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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Revelation is divided into four large sections, marked by the phrase “in the Spirit.” (I picked this up from an ETS presentation by E. Michael Rusten.) Jesus is in the Spirit on the island of Patmos (1:9-10); a trumpet voice calls him to heaven and he ascends in the Spirit…
In the final chapter of his magisterial The Mind of Egypt , Jan Assmann sketches out the path by which Egypt left its mark on the modern world. Interest in Egypt surged in the Renaissance, as “newly discovered manuscripts were hailed as the rediscovery of Egyptian wisdom” (427), but it…
Jan Assmann ( The Mind of Egypt ) summarizes the account of the exodus provided by late antique Egyptian writers - Manetho, Apion, and Pompeius Trogus, a first-century BC historian. The last of these conflates the exodus with an old Egyptian story of the expulsion of the lepers: “Moses is…
Assessing the impact of Hellenism on Egyptian culture, Jan Assmann ( The Mind of Egypt ) argues that “The Hellenistic project was not a bid to hellenize the east but to find forms of expression in which indigenous traditions could be made transparent and translatable. Hellenism provided local traditions with…
Robert Kaplan argues in Asia’s Cauldron that control of the South China Sea is going to be critical in the geopolitics of this century. According to Ian Morris’s NYTBR review, “Kaplan starts out from some basic economics. More than half of the world’s annual merchant fleet tonnage (including four-fifths of…
David Owen’s fascinating New Yorker piece on airline seating included these tidbits. “seat-back video screens and the hard frames that surround them pose a safety challenge, partly because of the potential for injuries caused by head strikes, and partly because the computers and the electrical systems that serve them have…
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