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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Biblical Studies

Is Abraham’s Life a Type?

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 James B. JordanMay 5, 2001
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Hermeneutics

Thirty-Eight Years by the Sheep Pool

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…

by Jeff MeyersDecember 5, 2000
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Biblical Horizons

How Are Women Saved?

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…

by Jeff MeyersOctober 5, 2000
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Jeremiah

The Return of Hamor

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…

by James B. JordanOctober 4, 2000
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Biblical Horizons

Abram’s 318 Men

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…

by James B. JordanSeptember 4, 2000
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Hermeneutics

153 Large Fish

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…

by James B. JordanSeptember 4, 2000

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Biblical Studies

Word of God, City of Man

I was honored to serve as guest editor of the Fall 2012 edition of Comment magazine, a publication of the Canadian think tank Cardus. The issue focuses on the “Word of God in the City of Man,” and includes articles by James Payton, Al Wolters, Richard Mouw, Marilynne Robinson, Daniel…

December 7, 2012

Origins of Islam

Next door on the main First Things site ( www.firstthings.com ), I summarize some recent revisionist scholarship on the origins of Islam.

December 7, 2012

Trinity Institute: A View from London

There aren’t many contemporary Reformed theologians whose writings I find more stimulating and insightful than Peter Leithart and Jim Jordan. On everything from biblical commentary to historical theology, from poetry to politics, from music and liturgics to eschatology and hermeneutics, the light of the gospel shines forth in fresh and…

December 7, 2012
Art

Bronze

The December 20 edition of the NYRB has some arresting photos of bronze statues in a London Royal Academy exhibit, made all the more impressive by the reviewer Andrew Butterfield’s description of the process of bronze sculpture: “Bronze is very different from most materials of sculpture. The other substances commonly…

December 7, 2012

1950s redux?

Poor Camille Paglia. She’s worked herself into a froth. Writing in The Hollywood Reporter , she complains s(n)eeringly that the latest crop of women stars have betrayed feminism. With Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and their crowd of new power women, we’re back “to the demure girly-girl days of the white-bread…

December 6, 2012
Economics

Before Economics

“None of our Western [economic] distinctions was completely absent in antiquity,” writes Sitta van Reden near the end of her Exchange in Ancient Greece (218). Yet, because of a different configuration of society the distinctions we take for granted were not so ingrained: “Rigid status boundaries between citizens and outsiders,…

December 5, 2012

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