Böcker av Mark McEntire

The narrative books of the Bible are dominated by the themes of violence and death. In his newly released work, author and biblical scholar Mark McEntire examines the messy stories of life and death found in the Bible. From gentle death at a good, old age to starvation to brutal murder, death appears in its many forms in these biblical worlds. Through the stories, we are invited to move back and forth between our own stories and those of the Bible, as McEntire writes, "so that we might live and die faithfully in the dangerous world they form together." As we live and die in our own dangerous world, the stories of life and death we encounter in the Bible offer us resources for understanding the most difficult aspect of our existence.

The Hebrew Bible displays a complicated attitude toward cities. Much of the story tells of a rural, agrarian society, yet those stories were written by people living in urban environments. Moreover, cities frequently appear in a negative light; the Hebrew slaves in the book of Exodus were forced to build cities, and the book of Samuels...

Defining Prophetic LiteratureIntroducing the prophetic literature of the Old Testament should be a daunting task because it is a daunting collection. Its size, variety, and complexity have challenged every interpreter who has sought to make a coherent statement about this set of anc

Mark McEntire continues the story begun in Portraits of a Mature God, extending his narrative beyond the conclusion of the Hebrew Bible as Israel and Israels God moved into the Hellenistic world. The narrative McEntire perceives in the apocryphal literature describes a God protecting and guiding the scattered and persecuted, a God responding to suffering in revolt, and a God disclosing mysteries, yet also hidden in the symbolism of dreams and visions. McEntire here provides a coherent and compelling account of theological perspectives in the writings of Hellenistic Judaism.

What difference would it make for Old Testament theology if we turned our attention from the more dramatic, forceful mighty acts of God to the more subdued, but more realistic themes of later writings in the Hebrew Bible? The result, Mark McEntire argues, would be a more mature theology that would enable us to respond more realistically and creatively to the unprecedented challenges of the present age.