Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism
About the Book Series
The Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism (RIPBC) series features volumes that engage substantially with Biblical literature from perspectives not traditionally associated with Biblical studies. This series aims at employing the best tools, theories, and insights from the sciences, philosophy, and beyond to yield fresh and demonstrable insights from the Biblical texts and from Biblical criticism itself.
Volumes in this series will typically have a dual emphasis between a field of study and Biblical scholarship, and accomplish at least one of the following:
- Demonstrate why a particular field of study enables new insights in reading select biblical passages, texts, or corpora
- Show how Biblical texts have anticipated themes and issues later approached in other disciplines, and can serve as an ancient conversation partner, or prescient critique, of those areas of study
- Explain how a field of study offers a parallel insight into the methods or findings of Biblical criticism
Posttraumatic Growth in Psalms of Lament, Jeremiah, and Lamentations
1st Edition
By Xi Li
July 31, 2026
This book examines the presence and patterns of posttraumatic growth in selected biblical texts in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament to show how ancient Israelites interpreted trauma, particularly the fall of Jerusalem, and how these responses reshape biblical interpretation and theology. It offers a ...
Biblical and Socio-Scientific Approaches to Religious Enmity
1st Edition
Edited
By Christopher A. Porter, Elizabeth E. Shively, Kenneth I. Mavor
December 30, 2025
This book examines how Christian teachings on love and enmity shape group identity and conflict, with scripture and theology used both to justify violence and call for reconciliation. It explores interdisciplinary perspectives that combine socio-scientific approaches with biblical criticism. By ...
Playing with Scripture: Reading Contested Biblical Texts with Gadamer and Genre Theory
1st Edition
By Andrew Judd
May 06, 2025
This book puts a creative new reading of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and literary genre theory to work on the problem of Scripture. Reading texts as Scripture brings two hermeneutical assumptions into tension: that the text will continually say something new and relevant to the ...
Human-Divine Interactions in the Hebrew Scriptures: Covenants and Cross-Purposes
1st Edition
By Berel Dov Lerner
December 18, 2024
Rabbi Sacks Book Prize Finalist 2024. This book addresses central theological issues and biblical narratives in terms of a bold thesis regarding relations between God and humans: that the actions of God and the actions of humans are informed by independently valid moral viewpoints which do not ...
Luke and the Jewish Other: Politics of Identity in the Third Gospel
1st Edition
By David Andrew Smith
December 18, 2024
Luke and the Jewish Other takes up the debated question of the orientation of Luke toward the Jewish people. Building on recent studies in the social history of early Jewish-Christian relations, it offers an analysis of Luke’s portrayal of Jewish and Christian identities that challenges the common ...
A Prototype Approach to Hate and Anger in the Hebrew Bible
1st Edition
By Deena Grant
November 29, 2024
This innovative book applies findings from the field of cognitive linguistics to the study of emotions in the Hebrew Bible. The book draws on the prototype approach to conceptual categories to help interpret emotion language in biblical passages. Contemporary scholarship has come to recognize that ...
Metaphor, Ritual, and Order in John 12-13: Judas and the Prince
1st Edition
By Todd E. Klutz
November 29, 2024
This book offers new interpretative insight into the Gospel of John, applying a combination of critical discourse analysis, conceptual metaphor theory, and anthropological theories of ritual. Specifically it explores the meaning of the statement “Now the ruler of this world will be driven out” in ...
Paul and Diversity: A New Perspective on Σάρξ and Resilience in Galatians
1st Edition
By Linda Joelsson
November 28, 2024
This book investigates attitudes toward diversity as expressed in Paul’s letter to the Galatians and proposes a renewed understanding of the term σάρξ as used in this letter. Σάρξ (sarx) is usually translated as "flesh" and has often been perceived in theological studies as a complicated and highly...
Human Agency and Divine Will: The Book of Genesis
1st Edition
By Charlotte Katzoff
April 29, 2022
This book explores the conjuncture of human agency and divine volition in the biblical narrative – sometimes referred to as "double causality." A commonly held view has it that the biblical narrative shows human action to be determined by divine will. Yet, when reading the biblical narrative we are...
A Philosophical Theology of the Old Testament: A historical, experimental, comparative and analytic perspective
1st Edition
By Jaco Gericke
September 30, 2021
Are we able to identify and compare the philosophical perspectives and questions that must be postulated as having been somehow present in the language, ideas and worldviews of the Biblical authors? This book sets out an approach to something that has been generally considered impossible: a ...
Thinking Sex with the Great Whore: Deviant Sexualities and Empire in the Book of Revelation
1st Edition
By Luis Menéndez-Antuña
August 14, 2020
Many scholars in Biblical and Revelation studies have written at length about the imperial and patriarchal implications of the figure of the Whore of Babylon. However, much of the focus has been on the links to the Roman Empire and ancient attitudes towards gender. This book adds another layer to ...
Cain, Abel, and the Politics of God: An Agambenian reading of Genesis 4:1-16
1st Edition
By Julián Andrés González Holguín
December 12, 2019
The Genesis story of Cain’s murder of Abel is often told as a simplistic contrast between the innocence of Abel and the evil of Cain. This book subverts that reading of the Biblical text by utilising Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of homo sacer, the state of exception and the idea of sovereignty to ...