Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
As we move into the Persian period of ancient history, and try to reconcile it with Daniel’s prophecies, we need to ask some hard questions about the interpretation of the data before us. One question concerns the reliability of the Biblical witness, and beyond that a second question concerns the…
Ewa Majewska Thompson: Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture Ewa M. Thompson is Professor and Chairman of the Department of German and Slavic Studies at Rice University. In this seminal study, she investigates the concept of the "holy fool" as it exists in Russian culture and civilization. While…
The most cursory glance at the history of Western literature reveals that it has been deeply influenced by the Bible. Some of the greatest classics of Western literature draw their plots, characters, and ideas largely from Scripture; Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost are two of the most notable…
Each time the Scriptures recount the story of Moses’ birth and deliverance from Pharaoh, reference is made to two facts about that event. First, each text points out that Moses was "beautiful." Second, each text points out that Amram and Jochebed, his parents, hid him for three months (cf. Ex.…
Click HERE for Part 1. The Message of the Covenant Can we really say that the saints presently rule the world, and always have since Noah? Look around and you can see that the wicked rule in virtually every country on earth. There are wicked civilizations that rise Babelically age…
As we saw last time , we have come to the place in the study of Biblical chronology where it seems that we are forced to abandon the Bible itself as our primary source of information. If we assume that the seventy sevens of Daniel 9:24-27 are in fact weeks…
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What hath Jerusalem to do with Athens? The worship of Greece with the worship of the temple? Quite a lot, in fact, argues David Biale in Blood and Belief (26): “Greek and Israelite sacrificial customs turn out to have been more similar to each other than the Israelite was to…
David Biale ( Blood and Belief ) argues that menstrual blood is not defiling because it is associated with death (as Jacob Milgrom, among others, argues). After all, menstrual blood doesn’t mean a woman is dying but that she is fertile. On the other hand, the sorts of bleeding that…
Durkheim said that “society” was the god to whom primitive peoples sacrificed, the totem standing in for the clan for which it served as totem. We might say, But of course. As FS Naiden ( Smoke Signals for the Gods , 277) has recently pointed out, by the time of…
John M. Lundquist argues that ancient temples were “associated with the realm of the dead, the underworld, the afterlife, the grave.” He states further: “The unifying feature here is the rites and worship of ancestors. The temple is the link between this world and the next. It has been called…
Paul says that everything that is in the light, everything that becomes visible, is light (Ephesians 5). He is writing about the light of the Father, Jesus, or the Spirit. If we are in that light, we ourselves become lights. But the claim is strictly true: Everything that the light…
John Lundquist claims that secrecy is one of the features of temples and temple rituals in the ancient world. All temples are sacred space, which means secret space, off-limits to any but the authorized. He cites Exodus 19:12-13, 21-24 in support. This is certainly true of ancient temples in general,…
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