Despite the best efforts of my post delivery person to reduce this to pulp before I opened it, by leaving it at the back of my house in the rain, this promises to be a fascinating read, and at least vaguely connected to (a) my research and (b) my fascination with what Phyllis Tribble (and others) term 'texts of terror' and other similar items which the RCL and SU neatly skip over as often as they can get away with it.

It is great to find such a book written by a man rather than, as sometimes is the case, an aggressive woman.  And it is fascinating - or will be when I get round to reading it properly, to discover how exegesis worked (or might have done) in a pre-Modern age.

The sub-title to the book 'what you can learn from the history of exegesis that you can't learn from exegesis alone' sums up nicely why I bought it - that and it was obviously in the bibliography of something I read.  My read across becomes something like 'what I can I learn from this that relates to reading history?' - it's not quite parallel, cos I'm not quite doing exegesis, at least not yet.

Looks a fascinating book - to be read at some point!

Some topics covered include...

• Hagar
• Jephthah's daughter
• Patriarchs behaving badly
• Divorce
• Silent prophetesses?
• Reading sex and violence