This is the 5th and final post in a series by guest blogger, Stephen Huebscher ——- This is the final post in this series, and I draw a number of conclusions here. At the end, I list all the works that I referenced in this series, in case I missed one...
Cosmic Geography
Heavenly Worship in Second Temple Judaism, Early Christianity, and Gnostic Sects: Part 4
Part 4 of a series by guest blogger, Stephen Huebscher ——- C. CONCEPTIONS OF HEAVENLY WORSHIP IN GNOSTIC GROUPS This post deals with groups that are known as “Gnostics” from the Greek word gnosis = “knowledge.” They developed the century after...
Heavenly Worship in Second Temple Judaism, Early Christianity, and Gnostic Sects: Part 3
Guest blogger, Stephen Huebscher This is the third of five posts in this series. B. CONCEPTIONS OF HEAVENLY WORSHIP IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY Early Christian conceptions of heavenly worship drew heavily on the OT and, not surprisingly, show a similarity, though with some...
Heavenly Worship in Second Temple Judaism, Early Christianity, and Gnostic Sects: Part 2
By guest blogger Stephen L. Huebscher STEP THREE: LOOKING AT THE THREE GROUPS INDIVIDUALLY CONCEPTIONS OF HEAVENLY WORSHIP IN SECOND TEMPLE JUDAISM The variety of groups and beliefs at this time was reflected in the variety of sacred texts used. It was common to...
Heavenly Worship in Second Temple Judaism, Early Christianity, and Gnostic Sects: Part 1
By guest blogger, Stephen L. Huebscher This series was originally written as an academic paper for presentation at a conference. At the time, we were doing research on the divine council for what ended up in Mike’s book The Unseen Realm. I had told Mike I was...
The Cosmic Mountain and Trees In Old Testament Theology
In a couple of weeks I’ll be filming three courses for Faithlife (my employer; aka Logos Bible Software) that revolve around content threads in my book The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible . The idea is not to go through the book...
Cool Motion-Animation Video of Ancient Israelite Cosmology
Thanks to Shaun Swanson for his effort in producing this video, and to Steve McHenry for the voiceover. This is the sort of thing Miqlat (my non-profit)[1. See this long post, about a third of the way down, for the Miqlat vision.] will be able to produce with...
Sacrifice, Defilement, Purity, Impurity
I’m currently reading an excellent book by Jonathan Klawans entitled, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism . Klawans makes a simple, yet profound observation — that ritual impurity and the defilement brought about by sin are not the same in OT law and...
Free Book (PDF) on Temples and Temple Cosmology in Antiquity
The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago recently posted a new volume in the Oriental Institute Seminars series: Heaven on Earth: Temples, Ritual, and Cosmic Symbolism in the Ancient World (Edited by Deena Ragavan). You can download the book as a PDF for...
The Deuteronomy 32 Worldview of the Bible (“Cosmic Geography”)
In this presentation, Dr. Michael Heiser lays out the divine council worldview as a framework for understanding the story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. He describes it as a form of biblical theology centered on cosmic geography—the idea that God’s rule over...
The Cosmology of Genesis 1 and the Old Testament’s Pre-Scientific Worldview
Naked Bible readers will remember I got into this issue several times during the discussion on inerrancy. It’s current again for me for two reasons. One is N.T. Wright has chimed in on the subject in this video, which I offer for the curious (I’m not...
The Stones of Fire in Ezekiel 28
A reader recently asked me about these references. I’m asked this question often enough I thought I’d blog on it. Let me say from the outset that, though I will disagree (with a high degree of security in my mind) with common interpretations, particularly...