Here are 100 books that Today's Handbook of Bible Times and Customs fans have personally recommended if you like
Today's Handbook of Bible Times and Customs.
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I have been an avid reader of historical fiction since I was very young, and I love learning about the life and times of different periods of history. One might describe me as a "research junkie." My desire to know more about the everyday lives of my historical characters has taken me on many wonderful adventures, and my personal library is full of books I use for research. I write fiction, creative nonfiction, and novels. I am currently completing a new novel about a family of downwinders, people who contracted cancer from government-sanctioned radioactive fallout from the atomic bomb tests in Nevada during the 1950s and 1960s.
When I pulled this book off my library shelves, I discovered it was still bookmarked with about 40 Post-it flags. This was one of my go-to books for research about life and times in first-century Palestine. The book is divided into sections with labels such as "Family Life," "Religion and Magic," and "Labour and Trade." Each section contains detailed discussions on subtopics related to the main section. For example, under "Family Life," you will find information on clothing, marriage, and divorce, jewelry, food, housing, etc. There are wonderful illustrations and drawings. At the end of each chapter, there is a list of suggested reading and a full bibliography. I spent hours pouring through the resources here when researching my own novel.
Written by an international and interdisciplinary team of distinguished scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine is an indispensable reference compendium on the day-to-day lives of Jews in the land of Israel in Roman times. Ranging from subjects such as clothing and domestic architecture to food and meals, labour and trade, and leisure time activities, the volume covers all the major themes in an encompassing yet easily accessible way. Individual chapters introduce the reader to the current state of research on particular aspects of ancient Jewish everyday life-research which has been greatly enriched by critical methodological…
I have been an avid reader of historical fiction since I was very young, and I love learning about the life and times of different periods of history. One might describe me as a "research junkie." My desire to know more about the everyday lives of my historical characters has taken me on many wonderful adventures, and my personal library is full of books I use for research. I write fiction, creative nonfiction, and novels. I am currently completing a new novel about a family of downwinders, people who contracted cancer from government-sanctioned radioactive fallout from the atomic bomb tests in Nevada during the 1950s and 1960s.
Part of my job when writing historical fiction is to know the "lay of the land." That means understanding regional maps, the geography, the climate, and the flora and fauna of the era and location of my story. I turned to this book so often that some of the pages are falling out. Beautifully illustrated with color photos, maps, and drawings, this book describes the history and main features of twelve main geographical regions in the Holy Land and connects them to major events in the Old and New Testaments. It's an accessible resource that functions more as a cultural atlas than simply as a map atlas.
The first atlas of the Bible to treat its subject geographically rather than historically, this unique work features the main biblical sites, illustrated with photographs and colour maps. The book opens with a description of the Bible, explains how it came to be composed and how it has been transmitted to us through medieval manuscript copies and modern translations. The second section of the text provides an outline of the historical background of the Bible, from the time of Abraham to the close of the New Testament period. The third and principal section discusses the main geographical regions of the…
I have been an avid reader of historical fiction since I was very young, and I love learning about the life and times of different periods of history. One might describe me as a "research junkie." My desire to know more about the everyday lives of my historical characters has taken me on many wonderful adventures, and my personal library is full of books I use for research. I write fiction, creative nonfiction, and novels. I am currently completing a new novel about a family of downwinders, people who contracted cancer from government-sanctioned radioactive fallout from the atomic bomb tests in Nevada during the 1950s and 1960s.
As its title implies, this book is accessible to the entire family and would be a great resource for Sunday school teachers who want to provide their students with a larger understanding of the life and times of peoples in ancient Palestine and Rome. The book is broken down into easy-to-find categories such as "The Home," "Warfare," and "Travel and Communication," to name a few. There are stunning photographs on every page with detailed and clear explanations. The back of the book has timelines of the Bible and a map of Palestine in New Testament times with highlights of key events in the New Testament. There is also an alphabetical index that makes it easy to find information on specific topics.
Discusses historical and cultural topics relevant to an understanding of the Bible, under such topics as archaeology, geography, government, business, education, and health.
I have been an avid reader of historical fiction since I was very young, and I love learning about the life and times of different periods of history. One might describe me as a "research junkie." My desire to know more about the everyday lives of my historical characters has taken me on many wonderful adventures, and my personal library is full of books I use for research. I write fiction, creative nonfiction, and novels. I am currently completing a new novel about a family of downwinders, people who contracted cancer from government-sanctioned radioactive fallout from the atomic bomb tests in Nevada during the 1950s and 1960s.
