Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Genesis 3 ends on a decisive, and decisively negative, note. Yahweh “drove the man out” of the garden, and, in addition, “at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every direction, to guard the way to the tree of life.”…
When she died in 2005 at the age of 72, Anna Haycraft, the author who published under the name Alice Thomas Ellis, was a celebrated writer in Great Britain. While working at Duckworth Publishers(which her husband owned), she produced a dozen novels, a collection of short stories, a cookbook, volumes…
Some have suggested recently that my "project" is postmodern. To clarify my views on postmodernism, I'm re-posting something I wrote in 2005, with a few modifications. For a fuller discussion, you can check out my Solomon among the Postmoderns (Canon, 2008). First, it is helpful to distinguish, as many writers…
Calling Jerusalem the "holy city" comes so naturally to Christians that it comes as something of a surprise to realize how infrequently the phrase is used in Scripture. Not only is Jerusalem rarely called holy, but in the Old Testament this classification is found only in texts that refer to…
Asking why the church doesn’t sing hymns or even why men don’t sing in church is a bit like lamenting over the lame man who can’t waltz on the dance floor. While it is a valid question, the more immediate question would seem to be, “why doesn’t the lame man…
The theme of 1 Timothy is the distinction between the true children in the Household of God and false children who really belong to the household of Satan. This is seen in the fact that in the chiastic structure of the Epistle, heresy is the subject in the center (…
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It is well known that Greeks rarely offered holocaust sacrifices - sacrifices in which the entire animal is offered to the gods by being consumed in the fire. the most common sacrifice was the thysia , which always culminated with a meal. Alongside the rare holocausts were the equally rare…
When I spot an essay entitled “The Secret Auden,” I get nervous. When it’s in the New York Review of Books , I get nervouser. Edward Mendelson’s recent piece on Auden does refer to Auden’s homosexuality, but the focus of the piece is elsewhere: Auden’s dirty little secret is that…
Is the olah , the “whole burnt offering,” a “pure gift, as Moshe Halbertal has it in On Sacrifice (14)? It seems so: The entire animal is burned, no meat remains for the worshiper, there is no evident benefit given in return for the total devotion of an animal to…
Blood atones. That’s rooted in the created fact that life is in the blood, but in the Bible this doesn’t mean that blood is a kind of magical moral detergent. How then can it atone? It atones because God has “given” it for atonement: “I have given [blood] to you…
Stephen A. Geller offers an intriguing reading of the day of atonement rituals. He points out that, for all the attention given to the scapegoat, one of the unique features of this day’s rites, it is not said that the scapegoat atones for sin. What puts the kafar into Yom…
Why, Stephen A. Geller asks, does “P” consider blood a necessary agent for achieving forgiveness and the re-creation that is atonement? He answers by noting the sequence of Leviticus 16-17, which moves from the bloody cleansing and reestablishment of the sanctuary to the command that butchering be done in the…
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