The Meaning of the Bible

What the Jewish Scriptures and Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us

Douglas A. Knight and Amy-Jill Levine, HarperOne

This is a comprehensive volume by prominent scholars on what Christians have come to call the Old Testament and Jews the Tanakh.

This is the volume on the vast anthology of sacred texts that was always waiting to be written — lucid, scholarly, entertaining, inspiring. It aims through sheer exegetical fidelity to work against over dogmatic use of selected parts of the Bible.

It insists on its sheer patient attention to literary historical and textual scrutiny so that it is only through the act of diligent reading and study that the sacred nature of the Testament can be appreciated.

The volume does not directly join the dots about how or why the Bible should be appreciated in the 21st century but it is an essential tool in any contemporary journey of applied theology.

The authors adopt a thematic rather than literary (book by book) or chronological approach — and from part one supplement exegesis with historical and literary background.

The study is uniformly rich in content — time does not permit discrimination of its bounty of headings, from law, to sexuality, to self, to politics, and the divine. Yet it is always written in a lithe, assured and organised style.

It is an eminently readable resource book. It opens a fresh window into familiar books indeed: it is as if the Old Testament speaks again, or for the first time.

Geoffrey Sykes