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SBL Press simultaneously publishes hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions of essential research in the fields of biblical studies and related disciplines.

Forthcoming from SBL Press Ancient Tyre between Myth and History by Hélène Sader John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 and 2 Timothy by Pauline Allen John, Jesus, and History, Volume 5: Jesus Remembered within the Johannine Tradition edited by Paul N. Anderson, Felix S. J. Just, and Tom Thatcher The Invention of Early Christian Discourse, Volume 1: Rhetography, Rhetology and Storyline in Wisdom, Prophetic, and Apocalyptic Rhetorolect by Vernon K. Robbins
Coming soon from WGRW John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 and 2 Timothy by Pauline Allen
Book cover Reading Ruth in Settler Colonial Australia Rebecca Lindsay In writing this prologue, I offer my respect to the scholars whose voices I encounter, who continue to engage and challenge my thinking and my being. This respect is essential to the methodologies that I unfold in the work that follows. I also offer my respect to you as reader. I do not know how you understand your location and belonging, but your part in this conversation will be easier if you know something of how I understand my entanglements and location within settler colonial Australia. —Rebecca Lindsay
book cover Carrying Qoheleth’s Maota (House): An Australian-Samoan Diasporic Reading Brian Fiu Kolia
“Papyrus Bookrolls with Jewish and Christian Content” Are there continuities or consistencies that over time, even into the Christian era, distinguish Septuagint bookrolls from bookrolls containing classical Greek literature? For purposes of this investigation, we will limit ourselves to Septuagint books written on papyrus (not leather), and as bookrolls (i.e., not in codex form). — William A. Johnson and Nicholas E. Wagner
“Children Dwelling in a Field”: Age, Gender, and the Exegesis of Creation in Gospel of Thomas 21 I show that the idea of regression toward infancy illuminates Thomas’s backward reading of Gen 1–3, through which the gospel addresses the anthropological and cosmological differences between the two creation accounts. — Eunyung Lim
book cover Reading Ruth in Settler Colonial Australia Rebecca Lindsay
“The Letter to Titus and Apostolic Succession in Crete” Given the goals of each of the individuals involved, the lack of any reference to Titus by Dionysius, Philip, Pinytus, or Eusebius makes it likely that none of these actors cited the letter. Thus, there is a situation in the second century and in Eusebius’s writing in which all parties have compelling reasons to cite Titus, but none do. This raises the question as to why any reference to Titus is absent from this correspondence. — Michael Scott Robertson
The Allegory of the Cross in Galatians This article thus develops an account of how Paul came to understand one man’s crucifixion to have implicated the whole cosmos, from the elemental structures of reality to the innermost depths of the heart: a radically universalized and interiorized—that is to say, allegorical—vision of the cross. — Samuel B. Johnson
“ The Paraclete as Christian Muse: Audience-Critical Reflections on the Fourth Gospel’s Extrahistorical Claims” In this study, I argue that a mythologically informed Greco-Roman audience may have perceived the role attributed to the Paraclete in the Farewell Discourse as analogous to that of the Muses (Μούσες)—the inspirational and omniscient god desses of literature. Such a correspondence would have offered these hearers a culturally intelligible framework for navigating the epistemological challenges posed by the gospel’s extrahistorical claims. — Sanghwan Lee
“The Johannine Reception of a Matthean Legend” Attending not only to the isolated units of tradition but also to the narrative whole of each of these gospels enables us to perceive with greater clarity the traces of Matthew’s influence on John. Similarly, situating John within the broader phenomenon of gospel writing, not just his canonical context, allows us to appreciate more fully his reception of Matthew’s raising of the saints as a creative transformation of prior tradition. — Daniel Frayer-Griggs
“Internalized Foreignness and Judahite Identity (Re)Construction in Ezekiel 16” I have interpreted Ezekiel’s use of shared traditions concerning land, sexuality, and exclusion that are found also in Leviticus as a further expression of these dynamics, whereby colonized groups may reproduce and rework justificationsof subjugation and land rights in their own struggles for legitimacy. — Natalie F. Mylonas
