Philip Esler, "Reading Biblical Narrative with Its Ancient Audience"

PHILIP ESLER has an essay posted at the Bible and Interpretation website:

Reading Biblical Narrative with Its Ancient Audience

Cultures similar to, but certainly not the same as, those of ancient Israel and sharing all of these features have existed around the Mediterranean until very recent times and have been studied closely by anthropologists,... By applying this material to biblical narratives we can wash away our modern, Northern Atlantic understandings of what they meant and find something very different and very exciting underneath.


For further details of this research and for references to the secondary authors referred to, please see Philip F. Esler, Sex, Wives, and Warriors: Reading Biblical Narrative With Its Ancient Audience (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011).