Nahum (Readings: A New Biblical Commentary)

Julia O'Brien
Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 25/04/2002
EAN 9781841273006, ISBN10: 1841273007

Paperback, 225 pages, 23 x 15.4 x 1 cm
Language: English

In its wanton celebration of violence, the book of Nahum poses ethical challenges to the modern reader. O'Brien offers a full-scale engagement with this dimension of the book, exploring the ways in which the artfulness of its poetry serves the book's violent ideology, highlighting how its rhetoric attempts to render the "other" fit for annihilation. She then reads from feminist, intertextual and deconstructionist angles and uncovers the destabilizing function of the book's aesthetics. Finally, she demonstrates how mining Nahum's ambiguities and tensions can contribute to an ethical response to its violence.