Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
After Elijah’s battered and depressed howling in the wilderness it must have seemed like the new prophet came eating and drinking. Which is a pattern we see again in the New Testament—John is explicitly identified with Elijah (Luke 1.17, Matthew 11.14), howling the truth in the wilderness that the people…
Reading Robert Conquest’s biography of Stalin 1 has opened new lines of meditation on Paul’s command in Colossians 3:9. But before turning to that, let me briefly indicate what Paul is not saying. He is not saying that there is no such thing as righteous deception, such as Jael practiced…
You won’t find wild lions today in Israel. But lions used to range much more widely than they do now, and in biblical times they were a menace that shepherds in Israel had to contend with. David did as a shepherd boy, and Amos—who “ was among the sheepbreeders of…
I would like to remedy a flaw for English speakers in the book of Genesis. A flaw that may seem innocuous, but we must remember where the devil lives...in the details. If we are to fear the Lord, it behooves our translation committees to ensure that the fearfulness of God…
While reading at my son’s baseball game this week, a mom from our school approached me and asked if I was reading Dante. I wasn’t, but our sons are both reading Divine Comedy in their sophomore literature class, so it was a reasonable question. What unfolded was a quick conversation…
In the first two essays in this series, I addressed the question of how the nations would learn about Israel’s Torah, in the second essay especially emphasizing the aesthetic aspects of Israel’s testimony. For we naturally wonder: How would people in Mesopotamia or Egypt, not to mention the rest of…
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Bodies are objects, but beginning with Husserl philosophers, anthropologists and others have considered not the objective character of the body but the “live body” that is both a living object and a cultural artifact. In the sense that the lived body is a cultural artifact, writes John Dunnill in his…
In Sacrifice and the Body , John Dunnill makes the simple observation that most of what ancient Israelites sacrificed was food. This means that “the elements of thanksgiving and tribute, which are always implicitly present in such meal offerings, not only attribute the harvest to God, and return a small…
John Dunnill’s summary of the interconnections of gift, creation, covenant, sacrifice, and Trinity is lovely ( Sacrifice and the Body , 29): “To say that the world is gift, and that human life fulfills itself when it responds by giving, is more than a perception or ungrounded assertion about the…
Summarizing the prophetic critique of sacrifice, John Dunnill ( Sacrifice and the Body , 38) rebuts Roland de Vaux’s claim that “God demands first and foremost an interior religion” and that the prophets aimed their attacks as “outward religion” as such. Dunnill argues, on the contrary, that “the critique expresses…
In their 1994 The Archetypal Actions of Ritual , Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw attempt a philosophically sophisticated definition of ritual. Through a survey of the existing literature on ritual, the authors seek to determine what kind of theory or ritual is needed. They reject theories that claim that ritual…
In his study of circumcision, Marked in Your Flesh , Leonard Glick picks up a suggestion made by Jon Levenson that circumcision in ancient Israel might symbolize child sacrifice. The cutting of the foreskin would function as a substitute for the cutting of the child, a reenactment of the aqedah…
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