Finding Beauty in the Bible - (McMaster Biblical Studies) by Robert D Miller

Book Synopsis

We approach Raphael's Agony in the Garden or Fra Angelico's Crucifixion for their beauty and not primarily to learn about fifteenth-century fashion or even to decode the iconography. Yet the many books on the Song of Songs, whether they try to read the book as an ancient Near Eastern love song or a Christian allegory, miss the main point of this book: its aesthetic elements. ""Aesthetics"" is the appreciation of beauty. Aesthetics examines literary form as a response to content, the way poetics works with contents, the use of loaded semantic terms, even the sound created by words and what cognitive science tells us it does to listeners. This book uses the commentary format to accompany an individual's reading of the Song of Songs, focusing on these neglected aspects of the text. It both reads the book as it is meant to be read and opens up a new vista on this magnificent biblical text.

Review Quotes

"Robert Miller has done a very difficult thing: he has read an ancient literary masterpiece as though it were written just yesterday, yet without once losing sight of its cultural remoteness or compromising its irreducible strangeness. An elegant book about beautiful love-poems."
--Brian McHale, author of The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems

"Robert Miller offers an illuminating and fresh study of the evocative power of beauty in the Bible's Song of Songs. It is a careful and sophisticated commentary on the Song's poetic elements that yields new insights into the Song's myriad meanings. Using aesthetic criticism, Miller does more than help us understand beauty within the Song; he demonstrates that beauty is a reverberating energy between the reader and this text."
--Carey Ellen Walsh, author of Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs

About the Author

Robert Miller is ordinary professor of Old Testament at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and a research affiliate of the University of Pretoria Faculty of Theology & Religion. He is the author of many books on the Old Testament and ancient Israel.