Books by Justin Walker
Peeters, 2022
The publication of Keel’s Symbolism of the Biblical World (German 1972, English 1978) demonstrate... more The publication of Keel’s Symbolism of the Biblical World (German 1972, English 1978) demonstrated the val-ue of ancient Near Eastern iconography for interpreting biblical texts. In the intervening decades since (and of) Keel’s work, iconographic exegesis of the Hebrew Bible has witnessed significant methodological and theoretical developments, many of which can be broadly characterized by an increasing concern with issues of histor(icit)y and contiguity in the image-text comparison. The present work represents a (re)turn to a phenomenological approach to iconographic exegesis that is especially concerned with how images and texts might mutually inform one another at the level of their respective poetics. As a test case for such a comparison, this volume examines how the phenomenon of violence figures in Lamentations 2 and in Ashurbanipal’s palace reliefs - specifically, one of the Battle of Til-Tuba programs (Southwest Palace, Room 33) and the lion hunt reliefs (North Palace, Room C).
The project begins with a discussion of the neurological and cognitive relationship between seeing images with the eye and imagining them with the “mind’s eye” as a means of justifying such a phenomenological approach that compares how ancient artists and the biblical author construct the violent images that are seen and imagined in their works, respectively (ch. 1). It then conducts detailed analyses of the poetics of violent imagery in Lamentations 2 (chs. 2-3), the Battle of Til-Tuba reliefs (ch. 4), and Ashurbanipal’s lion hunt reliefs (ch. 5) before providing an extended comparison of the similar and divergent ways that violence figures in the literary and textual images of each piece (ch. 6). Overall, the volume profers new interpretive insights concerning the phenomenon of violence in the ancient Near Eastern artwork and Lamentations 2 specifically - particularly as it pertains to the poem’s construction of Yahweh’s and Zion’s bodies, its perspectival play, its manipulation of time, and the “power” of its imagery in eliciting the divine gaze. The project also demonstrates the utility of ancient Near Eastern art for illuminating not only what but also how a given phenomenon figures in biblical poetry and vice versa.
Edited Volumes by Justin Walker
Eerdmans, 2023
Attempting to describe the nature of God often prompts the exclamation of the psalmist--that God ... more Attempting to describe the nature of God often prompts the exclamation of the psalmist--that God is unlike anyone or anything else. And yet the claim is not simply the overflow of an adoring heart: God's incomparability is a truth lodged deep within Christian Scripture. In The Incomparable God, Old Testament scholar Brent Strawn offers thoughtful insight into this theological mystery. This volume collects eighteen of Strawn's most provocative essays on the nature of God, several of which are published for the first time here. Strawn covers the following topics: the complex portrayal of God in Genesis; God's mercy in Exodus; poetic description of God in the Psalms; the Trinity in both testaments; pedagogy of the Old Testament; integration of faith and scholarship. Encompassing close readings of Scripture, biblical-theological argument, and considerations of praxis, The Incomparable God is essential reading for Old Testament scholars and students.
Journal Articles by Justin Walker
Currents in Biblical Research, 2025
The last decade has seen a significant expansion in Lamentations research. Since 2013, over 30 ne... more The last decade has seen a significant expansion in Lamentations research. Since 2013, over 30 new commentaries and monographs have been published on various topics in this short biblical book, along with dozens of articles and essays. Many of these studies represent extensions of the once ‘new’ trends of the 2000s—literary studies, feminist interpretations, trauma readings, and reception historical studies—while others have pushed Lamentations research into even ‘newer’ territories (iconographic exegesis, performance criticism, intertextual approaches, and so forth). This essay traces these various trends in Lamentations research and surveys many publications from the last decade.
Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel, 2024
The Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1–18) features episodic narrative (re-)tellings of the exodus (and... more The Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1–18) features episodic narrative (re-)tellings of the exodus (and eisodus) events (e. g., 15:4–5, 8–10, 12–17) as a means of praising Yhwh for Israel's deliverance at the Reed Sea. Over against the preceding prose account (Exodus 14), the Song's narrativity is unique and recounts Yhwh's salvific deeds through its own lyrical means. Many have acknowledged these narrative features and accounted for their details in terms of the Song's poetic genre: they explain (away) the poem's distinct »telling« of the exodus/eisodus events, especially as it contrasts with the prose account, with recourse to lyric's typical features, particularly exaggeration, allusion, or brevity. The present essay critically examines the Song's use of narrativity as a constitutive device of its meaning with recourse to ancient Near Eastern iconography – specifically, the throneroom reliefs of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud. The essay begins with an analysis of historical narrativity within the Song before addressing the use of the same in the artistic program of Ashurnasirpal's throneroom. The throneroom's combination of historical and »iconic« scenes, its symmetrical arrangements, and its ingenious staging of the king's image vis-à-vis the enthroned king himself (among other features) provide an informative lens by which to evaluate the poetic and theological significance of narrativity in the Song.
