Hi Jason! Your first sentence is a reasonable summary, yes. In the book, I go into more detail about past interpretations, which have tended to treat the text as "unmoored from history" (as noted briefly above). If you do that, the text can mean pretty much anything you want it to. My approach will be too historically positivist for some, but... it's an historical argument. Another chapter of the book (based on a HBAI article) presents an argument for how the text came to be dehistoricized and read as apocalyptic, etc. So I'm trying to explain not just the initial composition but the early process of reception. -- Chris
Hi Jason! Your first sentence is a reasonable summary, yes. In the book, I go into more detail about past interpretations, which have tended to treat the text as "unmoored from history" (as noted briefly above). If you do that, the text can mean pretty much anything you want it to. My approach will be too historically positivist for some, but... it's an historical argument. Another chapter of the book (based on a HBAI article) presents an argument for how the text came to be dehistoricized and read as apocalyptic, etc. So I'm trying to explain not just the initial composition but the early process of reception. -- Chris