“ ‘He Shall Not Be Put to Shame’: Honor-and-Shame Culture as the Overlooked Context of Psalm 127” In contrast to the approach of many scholars, the last two cola of Ps 127 (v. 5cd) have been my starting point for reading the psalm. The expressions “shall not be put to shame” (v. 5c) and “speak with enemies in the gate” (v. 5d) call for an analysis of the text from the perspective of honor-and-shame culture. — Iman Jaya Zandroto
BOOK COVER To the Ends of the Earth: The Necropolitics of the Acts of the Apostles Eric C. Smith The pages of history are always imprinted with the weight of the anxieties of the present age. Ink is pressed into the pages under the force of the preoccupations of the writer’s world—politics and love, peace and war, scarcity and plenty, inspiration and disappointment, domination and subjection. Like the great mechanical workings of early printing presses, which pushed black ink into paper, our words about the past are given force and permanence by the heft of the machinery of the time in which they are written, and our words about the past are as freighted with the present as they are with any time gone by. —Eric C. Smith
“Nonlinear Literary Dependence between Ezekiel and H? Evaluating Recent Suggestions” Limiting the criterion of incongruity to examples of grammatical incongruity keeps the criteria for determining literary dependence more objective than seeking to detect incongruity in the message or concepts of a particular author, which necessarily involves a certain level of subjective interpretation. —Seth Johnson
All SBL Press and Brown Judaic Studies titles are 30 percent off during the SBL Press International Meeting Sale. Visit our store and use the promo code IM2026 between now and 8 August to receive the discount.
Book sover Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles Joseph A. Marchal, editor “A Slave to All’: The Queerness of Paul’s Slave Form” “I felt it as I wondered, following the lead of Jennifer A. Glancy (1998), whether enslaved persons would have been counted as full members of the ekklēsiai in Christ when they had no control over the sexual uses of their bodies, being denied the sort of selfcontrol with which Paul was so deeply concerned. I felt the urgency of such critical analysis being animated, in no small part, by debates raging within contemporary Christian churches over the inclusion, or not, of LGBTQ+ Christians. The question of who can count authentically as Christian, then or now, is not merely an academic or historical exercise.” —Tyler M. Schwaller
“The Usefulness of an Onesimus: The Sexual Use of Slaves and Paul’s Letter to Philemon” Various sources show that this use of slaves was both ubiquitous and unexceptional for the centuries preceding and following the creation and circulation of Paul's letters. Nevertheless, an appreciation of this ubiquity is itself far from ubiquitous among Pauline scholars, since the limited considerations of the sexual use of slaves have yet to extend to understanding the terminologies of use and the figure of Onesimus in Paul's shortest letter. —Joseph A. Marchal
Book Cover Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles Joseph A. Marchal, editor “Pauline Anthropology as System and the Problem of Romans 1” “Eve’s difference functions as a persistent disjointing link, an unavoidable remainder troubling the system’s pretensions to anthropological coherence and totality—and in the process, pointing to the theological instability of all sexual subject positions, within the terms of a system that attempts (or at least assumes) precisely this stability. ” —Benjamin H. Dunning
Book Cover Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles Joseph A. Marchal, editor “A Little Porneia Leavens the Whole: Queer(ing) Limits of Community in 1 Corinthians 5” “Porneia, in its sense as an ambiguous and anti–status quo possibility, animates the community’s imagination of what being ex-ethnē can mean, including a potential embrace of what the ethnē would reject.” —Midori E. Hartman
Cover of Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship edited by Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone “Bodies Del Otro Lado Finding Life and Hope in the Borderland: Gloria Anzaldúa, the Ethiopian Eunuch of Acts 8:26–40, y Yo” “In Mexico, a joto like me is not allowed to interpret the Bible because ‘I have my own agenda,’ as I am often told, meaning that my word is illegitimate, incapable of producing any ‘real meaning’ in my biblical interpretation. ‘He is a bastard who speaks nonsense,’ they say of me, whereas their discourse and interpretation are classified and validated on the basis of ‘social location.’ In this context, my body and my joterías have become homeless and borderless.” — Manuel Villalobo
