First Published in 1990, The Bible as Rhetoric explores the ways in which the persuasive strategies employed in the biblical texts relate (both positively and negatively) to their preoccupations with religious and historical truth. The book contains pioneering interdisciplinary papers that clarify what is at issue in the apparently competing claims that the Bible should be read ‘as literature’ and ‘as scripture’.

Uniquely, the volume brings together philosophers, literary critics, biblical scholars, theologians, and historians of ideas who combine the best biblical and historical scholarship with a range of contemporary approaches to the study of texts, from the deconstructive and the feminist through the Wittgensteinian to those of the heirs of the tradition of practical criticism. The volume is of importance both to those interested in the applications of contemporary literary theory and to all those concerned with the relation between religious and secular readings of the Bible.