Thematic Guide to Biblical Literature

(Hardback)

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Description

The Bible has had a tremendous influence on world history and culture, but it is largely unfamiliar to many students. This book relates the Bible to a wide range of literary works commonly read by students and thus helps students understand these texts as well as the cultural and historical contexts surrounding them. Included are chapters on 20 themes, such as creation, family and friends, love and marriage, the hero, war, and death and the afterlife. Each chapter discusses the biblical significance of the theme, provides scriptural quotations and citations, and explores the biblical presence of the theme in literary works often read by students. Each chapter cites works for further reading, and the volume closes with a selected, general bibliography.

Reviews

Tischler's learned commentary on integral biblical themes reads as engagingly as a lecture by a teacher who both understands and values the Bible as a source of wisdom and as a component of world literature. Tischler respects the written word and the music of poetry and seems at home with all corners of American and British and, to some degree, world classics as well. Simple layout invites the neophyte to read signal passages of scripture on such topics as creation, gender, war, and the afterlife; and to peruse classic works--Billy Budd, To Kill a Mockingbird, Donne's sonnets, The Old Man and the Sea, Little Women, The Prince--for more recent thinking on the chosen subjects. Tischler's tone and diction avoid tedious cant and dogma by sticking to humanistic themes--godhood, justice, liberty, power, sacrifice, violence--and pure, uncluttered glimpses of human situations, such as the nonstop task of the shepherd, David's emergence into leadership, the circumscribed world of women, and the Jewish response to the threat of alien invasion.Highly recommended. Home, church, high school, and public libraries; general readers. * Choice *
This work is recommended as an excellent beginning for further research on particular themes such as slavery and freedom, truth, earthly paradise, government and politics, and the journey of life.Tischler's style of writing is a pleasure to read and would surely be appreciated by students. * American Reference Books Annual *
Tischler traces a few typical examples of the various biblical themes in English and American literature, and occasionally in their European counterparts. In each thematic chapter, she identifies a handful of biblical and literary works she considers, then explores how that theme has been worked out from biblical times to the present. Among the themes are animals and humans, women as heroes, war, predestination and free will, and last days. * Reference & Research Book News *

Author Bio

Nancy M. Tischler is Professor Emerita of English and the Humanities at the Pennsylvania State University. Her previous books include All Things in the Bible (2006), Men and Women of the Bible (2003), and Student Companion to Tennessee Williams (2000), all available from Greenwood Press.