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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Through much of Kings, the parallel of North and South has been deigned to emphasize the South’s apostasy. When the South becomes a mirror-image of the idolatrous North, it’s a sign of Judah’s doom. Here, the mirroring goes the other way: Yahweh’s faithfulness to David’s house is reflected in His…
Shakespeare’s Antony is an Aeneas who refuses to act piously by leaving his Dido and moving on to found Rome. Hence, in pursuit of Cleopatra he leaves Empire to Octavius, and Aeneas is split between the two of them. But Antony is also an Aeneas who will never be separated…
According to Deuteronomy 20, any man who had built a house, planted a vineyard, or married a wife without enjoying their benefits and joys was excused from military service. While it was certainly possible for a 20-year-old Israelite to be unmarried and propertyless, it would seem that the military was…
In his book on the Deuteronomistic history, Terence Fretheim notes the marked differences between God’s dealings with Israel and the expectations suggested by suzereignty treaties: “the historian makes it abundantly clear that God is not bound to react to the people in some schematic or univocal fashion. The relationship between…
Here’s a PhD thesis: What is going on, philosophically and theologically, in the transition from viewing Joshua-2 Kings as Former Prophets (Jewish tradition) to seeing them as Historical Books (evangelical) to seeing them as Deuteronomistic History (contemporary academic consensus). There’s a story to unpack there similar to the story that…
Jesus comes telling parables, so that seeing they might not see and hearing they might not understand. Yahweh does the same in Kings; He tells and enacts parables that are understood only by those who have received the wisdom that comes from God. It is, as with Jesus and Paul,…
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