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Biblical Horizons

OPEN BOOK: Views and Reviews

Isaac E. Mozeson, The Word: The Dictionary that Reveals the Hebrew Sources of English (Northvale, NJ: Jacob Aaronson Inc., 1995), 310 pp. Reviewed by James B. Jordan. Once there was only one language in the world, the language God spoke to Adam. At the Tower of Babel, there came to…

by James B. JordanJune 28, 1996
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Esther

Esther: Historical & Chronological Comments (IV)

2. The Setting of the Book of Esther A. Xerxes (continued from previous issue) Ezra 6:14 says that the Jews finished building "according to the command of the God of Israel and the decree of Cyrus and Darius and Artaxerxes king of Persia." The problem with this verse is that…

by James B. JordanJune 28, 1996
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Acts

Jesus and Amalek

This essay goes with our previous study of the Amalek pattern back in Biblical Horizons No. 2. Since many do not have this essay, entitled "The Battle of Gog and Magog," let me cite the relevant paragraphs: Note in Genesis 12-15 that Abram moves into the land after escaping Pharaoh…

by James B. JordanJune 28, 1996
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Proverbs

The Strange Woman

Proverbs 7:6-23 is one of several passages early in the Proverbs in which Solomon warns his son about the wiles and dangers of the "strange woman." It is certainly quite proper to take these as straightforward warnings against sexual sins, and these are certainly warnings that need to be impressed…

by Peter LeithartJune 27, 1996
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Biblical Studies

Some Observations

1. In Luke 4:20 we read that after Jesus finished reading from Isaiah, "the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon Him." This is usually taken in a psychological sense: They were amazed at Jesus somehow. I suggest that, as always, a merely psychological reading is a modern…

by James B. JordanMay 28, 1996
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Esther

Esther: Historical & Chronological Comments (III)

2. The Setting of the Book of Esther Up to now we have assumed what we must prove, that the king in Esther is Darius the Great. While Biblical chronologists have usually taken this position, commentators on the book of Esther have often taken others as the king. One view,…

by James B. JordanMay 28, 1996

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Exhortation

When John first talks about sin, he connects it to fellowship and walking in the light. He does not say, “If we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus cleanses us, and as a result we have fellowship with one another.” He says, “If we walk in the light,…

October 1, 2006
Economics

Bakhtin the capitalist

Stallybrass and White critize Bakhtin for conceptualizing the fair purely as a place of communal celebration, ignoring the commercial activities of the fair: “In developing this concept, Bakhtin succumbs to that separation of the festive and the commercial which is distinctive of capitalist rationality as it emerged in the Renaissance.…

September 29, 2006
History

Classical bodies and modernity

Stallybrass and White again: The classical form “was far more than an aesthetic standard or model.” It might be better to say that there was a classicist aesthetic at work in other areas besides art. In any case, the classical body “structured, from the inside as it were, the characteristically…

September 28, 2006
Art

Classical and other bodies

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White ( The Politics and Poetics of Transgression ) summarize a point from Bakhtin: “Bakhtin was struck by the compelling difference between the human body as represented in popular festivity and the body as represented in classical statuary in the Renaissance. He noticed how the two…

September 28, 2006

Humilation and Exaltation

Theologians normally treat the incarnation-to-burial of Jesus as the humiliation of the Son; resurrection-to-ascension exaltation. That’s correct, but there are other angles too. God hid His face behind a veil from the time of Moses to the incarnation. This is His humiliation - we might almost say, a display of…

September 28, 2006
Literature

Metaphysical Hamlet

Andre Gide wrote: “Has anyone, in explaining Hamlet’s character, made full use of the fact that he has returned from a German university? He brings back to his native country the germs of a foreign philosophy; he has plunged int a metaphysics whose remarkable fruit seems to me ‘To be…

September 28, 2006

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