Weighing Hearts: Character, Judgment, and the Ethics of Reading the Bible

Issues involving 'character' have been the object of increasing interest and debate in recent years. Social psychologists attempt to determine the role of character as a cause of human behavior, moral philosophers explore the significance of character for understanding ethics and virtue, and literary scholars investigate the depiction of character in narrative. Weighing Hearts represents the first serious attempt to integrate all these approaches in order to gain a deeper and more precise understanding of how readers evaluate characters in biblical narrative. While the primary focus is on the Hebrew Bible, the author also includes several comparative analyses involving other ancient and modern literary works. Weighing Hearts also shows how biblical historians and redaction critics can make their analyses more precise and nuanced, by taking into account what psychology has learned about the consistency of character and the 'attribution errors' people make when evaluating others.