Global Bible Commentary - Softcover

Patte, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0687064031 ISBN 13: 9780687064038

Verlag: Abingdon Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

The Global Bible Commentary invites its users to expand their horizon by reading the Bible with scholars from all over the world and from different religious persuasions. These scholars have approaches and concerns that often are poles apart. Yet they share two basic convictions: biblical interpretation always matters; and reading the Bible 'with others' is highly rewarding. Each of the short commentaries of the Global Bible Commentary is a readily accessible guide for reading a biblical book. Written for undergraduate and seminary students and their teachers, as well as for pastors, priests, and Adult Sunday School classes, it introduces the users to the main features of the biblical book and its content. Yet each short commentary does more. It also brings us a precious gift, namely the opportunity of reading this biblical book as if for the first time. By making explicit the specific context and the concerns from which she/he reads the Bible, the scholar points out to us the significance of aspects of the biblical text that we simply took for granted or overlooked. Need more info? Download Global Bible Commentary Marketing Brochure PDF Free Adobe Acrobat Reader! If any book demonstrates the value of cultural criticism and the importance of particularity in interpretation, this is it! Scholars from diverse social locations in every continent bring their distinctive context to bear on the act of interpreting. In so doing, they shed eye-opening light on the biblical texts. The resulting critical dialogue with the Bible exposes the oppressive as well as the liberating dynamics of the texts while at the same time showing how the Bible might address the social, political, cultural, and economic dynamics of our world today. This collection can change the way you read the Bible? scholars and students, clergy and laity alike.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel Patte, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, received a B.A. from the University of Grenoble, a B.D. from the Protestant Theological Seminary, Montpellier, a Th.M. from the University of Geneva and a Th.D. from Chicago Theological Seminary. After serving two terms as General Editor of Semeia: An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism of the Society of Biblical Literature, he is now on the editorial boards of The Bulletin of Contextual Theology in Southern Africa and Africa and of Chinese Christianity: An Experimental Journal of Bible, Theology and Culture. His twelve books, six edited volumes, and more than 80 articles reflect his overall quest for a "hermeneutics of moral responsibility in biblical interpretation." His interest in hermeneutics (Early Jewish Hermeneutics in Palestine) and in theories of communication, structuralism, and semiotics (three books on "Structural Exegesis") led him to pay special attention to The Religious Dimensions of Biblical Text

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Global Bible Commentary

By Daniel Patte

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2004 Abingdon Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-687-06403-8

Contents

Abbreviations, 
Introduction, 
Using the GBC in Bible Study Groups and Classes, 
HEBREW BIBLE, 
NEW TESTAMENT, 

CHAPTER 1

GENESIS

Clare Amos

Network for Inter Faith Concerns of the Anglican Communion, London, England

LIFE CONTEXT OF THE INTERPRETATION

No other book of the Bible addresses the tension between universality and particularity quite as compellingly as Genesis. It begins with a vast sweep of heaven and earth and ends with a solitary human body preserved in a casket in Egypt, a body to which the destiny of a small but chosen group of people, strangers in a foreign land, is linked. And in between are surprising choices, apparently unfair exclusions, and a God who shifts shape and name and seems to have as much to learn about relating to human creation as people do about relating to their God.

Few, if any, parts of the world have felt the tension between universality and particularity as fiercely as the Middle East. Home to Abraham (perhaps the human "hero" of Genesis) and to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three great world faiths that name him as father, the region struggles to this day with holy privilege and horrible pain. The pain, the privilege, and the particularity belong together. How can these three monotheistic faiths all worship the same God? How can they not? Does each one's affirmation of its own finality invalidate the truth of the others? Above all, perhaps, how can a land claimed so passionately as holy by all three faiths offer liberty and space, both sacred and secular, to each?

I spent ten formative years of my life living in the Middle East, in both Jerusalem and Beirut, Lebanon. I taught Old Testament studies there and I still relate closely to the region. I am also involved in the interfaith work of my church. These two strands belong together and provide the life context for this commentary.