As a writer of historical fiction, I believe context is everything, and this book provides a scholarly discussion of the beliefs and practices of the period that inspired Christianity. In order to understand the teachings of Jesus, it can be extremely helpful to understand where Jesus came from, including the culture he grew up in. This book draws upon recent archaeological findings and translations to discuss in the detail the philosophical and psychological foundations of Jesus' ideas and beliefs. As a contextual biography of Jesus' life, it offers a readable and compelling story of Jesus' world.
Beginning with the Gospels, interpretations of the life of Jesus have flourished for nearly two millennia, yet a clear and coherent picture of Jesus as a man has remained elusive. In Rabbi Jesus, the noted biblical scholar Bruce Chilton places Jesus within the context of his times to present a fresh, historically accurate, and revolutionary examination of the man who founded Christianity.
Drawing on recent archaeological findings and new translations and interpretations of ancient texts, Chilton discusses in enlightening detail the philosophical and psychological foundations of Jesus’ ideas and beliefs. His in-depth investigation also provides evidence that contradicts long-held beliefs…
Before I became a writer, I worked for a time in the violence against women sector, and I started to see how violence against women was normalised or sanctioned by a complex matrix of laws, norms, and ideas that stick to our society like a spider’s web. I wanted to do my part in unpicking the web—and for me, as a writer, that comes in the form of beginning to break down simplistic stories and archetypes about what women should be, and what they historically might have been, in favour of a liberated future where the true potential of half the human race can be dreamed of, and realised.
A fascinating novel that depicts, in unsettlingly flat style, a historic gang-rape of a Palestinian woman by Israeli soldiers. Cut to the present day and a nameless, obsessive narrator becomes an amateur sleuth, preoccupied with understanding what took place. A brilliant meditation on memory, agency, and our relationship with history.
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba - the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people - and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this 'minor detail' of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience…
I read my first novel when I was seven and wrote my first full story when I was eight. I’ve never stopped putting words to paper. Along with a passion for reading and writing, I’ve always been an all or nothing kind of person. When I want to know something, I dig and research until I know everything I can, which is exactly what I did when my eyes were opened to the spiritual warfare going on all around us. I’ve lost count of how many dozens of times I’ve read the Bible. I’ve since devoted myself to marrying my passions to develop suspense-filled stories with intense looks into the spiritual realm.
I absolutely love thrillers and stories filled with suspense.
The problem with that is, all I can ever seem to find are thrillers about washed-up detectives, which are fine and all, but sometimes I want to read a suspenseful story in a different genre. If a story can do that and weave in history, war, and the Bible, I’m in.
Ted Dekker checks every box with A.D. 30, and he’s just a master of storytelling. Dekker keeps you on the edge of your seat and brings together unlikely worlds in unexpected ways that are just so much fun to read.
Even better, this book really made me think about different cultures and the things we all have in common.
A sweeping epic set in the harsh deserts of Arabia and ancient Palestine. A war that rages between kingdoms on the earth and in the heart. The harrowing journey of the woman at the centre of it all. The story of Jesus in a way you have never experienced it.
Step back in time to the year of our Lord, Anno Domini, 30.
Ilan Pappé is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
There is no better way of understanding what it means to be a Palestinian than reading a personal account. When this account is written by one of the veteran activists on behalf of Palestine in the West and a scholar by her own right, the reward is even greater for the reader of this autobiographical tale.
Ghada Karmi's acclaimed memoir relates her childhood in Palestine, the flight to Britain after the catastrophe of 1948, and coming of age in the coffee-bars of Golders Green, the middle-class Jewish quarter in North London. A gentle humor describes the bizarre and sometimes tense realities that mask her life in 'Little Tel Aviv' and, later, her struggle, like that of many other women in the late fifties, to get a university grant to study medicine. Ghada's personal story is set against the continuing crisis in the Middle East. "In Search of Fatima" reminds us that the only crime the Palestinians…
I always felt that Middle Eastern studies is different from other fields of history. Its ever-presence in our life, the news cycle, religious life, political life, yet, because of language barriers and other filters, there’s a gap in knowledge that is highly conspicuous when forming one’s opinion. When I started my academic training, I felt like I was swimming in this ocean of histories that were completely unknown to me. I studied the Jewish histories of the region only later in my training and found that this gap is even more visible when talking about the history of Jews in the Middle East, because of misconceptions of antisemitism, the Israel-Palestine conflict, political tilt of media outlet, and more. For me, entering this field was a way to understand long-term processes in my own society, and expand the body of scholarship to enrich the public conversation on top of the academic one.
