A Few of My Favorite Books from Seminary

Or, How to Make Your Bookshelf Look Like You Went to Seminary

I’ve got a pretty intense couple of weeks at work ahead of me, so I wanted to take it easy. At the same time, I don’t want to leave my readers hanging, so this week I wanted to discuss some of my favorite books I was assigned in Seminary. I’ve written a bit about my Seminary experiences before, but one of my favorite things about it was all the great reading. Here are the books that, years later, I still keep on my shelf.

Eerdman’s

Apocalypse Against Empire by Anathea E. Portier-Young

Portier-Young’s work informs a lot of my own thinking about Apocalypse as a biblical genre. Her book focuses primarily on Jewish apocalypses, particularly the Book of Daniel, the Apocalypse of Weeks and the Book of Dreams, not engaging with Revelation directly. She places these in the context of Seleucid, or Greek, persecution of Jewish religious practices and proposes that they represent rebellious and revolutionary literature, meant to convey subversive messages in a cultural code that would go over the heads of the occupying soldiers. It’s an…