Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When Samuel saw Saul, Yahweh answered him, "Behold, the man of whom I spoke to you! This one will restrain My people" (1 Samuel 9:17) Many English versions of 1 Samuel 9:17 read, "This one will rule over My people," but that is a mistranslation. The Hebrew verb is `atsar…
We have arrived at the tentative date of A.M. 3474 for the decree of Cyrus, and we have determined to operate as if the 70 weeks of Daniel 9 are literal years. We also decided that Messiah the Prince arrives at the beginning of the 70th week, after the 69…
The book of Proverbs appears as a largely random collection of aphorisms drawn from experience saturated in law. Despite its random arrangement, however, the book does have an over-arching structure that reinforces its main themes. One way to gather clues regarding the structure of a biblical book (or any book)…
I recently had the privilege and pleasure of reading the first draught of Gary North’s Economic Commentary on Leviticus , which will be out some time next year. Gary’s comments on Leviticus 27 were stimulating, and caused me to take another look at the passage. The results, which I sent…
As we have seen in this series, each time there is a new covenant, there is a break in the year-by-year chronology. At the same time, each time the break is crossed by information provided in the text. Thus, the year-by-year chronology breaks down at the birth of Abraham, but…
The Openness of Literature Let’s discuss literature for a moment. There are two ways a story or novel can close. The first is called poetic justice. When a story ends with poetic justice, the bad guys are all punished and the good guys are all rewarded. This kind of story…
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Melanchthon wrote, “The views of Erasmus might have caused greater tumults if Luther had not arisen to arrest them . . . all of this tragedy about the Lord’s Supper started from him.” Melanchthon had in mind Erasmus’s Neo-platonic disparagement of matter, which infected Zwingli and filtered into Anabaptist theology.…
Zechariah predicts that Tyre will be dispossessed and her wealth cast into the sea (v. 4), and then the city will be “consumed with fire.” The verb is the common verb for “eating,” and the picture of an “eating fire” sends the mind back to the sacrificial system, where the…
Zechariah 9:1-4 focuses on the conquest of Tyre, the “wise” city, shrewd at least in amassing wealth (v. 3). But the celebratory description contains a subversive pun. The Hebrew for Tyre is tsor (“rock”), and Zechariah says that Tyre has built herself a fortress, a word built on the same…
In the second edition of African Religions and Philosophy (1989), John Mbiti says that Africans generally lack a concept of the future. Their future tenses reach only a short time into the past, and one people leave the present they are absorbed into an atemporal afterlife. Mbiti notes as well…
E.B. Tylor was the first to characterize African religions as “animist,” remarking that “one great element of religion, that moral element which among the higher nations forms its most vital part, is indeed little represented in the religion of the lower races.” Others characterized the”lower religions” as “fetishist” because of…
Tatian’s Oration to the Greeks is an attempt to vindicate the wisdom of Moses against Greek snobbery toward the barbarians. Aime Puech points out that chronology was central to Tatian’s argument: “In order to rehabilitate the Barbarians it was important to prove that they had contributed their share, indeed the…
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