JBL cover “Pornographic Desire in the Pauline Corpus” I argue that, for Paul, πορνεία, as his term of choice for sex work, connotes inordinate sexual desire—even within marriage—as evidenced by his correlation of πορνεία and ἀκρασία (“lack of self-control”) —Joshua M. Reno
JBL Cover “Of Social Death and Solitary Confinement: The Political Life of a Gerasene (Luke 8:26–39)” I offer a complementary solution in the shape of what I call a trajectory of interpretation: a theorybased approach, intercontextual in its application that, in the case of the Gerasene, takes thick descriptions of contemporary experiences of social death, more specifically of solitary confinement, as a starting point to explore the character. —Luis Menéndez-Antuña
Book cover Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship edited by Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone “Queer Reading between Bible and Film: Paris Is Burning and the “Legendary Houses” “Gender ambiguity and the feminization of men appear in the biblical representation of the struggle between Israel’s legendary houses even prior to 2 Sam 3. If we look carefully at earlier stages of the story, we may find something rather closer to Runions’s notion of biblical gender ‘mixing’ in the figure of the brother whom Ishbaal apparently replaces, another one of the legendary children of the house of Saul: Jonathan.” —Ken Stone
Book cover Transgender, Intersex, and Biblical Interpretation Teresa J. Hornsby and Deryn Guest Modeling the Transgender Gaze: Performances of Masculinities in 2 Kings 9–10 “In 2 Kgs 9, Jezebel steps on to the stage only to die, but some significant threads in these few verses are worthy of comment. I limit myself to three points: (1) Jezebel occupies “masculine” space; (2) Jezebel is deliberately feminized; and (3) the connection of Jezebel with the goddess enhances, rather than undermines, the portrayal of female masculinity.” —Deryn Guest
Book Review The Straight Mind in Corinth: Queer Readings across 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 Gillian Townsley “Throughout this discussion, various issues of gender and sexuality have emerged. Primarily these have revolved around the interrelationship between effeminacy, masculinity, and same-sex behavior and the ways in which these have been entwined with certain views of women.” —Gillian Townsley
Book cover Queer Readings of the Centurion at Capernaum: Their History and Politics Christopher B. Zeichmann “Interpretations, whether homoerotic or heteronormative, tend to preoccupy themselves with the theological authority of Jesus and are largely concerned with how Jesus, Matthew, Luke, or Q understood same-sex intercourse. For this reason, much this discussion of Secret Mark applies mutatis mutandis to the homoerotic interpretation of the centurion at Capernaum; there is a widespread academic interest in reassuring readers that nothing too queer was going on in early Christianity.” —Christopher B. Zeichmann
Book Cover Queer Readings of the Centurion at Capernaum: Their History and Politics Christopher B. Zeichmann “If the homophile readings discussed in chapter 1 presumed a certain acceptance of queer people’s outsider status—adopting a position to the effect of “we do not require full participation in mainstream heterosexual culture, but we affirm your values and only ask you not punish us for having sex with people the same age as those you do”—then Anglophone gay readings saw a greater shift toward a politics of assimilation.” —Christopher B. Zeichmann
Book cover Transgender, Intersex, and Biblical Interpretation Teresa J. Hornsby, Deryn Guest Troubling the Waters: תהום†, Transgender, and Reading Genesis Backwards “The stage opening of creation, for all its unsettling lack of coordinates, potentially reveals to us something of the Divine, and if we pause the scene at those opening two verses rather than rushing forward to ‘Let there be light’ and the subsequent feats of creation, we can explore that divine presence in the qualities of formlessness and fluidity.” —Deryn Guest
Book coverr The Straight Mind in Corinth: Queer Readings across 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 Gillian Townsley “I am unaware of any study that goes beyond an association of gender with feminism and considers the ideologies of masculinity that lie behind not only this text but also various interpretations or utilizations of it. This may partly be explained, I suspect, by the lack of recognition by the majority of scholars that the Corinthian men are involved in the problem Paul is addressing.” —Gillian Townsley