Vetus Testamentum, 2021
This essay addresses the composition of Samson's lion encounter (Judg 14:5-6) in two parts. First... more This essay addresses the composition of Samson's lion encounter (Judg 14:5-6) in two parts. First, the narrative of the lion encounter is considered in its literary context (Judg 14:5-6), with particular attention to three difficulties or ambiguities in the narrative arrangement: the presence/absence of the parents, verbal repetition, and the meaning of the .חידה The incongruity of these details indicates redactional seams that, as the present essay argues, might be explained with reference to a Persian period compositional setting of Judg 14:3-6. Second, as supporting evidence for this hypothesis, the essay contextualizes Samson's lion encounter with reference to Persian period leonine iconography. Two major iconographic motifs are considered-the "heroic encounter" and Herakles depictions-both in their broader settings (the ancient Near East and Greece respectively) and in specific Levantine examples. These artifacts serve to fill out Samson's heroic characterization and to provide tantalizing material evidence for a possible Persian period setting of this episode in the Samson narrative.
Reference Entries by Justin Walker
Book of Lamentations
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, 2025
The fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587 BCE spawned a flourish of literary activity, as t... more The fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587 BCE spawned a flourish of literary activity, as the defeated populace attempted to articulate and make sense of their trauma. The Book of Lamentations is a primary example of this literature. Consisting of five distinct poems—four of which employ the Hebrew alphabet to structure their discourse (chaps. 1–4)—Lamentations features an astounding literary artistry that stands among the best of the Hebrew canon. With its use of multiple voices, its blending of literary genres, its dense presentation of graphic images, and its juxtaposition of complex—even contradictory—theological portraits, Lamentations facilitates a dramatic experience that grants modern readers a most immediate access into the effects of Jerusalem’s fall upon Judahite identity and theology.
It begins in chapter 1 with a dirge-like cry over Jerusalem’s precipitous downfall: “Daughter Zion,” the personified city, has fallen with none to comfort her (1:1–11). The lamenter’s descriptions then yield to Zion’s own voice, as she pleads for the passersby and God to regard her suffering (1:12–22). In the second chapter, the poet intensifies his account of Jerusalem’s fall with a barrage of divine images that unequivocally attribute the destruction to God’s hand (2:1–10) before expressing his own grief at Zion’s downfall and petitioning the personified city to make her plea before God (2:11–19). The chapter concludes with Zion’s caustic accusation of God’s punishment and its results: starving women forced to eat the bodies of their deceased children, and prophets and priests slain in the temple (2:20–22). The third chapter, the climax of the acrostic form, presents a new voice—the “everyman”—who laments God’s violent pursuit against him (3:1–20) before “calling to mind” God’s justice and faithfulness (3:21–24). Such theological memory paves the way for an extended parenesis explicating God’s discipline and recommending humble submission (3:25–39). This exhortation issues in a communal response (3:40–47) before returning to the “everyman’s” petition for God to punish his enemies (3:48–66). Chapter 4 returns to the dirge motifs of chapters 1 and 2 and continues the interplay of individual and communal voices begun in chapter 3; it ends with an encouraging word to Daughter Zion that her punishment is complete (4:22). The book’s concluding poem, its shortest and only non-acrostic composition, contains a sustained communal lament, albeit with a tragic twist: rather than providing the confession of trust often found in such corporate prayers of the Psalter, Lamentations ends without any professed confidence, as the community ponders whether God has utterly forsaken them (5:22).
As early as its Greek translation (LXX), Lamentations was attributed to the pen of Jeremiah, whose looming legacy as the weeping prophet and preacher of retributive doom colored the Jewish and Christian interpretation of the book for millennia. Lamentations was read as prophecy (cf. Jer 36)—a forecasted destruction so certain that the prophet could write Jerusalem’s elegy even prior to its “death.” With the advent of modern criticism, however, readers challenged this presupposed connection and eventually disentangled Lamentations from the biblical prophet altogether. The result has been a sustained exploration of the book’s history, literary quality, and theology on its own terms. Lamentations continues to figure prominently in Jewish worship—namely the Tisha B’Av liturgy commemorating the temple’s destruction—but is occasionally overlooked in many Christian communities, notwithstanding its hopeful center. Its combination of intentionally crafted artistry and desperate prayer makes it an invaluable canonical voice for early 21st-century readers.
