When I read in the newspaper recently that the U.S. Navy had decided to lift its ban on women serving on submarines, I remembered a woman who told me a story about how she communicated with her husband when he was serving aboard a submarine in the 1970s.
It is autumn again, and life is speeding up. Students are back in school, classes are beginning and the fall programs of churches are in full swing. Wouldn’t it be good to find a spiritual discipline for these days that would remind us of the pace and the blessings of summer?
Books
The Jezebel Letters: Religion and Politics in Ninth-Century Israel
Eleanor Ferris Beach
Reading the Bible with the Damned
Bob Ekblad
Song of Songs
J. Cheryl Exum
A Moral Creed for all Christians
Daniel C. Maguire
Leviticus: A Book of Ritual and Ethics
Jacob Milgrom
The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1
J. Richard Middleton
The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament
Rolf Rendtorff
Making Wise the Simple: The Torah in Christian Faith and Practice
Johanna W. H. van Wijk-Bos
God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation
With a clever convergence of biblical texts, ancient Near Eastern literature, archaeology, and fictive imagination that is not fictitious, Beach weaves a new account of Jezebel and Ahab from the perspective of Jezebel.
Some exegetes and preachers have tried to persuade us that the Song of Songs is an elaborate allegory about the love of God for Israel or of Christ for the church. Yes, the book may have something to teach us about the divine-human relationship, but it is also, and without doubt, a song of erotic love. It is sensual, playful, beautiful and filled with longing.
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