On the Way to the Postmodern: Volume II

In the 50 chapters of these two volumes, David J. A. Clines presents a series of discourses, spanning three decades, from an increasingly postmodern perspective. Rather than using only methods of deconstruction, he combines traditional methods with postmodern ideas of analysis, resulting in a substantial reading of the Hebrew Bible.

Clines’s selected sequence of articles and papers—ten of them not previously published—displays a golden thread of a scholar’s journey in biblical interpretation. Some of the papers, like ‘The Evidence for an Autumnal New Year in Pre-exilic Israel Reconsidered’, are far from postmodern in their outlook, and sit in intriguing juxtaposition with others such as ‘The Postmodern Adventure in Biblical Studies’.

The essays are organized in eight sections;

– Method, Literature, History (Vol. I.),

– Theology, Language, Psalms, Job, and, entertainingly, Divertimenti (Vol. II). They include ‘Reading Esther from Left to Right’, ‘Beyond Synchronic Diachronic’, ‘Story and Poem: The Old Testament as Literature and as Scripture’, ‘In Search of the Indian Job’, and ‘Philology and Power’.

Further items in this second volume to highlight are:
Sacred Space, Holy Places and Suchlike
The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew
Universal Dominion in Psalm 2?
False Naivety in the Prologue to Job
New Directions in Pooh Studies.

This volume is a reprint of the original 1998 edition.