Scripture As Social Discourse ─ Social-scientific Perspectives on Early Jewish and Christian Writings

In this examination of the bible in the social sciences the contributors explore a wide range of broadly social-scientific disciplines and discourses – cultural anthropology, sociology, archaeology, political science, the New Historicism, forced migration studies, gender studies – and provide multiple examples of the ways in which diverse methods and theories, if intentionally chosen for their fitness for a given interpreter's inquiry, can shed new and often fascinating light on the ancient texts, light that a single preferred meta-theory might not consistently be able to give.

Professional biblical scholars have been adapting concepts and theories from the social sciences, and most especially social and cultural anthropology, throughout the last several decades in order to cast new light on ancient biblical writings, early Jewish and Christian texts that circulated with the Scriptures, and the various contexts in which these literatures were produced and first received. The present volume of essays, written by scholars from the United Kingdom (Manchester, Sheffield, and Derby) and Switzerland (Lausanne), belongs to that development in the history of biblical research but also transforms it in several important ways.

Todd Klutz is Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. He is the author of Rewriting the Testament of Solomon: Tradition, Conflict, and Identity in a Late Antique Pseudepigraphon (2005), the editor of Magic in the Biblical World (2003), and the translator of the recently published translation of the Eighth Book of Moses (2013).

Casey Strine is Vice-Chancellor's Fellow and Lecturer in Hebrew Bible at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Jessica M. Keady is Researcher in Biblical Studies and Gender at the University of Chester, UK.