Dr Charlie Hadjiev
A little bit about me
I am originally from Bulgaria and first came to the UK as a theology student in 1993. In 2004 I returned to pursue doctoral studies at Oxford. I was involved for a number of years in university mission and evangelism both in Bulgaria and across Europe, as well as various forms of Church ministry, including preaching, leadership and church planting. In 2011 I moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to teach Biblical Studies and Hebrew, before joining St Padarn’s in 2023. I am currently the Old Testament editor for the Bulgarian Bible Society’s project to revise its existing translation of the Bible into contemporary Bulgarian. Besides theology and Scripture, I love humour, sit-coms, science fiction, mystery novels and all other kinds of good literature.
My research interests
Most of my academic work has been on the Old Testament prophetic and narrative literature. My primary interest is in hermeneutics, i.e., the way we read and understand Scripture and relate it to our own lives and experience. I began my academic career as a redaction critic because I was fascinated by the way biblical writers actualised prior tradition to address their own situation. I continue to maintain a keen interest in the historical issues that arise out of redaction criticism but I am also fascinated by the questions that reader response approaches (of which redaction might have been an ancient precursor) raise for faithful life and worship today.
Some of my recent work
2022 ‘“(Not) Her Husband”: Hosea’s God and Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Suspicion and Trust’ Religions 13:163 https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13020163
2022 ‘Reading Joel Within and Without the “Book of the Twelve”’, in Reading the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets. Edited by David G. Firth and Brittany N. Melton (Studies in Scripture and Biblical Theology; Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic), 30-45.
2020 Joel and Amos (Tyndale Old Testament Commentary: New Series; Nottingham: IVP)
2020 Joel, Obadiah, Habakkuk and Zephaniah: An Introduction and Study Guide (T&T Clark Study Guides to the Old Testament; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark)
2020 ‘A Prophetic Anthology rather than a Book of the Twelve’ in The Book of the Twelve: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation. Edited by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer and Jakob Wöhrle (Vetus Testamentum Supplements 184; Leiden and Boston: Brill), 90-108
2018 ‘Introduction: Images of Migration in the Hebrew Bible’, Biblical Interpretation 26: 435-438
2018 ‘“I Have Become a Stranger in a Foreign Land”: Reading the Exodus Narrative as the Villain’, Biblical Interpretation, 26: 515-527
2016 ‘Adultery, Shame and Sexual Pollution in Ancient Israel and in Hosea: A Response to Joshua Moon’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 41: 221-236
2015 ‘Elijah's Alleged Megalomania: Reading Strategies for Composite Texts, with 1 Kings 19 as an Example,’ Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 39: 433-449
2015 ‘The King and the Reader: Hermeneutical Reflections on 1 Kings 20-21,’ Tyndale Bulletin 66: 63-74
2014 'The Theological Transformations of Zephaniah's Proclamation of Doom,' ZAW 126: 506-520