Many of you know that I've been working (puttering is more accurate) on a book for non-specialists (i.e., lay people and pastors, not the academy) on what I refer to as the divine council worldview of the Bible. It's entitled The Myth That Is True. I've been at it for...
Deuteronomy
Dan McClellen's Response to Yours Truly, and My Rejoinder Points
Hope you all aren't getting bored with this. For those interested, Dan McClellan has posted a response on his blog to my thoughts on his SBL paper of last year. You can all go read it in full. I'm taking a few moments here to add "rejoinder thoughts" to his most...
The Election of Israel and Its Meaning
I want to take this topic in shorter, manageable posts. My goal is to take you through my thought process in shorter increments than usual. This topic seems to require it. We'll start in the Old Testament. Anyone can tell from a lexicon or the list of verses I posted...
ZIBBC: Rest of Volume 1 (Pentateuch)
I'm finishing my comments on volume 1 of Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary (ZIBBC). I hope to post once on each of the other four volumes before leaving for the ETS and SBL meetings in mid-November. I was looking for specific items in the treatments...
Why Use the Septuagint?
I found this on the Logos blog today. It's something I wrote for the Logos blog in 2007, and I don't think I ever posted it here. Forgot I even wrote it (I'm doing some LXX thinking today at work so I found it via Google!). Here's the short article -- it addresses...
An Afterword on the Changes to Passover in Deuteronomy
If you're following the comments on this post, you will note that one of the readers (Chris) has argued that the rules for the Passover in the book of Exodus weren't really rules - Exodus only described a memorial. Therefore, the rules in Deuteronomy were the "real"...
Example #2 – Changes in Passover Laws
This is long, but bear with me. There's a discussion payoff at the end. The Three Annual (Required) Festivals for Israelites in the Book of Exodus are: Passover / Unleavened Bread (the month of Abib was renamed to Nisan during exilic times) Harvest (qatsir)...
The Point of My Exodus 21/ Deuteronomy 15 Illustration
A little while back a commenter to the discussion of inspiration and inerrancy wanted me to put forth examples where something written in Scripture was later changed in Scripture. I provided two examples off the top of my head since I've thought about both again...
Discerning the Dead, Part 3
We're at the point now in our intermittent forays into the biblical realm of the dead to flesh out (again, pardon the pun) who's who in the Underworld. I noted at the start that I wanted to start with the term metim to see if that term spoke of the human dead, as...
Discerning the Dead, Part 2
Here is the short list of passages (from the last post) we need to consider: Deut 18:11; Deut. 26:14; Deut 28:62; Psa 88:5; Psa 88:10; Psa 106:28; Psa 115:17; Eccl 9:3; Eccl 9:5; Isaiah 8:19; Isaiah 26:14; Isaiah 26:19 Continuing on in our efforts to parse the dead...
Whittling Away at the Dead
As some of you, no doubt, I've had time to go through the PDF file of the occurrences of (Hebrew) met and metim ("the dead"). You no doubt noticed that the overwhelming majority of these instances are pretty straightforward and refer to dead human beings--victims of...