Out Now - The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters
A few weeks ago, I got my copies in the mail of The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Monsters, a project I co-edited with John W. Morehead. It was
When I think of a handbook, I think of something tiny, portable, and with a generalized overview of a bunch of topics - maybe something you’d take into the field to identify birds. That’s not how Oxford University Press (and, to be fair, most other academic presses) think of them. This is a huge book, with thirty chapters that give an in-depth look at monsters of the Bible, how they’ve been interpreted through the centuries, and how they continue to impact popular culture today. If you’re a researcher working on monsters, this is a book you need to read. If you’re monster-curious, I hope you can get it from a library near you!
Some of the chapters explore actual monsters that appear in the text, like Leviathan, Behemoth, or the red dragon of Revelation. Some look at more metaphorical monsters, like how the underworld (Sheol) is so often portrayed as a devouring mouth, or how God might be seen as a monstrous creator in connection with Dr. Frankenstein. And then other chapters move even further afield to look at how the rhetoric of monstrosity is used to make monsters out of certain groups (like women, or the Jews in the Gospel of John).
It was an unbelievable amount of work, over five years - John and I were realizing that we first gave the proposal to the publisher before COVID. Then it was five years of gathering all the authors together, working with everyone to get their chapters in and formatted, proofing and editing to get the arguments as clear as possible, and putting it all together. I certainly had a celebratory drink once it was finished.
It’s an academic tome, so it’s pricey - but hopefully it will start showing up in libraries soon. And if you’re a student, staff, or faculty at a college or university, send a note to your librarian asking them to order a copy. And if you’d like a preview, bits and pieces of it are available on Google Books as a free sample - including the entire introductory chapter that John and I wrote, which offers an interesting (at least I hope it is!) survey of where biblical scholarship has been with monsters, and some of the ways that thinking with monsters might be useful. It’s here: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Oxford_Handbook_of_Biblical_Monsters.html?id=CMEZ0QEACAAJ