Review: Marvin L. Chaney, Uriah Y. Kim, and Annette Schellenberg (eds.), Reading a Tendentious Bible: Essays in Honor of Robert B. Coote

Robert B. Coote is internationally renowned for work on the Bible and the ancient Near East that crosses the usual disciplinary boundaries. Whether re-examining arcane inscriptions, conventional views of the Pentateuch, Israel’s early history, the composition of a particular book of the Bible, or the making of the Bible in the broader sense, his question has been not whether some texts are tendentious and others not, but rather how each biblical composition or re-composition pushes back against its contexts. Coote’s skill in explicating the subtle interplay between contextual foil and literary structure and content has been a major characteristic of his work. Nineteen colleagues, friends, and former students have joined to honour Bob Coote with this Festschrift. Their wide-ranging contributions cover many, but not all of the interests of his prodigious career—textual criticism (Emanuel Tov), literary studies in several guises (Barbara Green, Uriah Y. Kim, Annette Schellenberg, Chris Seeman), historiography (Norman K. Gottwald, Ernst Axel Knauf, Keith W. Whitelam), social institutions (John H. Elliott, Sarah Shectman), text and social context (Marvin L. Chaney, Eugene Eung-Chun Park, Herman C. Waetjen), cultural memory (Ronald Hendel), ethnic identity (Aaron J. Brody), relationship of oral and written ‘texts’ (Antoinette Clark Wire), iconography and text (Annette Weissenrieder), cuneiform and gender studies (Mary Frances Wogec), and hermeneutics (Chandler Stokes).