Synopses & Reviews
In collaboration with Mohr Siebeck and an international team of experts in early American studies, Baker Academic releases the second of ten projected volumes in Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana. This volume offers Mather's comments on Joshua-2 Chronicles. Mather's commentary takes the form of questions and answers on the biblical canon.
Cotton Mather, one of the leading intellectuals of colonial America, has often been overshadowed by his younger Puritan contemporary, Jonathan Edwards. Now, however, the publication of Mather's magnum opus in the area of biblical knowledge focuses fresh attention on early New England's second most prodigious intellect.
This work will be treasured by students of American church history, colonial-era Puritanism, Christian responses to the Enlightenment, American intellectual development, and the history of biblical interpretation. It is a must-have acquisition for research libraries covering these disciplines.
Synopsis
The third volume of the Biblia Americana contains some 1250 of Mather's "illustrations," as he called them, on the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. These entries reveal Mather as a sacred historian, marshaling an array of approaches and disciplines to illuminate and defend the Scripture accounts. He revisits certain themes throughout such as idols and idolatry, parallels between the Hebrew Bible and the history and mythology of "pagan" cultures, and typological significations of events and characters. Other topics warranted sustained attention in a long entry or a series of entries, such as accounts of when the sun stood still; human sacrifice, as instanced in Jephthah's vow, the building, running, and destruction of Solomon's Temple, the nature of prophecy, the dispersion of the Israelites in captivity, and the timing of their eventual return.