This volume is ambitious, both with respect to its content, addressing numerous “key approaches” to biblical ethics in the space of a single volume, and its intent, drawing together leaders in the field of biblical ethics for an “interdisciplinary dialogue.” It is also remarkably rewarding. Arising out of presentations given for the SBL Annual Meetings of 2013–16, it reflects the diversity of goals and concerns within that program unit.
The methodological questions of part 1 have their agenda set by Ruben Zimmermann’s “implicit ethics.” He takes ethics to be a “meta-perspective on behavior and life” (p. 20) and attends to ways that biblical texts implicitly communicate such a perspective through language, norms, and forms. If Zimmermann seems to offer a tidy system that gives the reader conceptual handles for biblical ethics, Markus Zehnder follows and complicates that system, particularly with a concern for OT ethics. Charles Cosgrave also engages the...
