From Iron Age To Independence

The publication and attention given to postcolonial work has flooded the field of academia, yet not much attention has been paid to the precolonial, premissional, and colonial eras, and receptions of the Western Missionary Bible and its impact on the colonization of Global South nations; schools in this area had to wrestle with the study of the Bible from kindergarten to college. Through vigorous readings of the New Testament and other related subjects, indigenous Christian converts demanded that the Bible needed to be translated into various vernacular and ethnic languages. The hunger for engaging the Bible in the linguistic worldview of people led to the process of translation, printing, and distribution into rural and urban centers. Hence the journey of the Bible and its reception in the Global South is what is referred to as "Vernacular Translation as Incarnation" (taken from John 1:14). Therefore, this book is an invitation to postcolonial readers of the Bible, as well as an urgent invitation to both Europe and North America to consider having the Bible in schools so that young minds can be engaged by it. Without translations of the Bible into the vernacular, Christianity would not be growing as it is in the Global South nations, namely Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Hence, vernacular translations of the Bible are indeed incarnational.

Israel Kamudzandu explores the legacy of how the Shona found in the figure of Abraham himself a potent resource for cultural resistance, and makes intriguing comparisons with the ways the apostle Paul used the same figure in his interaction with the ancestry of Aeneas in imperial myths of the destiny of the Roman people. The result is a groundbreaking study that combines the best tradition-historical insights with postcolonial-critical acumen. Kamudzandu offers at last a model of multi-cultural Christianity forged in the experience of postcolonial Zimbabwe.

As biblical studies becomes increasingly fragmented, this collection of essays brings together a number of leading scholars in order to show how historical reconstruction, philology, metacriticism, and reception history can be part of a collective vision for the future of the field. This collection of essays focuses more specifically on critical questions surrounding the construction of ancient Israel(s), 'minimalism', the ongoing significance of lexicography, the development of early Judaism, orientalism, and the use of the Bible in contemporary political discourses. Contributors include John van Seters, Niels Peter Lemche, Ingrid Hjelm, and Philip R. Davies.

By the third century BC, the once-modest settlement of Rome had conquered most of Italy and was poised to build an empire throughout the Mediterranean basin. What transformed a humble city into the preeminent power of the region? In The Rise of Rome, the historian and archaeologist Kathryn Lomas reconstructs the diplomatic ploys, political stratagems, and cultural exchanges whereby Rome established itself as a dominant player in a region already brimming with competitors. The Latin world, she argues, was not so much subjugated by Rome as unified by it. This new type of society that emerged from Rome’s conquest and unification of Italy would serve as a political model for centuries to come. Archaic Italy was home to a vast range of ethnic communities, each with its own language and customs. Some such as the Etruscans, and later the Samnites, were major rivals of Rome. From the late Iron Age onward, these groups interacted in increasingly dynamic ways within Italy and beyond, expanding trade and influencing religion, dress, architecture, weaponry, and government throughout the region. Rome manipulated preexisting social and political structures in the conquered territories with great care, extending strategic invitations to citizenship and thereby allowing a degree of local independence while also fostering a sense of imperial belonging. In the story of Rome’s rise, Lomas identifies nascent political structures that unified the empire’s diverse populations, and finds the beginnings of Italian peoplehood.

In this volume, Harding examines the deposition of Iron Age human and animal remains in Britain and challenges the assumption that there should have been any regular form of cemetery in prehistory, arguing that the dead were more commonly integrated into settlements of the living than segregated into dedicated cemeteries.