Students of Middle East studies learn a lot about Ottoman history, specifically about the Ottoman Empire's last decades, before WWI. But historians gave very little attention to the Arab provinces of the empire in comparison to Istanbul and the imperial center. In this book, Campos presented the fascinating case of Ottoman Palestine. Campos shows the most convincing rebuttal for the theories that attributed no Ottoman identity in the peripheries. The fantastic picture of Jerusalem during the last years of the empire can teach us a lot about the relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Palestine, the understanding of national and imperial frameworks at the turn of the century, and the optimistic reader may find ideas to deadlock conflicts in the 21st century.
In its last decade, the Ottoman Empire underwent a period of dynamic reform, and the 1908 revolution transformed the empire's 20 million subjects into citizens overnight. Questions quickly emerged about what it meant to be Ottoman, what bound the empire together, what role religion and ethnicity would play in politics, and what liberty, reform, and enfranchisement would look like. Ottoman Brothers explores the development of Ottoman collective identity, tracing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews became imperial citizens together. In Palestine, even against the backdrop of the emergence of the Zionist movement and Arab nationalism, Jews and Arabs cooperated in local…
My engagement in the topic has two distinct vectors, academic, and personal, or, if you wish, existential. My academic engagement began when Buber's son Raphael (1900-91), who served as the Executor of the Martin Buber Literary Estate, invited me to assemble and edit his father's writings on the "Arab Question." He explained that of all of his father's publications, his ramified writings promoting the political and human dignity of the Palestinian Arabs spoke most dearly and, as a citizen of the State of Israel, most immediately to him. I accepted Rafael's invitation with alacrity, for like Raphael I'm an Israeli by choice, having emigrated to the country in 1970.
Silencing the Sea follows Palestinian poets'
debates about their craft as they traverse multiple and competing realities of
secularism and religion, expulsion and occupation, art, politics, immortality,
death, fame, and obscurity. Khaled Furani eloquently leads his reader along
ancient roads and across Israeli military checkpoints to join the poets' worlds
and engage with the rhythms of their lifelong journeys in Islamic and Arabic
history, language, and verse. This excursion offers newfound understandings of
how today's secular age goes far beyond doctrine, to inhabit our very senses,
imbuing all that we see, hear, feel, and utter.
Poetry, the traditional
repository of Arab history, has become the preeminent medium of Palestinian
memory in exile. In probing poets' writings, this work investigates how
struggles over poetic form can host larger struggles over authority, knowledge,
language, and freedom. It reveals a very intimate and venerated world,
entwining art, intellect, and politics, narrating previously untold…
Silencing the Sea follows Palestinian poets' debates about their craft as they traverse multiple and competing realities of secularism and religion, expulsion and occupation, art, politics, immortality, death, fame, and obscurity. Khaled Furani takes his reader down ancient roads and across military checkpoints to join the poets' worlds and engage with the rhythms of their lifelong journeys in Islamic and Arabic history, language, and verse. This excursion offers newfound understandings of how today's secular age goes far beyond doctrine, to inhabit our very senses, imbuing all that we see, hear, feel, and say.
Poetry, the traditional repository of Arab history,…
As an archaeologist for over 50 years, I specialized in Household Archaeology, the branch of archaeology that investigates daily life. I was born and spent my childhood in British Mandatorial Palestine and then grew up to adulthood in Israel after it was founded. I spent many years as a kibbutz member in the Northern Negev living near the Bedouin. These experiences brought me close to pre-industrial societies. All my life I was surrounded by archaeological sites, taught biblical archaeology for over 40 years in college and wrote several books and articles on subjects related to daily life in biblical times.
This volume, with over 175 full-color pictures and illustrations, has the appearance of a coffee table book; however, its content is based on the latest research, and presents a vivid description of the world of Ancient Israel, covering many topics such as domestic life, the economy, cultural expression, and religious practices.
This special-edition volume of the Library of Ancient Israel, based on the latest research, presents a vivid description of the world of Ancient Israel, covering such topics as domestic life, the means of existence, cultural expression, and religious practices. With over 175 full-color pictures and illustrations, Life in Biblical Israel opens the door to everyday life in biblical Israel for all readers. This volume is perfect for classrooms, coffee tables, and personal use.
Volumes in the Library of Ancient Israel draw on multiple disciplines--such as archaeology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and literary criticism--to illuminate the everyday realities and social subtleties these…
