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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CS Lewis says that language cannot do what music and gesture do, that is, “do more than one thing at once.” He admits that “the words in a great poet’s phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly speaking, each word must be read…
INTRODUCTION At the middle of Matthew’s story of Jesus, Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ ( 16:16 ). But he doesn’t yet understand what that means. He still has to learn that being Christ means taking up a cross and losing life to find it. THE TEXT “When Jesus…
Matthew uses the word “sign” in only four contexts. In the closely parallel passages 12:38-45 and 16:1-4, the Jewish leaders ask Jesus for a sign; the word is used several times in chapter 24, and a last time in 26:48 to describe Judas’s kiss. Chapters 12 and 16 are obviously…
Yahweh rained bread from heaven to test Israel, to see if they would follow His instructions (Exodus 16:4). They didn’t follow Him. Instead, they disobeyed the instructions about manna (16:13-21) and turned the tables to put God to the test (17:2, 7). Jesus follows the same pattern. He is Bread…
The Pharisees and Sadducees ask Jesus for a sign from heaven (Matthew 16:1). The first “signs” in the heavens were the sun, moon, and stars. A sign from heaven is a sign of new creation, and Jesus’ response, alluding to the evening-morning pattern of the creation week, continues the creation…
The tide started turning against the etymologists during the Renaissance. In Praise of Folly , Erasmus mocked the theologians for their obsessions with the minutiae of words: “I met with another, some eighty years of age, and such a divine that you’d have sworn Scotus himself was revived in him.…
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