Friendship in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

Friendship, though a topic of considerable humanistic and cross disciplinary interest in the contemporary academy, has mainly been ignored by scholars of the Hebrew Bible, possibly on account of its complexity and elusiveness. Yet friendship in the Hebrew Bible warrants the kind of thorough, detailed exploration that friendship has received from specialists in neighboring fields such as Classics and New Testament and in any number of other fields. The author of this book provides an in-depth, theoretically engaged, philologically grounded, and contextually sensitive study of friendship in the Hebrew Bible. It is the first book-length study of its kind, filling in a significant gap in our knowledge and understanding of the constellation of social relationships represented in biblical texts and contributing to contemporary, incipient cross-disciplinary theorizing of friendship. Topics covered include how the expectations of friends and family members overlap and differ, including what makes the friend a distinct social actor; failed friendship; friendships in narrative such as those of Ruth and Naomi, Jonathan and David, and Job and his three comforters; and friendship in the second century BCE Hebrew wisdom text Ben Sira, including how Ben Sira’s notions of friendship relate to ideas expressed in earlier biblical texts and in Greek sources.