Readings in Old Testament Studies

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in 1950, the author holds several academic degrees

including majors in Linguistic Science, Chinese and African Studies, Theology and Religious Studies. He has rich teaching and research experience gained at several universities in Africa, Asia, and the USA and Europe. He has also published over

20 books in his special fields of expertise (Linguistic Science, Theory of Foreign

Language Teaching, Translation Theory, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Religious Studies/Theology).

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  LIST OF CONTENTS  

  The Need to interpret the Bible  1

  Interpreting Old Testament Scripture in Translation  3

  Literary forms of the Old Testament  5

  Literary forms and Interpretation  8

  Literary forms and Inspiration  9

  Exegetical Procedures  12

  The Components of Old Testament Narrative  21

  Interpreting Old Testament Narrative  23

  The Accuracy of Historical Narrative  27

  How A Covenant functions  30

  How Law functions  34

  EXEGESIS I  36

  EXEGESIS II  38

  EXEGESIS III  41

  Interpreting Oracles of Salvation  47

  Announcement of Judgment  49

  EXEGESIS IV  57

  Lament and Praise  64

  Proverb and Wisdom  68

  EXEGESIS V  73

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However, since also translation may be considered to be a special task of This communicative function is the mediation (between source and target upper level of a “hierarchy” reaching culture), the nature of the transmission down of dividing an utterance – a process for preachers and teachers is, single sentence or a sequence of in many respects, very much the same sentences – into its “lower” sub- as that of the translation process. components such as structure and words etc. “Communicative function” thus is a notion applied in Communication and later Linguistic Theory and essentially constitutes a part of the copncept we call commonly “meaning”. Most commonly, there are levels of lexical (word), grammatical (structure) and communicative (non- verbal aspects of meaning referring to such items as emotion, context etc) meaning. In Linguistics, it had been held for years that “meaning is shaped most significantly at genre level” and that hence “texts are multitieered things and the decisions made at the top level of the text influence all of the lower levels of the text as to their meaning” ( RUSSELL, III, W.B.: Literary Forms in the Hands of Preachers and Teachers”, in:

SANDY/GIESE, ibd., pp. 287-288). In practice, this means that the decision on the part of the speaker/writer which lexical material (word) and structure to

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