
New Books in Biblical Studies
Interviews with Biblical Scholars about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biblical-studies
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Nathan S. French, "A Theocentric Interpretation of הדעת טוב ורע" (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021)
he Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, set within the midst of the garden of Eden, is a longstanding enigma. What does it represent? How best to translate the Hebrew? What was gained and/or lost when the primal couple took of its fruit? Tune in as we speak with Nathan French about his book, A Theocentric Interpreta

Kirsten Macfarlane, "Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Early modernity has long been seen as a crucial period in the history of biblical scholarship, witnessing rapid advances in studies of Hebrew, Greek, and the ancient Jewish and Christian past. Historians have devoted much attention to how these developments were received by the academic and clerical elite, and yet ther

Marc Katz, "Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
Some two thousand years ago, as the story goes, a rabbi named Yochanan makes the epitome of pragmatic gambles—wagering the entire fate of the Jewish people. In dialogue with the soon-to-be Roman emperor Vespasian, Yochanan tacitly acknowledges the Romans’ planned destruction of Jerusalem in return for a plot of land in

Timothy A. Lee, "The Syriac Peshiṭta Bible: The New Testament" (Gorgias Press, 2023)
This is the first Syriac reader for the New Testament. It guides the reader through the Syriac New Testament Peshitta, glossing the uncommon words and parsing difficult word forms. It is designed for two groups of people. First, for students learning Syriac after a years’ worth of study this series provides the materia

David Resnick, "Empowered or Abused: The Bible's Plan to Stop Battlefield Rape and Reduce Sexual Abuse" (BfoT, 2025)
What to do when a victorious soldier lusts for the beautiful woman he’s just taken captive in an overseas war. In fact, her body already belongs to him as war booty. If they’re alone in an alley, no one will find out what he does to her. That’s the incendiary situation to which the Bible responds with the Beautiful Cap

Timothy Twining, "The Limits of Erudition: The Old Testament in Post-Reformation Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
The history of early modern biblical scholarship has often been told as a teleological narrative in which a succession of radical thinkers dethroned the authority of the sacred word. The Limits of Erudition: The Old Testament in Post-Reformation Europe (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a very different story. Drawing on a ma