Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Showing page 265 of 309
Showing page 7 of 43
In his classic work on the Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations , Cyrus Gordon points to a very specific parallel: “Homeric tradition often represents military organisation as contingents of troops under a triad of officers for each contingent.” He cites Iliad 1.563-7 and Odyssey 14.470-1 for support. And…
Giorgio de Santillana’s Hamlet’s Mill is an exercise in un-forgetting. Ancients believed the world moved through various ages: “Each age brings a World Era, a Twilight of the Gods. Great structures collapse; pillars topple which supported the great fabric; floods and cataclysms herald the shaping of a new world.” And…
In an essay written around 1942, John Maynard Keynes beautifully captured the archaic character of Isaac Newton: “Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the…
Giorgio de Santillana argued that mythology was not historical but cosmological ( Hamlet’s Mill , 50): “whatever is true myth has no historical basis, however tempting the reduction, however massive and well armed the impact of a good deal of modern criticism on that belief. The attempt to reduce myth…
Sim Van der Ryn’s Design for an Empathic World is a brief for person-centered design, design that takes the users and the world around a building into account. Van der Ryn sees “forward-thinking companies” doing just what he suggests. He quotes Paul Goldberger on Google’s California campus: “What is really…
University of Cape Town professor David Benatar argues answers the question “How many children should we have” with a simple “None.” “Morally responsible parents wish to spare their children pain,” he argues. But “the only way to prevent harm altogether is to desist from bringing children into existence. Any child…
Showing page 559 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