Book cover Queer Readings of the Centurion at Capernaum: Their History and Politics Christopher B. Zeichmann “Homophile interpreters frequently framed themselves like they do the centurion: outsiders to Judeo-Christianity, seeking only the end of discrimination by those deemed more religious. In effect, saying to homophobic Christians: isn’t it queer that your own Bible depicts Jesus healing a homophile without judgment? Jesus does not endorse their relationship in French interpretations, unlike later readings. Rather, French homophile interpretations regard as sufficient that Jesus does not care one way or another.” —Christopher B. Zeichmann
Book cover The Straight Mind in Corinth: Queer Readings across 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 Gillian Townsley “By intersecting biblical studies and queer theory, this project creates a marginal zone of critical inquiry, something that theorist Judith Butler (1999, xxxii) reminds us is required when examining the complex issues of gender and sexuality.” —Gillian Townsley
Book cover Transgender, Intersex, and Biblical Interpretation Teresa J. Hornsby and Deryn Guest Introduction: The Body as Decoy “The complexity of bodies and their social destinies are all entangled within (and produced by) heteronormativity: the dominant belief system that relies on fixed and binary genders and the certainty that heterosexuality is the norm that occurs naturally, that is, apart from cultural influences.” —Teresa J. Hornsby
Book Review Queer Readings of the Centurion at Capernaum: Their History and Politics Christopher B. Zeichmann “Zeichmann is at his best when he synthesizes the information he has presented, both the historical-critical textual analysis and the politically-minded survey of the history of its reception, to connect ancient and modern interactions between queer people and the states, markets, and cultures they inhabit.” —Erin Beall, The Bible & Critical Theory
Book Review The Straight Mind in Corinth: Queer Readings across 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 Gillian Townsley “In short, this book is one of a kind, and not to be missed.” —Joseph A. Marchal, Review of Biblical Literature
Book Review Transgender, Intersex, and Biblical Interpretation Teresa J. Hornsby and Deryn Guest “The book is an ethically motivated and necessary corrective offering counternarratives to dominant transphobic and transmisogynistic renderings of biblical narratives.” —Jo Henderson-Merrygold, Review of Biblical Literature
Queer Bibles, Queer Scriptures? An Introductory Response One cannot engage questions of sexuality, race/ethnicity, and gender these days and not be aware of—and to some degree feel responsible to—the fraught status of “the Bible” in ongoing debates over the status of sexual minorities within communities around the globe that take this peculiar collection of texts as “Scripture.” —Ellen T. Armour
Queer Theory and Historical-Critical Exegesis: Queering Biblicists—A Response I believe that queer readings will have a longer lasting impact and will speak to a greater audience if they are framed as a reading strategy that adds new layers to our appreciation of the Bible. This will require queer theorists to allow themselves to land for even a moment in the world of meaning making and, perhaps more challenging, it will require more traditional biblicists to heed the voice of Jewish textual tradition that “these and these are the word of the living God” (b. ‘Erub. 34a). —S. Tamar Kamionkowski
Penderecki’s Iron Maiden: Intimacy and Other Anomalies in the Canticum canticorum Salomonis Details of music history fortify my appropriation of this tale of love as emblematically queer and postmodern. For it is a product of rebellion not just within postwar political/cultural history but within modern music history as well. —Heidi Epstein
Paul, the Goddess Religions, and Queer Sects: Romans 1:23–28 The cumulative evidence suggests that Paul's context for the entire pericope of Rom 1:18-32 is idolatry, and that w. 26-27 refer to the gender and sex-variant practices of the goddess cults. —Jeramy Townsley
Book cover: Bridging the Interpretive Abyss: Reading the New Testament after the Cultural Studies Turn by Luis Menéndez-Antuña From a historiographical perspective, a queer optic offers an intercontextual reading that explores virtual connections across periods, frustrating the grasp that historical-critical, literary, and sociological studies hold on the biblical text. Queer historicism here seeks to transcend authorial intention and intended audience as the exclusive criteria to understand, explain, or expand textual meaning, and it does so through the lens of artistic representation
Book cover: Feminism, Queerness, Affect, and Romans: Under God? by Jimmy Hoke The optimistic attachments πίστις forged bound subjects in relations structured kyriarchically, such as enslaved persons to enslavers, loyal subjects to their emperor, or Jesus to God. πίστις in Rome and Romans required faithful submission.
