War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible

Jacob L. Wright is a professor at Emory University in the Candler School of Theology. He writes on a wide array of topics, ranging from material culture to commensality and urbicide. His first book, Rebuilding Identity (De Gruyter, 2003), won the Templeton Prize, and his most recent book, David, King of Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2014), won the ASOR Nancy Lapp Popular Book Award. His free online course (The Bible's Prehistory, Purpose, and Political Future) consistently ranks among the top online courses in the humanities.

• Part 1. Refugee Memories: Negotiating Relations and Borders to Neighboring States; 1. Passages to Peace; 2. Edom as Israel's Other; Part 2. Kinship and Commandment: The Transjordanian Tribes and the Conquest of Canaan; 3. Mapping the Promised Land; 4. The Nation's Transjordanian Vanguard; 5. A Nation Beyond Its Borders; 6. Kinship, Law, and Narrative; Part 3. Rahab: An Archetypal Outsider; 7. Between Faith and Works; 8. The Composition of the Rahab Story; 9. Rahab's Courage and the Gibeonites' Cowardice; Part 4. Deborah: Mother of a Voluntary Nation; 10. A Prophet and Her General; 11. A Poetic War Monument; 12. A National Anthem for the North; 13. Women and War Commemoration; 14. Jael's Identities.

'The book is a welcome follow-up to the author's previous volume (David, King of Israel, and Caleb in Biblical Memory) [Cambridge, 2014] … The highlight of the work, however, is its thoroughgoing interdisciplinary character. Wright has provided an exemplar of the interdisciplinary study that should mark today's engagements with biblical warfare texts. This interdisciplinarity includes engagement with political theory and philosophy, sociology, anthropology, classical Greek literature, and international law. Readers of this monograph will find both a compelling technical approach to specific biblical texts and an invitation to a broader social and cultural conversation much needed in our time.' Brad E. Kelle, Society Of Biblical Literature