Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
WHAT IS THE OT PRECURSOR OF THE NT OFFICE OF PASTOR? HOW DOES THE FORMER ILLUMINATE THE LATTER? The first problem to address is: how do we know that there is an office of pastor in the New Testament? 1 Perhaps the way the question is put may permit me…
[This essay was originally published in December, 1981, in The Biblical Educator , a publication of the Institute for Christian Economics, and again with slight revisions in Contra Mundum 7 (Spring, 1993). It is reprinted here as a supplement to my book Creation in Six Days .] In 1979, Dr.…
Anyone seeking to reverse the meaning of this promise needs to come to grips not only with the phrase "God was with the lad" later on, but also with Hagar’s response in 16:13. She worships Yahweh, putting her trust in Him and obeying Him. In fact, Hagar is at the…
Ishmael is the narrator of Melville’s fantasy-romance Moby Dick. Melville takes up the traditional view of Ishmael as a wayward son of Abraham, driven out solely because of the Divine "caprice" of election, an angry man with his hand raised against all other men. He is a fitting "anti-hero," or…
There were five cities at the center of the Canaanite culture in the circle of the Jordan, a place like the Garden of Eden, like the land of Egypt, before it became the Dead Sea at the destruction of the cities (Genesis 13:10). Genesis 14:2 tells us their names: Sodom,…
Meditations by James B. Jordan Genesis 19, the destruction of Sodom and the rescue of Lot, is part two of a story that begins in Genesis 18. These two chapters happen in one 24-hour period: noon and evening in Mamre, and midnight and daybreak in Sodom. God and two angels…
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Mesopotamian temples were sometimes made of bricks, and, according to M. J. Geller (a contribution to Figurative Language in the Ancient Near East ), great care was taken with the first brick, the “auspicious brick.” Geller writes, “When a temple was not built of stone (the usual practice) but of…
In his study of Ritual and Cult at Ugarit , Dennis Pardee discusses the similarities and differences between Ugaritic and Israelite cult. One of the “most striking set of similarities,” he says, “is provided by those terms that are either etymologically related to corresponding Hebrew terms.” The two languages use…
In 2008, William Deresiewicz published an article in The American Scholar on “ The Disadvantages of Elite Education .” Drawing on his years of study and graduate teaching at Columbia and his time at Yale, he argued that his education had made him incapable of carrying on a conversation with…
Frank Vertosick’s Mind: A Unified Theory of Intelligence is out there. He argues that living things are all intelligence, going so far as to suggest that “amoebas may be the smartest things on the planet” and claims that life is intelligence at the molecular level.” In short, “all living things—even…
B.W. Powe’s Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye is a sassy book about two of Canada’s greatest intellectuals, McLuhan the orator and rhetorician and popular guru, Frye the media-shy theorist of literary archetypes. Powe deals with their relationship as colleagues at the University of Toronto, as well as describing their direct…
Flood stories are widespread in the ancient world, and many studies compare the Babylonian account with the best known account, that of Noah in Genesis. Y.S. Chen’s The Primeval Flood Catastrophe , a revision of the author’s DPhil dissertation, looks at flood traditions from another angle, attempting to trace the…
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