Cultural background is an important but often unexamined factor that shapes and influences any piece of writing. The Bible is no different. In the New Testament, gospel and epistle writers used expressions and ideas they knew would be familiar to their readers. Jesus himself spoke in parables that drew heavily on the common experiences of his audience.

But for modern readers, the cultural world of early Christianity is quite foreign—which means that reading and understanding the New Testament in its proper cultural and historical context can sometimes be challenging. The Dictionary of New Testament Background is a reference work designed to narrow the gap between the perspective of modern readers and the ancient setting of the New Testament. Drawing from the best and most recent scholarship on the ancient Mediterranean world, this work offers important information on Jewish religion, Greco-Roman culture, and other factors of vital importance in shaping the New Testament world.

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Who isn't familiar with the image of God as the Good Shepherd?

Some of our most fundamental biblical understandings come to us in the form of images, metaphors, and symbols—pictures that are painted with words in the biblical text. So it's easy to see why an ability to recognize and decode the Bible's many verbal pictures is extremely important to our faith.

For modern readers, this task is especially important, because images that were commonplace to readers, writers, and speakers in ancient times, when the words of the Bible were first written and collected, may no longer be familiar to us at all. For instance, did you know that the sea monster (as in Job 41) can symbolize both chaos and God's creative power?

The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery from InterVaristy Press offers an easily-searchable guide to images, metaphors, motifs, archetypes, and literary patterns which recur again and again throughout the Bible, across both the Old and the New Testaments. This unique reference tool awakens us to a rich world of meanings and associations within the biblical text, and fills an important gap in any modern reader's understanding of the Bible.

In the Tyndale Bible Dictionary, you'll find an easily searchable reference tool with over 1,000 articles on Bible topics at your fingertips. Find answers on any topic you encounter while reading and studying the Bible.

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A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life is the most well-known and influential of William Law's many Christian writings. It issues a passionate call for readers to live a life "governed by the spirit of devotion," but also offers down-to-earth practices for doing so, such as a regular method of daily prayer, and meditation on Christian virtues like humility and universal love.

The aim of Law's treatise is to set readers on a path that draws always closer to God, and to enable them to turn aside from the temptations of the present "polite age" that sees heartfelt religious devotion as weak or ignorant. One of Law's contemporaries remarked, "If Mr. Law finds a spark of piety in a reader's mind, he will soon kindle it into a flame." While clearly grounded in the passion and revival of a pivotal moment in Christian history, Law's words ring with an inspiration that is still relevant to Christian readers today.

William Law (1686-1761) taught at Cambridge in the early 1700s but was banned from teaching and preaching because he refused to take an loyalty oath to the government during a time of great political and religious turmoil in Great Britain. Law's writings influenced many prominent religious figures of the day, including John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism, and George Whitefield, a renowned preacher and evangelist in the early Methodist movement.

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And see also these new free works from William Law:

• All Free Olive Tree Resources
• The Holy Bible in Esperanto
• The Scholar's Collection (You save 58%)
• The John Piper eBook Collection
• Build your own Collection and SAVE!
• The Net Bible with Notes
• Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Little Kittel)