The book of Job presents its readers with a profound drama concerning innocent suffering. Such honest, forthright wrestling with the problem of evil and the silence of God has intrigued a wide gamut of readers both religious and nonreligious.

Surprisingly, the earliest church fathers showed little interest in the book of Job. Not until Origen in the early third century is ...

The Psalms have long served a vital role in the individual and corporate lives of Christians, expressing the full range of human emotions, including some that we are ashamed to admit. The Psalms reverberate with joy, groan in pain, whimper with sadness, grumble in disappointment, and rage with anger.

The church fathers employed the Psalms widely. In liturgy they used them ...

Among the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon were all thought by the early church fathers to have derived from the hand of Solomon. To their minds the finest wisdom about the deeper issues of life prior to the time of God's taking human form in Jesus Christ was to be found in these books. As in all the Old Testament, they were ...

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government will be upon his shoulder
and his name shall be called
"Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."

For the early church fathers the prophecy of Isaiah was not a compendium of Jewish history or theology but an announcement of the coming Messiah fulfilled in the life and ministry ...

No book of the Old Testament is more frequently quoted in the New than Isaiah, and no portion of Isaiah is more frequently quoted in the New than the typologically fertile soil of Isaiah 40–66. Still, as interpreted by the fathers, Isaiah presents a message that is far more soteriological than christological, leading readers to a deeper understanding of God's judgment and salvation. ...

Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, prophesied for four decades under the last five kings of Judah—from 627 to 587 B.C. His mission: a call to repentance. Among the apostolic fathers, Jeremiah was rarely cited, but several later authors give prominent attention to him, including Origen, Theodoret of Cyr, and Jerome, who wrote individual commentaries on Jeremiah, and Cyril of Alexandria ...

The books of Ezekiel and Daniel are rich in imagery that is taken up afresh in the New Testament. Echoes of Ezekiel—with its words of doom and hope, vision of a new temple, and scroll-eating prophet—are especially apparent in thebook of Revelation. Daniel is most notable in supplying terminology and imagery for Jesus of Nazareth's favored self-description as "Son of man," a phrase ...

Genesis 12–50 recounts the history of the patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. From their mentors Paul, Peter, Stephen, and the author of the letter to the Hebrews, the early fathers learned to draw out the spiritual significance of the patriarchal narrative for Christian believers. The Alexandrian school especially followed Paul's allegorical use of the story of Sarah ...