Easter comes on April 1 this year, and March 31 is the first day of Passover, so this is a good time to review books that, like Christianity, have Jewish roots.

In Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus (Baker, 2018), Lois Tverberg explains well how our culture differs from Israel’s 2,000 years ago. Now, thin is beautiful and sunshine means happiness: Then, fat (an indication of wealth) was a blessing and rainfall brought joy. Now, fear of God sounds negative: Then, “fear” was closer to “revere.” Since Hebrew focuses on action rather than thought, when God “forgets” sins He still remembers them, but He does not act on that memory and forsake us.

From the beginning God inspired Bible writers to use concrete metaphors. When we learn in Genesis 2:7 that God formed man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, we’re learning that man is lowly like dust but raised high by drawing life directly from God.

Martin Goodman’s A History of Judaism (Princeton, 2018) is a readable 543-page (plus footnotes) introduction to a complex subject. The 18 pages about the most famous Jew in history, Jesus, recognize that He was real and this reality made the early Christians resilient: “Other groups had faded away once their leader was no more.” Too bad Goodman calls Christ’s birth in a Bethlehem manger probably a “patent fiction,” but he does point out the centrality of the resurrection account: “Nothing in the earlier history of Judaism had prepared for this. … The notion at the heart of Paul’s message, of the central significance of death and resurrection, was new within Judaism.”

When Goodman writes that nothing Jesus said “suggests a fundamental rift between Jesus and his fellow Jews that might lead to a charge of blasphemy,” he shows unawareness of C.S. Lewis’ commonsense view that Jesus was either liar, lunatic, or Lord. The refusal to recognize Christ left the door open for a series of false messiahs, because the yearning for one did not go away.

Burton Visotzky’s Aphrodite and the Rabbis (St. Martin’s, 2016) is a fascinating historical account of (to quote the subtitle) How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It. Ancient synagogue mosaic floors depict Zeus-Helios, and other archaeological evidence indicates attempts to meld Jerusalem and Rome.

Gerald McDermott’s Israel Matters (Brazos, 2017) offers the strongest succinct argument I’ve seen against supersessionism, which holds that the promises God made to Old Testament Israel should now be applied only to the Christian church. Jim Melnick’s Jewish Giftedness and World Redemption (Lederer, 2017) documents Jewish success in a variety of fields and notes that Hitler’s murderous hatred of Jews lost him the opportunity to develop a nuclear bomb.

Yair Mintzker’s The Many Deaths of Jew Süss (Princeton, 2017) analyzes the most important 18th-century German anti-Semitic trial. Princeton has just come out with an 875-page, detail-filled, eight-authored Hasidism: A New History that is likely to be the definitive work on Judaism’s equivalent of charismatic Protestantism.

BOOKMARKS

Two dangers come with stories about Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Little House on the Prairie TV series downplays the Christian foundation in her pioneer life, and others portray her as an evangelical saint.

A good journalist, Stephen W. Hines avoids either pitfall in A Prairie Girl’s Faith (WaterBrook, 2018). He did his reporting and went to original sources, since Wilder got her start in writing as a newspaper columnist. He also portrays a mother-daughter team at work. Laura was a staunch Christian, but daughter Rose Wilder Lane was a modernist unbeliever. Laura had a great story to tell. Rose was a great editor. Hines doesn’t pick sides in this complicated relationship. He just reports how they made an incredible team.

Another Hines advantage—he grew up on a Kansas farm and milked cows. That helps when you write about farm life.—Russ Pulliam