Customer Reviews

Social Justice in the Hebrew Bible (Religious orders)

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I guess I liked this book because it confirms a suspicion I've been harboring during most of my thirty years of enthusiastic Bible reading--that the authors of the Hebrew Bible weren't as original as the Christian (and I suspect Jewish) community would like to believe. Although this book may for some readers dim the halo on the Sacred Text, Malchow is not on a debunking crusade. He simply points out how much of what is found in the Bible is remarkably similar to what can be found in many different kinds of texts (legal, liturgical, sapiential) common to the Ancient Near East. Nor does he waste much ink trying to prove direct dependencies. In fact, wasting ink and killing trees is the last thing you could accuse him of doing. At 88 pages (counting the introduction and bibliography), this is a lean volume that gets right to the point. It has helpful chapters on "Law Codes", "The Prophetic Books," "The Psalms," "Late Narrative Works," and "The Wisdom Literature." If Malchow's statement that much of the biblical literature was written by a privileged elite (including many of the prophets) is true, it is both astonishing and gratifying that these people so often spoke out against their own class and on behalf of the poor and marginalized. This is a book I plan to hold on to and read again and again.

The book amazingly summurizes how the Israelites understood Justice. He goes trhough the major texts of the Hebrew Bible and analyzes the context in which they were writte. He constantly keep an eye on the Near Eastern texts which are, more or less, older than some sections of the bible.

The book, however, has 78 pages of text, and, even though it was published in 1996, all the works cited go all the way to 1991. It feels as though something is lacking, but overall it's a good little introduction to a huge topic