Sheffield Academic Press The Construction of Shame in the Hebrew Bible: The Prophetic Contribution: No.346 (The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies)

This book explores the phenomenon of shame in the Hebrew bible. It focuses particularly on the major prophets, because shame vocabulary is most prominent there. Shame has been widely discussed in the literature of psychology and anthropology; the book discusses the findings of both disciplines in some detail. It emphasises the social-anthropological honour/shame model, which a considerable number of biblical scholars since the early 1990s have embraced enthusiastically. The author highlights the shortcomings of this heuristic model and proposes a number of alternative critical approaches. Review "Stiebert is to be commended for calling the attention of biblical scholars to a neglected semantic domain and for focusing our attention on the writings in which they predominate. She has summarized important criticisms of the honor-shame rubric, appropriately asserting that models presuming cultural continuity should not be superimposed on ancient texts . In the end, the best insights of the book are the careful, lexically sensitive readings of biblical texts, the kind of work this reviewer wishes there was more of." Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, Volume 4 (2002-2003)A summary of the book Religious Studies Review, 01/04--Marvin A. Sweeny "Religious Studies Review " About the Author Johanna Stiebert is Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Leeds, UK.