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Book Review: Life in Biblical Israel

For most passages, Davis provides homiletic exegesis of five to twenty-six pages each. Davis is to be commended for her effort to reconnect Christians with their Hebrew heritage. She chooses passages that Christians may easily appropriate for "spiritually engaged reading" (p. 1). But the historical narratives, legal corpus, and prophetic texts are noticeably absent. Without treatment of the majority of the Old Testament, and especially those texts that seem to confirm Christian misperceptions about the God described by our Hebrew ancestors, the subtitle, "Rediscovering the Old Testament," seems an overstatement. Davis's writing style is fresh and engaging, and preachers and teachers will find useful ideas for proclamation and education. In Davis's hands, these Old Testament texts describe a God who is anxious and then relieved about human actions (p. 60-61), who "loves pizzazz" (p. 139), who "resists being taken for granted yet longs to be desired" (p. 157), and who is "terribly vulnerable to human sin . . . [as] a tearing pain in God's heart and God's gut" (p. 172). This collection is easily accessible by persons who are not biblical scholars and would work well for a Sunday School class or Bible Study.