5 Best Books On The Bible

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...according to the Wall Street Journal

(Biblical scholar Robert Alter says in the WJS these works on the Good Book are heavenly)

 

5. The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible

Ilana Pardes, a scholar of comparative literature based in Jerusalem, traces an ancient nation's origins from Exodus through Deuteronomy. Combining anthropology, psychoanalysis, comparative religion and literary analysis, she shows us an epic tale that has as its subject not an individual hero but the Israelite people itself.

 

4. Leviticus as Literature

British anthropologist Mary Douglas takes us on an intellectual adventure with "Leviticus as Literature." No small feat, given that Leviticus is notoriously the driest of biblical books -- it consists mainly of elaborate instructions for the sacrificial cult. But Douglas proposes that these cultic procedures reflect a sophisticated system of thought

 

3. The Book of God

"The Book of God" is an imaginative overview, sensitive to narrative detail and to stylistic nuance, of both Testaments. Josipovici sees how the Bible constitutes a unique kind of literature -- a book, as he says, meant to change your sense of reality

 

2. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative

The German-born Yale theologian Hans Frei identifies a turning point in the way the world understood the Bible: when 18th- and 19th-century English and German thinkers such as Locke and Kant broke the traditional link between the factual and the allegorical in the Bible.

 

1. Mimesis

The formidable challenge that Erich Auerbach set himself with "Mimesis" is made clear by its subtitle: "The Representation of Reality in Western Literature." But the German scholar succeeded brilliantly, producing a masterwork of 20th-century criticism that also happens to have pioneered a modern literary understanding of the Bible.

 

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