Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The preceding essay has caused me to consider the possibility that the life of Abraham as recounted in Genesis contains a typological prophecy of the history of Israel; that is, that the events in Abraham’s life broadly anticipate events in Israel’s history. This kind of pattern is seen in the…
by: Jeff Meyers and James Jordan In the fifth chapter of John’s gospel we read of a man who had been ill for 38 years and who was lying by a pool located by the Sheep Gate of Jerusalem. This sheep waited, as did many other infirm people, for an…
What had been reduced to ruin by this sex, would by the selfsame sex be recovered to salvation. As Eve believed the serpent, so Mary believed the angel. The delinquency which the one occasioned by believing, the other by believing effaced. —Tertullian What is Paul saying about women and salvation…
Back in Biblical Horizons 132 I discussed the horrible abuse of the converted men of Salem/Shechem in Genesis 34. These Hivites had joined the covenant by circumcision and then were slaughtered by Simeon and Levi. That, however, is not the end of their story. In Joshua 9 we find the…
Genesis 14:14 says that Abram mustered his trained men, “born in his house,” to rescue Lot, and gives their number as 318. It is clear that the precise number is provided for some reason, but what is it? S. Gevirtz notes that 318 is the sum of all the prime…
Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three; and although there were so many, the net was not torn. (John 21:11) This is one of those texts in the Bible that many people puzzle over. It is not a puzzle…
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Joel 2:25 plays a strangely prominent role in the Arian controversy.  In the NASB translation, the Lord promises to “make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the creeping locust, the stripping locust and the gnawing locust, my great army which I sent among you.” In the Greek translations…
The priests pay Judas 30 pieces of silver to betray Jesus (Matthew 26:15).  The amount of the payment takes us back to Exodus 21:32 and Zechariah 11:12-13.  Here I want to muse on the connection between Matthew and the Exodus passage. The scenario in Exodus is this: A man owns…
“Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.” For nearly two millennia, Christians have been singing that every week, often without a second thought about the radical claims embedded in the hymn. In Isaiah 6, the song shakes the temple, but Christians…
Gifts blind the clear-sighted and subvert justice (Exodus 23:8).  In context, that’s statement about bribery, and the word used for “gift” here is almost invariably used for bribes of one sort or another (Deuteronomy 10:17; 16:19; 27:25; 1 Samuel 8:3; 1 Kings 15:29; 16:8; etc.). Occasionally, the reference seems a…
From Nabokov’s lectures on literature, quoted in Smith’s book: “All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over.  Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic relight is between the shoulder blades.  That little shiver behind is quite certainly…
Jamie Smith’s latest book ( Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Cultural Liturgies) ) is excellent.  He rightly challenges the tendency for “worldview-talk” to take a rationalist bent, and in place of the assumption that “man is a thinking being” he argues an anthropology based on the notion…
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