Julia M. OBrien

I've just published an article over at The Bible and Interpretation, entitled  "Violence and the Bible:  A Problem to be Solved?"

I've read several articles in the past few weeks relating the presence of archaeological finds to the question of statehood.

I've just published a piece over at the Bible and Interpretation site entitled "Who Cares about the Prophets?"

I've just encountered powerful curriculum on Joshua.  It's entitled Joshua:  A Journey of Faith and is the 2009-2010 Horizons Bible Study for Presbyterian women.

It's a common plot of novels and movies:  while the superstitious public clings to outdated religious beliefs, people in power compete for access to ancient manuscripts which reveal the powerful, if shocking, truth about the past. Think The DaVinci Code.  Indiana Jones movies. Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. Irving Wallace's The Word.

It's one thing to acknowledge that the book of Psalms is written as poetry.  It's quite another to consider what difference the poetic style makes to interpretation of the Psalms. What if we encountered Psalm 139's claim that "I am fearfully and wonderfully made" not in private devotion or from the mouth of a lector in church but in a context more like that of def jam?  This great piece is Marty McConnell's "Instructions for a Body."

This semester, my students in the Introduction to Hebrew Bible/Old Testament class at LTS are working with new textbooks:  John Collins, A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Fortress, 2007) and Johanna van Wijk-Bos, Making Wise the Simple: The Torah in Christian Faith and Practice (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).  We also read from other sources (the Global Bible Commentary, the Women's Bible Commentary, the Eerdman's Dictionary of the Bible, and some internet pieces), but Collins and Bos have been our primary introductions to the Pentateuch.

Does it matter what order you read psalms?  Would it matter if Psalm 22 were really Psalm 122 instead?

One of the fascinating, if maddening, aspects of biblical interpretation is that the story embraced by one community as the greatest good news is often rejected by another as the worst bad news. Take the Exodus story, for example.

Every year since the late 1980's, I have assigned Phyllis Trible’s “Eve and Adam:  Genesis 2-3 Reread”  in introductory Bible courses.   From 1989-1997, my students were undergraduates at Meredith College, the women’s college from which Trible herself graduated in 1954.  Since 1997, the students to whom I’ve assigned Trible have been those preparing for theological vocations at Lancaster Theological Seminary.