DESCRIPTION

This book examines the intimate relationship between parables and conflict in the Hebrew Bible. Challenging the scholarly consensus, Jeremy Schipper argues that parables do not function as appeals to change their audience's behavior. Nor do they serve to diffuse tensions in regard to the various conflicts in which their audiences are involved. Rather, the parables help create, intensify, and justify judgments and hostile actions against their audiences. To examine how the parables accomplish these functions, this book pays particular attention to issues of genre and recent developments in genre theory, shifting the central issues in the interpretation of Hebrew Bible parables.

Jeremy Schipper is Assistant Professor of Religion (Hebrew Bible) at Temple University. He is the author of Disability Studies and the Hebrew Bible (2006) and co-editor of This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies (2007). Schipper has published articles in a number of scholarly journals, including Journal of Biblical Literature, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Vetus Testamentum, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and Biblical Interpretation.