Steven L. McKenzie

A startling examination of an American heritage of violence - a legacy from the pre-Revolutionary white rural South to today's urban America - that helps answer the question of how America became so violent. The tradition is reflected in the experiences of one black family, the Boskets, from the days of slavery to the present. This tragic family history culminates in the twentieth century with the seemingly inevitable destruction of two potentially valuable lives: those of Willie Bosket and his father, each first incarcerated at age nine, each ultimately convicted of murder. The saga begins with Willie Bosket's first known American ancestors, slaves in Edgefield, South Carolina - a place of epic violence, a place where white men were quick to fight to the death for the minutest trespass on their honor. Finally, we see how the lava-flow of violence, and its explosive admixture along the way with white racism, erupts in the lives of the Boskets of our own day - especially Willie Bosket, whose IQ breached the genius level (his father was the only person ever to earn a Ph.D. in prison) and whose boyhood charm was such that some of his elementary school teachers had visions of him as president of the United States. And yet, by Willie's own count he had by adolescence committed two hundred armed robberies and twenty-five stabbings. In his fifteenth year he shot and killed two men on the Manhattan subway. At age twenty-five he stabbed a prison guard he did not know. For him as for his father before him, prison has become his whole world, his surrogate mother. He has been deemed the most violent criminal in New York State history. Constantly manacled because he is considered so dangerous, the dazzlingly articulate Willie nevertheless seemed, when Fox Butterfield first met him, to have made prison his palace. Trying to make sense of Willie's life, of his father's life, of the Bosket family history back through time, Butterfield reveals the roots of the violence that threatens our future and considers what we might do to stem it.

This book investigates the composition of the book of Kings and its implications for the Deuteronomistic History ( DH ) of which it is a part. McKenzie analyses Kings on the basis of Noth's model of a single author/editor behind the original DH . He contends that the Deuteronomist ( Dtr ) wrote the series of oracles against the Northern royal houses without utilizing a prior, running prophetic document that some scholars have posited behind Samuel and Kings. He regards many other prophetic stories in Kings, including most of the Elijah and Elisha legends as later additions to the DH , in accord with Noth's recognition that the original DH was frequently supplemented by various writers. McKenzie illustrates Dtr 's compositional techniques in a treatment of the accounts of Hezekiah and Josiah in Kings. He tentatively dates Dtr to Josiah's reign but believes that tensions among the many later additions to the work, including the report from Josiah's death on, suggest that they are not the result of systematic editing (e.g., Dtr 2). The book offers the most up-to-date survey of research on the DH and the most recent detailed analysis of the lengthy variant version of Jeroboam's reign in LXXB at 1 Kings 12:24a-z. It offers a fresh perspective on the original shape of the DH based on recent scholarship and the author's own critical investigation.

This single volume introduces the reader to the most important methods of biblical criticism by giving equal time to historical and literary approaches. Each chapter addresses five sets of issues: (1) definition of the method, important terms and concepts, the history of its development, assumptions made about the relationship of text and history, and prospects for the future; (2) the method in relation to others discussed in this book; (3) the method in action, with reference to a particular text in either Genesis or Luke-Acts; (4) the drawbacks of the method; and (5) suggested reading for those who wish to study further. Chapter topics include reading the Bible historically, by J. Maxwell Miller; source criticism, by Pauline Viviano; tradition-historical criticism, by Robert A. Di Vito; form criticism, by Martin J. Buss; redaction criticism, by Gail Paterson Corrington; social-scientific criticism, by Dale B. Martin; canonical criticism, by Mary C. Callaway; rhetorical criticism, by Yehoshua Gitay; structural criticism, by Daniel Patte; narrative criticism, by David M. Gunn; reader-response criticism, by Edgar V. McKnight; the poststructuralist approach, by William A. Beardslee; and feminist criticism, by Danna Nolan Fewell.

"For scholars the Bible is a book of mysteries to be solved: Who wrote the text? When and why was it written? How can I make sense of these customs? Does this text relate to real history? This book explains the sort of detective work to biblical scholarship that entails finding and interpreting clues that help to answer such questions"--

David serves as a brave warrior in Saul's armies against the Philistines, and after Saul's death becomes King of Israel.

As newer approaches to biblical criticism become more established and influential, it is essential that students and other serious readers of the Bible be exposed to them and become familiar with them. That is the main impetus behind the present volume, which is offered as a textbook for those who wish to go further than the approaches covered in To Each Its Own Meaning by exploring more recent or experimental ways of reading. This book is a supplement and sequel to To Each Its Own Meaning, edited by Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes, which introduced the reader to the most important methods of biblical criticism and remains a widely used classroom textbook. This new volume explores recent developments in, and approaches to, biblical criticism since 1999. Leading contributors define and describe their approach for non-specialist readers, using examples from the Old and New Testament to help illustrate their discussion. Topics include cultural criticism, disability studies, queer criticism, postmodernism, ecological criticism, new historicism, popular culture, postcolonial criticism, and psychological criticism. Each section includes a list of key terms and definitions and suggestions for further reading. - Publisher.