Book cover: Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles Joseph A. Marchal, editor Interpreting as Queer or Interpreting Queerly? “I am interested in how material objects, such as collars and fetters, contributed to the enslaved body as an assemblage and how this relates to queerness.... Do we see Paul (or other New Testament and early Christian authors) ever using rhetoric that draws on these material aspects of enslavement?” —Lynn R. Huber
Book cover: Bridging the Interpretive Abyss: Reading the New Testament after the Cultural Studies Turn by Luis Menéndez-Antuña The Bible, after all, represents our cultural past as much as our political present. This is an invitation to complexify the historiographical mandate by way of strengthening the weakest link of the hermeneutical processes: past and present, text and interpreter, history and culture.
Book cover: Feminism, Queerness, Affect, and Romans: Under God? by Jimmy Hoke In attempting to unstick Rom 1:18–32 from these harmful affective effects, queer biblical scholarship itself gets stuck in Rom 1:18–32. How can a queer and feminist affective critique of Romans address these sticky verses of its opening chapter—without getting stuck in them for the remaining pages?
Book cover: Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles Joseph A. Marchal, editor Monstrous Bodies in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians “Inside this broader frame of subject and abject, female, and specifically maternal, bodies function in a powerful way to define monstrosity.” —Valérie Nicolet
Book cover: Bridging the Interpretive Abyss: Reading the New Testament after the Cultural Studies Turn by Luis Menéndez-Antuña Historicism relies on inextricable links between exegesis, objectivism, and scientificism. As a virtual solution, from a global perspective, I explore what models of knowledge are available to scholars disinvested in the afterlife of the Enlightenment.
Book cover: Feminism, Queerness, Affect, and Romans: Under God? by Jimmy Hoke Far too often in patriarchal and even in feminist history, equality has been heralded as having arrived (reminiscent, perhaps, of Caesar’s triumphal processions [παρουσίαι] that ushered in justice, equality, and πίστις to the nations he conquered). Yet these announcements have always been premature since, as killjoys show, equality today is still imagined in unequal terms.
Book cover: Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles Joseph A. Marchal, editor Wasting Time at the End of the World: Queer Failure, Unproductivity, and Unintelligibility in 1 Corinthians “I suggest that a hermeneutic of queer time deconstructs purpose and productivity as the foundations of authority, thereby dismantling the social hierarchies constructed on political and spiritual economies.” —Lindsey Guy
Book Review Book cover: Bridging the Interpretive Abyss: Reading the New Testament after the Cultural Studies Turn Luis Menéndez-Antuña “People and scholars of privilege must read this book.” —A. L. Kolp, Baldwin Wallace University Reprinted with permission from CHOICE http://www.choicereviews.org, copyright by the American Library Association.
Book review book cover: Feminism, Queerness, Affect, and Romans: Under God? by Jimmy Hoke “Hoke’s monograph is an important contribution to the scholarship on Romans, not least because it dares to ask different questions of the epistle and include a diversity of addressees.” —Valérie Nicolet, Review of Biblical Literature
SBL Press Spring Sale Time is running out for 30% off! Use code SP2026 through 5 June Book cover of Narrative Mode and Theological Claim in Johannine Literature: Essays in Honor of Gail R. O’Day edited by Lynn R. Huber, Susan Hylen, and William M. Wright IV
Book Review Book cover Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles Joseph A. Marchal, editor “a wider, more creative range of strategies for reading gender and sexuality in Paul.” —Matthew V. Novenson, Journal for the Study of the New Testament
SBL Press Spring Sale Time is running out for 30% off! Use code SP2026 through 5 June Book cover of Women and the Society of Biblical Literature edited by Nicole L. Tilford
Book cover Humor in the Midst of Mark Jon Carman Book review “Carman’s elegant methodological approach provides a replicable framework for future research. The volume succeeds in establishing GTVH [General Theory of Verbal Humor] as a viable tool for biblical humor analysis, moving beyond impressionistic approaches to systematic methodology. More importantly, this work suggests that recognizing humor’s function may offer fresh perspectives on familiar passages and enrich our reading of Mark’s theological message.” —Christine Smaller, Review of Biblical Literature
SBL Press Spring Sale Time is running out for 30% off! Use code SP2026 through 5 June Book cover of Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship edited by Teresa J. Hornsby and Ken Stone