Alison Jack

What is the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and what do we know about the community that possessed them? Avoiding both popular sensationalism and specialist technical language, this book aims to integrate all the latest findings about the scrolls into existing knowledge of the period, to advance understanding of the scrolls and the Qumran community, and to explore their wider significance in a scholarly and accessible way. The state of the art in international scrolls scholarship. Contributors include E. P. Sanders, Eugene Ulrich, George Brooke, and John J. Collins.

A comprehensive selection of religious poetry that Scotland has produced over the centuries, including some Gaelic voices and reflecting the mixed religious profile of Scotland today. An earlier edition published in 2000 was a huge success, selling out very quickly. This eagerly awaited follow-up offers the very best from a diverse, often turbulent history and reveals an attractive and distinctive spirituality that is unique to Scotland. The poetry spans 15 centuries and includes poets from every corner of Scotland. It reflects the rich range of language across regions and centuries and is a unique collection of the deepest religious thought of a nation. Selected and introduced by three experts in the field, this offers an attractive and informed volume that will appeal to all lovers of Scottish literature.

The SCM Core Text The Bible and Literature explores the crossover between attempts to read the Bible as literature and to read the Bible in literature. It seeks to assess what form a truly inter-disciplinary approach to the reading of the Bible would have to take, taking into consideration the background knowledge, preconceptions and theories of reading which scholars from each discipline, literary and biblical studies, bring to literary and biblical texts. The book covers all the key methods of literary criticism such as narrative criticism, reader-response, intertextuality and feminist criticism and explores how they might be relevant to the crossover between the Bible and literature. The SCM Core Text The Bible and Literature is presented as an undergraduate-friendly textbook and will make a valuable addition to the reading lists of courses on theology and literature, hermeneutics and Biblical Studies.

The language, themes and imagery of the Bible have been rewritten into texts across time. In the Revelation of John, the Hebrew Bible echoes and is reinvented, just as in James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) many explicit and implicit readings and interpretations of the Bible are offered. In Texts Reading Texts, these readings of the Bible, and the ways in which Revelation and Hogg's Confessions have themselves been read, are considered from the two postmodern perspectives of marginalization and deconstruction. By reading the two seemingly unrelated texts side by side from these perspectives, traditional readings of them both are disturbed and challenged.