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,…
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Athanasius points out to Marcellinus that the Psalms cover every “eventuality.”  They are a mirror of the soul because they are a mirror of human experience - of suffering, of desperation, of exultation, of thanksgiving, of prosperity, of adversity, of garden and wilderness, of isolation and communion, and on and…
No one would dare, Athanasius writes to Marcellinus, to take the words of the patriarchs, or Moses, or the prophets as his own.  No one would dare imitate the prophets by saying “As the Lord lives, before whom I stand today.” The Psalms are different.  When someone reads, hears, chants,…
Paul ends 1 Corinthians (16:22) with a neat chiastic sign-off.  Anyone who does not love the Lord is declared “accursed” ( anathema ) and Paul follows this with the cry of maranatha (“the Lord comes”).  Anath-ma/mar-anatha . Substantively, it is a striking phrase.   Anathema speaks a harsh word of…
In his superb introduction to the New City Press edition of  Augustine’s de Trinitate ( Trinity, The (Works of Saint Augustine A Translation for the 21st Century) ), Edmund Hill offers a chiastic outline of the treatise: 1. Introduction, 1 2. Divine missions: exegetical, 2-4 3. Trinitarian language: philosophical, 5-7…
In Epistle 11, Augustine attempts to explain an apparent contradiction in the Catholic faith.  On the one hand, all of God does all that God does, since the Persons of the Trinity are inseparable and act inseparably: “For the union of Persons in the Trinity is in the Catholic faith set forth and believed, and…
David Garland comments that the first part of Matthew’s Passion narrative (26:2-56) begins with the plot of the priests and elders and then is divided into six scenes: 1. Anointing for burial, 26:6-13 2. Judas’ betrayal, 26:14-15 3. Preparation for Passover, 26:17-19 4. Last Supper, 26:20-30 5. Prediction that the…
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