Chapter 4 (The Idolatrous Professional and the Bad Faith Argument): In this chapter, I juxtapose pericopes from the Hebrew Bible with thematically similar texts from the mid to late Second Temple and tannaitic periods. In so doing, I demonstrate that, despite the overall resemblance between them, these texts differ dramatically in their portrayal of pagan worship, with the earlier texts assuming the sincerity of such practices and the later texts arguing for their insincerity.

Chapter 3 (The Second Temple/Tannaitic Portrayal of Transgressive Worship): In this chapter, I focus on Jewish texts from the mid to late Second Temple period and the tannaitic period (i.e. from around the end of the third century BCE to around the third century CE). I argue that texts from this period frequently portray the worship of other gods and the reverence of their icons as insincere, and I present a taxonomy of different ways in which such a portrayal manifests itself within this literature.

In this essay, I will share some of the perspectives that emerged from my recent experience writing a commentary on the book of Jonah (OTL, Westminster John Knox, 2024) that may offer some insight into what knowledge production entails in my field of biblical interpretation. The numerous incongruities, complexities, and uncertainties associated with this enigmatic book have yielded some interesting interpretations, with interpreters returning again and again to these strange aspects of the text to generate new insights into old problems.

This chapter demonstrates the growth and broadening reach of Jewish–Christian dialogue, and especially Christian reflections on the significance of the Holocaust. Documents discuss the significance of the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul, alongside fraught discussions about the State of Israel.

Places the Museum of the Bible back into the history of white evangelicalism in the twentieth century and speculates on what role the museum might play in white evangelical networks in the future. Further maps out alternative pathways how the museum could be productively studied.

Shows how the Museum of the Bible produces a bible resistant to moral critique, particularly when it comes to racism, slavery, and civil rights in US history. Argues that the museum’s exhibits engage in selective history-telling and other techniques to protect the Bible from complicity in societal harms and to frame the Christian Bible as in indispensable ally for progress. The museum’s bible participates in the constructions of Christian cultural heritage narratives and Christian nationalism in the United States.

Allegory is an undeniably central feature of Renaissance literature. But it is often reduced to a Catholic or an anti-Catholic cliché. Too often, the entanglement of Catholic and Protestant interpretation and the survival of theological interests in biblical study are quickly downplayed. To document the continued importance of figurative reading in early-modern bible scholarship, this chapter views allegory broadly, as a manner of figurative reading evident in the way theologians practiced interpretation. It draws widely from a great variety of materials, roaming across the vast landscape of post-Reformation bible scholarship to suggest that the trouble with allegory was this: not that allegory exists, but that it must exist, it could never be overcome, and its division from the literal always remained fluid and tenuous. Biblical allegory becomes an expression of yet another “third force” in early modern religion, because the bible evaded a simple assertion of literalism and because it eluded confessional boundaries among the very people who helped create and police them.

The Epilogue offers two different venues where the influence of claims to be able to avoid all tradition to arrive at truer readings are seen in modern society in the United States of America. These two are biblical literalism and constitutional originalism. The study examines a number of cases, both exegetical and legal. In each case, the rules for reading “correctly” and only according to the text are shown to be instead part of a complex reading tradition that foregrounds certain facets of the text while ignoring others. The argument is not that biblical literalists or constitutional originalists are wrong in their conclusions. Instead, the evidence demonstrates that the hermeneutical high ground that claims only to read the text with no further rules, traditions, or caveats – does not exist.