This unusual book in the well-known Library of Literary Criticism series surveys the full range of literary commentary on the Hebrew Bible from ancient times to the present. Selections excerpted from hundred of books and articles cover nearly one hundred topics organized into four categories: The Hebrew Bible in General, Literary Features, The Texts, and Apocrypha.Here are writings by classical, early rabbinic, early Christian, medieval, early modern, and contemporary authors on such topics as prosody, imagery, and wordplay, as well as analyses of individual books and stories of the Hebrew Bible, such as Job, Ruth, the Binding of Isaac, David and Goliath.In addition to materials that have been previously translated from Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Russian, many selections have been rendered into English from Hebrew, French, German, and Spanish expressly for this volume. Many great writers on the Bible as literature who have barely been known outside small circles ---for example, the modern Hebrew poet Jacob Fichman -- appear here for the first time before a wide audience. There are also excerpts by great world authors: Goethe, Heine, Coleridge, Melville, Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence, Martin Buber. All the modern literary approaches are represented: New Criticism, formalist poetics, structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, reader-response criticism, deconstruction.For the literary study of the Bible, The Hebrew Bible will prove invaluable to students and teachers, and it is a unique resource for biblical scholars.