Review of English-language literature about the irony in the holy scriptures of the Old Testament (from the late 19th to the early 21st centuries)

The problem of irony in biblical texts is increasingly raised in biblical science. In Western biblical studies, this topic began to receive coverage for a long time. This review of English-language biblical studies seeks to compensate for the lack of a systematic view of the problem in Russian science. The article presents the most cited English-language works on the subject of irony in the Old Testament, at the end of the review an attempt to highlight the main areas of research in the selected topic and identified the Old Testament stories, the most popular from the point of view of ironic reading. The chronological framework of the study covers the period from the end of the 19th century to 2016. The main positive result of the work can be considered to attract the attention of readers to a significant number (over 65) of little-known and highly specialized texts on the problem of the presence and reading of irony in the Holy Scripture. In Russian, it is one of the first academic works devoted to the problem of biblical irony research.