Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Definitions/Abbreviations -- Introduction: Bound to Retell -- Raising Dust: Why choose Jacob and the Angel? -- The Argument Summarized -- Chapter 1 Dancing Between the Disciplines: Following the Mobile Bible -- What are we Reading When we Read 'The Bible'? -- Beginnings of the Enlightenment Bible -- New Inventions of Authority: the Rise and Rise of the Enlightenment Bible -- The Bible-as-Document: Making Sense of Corruption -- Protecting the Texts: Scholarly Specialisms as Theological Defence -- Adding Notes in the Margin: Pietistic Tools to Open Pandora's Box -- The Poetic Bible: Robert Lowth, Johann Gottfried Herder and the Parting of the Streams -- Robert Lowth's Understanding of the Purposes of Sacred Poetry -- Johann Gottfried Herder, the Book of Job, and the spirit of Einfühlung -- Confessions of Enquiring Romantics: Poets, Prophets and Biblical Criticism -- Coleridge and the Panharmonicon of the Poetic Bible -- The Authority of the Cultural Bible -- The 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible: The Cringes of Creating and Celebrating a Cultural Bible -- Returning to Bethsada and Stirring the Pool -- Chapter 2 Biblical Studies and Postmodern Poetics -- or, 'Gentlemanly' Readers Meet 'Uncouth Hydra Readers' -- Theoretical Murmurs in Biblical Studies -- Arresting the Texts -- how are the 'Literary' and 'Historical' Deployed in Biblical Studies? -- The Nature of Biblical Criticism and the Pharmakon of Writing -- The Bible-as-Literature: Robert Alter and Frank Kermode vs. The Bible and Culture Collective -- The Literary Guide to the Bible -- The Postmodern Bible -- Writing and History, or, Presiding over the "Organisation of Death" -- Biblical Archives -- History, Writing and 'Scripture' -- Realism, the Real, and Writing -- Elephants in the Many Rooms of Historical Criticism.

Chapter 3 Poetic Paragesis and Disciplining the Imagination -- Poetic Retellings as Poetic Parageses -- Why Poetry? -- The 'Critical Rupture': Asking Questions of Poetry -- Poetry in Theory -- Disciplining the Imagination in Biblical Studies -- Imagining the Facts -- Strangers at the Historical-Critical Table -- Serres, Derrida and Ricoeur: Metaphorical Inventions for Paragesis -- Parasites as Exegetical, Eisegetical, Intergetical Sites -- Chapter 4 Enacting Canonicity: Parageses in the Anatomy of Angels -- Reading and Retelling Again and Again: Who is Doing What to Whom? And What does it Mean? -- Constructing 'Imaginary' Canons -- Double Canonicities and Différance in the Canonical Contract -- The Hostipitality of Double-Canonicities: Alden Nowlan -- Pronouncing Shibboleth through Poetic Paragesis -- Doing without Names: Yehuda Amichai -- Parageses Pregnant with Catastrophe -- Groaning, Whispering, and Coughing Up Names in God's Territory: Jamie Wasserman -- Performing the 'Act-Event' of Canon -- Alterity, Invention, Singularity -- Chapter 5 Scripted Bodies: Paragesis and the Performative Poetics of Manhood -- Poetic Paragesis as Ethical Non-Indifference -- Critical Men's Studies and Androcriticism in Biblical Studies -- Creating the Textual Spectacle of Genesis 32:22-32: All-in Wrestling with Barthes, Westermann and Gunkel -- On (Not) Seeing the 'Face of God' in the Textual Spectacle of Jacob and the Angel -- The 'Visual Category' in Reading and Retelling Biblical Male Bodies -- Choreographies: Michael Symmons Roberts -- Denying the Look -- Revealing and Re-veiling: Michael Schmidt -- Envisioning the Coup de Jarnac: David Kinloch -- Reading 'Below the Belt' in the Critical Wrestle -- The Voice and the Wound: Marking the Male Body -- Conclusion The Dust Settles: Some Final Thoughts on Poetic Parageses of Jacob and the Angel.

The Anatomy of Poetic Paragesis -- Re-choreographing Biblical Interpretation: Limping or Dancing Away from the Jabbok? -- Calling Names from Off-Stage -- Bibliography -- Index of Authors -- Index of Scripture -- Index of Ancient Sources.