Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 58:1 (Mar 2015)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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JETS 58:1 (March 2015) p. 151

Book Reviews

A Cultural Handbook to the Bible. By John J. Pilch. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012, xii + 307 pp., $26.00 paper.

This work by John J. Pilch of Johns Hopkins University joins a growing number of volumes on the cultural world of the Bible. Pilch is active in The Context Group, a gathering of scholars who use social-scientific methods to view the text and world of the Bible with the goal of setting aside Western interpretive lenses in favor of those from the ancient and classical Mediterranean worlds. In his Cultural Handbook to the Bible, Pilch emphasizes some contributions of cultural and psychological anthropology to biblical interpretation.

The book is organized into eight sections: “The Cosmos,” “Earth,” “Persons,” “Family,” “Language,” “Human Consciousness,” “God and the Spirit World,” and “Entertainment,” with a short bibliography specific to each. Each section contains five to nine short essays on specific topics of scholarly and general interest (e.g. “Desert and Wilderness,” “Status by Gender and Age,” “Marriage,” “Naming the Nameless in the Bible,” “The Middle Eastern Jesus,” and “Final Words”), though some are a bit unusual (e.g. “Imaginary Mountains in Matthew,” “Dragons,” “Photina the Samaritan Woman,” and “Journeys to the Sky”). Together they are a collection of short articles published between 1998 and 2006 under the heading “A Window into the Biblical World” in The Bible Today (Liturgical Press), a journal for Catholic laity. They represent enlightening and at times provocative (Pilch uses the word “fresh”) attempts to bring the results of scholarly thinking into the pew. Similar articles by Pilch that appeared earlier (1993–1997) were published in The Cultural Dictionary of the Bible (Liturgical Press, 1999).

Following the methods and goals of The Context Group, Pilch seeks to apply broad-based anthropological observations of human behaviors worldwide to the biblical text. His sweep takes in peoples from Australia, Siberia, central Asia, eastern and Nordic Europe, and Central America. One of Pilch’s stated goals (p. 105) is to show that God neither is culture-specific nor privileges one culture over another. While Pilch acknowledges that the culture (he consistently uses the singular) of the Bible is indeed distinct from others, he stresses that biblical culture is simply one way of being human among many. Bible readers, as a result, need to appreciate how other cultures view differently the same realities that are described by the writers of the Bible. By implication, the interpretations of reality recorded in the Bible—including its moral exhortations—are not exclusively better than those of other cultures. (See, e.g., Pilch’s...

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