The Cambridge Companion to the Bible and Literature

Calum Carmichael

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108397339
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This Companion volume offers a sweeping survey of the Bible as a work of literature and its impact on Western writing. Underscoring the sophistication of the biblical writers' thinking in diverse areas of thought, it demonstrates how the Bible relates to many types of knowledge and its immense contribution to education through the ages. The volume emphasizes selected texts chosen from different books of the Bible and from later Western writers inspired by it. Individual essays, each written specially for this book, examine topics such as the gruesome wonders of apocalyptic texts, the erotic content of the Song of Songs, and Jesus' and Paul's language and reasoning, as well as Shakespeare's reflections on repentance in King Lear, Milton's genius in writing Paradise Lost, the social necessity of individual virtue in Shelley's poetry, and the mythic status of Melville's Moby Dick in the United States and the Western world in general.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Literature in the Ancient Near East and the Bible
• 2 The Primary Narrative (Genesis through 2 Kings)
• 3 Reading Biblical Literature from a Legal and Political Perspective
• 4 Biblical Law and Literature
• 5 Kings, Prophets, and Judges
• 6 Prophetic Literature
• 7 Wisdom Literature
• 8 The Gospels
• 9 Paul's Letters
• 10 Apocalyptic Literature
• 11 Shakespeare's King Lear and the Bible
• 12 The Bible and John Milton's Paradise Lost
• 13 The Bible, Shelley, and English Romanticism
• 14 Herman Melville and the Bible
• 15 The Song of Songs and Two Biblical Retellings
• Index