Summarizing the Old Testament Material Fundamental Questions To this point in our social justice series we've tracked through the OT vocabulary for poverty and the poor. We supplemented the study of the vocabulary to include an article by J. Levenson about Israel's...
ethics
Biblical Theology, Poverty, and Social Justice, Part 5
In the last installment of this series, I directed readers to the short essay by J. Levenson, “Poverty and the State in Biblical Thought” (13 pp). Levenson is a Jewish biblical scholar and a favorite of mine. I think the article is important for helping us think...
Biblical Theology, Poverty, and Social Justice, Part 4
In Part 3 of this series, I had assembled a list of verse references drawn from the ABD article (linked in Parts 2 and 3) on the poor / poverty which its author categorized as involving oppression of the poor in legal (and hence political) contexts. I then put an...
Biblical Theology, Poverty, and Social Justice, Part 3
Well, finally back to this. Since it's been so long, I need to give readers the context of the first and second posts. Review In the first post, I had encouraged readers to keep the following items in mind as they read the essay from the Anchor Bible Dictionary I...
Biblical Theology, Poverty, and Social Justice, Part 2
I'm hoping that by now those interested will have read the ABD essay I posted on terms for poverty and the poor in the Old Testament. In case readers did not take it upon themselves to do so, here is another PDF of the actual OT occurrences of each of the OT words for...
Biblical Theology, Poverty, and Social Justice: Part 1
I've decided to embark on an exploration of poverty and social justice with respect to the biblical text. "Social justice" is currently a hot-button issue and, in my view, is a term easily manipulated by politicians and theologians who want to wield political...
ETS-SBL Musings: Imprecatory Prayer
Just got back from the week of conferences. A tough trip getting there (15 hours due to flight delays and three flight legs . . . I have a history of hard travel experiences). But easy coming back, thankfully. One of the papers I attended was on the theology of...
Naked Bible Podcast Episode 023: Legal Genre
In the last episode of our series on studying the Bible, we transitioned to an important area of study: learning to read the Bible in terms of the various types of literature found in its pages. Our first example concerned reading narrative, where I...
Jason Colavito on the Serial Self-Plagiarism of David Hatcher Childress
Jason Colavito has been slogging through some of "research" of ancient astronaut enthusiast David Hatcher Childress with the goal toward demonstrating how Childress has gamed his gullible audience by re-publishing his own material for a quick buck. A nice system for...
Abortion, Luke 1:15, and Syntactical Databases
A couple months ago a friend sent me a link to a New Testament study that was apparently being popularized within certain segments of the Church to legitimize abortion. The argument is patently illogical, but that isn't why I'm blogging about it. There's more to it...
Polygamy and Old Testament Law
[UPDATE 3/27/2012: I'm already getting comments that seem to suggest that I "missed" the biblical portrayal of polygamy as causing great consternation in the home. No surprise, and no kidding. I think my post was clear on this originally, but just in case ... My point...
Focus on Fornication
I'll admit up front that I never thought I'd post on this subject, but it was brought to mind recently by a request I had via email to comment on the meaning of "fornication" (Greek: porneia). The question was put in the context of how some Christians have gotten the...
Lying and Deception
As a follow-up to the "God and deception" post, let me sketch out my position on the issues I raised. I define a lie as the deliberate utterance of a falsehood -- something contrary to reality -- with specific intent to deceive or conceal the truth. The focus is what...
Does God Lie?
This has been on my list of things I really want to dive into (having taught ethics for a number of years). We know that there are specific statements asserting very clearly that God does not tell lies (e.g., Num. 23:19; Titus 1:2). However, God does use deception. ...
UFOs: Physical or Metaphysical? Is the Answer Yes?
Check out the post by Mac Tonnies (thanks to Nick Redfern for posting this). I think much of what Mac says here is quite coherent. I've recently offered to do a lecture in Roswell next summer on the topic of why, in terms of biblical theology, intelligent alien life...