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How might the task of reading the Bible be regarded as labor? What happens when biblical texts are read in ways that highlight the work of interpretation? The Labour of Reading provides a collection of new and distinct readings of biblical texts. Gathered to honor the scholarship and teaching of Robert Culley, these essays seek to carry on his legacy. Covering both the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, they range through cultural and literary studies, philosophy, sociology and feminism, among other disciplines. The unifying motif is the need to work hard at and labor with the text: the legacy of Robert Culley.


Seraphim and Poetic Process
—Francis Landy

What is My Beloved? On Erotic Reading and the Song of Songs
—Fiona C. Black

To Love the Lord: An Intertextual Reading of John 20
—Adele Reinhartz

In the Eye of the Beholder: Wishing, Dreaming, and Double Entendre in the Song of Songs
—J. Cheryl Exum

Sing Us One of the Songs of Zion: Poetry and Theology in the Hebrew Bible
—Robert B. Robinson

Imagining Arrival: Rhetoric, Reader, and Word of God in Deuteronomy 1–3
—Susan Slater

Yearning for Jerusalem: Reading Myth on the Web
—David M. Gunn

Reading the Land: Holy Land as Text of Witness
—Burke O. Long

David Is a Thing
—Roland Boer

Bettered Woman: Elisha and the Shunammite in the Deuteronomic Work
—David Jobling

Reading Story in Judges 1
—Susan Niditch

Icelandic and Israelite Beginnings: A Comparative Probe
—Norman K. Gottwald

On Reading the Story of the Man of God from Judah in 1 Kings 13
—John Van Seters

The Labour of Sharing
—John Dominic Crossan

The Killing Fields of Matthew’s Gospel
—Gary A. Phillips

Labouring with Abusive Biblical Texts: Tracing Trajectories of Misogyny
—Pamela J. Milne

Playing It Again: Utopia, Contradiction, Hybrid Space and the Bright Future in Micah
—Erin Runions

In Job’s Face/Facing Job
—Edward Greenstein