In this tour de force, a premier Old Testament Scholar provides the reader with a grand overview of biblical theology: tracing the developments, critiquing the major contributions (e.g., Gese, Childs, Brueggemann), and providing his own provocative theological implications of the various constructions. In his usual bold manner, he examines the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts of biblical theology and their implications for our reading of both testaments in the modern world. Some of the key issues Bar addresses are typologies for doing biblical theology and Old Testament theology, the Apocryhpha and Pseudepigrapha, the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament, the history of religions versus theological approaches, and the Biblical Theology Movement.

The commands "Keep this festival", for the Israelites at Passover and for Jesus' disciples at the Lord's Supper, mark Judaism and Christianity as historical religions. They proclaim the God who has revealed himself both through the thoughts of his messengers and through events and their consequences. His acts demonstrate his nature to those who believe and may guide others to belief.

The papers collected here explore some of the ways that the ancient Hebrew writers and their contemporaries presented history and how their work should be understood today. Assessed against the background of the wealth of documents available from the ancient world, these studies examine the similarities and differences with the intent of providing criteria for approaching the writings of the Hebrew Bible. Recent publications display a growing tendency to treat the Hebrew narratives as products of their authors' beliefs, molded by their theology, and in some sense created to suit it, rather than arising from actual events. The contributors to this volume favor a positive approach to the Hebrew texts, taking into account the variety of contemporary concerns and perspectives.

Betz exhibits a massive control of the literature on Galatians and especially of the ancient literatuer relevant for understanding it. He has a gently rigorous way of demolishing fanciful and unsupported exegesis of the past while still taking clear positions on controversial issues.

In recent years there has been a tendency among certain scholars to claim that little can be known about pre-exilic Israel, because the Old Testament was only compiled in the post-exilic period (for example Philip Davies, Thomas Thompson, Neils Peter Lemche). One scholar (Lemche) has even claimed that the Old Testament is a Hellenistic work.

The purpose of this book is to argue that this is an extreme and untenable position and that, though much of the Old Testament was indeed edited in the exilic or post-exilic period, many of the underlying sources used go back to the pre-exilic period. When critically analyzed these sources can shed much light on the pre-exilic period.

This important work is the product of a team of seventeen international scholars, no fewer than five of whom are Fellows of the British Academy. None of the chapters has previously been published.