Conference Presentations by Justin Walker
SBL Annual Meeting, 2024
The book of Lamentations is virtually synonymous with the acrostic form. It is nearly impossible ... more The book of Lamentations is virtually synonymous with the acrostic form. It is nearly impossible to describe the book without mentioning the importance of this structuring device found in the first four poems explicitly and latent in the twenty-two non-alphabetized verses of chapter 5. Readers have proposed a host of explanations for the acrostic’s significance in the book: a mnemonic aid for vocal performance, a means of expressing grief’s totality (A to Z), a literary confinement for suffering’s chaos, a linguistic vessel for holding together suffering’s complexity, an imitation of suffering’s maddening repetition, and so forth. Building upon these (and other) interpretations, this paper (re-)considers the acrostic’s visual appeal specifically and proffers a reading of Lamentations as a kind of concrete poetry. Although the acrostic may indeed have played a role in guiding ancient listeners or jogging the mind of its performers, its subtlety in chapters 1, 2, and 4 especially would likely have escaped the notice of all but the most perspicacious of listeners. The acrostic thus functioned, even if only subtly, as a means of engaging the eye, as well as the ear. As recent research has argued, Lamentations (or parts of it) may therefore represent a true Judahite literature, written for readers or private audiences first, as opposed to the public stage. With these considerations in mind, this paper will (1) consider the acrostic’s rendering in select Hebrew and Greek manuscripts as a means of elucidating its visuality, (2) propose a reading of the book as a literary “memorial,” whereby the poetry becomes a collection of word objects to be “seen” and “remembered” (cf. 1:9, 11, 12, 18; 2:20; 3:36, 63; 5:1), and (3) explores the theological significance of “viewing” these texts with God, Zion’s listener and reader.
SBL Annual Meeting, 2023
The imagery of war and suffering in Lamentations presents many issues for contemporary readers. T... more The imagery of war and suffering in Lamentations presents many issues for contemporary readers. Though interpreters may commend the book for its honest testimony, its vivid descriptions of suffering children (2:11–12, 20–22; 4:10; 5:11) and troubling choice of metaphors (e.g., 1:8–10; cf. 2:4; 5:11) often disturb its interpreters, and the book has been criticized for such features. Many have claimed that these images foster compassion and just action within its readership, but in these assessments, the connection between viewing (or imagining) images of suffering and responding ethically is often assumed more than demonstrated. This paper seeks to explore that relationship more closely. It will ask what the book of Lamentations wants the reader to “do” or the kind of person its discourse seeks to produce with special consideration of the book’s imagery: What violent content does the book “show” the reader? How do the poetics of this imagery—how the poet frames these scenes—impinge upon the reader and form certain ethical responses rather than others? This paper will address these and related questions in a comparative manner, by drawing upon the fields of photography ethics and visual culture theory, specifically as it pertains to the complicated moral response elicited by images of human suffering. Many in these fields describe the distance generated between the viewer and the sufferer when the former “sees” the latter in image media. They also problematize the assumed connection between viewing images of suffering, feeling compassion for the depicted sufferer, and responding with ethical action. In light of these findings, this paper will thus examine how violence imagery figures in Lamentations, how this imagery may elicit complex (moral) responses from readers, and how the poetry might guide the reader beyond mere viewing into critical examination conducive of moral disposition and action.
SBL Annual Meeting, 2022
As many have noted, the absence of any divine speech in Lamentations constitutes one of the funda... more As many have noted, the absence of any divine speech in Lamentations constitutes one of the fundamental theological problems of the book. Though Daughter Zion (1:9–11, 20–22; 2:20–22), the geber (3:55–66), and the community (3:42–48; 5:1–22) address God directly, no explicit divine reply ever surfaces (cf. 3:57). One must look elsewhere to hear God’s comforting speech—namely, 2Isa, which, as many have argued, appears to know and respond specifically to the prayers of Lamentations. Though descriptions of God’s actions and character abound in the book, their conflicting (and often disturbing) portraits resist integration. What then are the implications of piecing together the theology of a book that solicits a God who remains conspicuously silent in the face of horrendous evil? Where is God to be found in a poetic sequence that seeks God out to no avail? In this paper, I address the problem of divine silence in Lamentations with special consideration of the use of apostrophe in the book’s lyric poetry. I draw upon the discussion of apostrophe’s significance in lyric theory to consider how the poet fosters intimacy with God via the immediacy of the lyric, despite the (felt) absence of God. As Helen Vendler notes, the lyric has the constitutive ability to create intimacy within and despite loneliness not simply for the sake of expressing relation to an unseen other but also to redefine the terms of that relation altogether. This paper will consider how the lyricism of Lamentations—in the voices of Daughter Zion and the community specifically—manufacture divine proximity within divine silence. In this reading, Lamentations thus represents a drawing near to and of God by the power of the lyric.