It is impossible to study and teach the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in the Middle East without being aware that its interpretations have directly affected, for good or for ill, the lives of the inhabitants of these lands. Among those whom I taught were several Christian Palestinian seminarians. For such students the question of biblical interpretation was notsimply an archaeological or intellectual exercise; it was all too relevant to present life and death. How can we expect such students to accept as canonical Old Testament books like Joshua? This book has undoubtedly been employed as a theological weapon to justify the dispossession of the Palestinian people, both Christian and Muslim. Or what about Genesis itself, with those apparently inalienable promises to Abraham and his descendants in chapters 15 and 17?

For me the problem was starkly posed by an experience of a friend of mine, a respectable, middle-class, Palestinian lady from Ramallah, a town on the West Bank. On a visit to Jerusalem my friend had a conversation with a Western tourist who, on discovering that she was a Christian living on the West Bank, informed her quite categorically that "she could not be a real Christian, because if she were a real Christian she would, of course, have been willing to leave her hometown, since she would know that God had given the land to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." My friend was incredulous and I was mortified for her. As the Palestinian Anglican theologian Naim Ateek writes:

In Israel-Palestine today, the Bible is being quoted to give the primary claim over the land to Jews. In the mind of many religious Jews and fundamentalist Christians the solution to the conflict lies in Palestinian recognition that God has given the Jews the land of Palestine forever. Palestinians are asked to accept this as a basic truth ... Palestinian Christians must tackle the land from a biblical perspective, not because I believe that the religious argument over the land is of the bene esse of the conflict, but because we are driven to it as a result of the religious-political abuse of biblical interpretation. (1992, 108)

This geographical and political setting in which the scandal of particularity can feel truly scandalous is the life context from which this commentary on Genesis is offered. Genesis is a keystone of the canonical scripture of two of the Abrahamic faiths, and many of its characters are venerated in the sacred Scripture of the third. How can this book, which begins with a universal message of the goodness of God's creation, be read at last as a blessing for all? This question is not only relevant to the peoples of the Middle East, for, as we are these days only too well aware, the fate of this region seems to be fundamentally entwined with the destiny of the world.

Genesis and the Relationship Between the People of God and the World

Humanity, Earth, Land, and World

The first issue posed sharply by Genesis is the relationship between the people of God and the world itself. This subject is highly appropriate for a book that begins with a story of creation that has profoundly influenced the theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yet significantly, it is not precisely a world as a self-contained entity that is created but the "heavens and the earth" (1:1), with the focus very much on the latter. Earth ('erets) is a word with a range of meanings in Genesis: our entire terrestrial planet; the dry land on which humans can live and plants can grow; a particular land, territory, or political entity, such as the land of Egypt or Canaan.

These interconnections are important: they are a verbal reminder that how human beings behave on a particular spot of land will inevitably affect the earth. This point is only too obvious in Israel/Palestine today. Its political identity and the ownership of its territory is an issue that has repercussions across our planet. No land is or can be an island unto itself: developments in one country of the Middle East impinge upon the rest of the region. Pressing environmental questions like the equitable sharing of scarce water resources in the region constitute a further issue. How human beings use or abuse the land as a resource for agriculture and other aspects of human life influences history. Human sin leads to the earth being cursed and less productive (3:17). The later "violence" initiated by the human species corrupts the earth, which does not escape the ensuing cataclysmic punishment (6:13). Genesis does not allow us to compartmentalize our understanding of the earth. It tells us that ecology and politics belong together.

Furthermore, this creation in which the earth is the linchpin is "good" (1:31). The word good echoes repeatedly throughout the first chapter of Genesis. It is also picked up in the last (50:20) as Joseph describes God's goal through the twists and turns of his family's story as being for their "good." God wants good for human beings. He desires their very physical good, in all aspects of their lives. "The Old Testament is the great interpreter of [the] coming of God to the world which leaves no area to itself, neither nature nor history, neither love nor power, neither state nor the community of the pious" (Zimmerli 1976, 149). The same criteria apply to those within the community of faith and those outside it. God is "the Judge of all the earth" (18:25), and the inhabitants of Sodom have as much right to God's justice and concern as do Abraham and his family, even if Abraham has to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Abingdon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0687064031
• ISBN 13: 9780687064038
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 608
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland