Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I believe hymnals should be shorter than they are. Much shorter. 100 hymns at most, let’s say. I imagine that this will be a hard one to swallow for most of my readers, so I will attempt to bolster my argument as best I can. I can’t think of any…
Joshua is never called a king in the Bible. Yet while lacking the title, Joshua possesses the trappings of biblical kingship to a degree that it seems warranted to consider him a royal figure. There are lots of reasons for thinking this. In a 1981 Journal of Biblical Literature article,…
God speaks. He is not silent. He has designed humanity for reception of such communication and also to speak on His behalf. This speaking is not simply happenstance. It is not just a curious quirk about humanity. It is intrinsic to who we are that we speak and shape the…
One evening, years ago, home from college for Christmas break, I dreamt that I was playing the piano, passionately and well, in the church sanctuary beneath the parsonage in the renovated mansion in rural New Hampshire where my father was the minister. It was something of a lucid dream because…
I’m a big worrier. Always have been. Some of my earliest memories are of being anxious to the point of getting sick, sometimes for trivial reasons. My mind moves a million miles a minute, wondering what will happen in 5 minutes, or tomorrow, or next week, or in ten years.…
“The sun had gone up on the earth when Lot came to Zoar. And the LORD rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD from heaven, and he devastated those cities and the whole valley and all those dwelling in the cities and the growth of…
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In Histories II, Herodotus claims that Greeks borrowed the very name Dionysus from Egyptians, not to mention the phallic procession associated with that god: “it was Melampous who introduced the phallic procession, and from Melampous that the Greeks learnt the rites that they now perform. Melampous, in my view, was…
According to Egyptian mythology, Osiris was the son of Ra, who later became associated with Amon. In the New Kingdom, these melded together, producing a union of Amon-Ra with his son Osiris. According to Martin Bernal ( Black Athena , 1.115-6), Alexander the Great saw himself “as this syncretic divinity,…
Jonathan Crary begins his 24/7 describing experiments to increase the time that soldiers can stay awake and alert. 24/7 has been around for a long time.So far, humans have resisted, simply by getting tired. Now we’re trying to create humans who can flourish, or at least survive, in the unnatural…
Isaiah 66 begins with an obvious allusion to this prayer. Yahweh claims to sit enthroned in heaven and use earth as His footstool (v. 1), and adds that, gargantuan as He is, He is uncontainable by any house that Israel might make for Him (v. 1). Solomon already knew this:…
Isaiah 66:6 would make a neat movie scene. First we hear a voice of tumult, a voice like the roaring of the sea or like the din of a gigantic party. It’s coming from the city, but the camera keeps moving to focus on the temple ( heykal , “palace,”…
James Hamilton’s lively new commentary on Exalting Christ in Ezra and Nehemiah is a volume in the Christ-Centered Exposition series. The series, written for pastors, is founded on the premise that the Bible “contains a unified story of redemptive history of which Jesus is the hero” (ix). Hamilton’s volume handles…
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