Ralph Allan Smith
108 articles
Every Noise Appalls
The first two essays in this series drew attention to the structure of the first part of Macbeth and to the way Shakespeare incorporates the Garden of Eden into his story. Macbeth , we saw, is a temptation story in which, compared to the Biblical story, the temptation itself is…
From Garden to Gate of Hell
In my previous essay on Macbeth , I pointed out that Shakespeare rewrote Scottish history to construct a play which points to Adam’s Fall — a man and a woman tempted by devils to steal the throne and become like gods. It is hard to imagine anyone in Shakespeare’s day…
Macbeth and the Fall of Adam
For anyone in Shakespeare’s audience who knew the real story of Macbeth, his play must have been surprising. Shakespeare changed so many important details of the historical Macbeth’s life that had Raphael Holinshed, the main author of the most popular history of the British Isles in Shakespeare’s day — Holinshed…
Macbeth and Nihilism
When it comes to the interpretation of Shakespeare, Harold Bloom is my favorite enemy. His writing is brilliant, his knowledge of things Shakespearean encyclopedic, and the insights he offers may puzzle, startle, or amaze, but they always educate. How then can he be an enemy? Because his anti-Christian bias is…
The Bard and the Book
I concluded the first essay on this topic by saying that I would introduce three books about Shakespeare and the Bible, but I decided to introduce four instead. The three books become four are: Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Associated University Presses, 1999) ; Hannibal Hamlin, The…
Was Shakespeare A Christian?
How would one go about answering the question posed by my title? That depends on what the question means. Obviously, different definitions of the question would require different approaches to an answer. Right off hand, I can think of at least three possible — though not necessarily mutually exclusive —…
Victory Food
In the nature of the case, “the” Christian meditation on Deuteronomy 14:1-21 cannot be written. Meditation offers too many possibilities, opens too many doors. There is not one and only one correct set of associations for a Christian to consider when thinking of Deuteronomy 14:1-21. We could, for example, consider…
You are what you eat
Deuteronomy 14 is full of allusions to events of Israel’s history and other portions of Scripture. What would an Israelite learn by mediation on these allusions? The answer, I believe, is at least fourfold. Faith, Worship, War For the ancient Israelite first hearing Moses’ sermon, or perhaps hearing it read…
Holy Things for Holy People
The allusion to the Exodus story is contained in the first words of Deuteronomy 14:1 — “ye are the sons of Yahweh your God” — as well as in 14:2 in the use of the technical term translated “treasured possession,” “His own possession,” “peculiar people,” “precious people,” and so forth.…
Forbidden Foods
I have argued that Deuteronomy 14:1-21 is an independent literary unit that applies the Third Word to the lives of Israelites from the time of Moses and Joshua. In this short pericope, Moses suggests broad and deep meaning by means of literary allusion to the stories of the creation and…
Allusive Torah
In the first part of this essay, I argued that the story of the covenant is what unifies and grounds the laws in the book of Deuteronomy. In the third section of this essay, as part of my argument that Deuteronomy 14:1-21 forms a distinct pericope, I claimed that these…
Jesus, David, Adam: A Reading of John 18:1-11
John 18:1-11 appears on the surface to be a straightforward, if somewhat unusual, narrative of Jesus’ arrest by officers of the chief priests and Pharisees accompanied by an apparently large group of Roman soldiers, all of them led by the betrayer, Judas. But there is much more here than what…
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