Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Summary In what follows, I will consider the “year-stamps” employed in Scripture, i.e., statements of the form, “Such-and-such an event took place in the Xth year of Y.” In the process, I will suggest some ways in which the Biblical narrative might relate to events in the extra-Biblical world, though…
In the first essay on the parable of the Prodigal Son, I suggested that the problems commentators and others encounter in interpreting Jesus three-part parable are not accidental. These are not just problems in our ignorance of cultural background. They are intentional features of the stories —stories designed to poke…
The story of the Prodigal Son is perhaps the most well-known story in the Bible. As others have observed, it may also be one of the most misunderstood. In two short essays, I will point out features of this story that are commonly neglected, aspects of Jesus’ parable that might…
The parable of Lazarus and the nameless rich man is not an independent story. It is part of a long context that begins in Luke 15:1, where Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners and the scribes and Pharisees grumble. In response to their hardheartedness, Jesus tells a three-part…
The Bible is written so that even when a reader cannot pick up on what might be deeper or more detailed aspects of a text, there is virtually always a message to be heard. In the ancient world, where the “reader” of Scripture would likely be a church official facing…
The distinction between garden (or vineyard) and field begins in Genesis 2. This relates to the ordering of the formless world. Plants of the field are contrasted with the garden planted by God in Genesis 2:5&8. Later on, under the Old Covenant the Israelites will be required to keep their…
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T he essays in Edward Alexander’s forthcoming Jews Against Themselves are an excoriating assault on Jewish “apostates”—Jews who, in the words of Maimonides, separate themselves “from the community” or “hold aloof from the congregation of Israel” and is “indifferent when they are in distress.” In Maimonides’s opinion, such no longer…
The TLS reviewer of Stephen Grant’s Collecting Shakespeare summarizes some of the intrigue, skullduggery, and determination that lie behind the creation of Washington’s Folger Shakespeare library: “During their long marriage, the diminutive couple (he was five foot four, she five foot) devoted themselves to collecting books, pictures and objects (relics…
“One could say that age is to time what place is to space,” says Robert Pogue Harrison ( Juvenescence , 3), and he’s surprising that with all the attention given by philosophers to time, so few make the connection with age. Even Heidegger, who understood time as “a kind of…
First there is only a tabernacle in the wilderness. Yahweh’s house, by itself, surrounded by a curtain. No priests live on the tabernacle grounds; the sanctuary is bounded off from everyone. By the time of Samuel, the little boy is sleeping in “the temple” at Shiloh. It’s still a tent,…
Winfried Corduan’s In the Beginning God is largely an effort to rehabilitate the reputation and theory of Catholic linguist Wilhelm Schmidt, whose 12-volume Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (1912-54) argued that monotheism was the original form of religious belief. As Corduan describes it, the “narrative behind the method” assumes that peoples…
I confess. I’m a sucker for books on the Trinity, and for books on the tabernacle. When someone combines these two topics in a discussion of the foundations of mathematics, as Vern Poythress does in Redeeming Mathematics , I’m hooked. Poythress has been busy redeeming nearly everything recently - Science…
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