The Book of Joshua is the sixth book in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament, and is the first book of the Deuteronomistic history, the story of Israel from the conquest of Canaan to the Babylonian exile. It tells of the campaigns of the Israelites in central, southern and northern Canaan, the destruction of their enemies, and the division of the land among the Twelve Tribes, framed by two set-piece speeches, the first by God commanding the conquest of the land, and, at the end, the second by Joshua warning of the need for faithful observance of the Law (torah) revealed to Moses.
The Book of Judges is the seventh book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. In the narrative of the Hebrew Bible, it covers the time between the conquest described in the Book of Joshua and the establishment of a kingdom in the Books of Samuel, during which biblical judges served as temporary leaders.
Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Torah, where it is called Devarim and the fifth book of the Christian Old Testament.
The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Israelites. The second division of Christian Bibles is the New Testament, written in Koine Greek.
The oldest surviving Hebrew Bible manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, date to c. the 2nd century BC. Some of these scrolls are presently stored at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. The oldest text of the entire Bible, including the New Testament, is the Codex Sinaiticus dating from the 4th century AD, with its Old Testament a copy of a Greek translation known as the Septuagint. The oldest extant manuscripts of the vocalized Masoretic Text date to the 9th century CE. With the exception of a few biblical sections in the Nevi'im, virtually no biblical text is contemporaneous with the events it describes.
The Deuteronomist, abbreviated as either Dtr or simply D, may refer either to the source document underlying the core chapters (12–26) of the Book of Deuteronomy, or to the broader "school" that produced all of Deuteronomy as well as the Deuteronomistic history of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, and also the Book of Jeremiah. The adjectives "Deuteronomic" and "Deuteronomistic" are sometimes used interchangeably; if they are distinguished, then the first refers to the core of Deuteronomy and the second to all of Deuteronomy and the history.
Martin Noth was a German scholar of the Hebrew Bible who specialized in the pre-Exilic history of the Hebrews and promoted the hypothesis that the Israelite tribes in the immediate period after the settlement in Canaan were organised as a group of twelve tribes arranged around a central sanctuary on the lines of the later Greek and Italian amphictyonies. With Gerhard von Rad he pioneered the traditional-historical approach to biblical studies, emphasising the role of oral traditions in the formation of the biblical texts.
Because scholars have tended to use the term in different ways, Biblical theology has been notoriously difficult to define.
Walter Brueggemann is an American Protestant Old Testament scholar and theologian who is widely considered one of the most influential Old Testament scholars of the last several decades. His work often focuses on the Hebrew prophetic tradition and sociopolitical imagination of the Church. He argues that the Church must provide a counter-narrative to the dominant forces of consumerism, militarism, and nationalism.
John Van Seters is a Canadian scholar of the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East. Currently University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, he was formerly James A. Gray Professor of Biblical Literature at UNC. He took his Ph.D. at Yale University in Near Eastern Studies (1965) and a Th.D. h.c. from the University of Lausanne (1999). His honours and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH fellowship, an ACLS Fellowship, and research fellowships at Oxford, Cambridge, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and National Research Foundation of South Africa. His many publications include The Hyksos: A New Investigation (1966); Abraham in History and Tradition (1975); In Search of History ; The Edited Bible (2006); and The Biblical Saga of King David (2009).
Gerhard von Rad was a German academic, Old Testament scholar, Lutheran theologian, exegete, and professor at the University of Heidelberg.
There is much disagreement within biblical scholarship today over the authorship of the Bible. The majority of scholars believe that most of the books of the Bible are the work of multiple authors and that all have been edited to produce the works known today. The following article outlines the conclusions of the majority of contemporary scholars, along with the traditional views, both Jewish and Christian.
Gerald "Gary" Neil Knoppers was a professor in the Department of Theology at University of Notre Dame. He wrote books and articles regarding a range of Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern topics. He is particularly renowned for his work on 1 Chronicles, writing I Chronicles 1 – 9 and I Chronicles 10 – 29, which together comprise a significant treatment of the work of the Chronicler. In May 2005 the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies/Societe canadienne des Etudes bibliques granted the R. B. Y. Scott Award to Knoppers for his two-volume Anchor Bible commentary on I Chronicles
Tremper Longman III is an Old Testament scholar, theologian, professor and author of several books, including 2009 ECPA Christian Book Award winner Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings.
Eugene Haines Merrill is an American Old Testament scholar who has worked as a distinguished professor of Old Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and 2010 president of the Evangelical Theological Society.
In biblical studies, the supplementary hypothesis proposes that the Pentateuch was derived from a series of direct additions to an existing corpus of work. It serves as a revision to the earlier documentary hypothesis, which proposed that independent and complete narratives were later combined by redactors to create the Pentateuch.
Wolfgang Max Wilhelm Roth, also known as W. M. W. Roth, was a German pastor of the United Church of Canada and an Old Testament scholar with major contribution to the growth of Old Testament scholarship for more than half a century from 1959 through 2013. Roth was a scholar in the line of Gerhard von Rad acknowledging the influence of the master-specialist of Old Testament ever since his study days at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Roth's writings drew the attention of the world of Old Testament scholarship through his writings which began appearing in journals like Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Journal of Biblical Literature, Vetus Testamentum, theological commentaries and other theological treatises.
Jacqueline E. Lapsley serves as President, and Professor of Old Testament at Union Presbyterian Seminary, and served as Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs and Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS). Her research interests lie in various fields, including literary theory, ethics, theological anthropology, and gender theory. These disciplines serve as valuable tools for Lapsley when approaching theological interpretations of the Old Testament.
Leslie J. Hoppe is a Roman Catholic priest and Franciscan Old Testament scholar with a focus on Deuteronomy and Deuteronomic literature and is an expert in biblical studies. He is Carroll Stuhlmueller Distinguished Professor of Old Testament Studies at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and the general editor of the refereed theological journal Catholic Biblical Quarterly.
Thomas Christian Römer is a German-born Swiss biblical scholar, exegete, philologist, professor, and Reformed minister. After teaching at the University of Geneva, he became professor of the Old Testament at the University of Lausanne. From 2007, has held the chair "Biblical environments" at the Collège de France, of which he became administrator in 2019. The Collège de France is considered to be France's most prestigious research establishment.
