Dr Casey Strine

I joined the University of Sheffield in 2013 as Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow. In 2016, I started in the Department of History, teaching Ancient Near Eastern History and Literature.

My doctorate is from the University of Oxford in 2011. The monograph emerging from my thesis was awarded the Manfred Lautenschläger Award for Theological Promise in 2015.

I study the history, literature, and cultures of the ancient Near East (the area now known as the Middle East) with a specialization in ancient Israel and Judah, the two societies that produced the texts known widely as the Old Testament. My approach employs the study of migration to reconstruct ancient history and to interpret ancient texts. I’m especially interested in how involuntary migration—people fleeing environmental disasters, war, or persecution in various forms—influences the ways groups construct their history, tell those stories, and respond to the other cultures they meet in their movements.

Publications

Selected journal articles and essays

‘Your Name Shall No Longer Be Jacob, but Refugee: Insights into Gen 25:19–33:20 from Involuntary Migration Studies’ pp. 51-69 in C. Strine, T. Klutz, and J. Keady (eds) Scripture in Social Discourse: Social Scientific Perspectives on Early Jewish and Christian Writings. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2018

“Sister Save Us: The Matriarchs as Breadwinners and Their Threat to Patriarchy,” in M. Halvorson-Taylor and K. Southwood (eds) Women and Exile. Bloomsbury T&T Clark, forthcoming 2016.

“On the Compositions Models for Ezekiel 38–39: A Response to William Tooman’s Gog of Magog.” Vetus Testamentum, forthcoming.

“Chaoskampf Against Empire: YHWH’s Battle Against Gog (Ezek 38–39) As Resistance Literature,” pp. 87-108 in A. Lenzi and J. Stökl (eds.), Divination, Politics and Ancient Near Eastern Empires. Ancient Near Eastern Monographs, Society of Biblical Literature, 2014.

“The Ritual Body in Ezekiel 37,” pp. 41-57 in J. E. Taylor (ed.), The Body as Cultural Entity in Biblical, Early Christian and Jewish Texts. T & T Clark, Library of Second Temple Studies 85, 2014.

“Ezekiel’s Image Problem: The Mesopotamian Cult Statue Induction Ritual and the Imago Dei Anthropology in the Book of Ezekiel.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 76:2 (2014): 252-72.

“Yhwh’s Battle Against Chaos in the Book of Ezekiel,” co-authored with C. L. Crouch. Journal of Biblical Literature 132:4 (2013): 883-903.

“The Role of Repentance in the Book of Ezekiel: A Second Chance for the Second Generation.” The Journal of Theological Studies 63:2 (2012): 476-91.

Books and monographs

Sworn Enemies: The Divine Oath, the Book of Ezekiel, and the Polemics of Exile. Walter de Gruyter, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 436, 2013.

Sworn Enemies: The Divine Oath, the Book of Ezekiel, and the Polemics of Exile. Walter de Gruyter, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 436, 2013.

Sworn Enemies explains how the book of Ezekiel uses formulaic language from the exodus origin tradition – especially YHWH’s oath – to craft an identity for the Judahite exiles. This language openly refutes an autochthonous origin tradition preferred by the non-exiled Judahites while covertly challenging Babylonian claims that YHWH was no longer worthy of worship. After specifying the layers of meaning in the divine oath, the book shows how Ezekiel uses these connotations to construct an explicit, public transcript that denies and mocks the non-exiles’ appeals to a combined Abraham and Jacob tradition (e.g. Ezek 35). Simultaneously, Ezekiel employs the oath’s exodus connotations to support a disguised polemic that resists Babylonian claims that YHWH was powerless to help the exiles. When YHWH swears “as I live” the text goes on to implicitly replace Marduk with YHWH as the deity who controls nations and history (e.g. Ezek 17). Ezekiel, thus, shares the “monotheistic” concepts found in Deutero-Isaiah and elsewhere. Finally, using James C. Scott’s concept of hidden transcripts, the author shows how both polemics cooperate to define a legitimate Judahite nationalism and faithful Yahwism that allows the exiles to resist these threatening “others”

Winner of Manfred Lautenschläger Award for Theological Promise

When the Son of Man Didn’t Come: A Constructive Proposal on the Delay of the Parousia, in collaboration with C. M. Hays, B. Gallaher, J. Konstantinovsky, and R. Ounsworth. Fortress Press, 2016.

When the Son of Man Didn’t Come: A Constructive Proposal on the Delay of the Parousia, in collaboration with C. M. Hays, B. Gallaher, J. Konstantinovsky, and R. Ounsworth. Fortress Press, 2016.

The delay of the Parousia—the second coming of Christ—has vexed Christians since the final decades of the first century. This volume offers a critical, constructive, and interdisciplinary solution to that dilemma. The argument is grounded in Christian tradition while remaining fully engaged with the critical insights and methodological approaches of twenty-first-century scholars. The authors argue that the deferral of Christ’s prophesied return follows logically from the conditional nature of ancient predictive prophecy: Jesus has not come again because God’s people have not yet responded sufficiently to Christ’s call for holy and godly action. God, in patient mercy, remains committed to cooperating with humans to bring about the consummation of history with Jesus’ return.

Collaboratively written by an interdisciplinary and ecumenical team of scholars, the argument draws on expertise in biblical studies, systematics, and historical theology to fuse critical biblical exegesis with a powerful theological paradigm that generates an apophatic and constructive Christian eschatology. The authors, however, have done more than tackle a daunting theological problem: as the group traverses issues from higher criticism through doctrine and into liturgy and ethics, they present an innovative approach for how to do Christian theology in the twenty-first-century academy.