Description: This book charts the mutations of the book of Jonah as it latches onto Christian and Jewish motifs and anxieties, passes through highbrow and lowbrow culture, and finally becomes something of a scavenger among the ruins, as, in its most resourceful move to date, it begins to live off the demise of faith. This book is concerned with those versions of the biblical that escape proper disciplinary boundaries: it shifts the focus from "Mainstream" to "Backwater" interpretation. It is less a navigation of interpretative history and more an interrogation of larger political/cultural issues: anti-Judaism in Biblical Studies, the secularization of the Bible, and the projection of the Bible as credulous ingenu, naive Other to our savvy post-Enlightenment selves.
Review Quotes: "A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives is surely one of the most erudite, compelling, and well-written books of the most recent generation of biblical scholarship. Sherwood combines a solid grounding in biblical studies and the history of interpretation, a sophisticated knowledge of the literature of cultural studies and literary theory, and an underlying commitment to the ethical and moral demands of reading. And mediating it all is the author's distinctive prose style. By turns elegant and witty, urbane and laugh-out-loud funny, Sherwood seems incapable of writing a bland sentence." Journal of Biblical Literature