was the first artist to make water mills the principal subject of a landscape. His most celebrated painting, Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede at the Rijksmuseum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum's Two Undershot Water Mills with an Open Sluice are the centerpieces of this overview of the artist's depictions of windmills and water mills. Both depended upon forces of nature for their operation, but their use in the Netherlands and their place in seventeenth-century Dutch art differed considerably. This book examines their role in Holland and introduces readers to the pleasure of studying Ruisdael's images of them, a joy conveyed by the English landscapist John Constable in a letter written to his dearest friend after seeing a Ruisdael painting of a water mill in a London shop: “It haunts my mind and clings to my heart.”

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A legal thriller that’s comparable to classics such as Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent . . . tragic and shocking.”—Associated Press NOW AN EMMY-NOMINATED ORIGINAL STREAMING SERIES • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • Boston Globe • Kansas City Star Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney for two decades. He is respected. Admired in the courtroom. Happy at home with the loves of his life: his wife, Laurie, and their teenage son, Jacob. Then Andy’s quiet suburb is stunned by a shocking crime: a young boy stabbed to death in a leafy park. And an even greater shock: The accused is Andy’s own son—shy, awkward, mysterious Jacob. Andy believes in Jacob’s innocence. Any parent would. But the pressure mounts. Damning evidence. Doubt. A faltering marriage. The neighbors’ contempt. A murder trial that threatens to obliterate Andy’s family. It is the ultimate test for any parent: How far would you go to protect your child? It is a test of devotion. A test of how well a parent can know a child. For Andy Barber, a man with an iron will and a dark secret, it is a test of guilt and innocence in the deepest sense. How far would you go? Praise for Defending Jacob “A novel like this comes along maybe once a decade . . . a tour de force, a full-blooded legal thriller about a murder trial and the way it shatters a family. With its relentless suspense, its mesmerizing prose, and a shocking twist at the end, it’s every bit as good as Scott Turow’s great Presumed Innocent. But it’s also something more: an indelible domestic drama that calls to mind Ordinary People and We Need to Talk About Kevin. A spellbinding and unforgettable literary crime novel.”—Joseph Finder “Defending Jacob is smart, sophisticated, and suspenseful—capturing both the complexity and stunning fragility of family life.”—Lee Child “Powerful . . . leaves you gasping breathlessly at each shocking revelation.”—Lisa Gardner “Disturbing, complex, and gripping, Defending Jacob is impossible to put down. William Landay is a stunning talent.”—Carla Neggers “Riveting, suspenseful, and emotionally searing.”—Linwood Barclay

Patristic Literature in Arabic Translations explores the Arabic translations of the Greek and Syriac Church Fathers, focusing on those produced in the Palestinian monasteries and at Sinai in the 8th–10th centuries and in Antioch during Byzantine rule (969–1084). These Arabic translations preserve patristic texts lost in the original languages. They offer crucial information about the diffusion and influence of patristic heritage among Middle Eastern Christians from the 8th century to the present. A systematic examination of Arabic patristic translations sheds light on the development of Muslim and Jewish theological thought. Contributors are Aaron Michael Butts, Joe Glynias, Habib Ibrahim, Jonas Karlsson, Sergey Kim, Joshua Mugler, Tamara Pataridze, Alexandre Roberts, Barbara Roggema, Alexander Treiger.

This revised edition of The Cold War Story follows Air Force Captain Jacob Walden, who was shot down over Vietnam in 1970 and never returned home. Forty years later, journalist Ted Pratt embarks on a mission to uncover Jacob's mysterious disappearance. Through his investigation, Ted meets Charlie Smith, a secretive and experienced operative who may have knowledge of the disappearance. As Ted pieces together the clues to uncover the truth, the mystery deepens and the stakes become higher. Will Ted be able to unravel the truth behind Jacob's disappearance? Get your copy now to find out!