1st Edition

Religion, Ethnicity and Xenophobia in the Bible A Theoretical, Exegetical and Theological Survey

By Brian Rainey Copyright 2019
322 Pages
by Routledge

322 Pages
by Routledge

322 Pages
by Routledge

Religion, Ethnicity and Xenophobia in the Bible looks at some of the Bible’s most hostile and violent anti-foreigner texts and raises critical questions about how students of the Bible and ancient Near East should grapple with "ethnicity" and "foreignness" conceptually, hermeneutically and theologically. The author uses insights from social psychology, cognitive psychology, anthropology,... Read more

Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Chapter One Biblical scholarship and "the Other"; Chapter Two Birds of a feather: explaining ethnic foreignness; Chapter Three "Brood of destruction": Mesopotamian caricatures of foreigners; Chapter Four "He fixed the boundaries of the earth": some biblical idioms of ethnicity; Chapter Five "A non-people, a foolish nation": caricatures of foreigners in Deuteronomistic texts; Chapter Six "I was repulsed by them": caricatures of foreigners in holiness texts; Chapter Seven "Foolish by nature": the reverberations of ethnic polemics in the Bible; Chapter Eight "In order that I might horrify them": a theological appraisal; Bibliography; Index

Biography

Brian Rainey is Assistant Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, USA.

"This is a thoroughly researched, multidisciplinary monograph which utilises a wide range of scholarship in order to trace portrayals of the ‘foreigners’ in biblical texts, and a variety of other relevant primary evidence. Rainey writes thoughtfully and brings strong theoretical foundations into dialogue with incisive analysis of texts. The monograph illustrates and highlights the various nuances of the enduring, and never more topical, nature of xenophobia, ethnicity, and religion."

- Katherine Southwood, University of Oxford, UK