Book alert! Playing with Scripture hits shelves in time for Christmas stockings

My book is out soon! It is basically about why smart people keep disagreeing about what the Bible means.

Everyone needs a dead German in their life, and I’ve chosen Hans-Georg Gadamer. He is often described as the father of philosophical hermeneutics. I use Gadamer’s idea of understanding as ‘play’, supplemented by some modern genre theory, to try to get my head around three troublesome issues in the reception history of the Bible.

The first is the use of Psalms by the apostles in Acts; Gadamer shows how factors like the historical moment of performance and the genre of the OT text being interpreted all determine the apostles’ exegetical method.

The second is nineteenth-century debates between abolitionists and slave owners over Hagar’s story (Genesis 16); these turn out to be first and fundamentally disagreements about the kind-of-thing (genre) the Bible is.

The third is the dark reception history of the rape and murder of the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19); I try to resist this tradition of misogyny by re-reading the story as a horror film like Psycho or Night of the Living Dead.

The book will be available in December 2023 with Routledge. Click here to pre-order.

Publishing a biblical studies thesis

I’m particularly delighted about this because this book came out of my doctoral thesis (2021, with Sydney University, supervised by the wonderful Prof Liam Semler), and it’s taken a while to find a publisher for it.

My work is a little interdisciplinary (biblical studies, philosophy, literary theory) which meant there wasn’t an obvious series that it would fit into. A friend (Chris Porter) suggested the Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Biblical Criticism, and it turned out to be great advice.

To keep “research active” status with the accrediting body for my University College I needed what’s known as an ERA level 5 publication. So that means going with a top level academic press or University press. Routledge is one of the most respected publishers, “well above world standard” in the awkward classification scheme.

But I also really wanted my book to be relatively affordable – there’s nothing worse as an Australian than having to pay hundreds of Euros plus postage to get a book you need for your research shipped halfway across the world! But as I explained to some friends recently, the cost of these books is simply a reflection of economics – technical books are not likely to sell thousands, which means individual units must be more expensive to cover the publisher’s fixed costs. Like most monographs the topic is simply too niche for most trade academic publishers to be interested in. (This book is not really going to be a hit as an introductory textbook.) Routledge are a great publisher in this regard because while they do niche academic books they also have great local distribution to places with Australia, and normally put out paperbacks after about 18 months.

Given these constraints it did take a while to find the right publisher for this project. I now have the data to do an in-depth study of the rejection letter genre! But keeping a healthy separation between my identity and my book, and trying to be disciplined in pushing past setbacks to the next stage, eventually the right people saw it and were willing to back the project. I am so grateful to everyone who made this possible, including the editors of RIPBC, and especially Dru Johnson who was generous with his time and super encouraging.

Hope you all like it!