The gospel story begins in Torah. What culminates at Golgotha starts with the rebellion in the garden. The Torah's story can be framed as a question: How will the word of God overcome the human revolution?

Torah Story offers a student-friendly introduction to the redemptive narrative housed in the first five books of the Bible. Every main chapter introduces a section of Torah with attention to its basic structure.

This is followed by another look at how this portion of Torah connects to the rest of the Christian Bible.

The dynamic design includes opportunities in every chapter to make the most of Torah study including:

A refreshingly new approach to the Torah--neither an introduction nor a commentary--Torah Story provides an apprenticeship on the Old Testament's first five books. But it also provides a model of how to read Scripture intertextually with an eye to the New Testament gospels. It leaves no doubt as to the overarching unity of the message and composition of the Pentateuch. The second edition is streamlined and simplified throughout, with updated examples and new sidebars and imagery.

No one can read far in the Old Testament without encountering numerous acts of violence that are sanctioned in the text and attributed to both God and humans. Over the years, these texts have been used to justify all sorts of violence: from colonizing people and justifying warfare, to sanctioning violence against women and children. For those who read the Bible as Scripture, these depictions of "virtuous" violence pose tremendous moral and theological challenges. What can be done to stop people from using the Old Testament in such destructive ways, and how might these violent texts be read more faithfully?Eric Seibert faces these challenges head-on by confronting the problem of "virtuous" violence and urging people to engage in an ethically responsible reading of these troublesome texts. He offers a variety of reading strategies designed to critique textually sanctioned violence, while still finding ways to use even the most difficult texts constructively, thus providing a desperately needed approach to the violence of Scripture that can help us live more peaceably in a world plagued by religious violence.

David Penchansky's What Rough Beast? is a study of six Old Testament stories. While many biblical theologies empasize reassuring images of God, Penchansky confronts those biblical passages where God is portrayed as irrational, malevolent, and even abusive, wrestling with the impact of these images on Christian faith. In dealing with these difficult passages, Penchansky contributes to a more authentic understanding of God.

"Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless." The word "meaningless" (hebel) appears more than 40 times in the book of Ecclesiastes and raises the question why a book that appears to deny meaning or purpose is included in the Bible. Many questions of interpretation as well as relevance surround the book of Ecclesiastes, including indeed the proper translation and understanding of the word hebel. If, after all, the book does examine the question of the meaning of life, what could be more important?

The present volume explores Ecclesiastes/Qohelet on many different levels: linguistic, text-critical, theological, historical, and literary. The contributors, chosen from many of the leading and emerging experts on the book, present both the state of the field and their own assessment of the varied interpretive issues of Ecclesiastes. They include scholars, preachers, and philosophers. It should be helpful not only to scholars but also to all who want to study this book seriously.

The first section of this volume deals with the history of interpretation. The second section is concerned with issues of history, form, and rhetoric. Section three is about key concepts and passages. The fourth section focuses on the language and grammar of Qohelet. The last section engages practical issues of interpretation. The volume is designed to provide exposure to a variety of readers who seek to engage Qohelet in fresh ways in the twenty-first century--from historians of interpretation to biblical exegetes to linguists to theological students.