Richard Clifford
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Psalms 73-150
$37.99Add to cartThe Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries series is designed to provide critical yet accessible information for college and seminary students as well as pastors. In Psalms 73-150, Clifford explains the pattern and progression within the Psalms while attending to the richness of their words and the texture of their imagery.
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Psalms 1-72
$37.99Add to cartThis commentary helps a modern “pray-er” of the psalms to understand the connections of each psalm to the rest of the Bible, and to discern how the great theological themes of covenant, divine mercy and justice, and human response play out through the psalms in prayer. It gives attention to Christian (and Jewish) reception of the psalms, and seeks to resolve such troubling ethical issues as ethno-centrism, hatred of enemies, and expressions of revenge that do occur in them. While interacting with classic and contemporary commentaries as it provides a literary, theological, and ethical analysis of each psalm, this work distinctively seeks to make the psalms available as a true book of prayer for contemporary believers.
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Fair Spoken And Persuading
$17.95Add to cartWithin the last two hundred years, critical scholarship has come to recognize that Chapters 40-55 of the Book of Isaiah are the work, not of the eighth century Isaiah of Jerusalem, but of an anonymous sixth century disciple standing in the Isaiah tradition. This “Second Isaiah” spoke to a community who had once lived in Judah and Jerusalem, but now, a half century later, were settled in Babylon.
Critical scholarship discovered Second Isaiah through its scientific methods. The successive fads and fashions of that scholarship — source criticism, then form criticism — have onesidedly determined interpretation. Fair Spoken and Persuading criticizes previous approaches that took the book to be a series of fragments, outbursts of a great lyrical poet. It argues instead that Isaiah 40-55 is a collection of substantial speeches that reinterpret national traditions to answer a sixth century question: how could the exiles be Israel outside of the sacred land? The prophet’s answer: by making a fresh Exodus and Conquest. The Judahites would become Israel through their brave and trustful journeying to Zion (Second Isaiah’s name for Jerusalem).
Second Isaiah is therefore not just a poet but an orator. His program of action — one becomes Israel through action — is still relevant today for both Jews and Christians who seek authenticity through their actions.
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Proverbs
$65.00Add to cartThrough translation, technical notes, and insightful commentary, Richard Clifford sheds new understanding on Proverbs. By focusing on the rhetoric of Proverbs, Clifford demonstrates how the book fosters a lifelong search for wisdom, and enables readers to see how the instructions and sayings are concerned with contemporary issues.
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Wisdom Literature
$27.99Add to cartThis volume explores the similarities between ancient and modern “wisdom literature” and on the comparable literature from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Canaan, then devotes a chapter to each book (Prover, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Sirach, and Wisdom of Solomon), examining rhetoric as well as content.