By Sheldon Greaves
I am pleased to announce that a book I co-edited with Mark Thomas and Karl Sandberg, Jacob and the Angel: Modern Readers and the Old Testament is now available on Amazon.com. This book was the result of an effort by myself and the aforementioned editors to compile an anthology of essays on by top scholars in the field, but written specifically for a general audience. I originally self-published this in 2014 via lulu.com, but failed to gain any traction. However, at the suggestion of a friend, I’m rebooting the project on Amazon, starting with the Kindle edition.
The authors represented here include William Dozeman, Diana Edelman, Marvin Sweeney, William Dever, Russell Fuller, Richard Clifford, and Carole Fontaine. Thanks to a grant from the Peery Foundation, we were able to do something that usually doesn’t happen with books of this kind: we were able to actually pay the contributors! Imagine that.
Essays touch on the major sections of the Old Testament; Law, Prophets, Psalms, along with the archaeology of the Bible and how the field itself has changed. Karl Sandberg, who did not live to see the book published, wrote an outstanding introduction that examines the barriers that the modern reader faces in trying to apprehend and ancient text.
The Story Behind “Jacob and the Angel”
Our original plan was to publish through a Utah publisher, who backed out of a signed contract when they decided that the book wasn’t “sexy enough” (!?). Meanwhile, Karl was gravely ill and, late one evening, phoned me literally from his death bed and made me promise to see the book to press, one way or another.
I was unable to find a publisher, and then the project languished; a pile of very well-written essays in a file folder until I had the opportunity to teach a class at Stanford University on “Discovering the Old Testament” (which I later turned into a podcast) I dusted off these essays and used them for the class text. They were well-received, and I decided that self-publishing was the way to go. Lulu.com was my first effort, but it didn’t really pan out. This venture with Amazon is a bit of an experiment, so please do take the opportunity to gain some insight into one of the most important books, you’ve probably never read.