Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…
In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…
Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…
The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…
More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…
The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…
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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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