Joshua

Groningen, The Netherlands 9606 RP The biblical book of Joshua is not the easiest one to comment on. The scholarly debate has to deal with the text of Joshua between the Masoretic and the Greek versions, with the literary structure of the book as a whole and its canonical place, with its relation to the Pentateuch on the one hand and the Former Prophets on the other, and with the reworking of the texts in different Deuteronomistic and Priestly contexts. The community of faith has to deal with the problems of the image of God relating to the possession of the land, war, ban, and extermination, not at least in view of a bloody history of reception in a (Christian) context. From Marcion until now the question of the validity of the biblical book in an ecclesiastical context has been under discussion. The well-known series Interpretation, edited by James L. Mays, Patrick D. Miller, and Paul J. Achtemeier, attempts to present neither pure historical-critical commentaries nor exclusively homiletical aids for preaching. Interpretation seeks to go the difficult third way of integrating historical and theological analysis. In this way the parameters are set. The presupposed translation is NRSV, and there is no verse-to-verse exegesis but rather expository essays on the textual units. The author of the Joshua volume, Jerome F. D. [Full Review]