The Roundup – 5.1.25

Here’s just a few of the books, articles, blog posts and more I’ve enjoyed over the last month or so.

Books, Articles, & Reviews

• I recently finished Kyle Greenwood’s and David Schreiner’s Ahab’s House of Horrors: A Historiographic Study of the Military Campaigns of the House of Omri (Lexham Press, 2023). It’s a short book and relatively interesting. One of the things they argue for is that when the Deuteronomic author fails to identify a ruler by name, foreign or Israelite, it isn’t a sign that the account was written down much later but rather it is a deliberate literary technique or “historiographic convention” intended to zero in on specific institutions for critique. I’m not sure exactly what I think about that but it is certainly an interesting idea.
• The New Yorker had an interesting article on Jesus. In it, Adam Gopnik talks about the nature of the Gospels and nods to scholars like Robyn Faith Walsh and Candida Moss.
• In the last Roundup, I mentioned reading Brandon Grafius’s Reading Horror with the Bible. Great book. I also recently read his paper “Text and Terror: Monster Theory and the Hebrew Bible” that came out in 2017. Excellent paper. Check it out!
• New arrivals to my library
  • Ancient Slavery and Its New Testament Contexts, edited by Christy Cobb and Katherine A. Shaner (Eerdmans, 2025)
  • Michael J. Kok, Four Evangelists and a Heresy Hunter: Investigating the Traditions about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (self published, 2025).
  • Dale C. Allison Jr., Interpreting Jesus (Eerdmans, 2025).
• Josh Olds posted a review of James McGrath’s book Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist. I’m hoping to read this book over the summer and post a review myself. I’m currently working on a review of McGrath’s The A to Z of the New Testament.

Blogposts

• If you’re looking for the March Biblical Studies Carnival (#226), Jim West is hosting it over at his website!
• Gary Rendsburg talks about the plagues of Exodus in their ancient Egyptian context. Of note is that Rendsburg when Moses and his Egyptian opponents turn their staffs into tannin, what they were doing wasn’t changing them into serpents but into crocodiles!

Podcasts

• Over at Shirley Paulson’s podcast The Bible and Beyond you can hear an interview with Kimberly Fowler on The Gospel of Philip. Interesting stuff!