Book Reviews by Justin Walker
Review of Reading Lamentations Intertextually, ed. Heath A. Thomas and Brittany N. Melton (LHBOTS 714; London: T&T Clark, 2021). Pp xviii + 330.
Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 2024
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Books by Justin Walker
The project begins with a discussion of the neurological and cognitive relationship between seeing images with the eye and imagining them with the “mind’s eye” as a means of justifying such a phenomenological approach that compares how ancient artists and the biblical author construct the violent images that are seen and imagined in their works, respectively (ch. 1). It then conducts detailed analyses of the poetics of violent imagery in Lamentations 2 (chs. 2-3), the Battle of Til-Tuba reliefs (ch. 4), and Ashurbanipal’s lion hunt reliefs (ch. 5) before providing an extended comparison of the similar and divergent ways that violence figures in the literary and textual images of each piece (ch. 6). Overall, the volume profers new interpretive insights concerning the phenomenon of violence in the ancient Near Eastern artwork and Lamentations 2 specifically - particularly as it pertains to the poem’s construction of Yahweh’s and Zion’s bodies, its perspectival play, its manipulation of time, and the “power” of its imagery in eliciting the divine gaze. The project also demonstrates the utility of ancient Near Eastern art for illuminating not only what but also how a given phenomenon figures in biblical poetry and vice versa.
Edited Volumes by Justin Walker
Journal Articles by Justin Walker
Reference Entries by Justin Walker
It begins in chapter 1 with a dirge-like cry over Jerusalem’s precipitous downfall: “Daughter Zion,” the personified city, has fallen with none to comfort her (1:1–11). The lamenter’s descriptions then yield to Zion’s own voice, as she pleads for the passersby and God to regard her suffering (1:12–22). In the second chapter, the poet intensifies his account of Jerusalem’s fall with a barrage of divine images that unequivocally attribute the destruction to God’s hand (2:1–10) before expressing his own grief at Zion’s downfall and petitioning the personified city to make her plea before God (2:11–19). The chapter concludes with Zion’s caustic accusation of God’s punishment and its results: starving women forced to eat the bodies of their deceased children, and prophets and priests slain in the temple (2:20–22). The third chapter, the climax of the acrostic form, presents a new voice—the “everyman”—who laments God’s violent pursuit against him (3:1–20) before “calling to mind” God’s justice and faithfulness (3:21–24). Such theological memory paves the way for an extended parenesis explicating God’s discipline and recommending humble submission (3:25–39). This exhortation issues in a communal response (3:40–47) before returning to the “everyman’s” petition for God to punish his enemies (3:48–66). Chapter 4 returns to the dirge motifs of chapters 1 and 2 and continues the interplay of individual and communal voices begun in chapter 3; it ends with an encouraging word to Daughter Zion that her punishment is complete (4:22). The book’s concluding poem, its shortest and only non-acrostic composition, contains a sustained communal lament, albeit with a tragic twist: rather than providing the confession of trust often found in such corporate prayers of the Psalter, Lamentations ends without any professed confidence, as the community ponders whether God has utterly forsaken them (5:22).
As early as its Greek translation (LXX), Lamentations was attributed to the pen of Jeremiah, whose looming legacy as the weeping prophet and preacher of retributive doom colored the Jewish and Christian interpretation of the book for millennia. Lamentations was read as prophecy (cf. Jer 36)—a forecasted destruction so certain that the prophet could write Jerusalem’s elegy even prior to its “death.” With the advent of modern criticism, however, readers challenged this presupposed connection and eventually disentangled Lamentations from the biblical prophet altogether. The result has been a sustained exploration of the book’s history, literary quality, and theology on its own terms. Lamentations continues to figure prominently in Jewish worship—namely the Tisha B’Av liturgy commemorating the temple’s destruction—but is occasionally overlooked in many Christian communities, notwithstanding its hopeful center. Its combination of intentionally crafted artistry and desperate prayer makes it an invaluable canonical voice for early 21st-century readers.
Conference Presentations by Justin Walker
Book Reviews by Justin Walker