Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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Though “word and sentence are interdependent,” argues David Braine ( Language and Human Understanding , 2), yet “neither is definable in terms of the other.” This is most often acknowledged from one direction: An infinite number of sentences can be constructed from the finite resources of the lexical stock of…
In a 2005 article in Atike Kunst , Gunnel Ekroth examines vase paintings to explore the role blood played in Greek sacrificial rites. One main aim is to support his thesis that Greek reserved sacrificial blood in order to consume it, and he defense this view by examining when blood…
Leviticus contains only two narratives (chs. 10, 24), and its structure is dictated by speeches from Yahweh to Moses, who delivers them to Israel. Yet, in a rough and broad way, it’s possible to see a narrative shape to the book, particularly if we view it as a continuation of…
In a 2005 Syracuse University dissertation on purity, Yohan Yoo traces some of the changes in purity regulations that took place in his three selected ancient purity systems - Egypt, Israel, and Greece. In the first, he finds what he describes as a “democratization of the mortuary texts” during the…
Israel is prohibited from uncovering nakedness of anyone who is “flesh of your flesh” (Leviticus 18:6). A man and a woman who already have a “flesh” relationship - whether biological or “covenantal” kinship - cannot add another one-flesh sexual relationship. An Israelite can rightly be joined in one flesh with…
Micah ends with promises of deliverance from sin. “I” bear Yahweh’s indignation because of my sin, but He will deliver me (7:9). Yahweh will have compassion and “tread our iniquities under foot” (7:19). It’s a new exodus, as in the days when Yahweh performed signs in Egypt (7:15). Exiles will…
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