Customer Reviews

Quest for the Kingdom of God: Studies in Honor of George E. Mendenhall

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I'm pleased to have found this book in print. I'm no specialist, but the subject interests me. I have been reading Mendenhall (and more recently, writers like Bart Ehrman) since my college days.

This is a collection of studies of Biblical texts and the underlying social and religious issues which may have caused them to be written in the first place. The subsequent redaction histories of the texts are mentioned as well. Mendenhall impressed me as being able to look for what actually was being reported in the ancient narratives and poetry, and in the process rescued Biblical narratives from the fantastic by retrieving humanity and profundity from the original languages and culture of the ancient fertile crescent, often saving obscure texts from the misunderstandings and manipulations of (sometimes much) later scribes.

This twenty year old collection gives a window into the relatively recent state of documentary hypothesis research, each learned author gives a (to my mind, interesting) perspective on their own specialty. The language of the studies is technical, but a reasonably dedicated person will be able to pull through it with the gist intact.