Robin A Parry

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An intriguing look at the cosmology of the Bible, showing how it can help to reveal the biblical message for modern society. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Bible. When we read Scripture we often imagine that the world inhabited by the Bible’s characters was much the same as our own. We would be wrong. The biblical world is an ancient world with a flat earth that stands at the centre of the cosmos, and with a vast ocean in the sky, chaos, dragons, mystical mountains, demonic deserts, an underground zone for the dead, stars that are sentient beings, and, if you travel upwards and through the doors in the solid dome of the sky, God’s heaven – the heart of the universe. Robin Parry takes the reader on a guided tour of the biblical cosmos with the goal of opening up the Bible in its ancient world. He then goes further and shows how this very ancient biblical way of seeing the world is still revelatory and can speak God’s word afresh into our own modern worlds.

Traditional scholarly commentaries aspire to open up biblical texts in the light of their ancient social and cultural contexts. In this commentary Robin Parry seeks to take the insights of such works seriously yet also move far beyond them by considering Lamentations within ever-expanding canonical and contemporary contexts. How do the words of Lamentations resonate when read in the context of Jeremiah? Or in the contexts of Isaiah 40-55, the New Testament, the history of Christian anti-Semitism, or the suffering of victims today? The question at the heart of this unusual engagement with the text is -How can Lamentations function as Christian scripture?- Parry argues that the key to answering this question is to follow the ancient liturgical tradition of the church and to see the text in the light of the death and resurrection of Israel's Messiah -- Jesus. According to Parry, Lamentations is Israel's Holy Saturday literature -- the cries of those caught between the death of Jerusalem and its resurrection. In this context Christians are able to make connections between this anguished Israelite poetry, the sufferings of Jesus, and the sufferings of the world. These biblical-theological links have the potential to open up fresh and imaginative theological, doxological, and pastoral encounters with a sadly neglected biblical book.

Christian use of the Old Testament has tended to focus on law and wisdom literature and to marginalize narrative materials. This book restores story to its rightful place in Old Testament ethics and aims to set out parameters within which Christian ethical reappropriations of Old Testament narratives can take place. The argument begins by examining recent philosophical studies of the role of story in the ethical life. Special attention is paid to the work of Paul Ricoer, Martha Nussbaum and Robert C. Roberts. Then the theological foundations are laid by demonstrating the importance of narrative for Old Testament ethics and of the biblical metanarrative for Christian interpretation. Genesis 34 is examined as a detailed case study to exemplify the fruits of the method for Christian readers. The study considers reception history, feminist interpretation, discourse analysis and canonical context to shed new light on the terrible story of the rape of Dinah.