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...
Hebrew
Naked Bible Podcast Episodes 190, 191, and 192: Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Interviews
The interviews from the 2017 SBL meetings had to be broken up into three episodes: Episode 190 (SBL, Part 1) We get caught up with David Burnett, now in his first semester of doctoral work at Marquette University. We also chat with Marina Westerdahl, a former student...
Naked Bible Podcast Episode 128: ETS-SBL Interviews with Scholars – Part 1
Well, I'm on my way back home from ETS and SBL. The week is always fun (sort of my Bible geek recharge for the year), but this year it was more so because Trey was along. We took the Naked Bible Podcast on the road. We wound up interviewing nearly twenty scholars (8.5...
Naked Bible Podcast Episode 159: Noah’s Nakedness, the Sin of Ham, and the Curse of Canaan
The episode of Noah’s drunkenness in Genesis 9 has long befuddled interpreters. One of Noah’s sons, Ham, commits some heinous crime against his father. Oddly, though, Ham is not the one cursed by his father. Instead, Ham’s son Canaan bears the wrath of Noah. This...
Brief Nephilim Note
I've added an archive page devoted to the nephilim discussion to try and arrange those items. It includes comment material. Editor's note: content copied here for ease of access. In March 2013 I posted a response to some criticisms of my understanding of the word...
My Thoughts on Nephilim: Answering a Criticism
Some readers have drawn my attention to this recent criticism of my understanding of the morphology of the word nephilim. I left some comments on that blog site, but thought it would be worth a post here. I'll try to be brief (stop laughing). First, it is true that...
Anti-Semitic Bible Study
I often get asked about the "true pronunciation of the divine name" or "the authentic meaning of YHWH, the Tetragrammaton." I've often wondered why people care -- why is it that they can't be content with the scholarly convention of "Yahweh" in this regard, especially...
Exposing the Work of Zecharia Sitchin, Part 2: Does the Bible Have the Gods Creating Humankind?
This is a Sitchin signature teaching. In an effort to marry his notion that the Anunnaki (a group of gods in the Sumero-Mesopotamian pantheon) created humankind to the biblical story, Sitchin teaches that the Bible itself has plural gods creating humankind in Genesis....
Fake Exegesis: Return of the א-ת BS
You've heard of fake news? (Who hasn't?) How about some fake exegesis? Some time ago I blogged about the nonsensical idea that the Hebrew particle את has an amazing hidden meaning in Gen 1:1 (that's an aleph and taw, read right-to-left, for those who don't read...
Journal Article on Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls
My thanks are due to the generous policy of Tyndale Bulletin for allowing me to post a link to a scholarly article that appears in the most recent issue. The article is entitled: Monotheism and the Language of Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea...
Naked Bible Podcast Episode 033: Word Studies, Part 2
Episode 33 continues our series on Bible study at the word level. Last time we talked about word usage as it pertains to usage by a single biblical author within the scope of that author's writings. Our launching point then was the lemma behind "unmarried" in 1 Cor...
Allegorical Interpretation of the Names in Genesis 5
I've had several readers over the past several months ask me to comment on a post authored by Chuck Missler entitled, "Meanings of the Names in Genesis 5." The essay puts forth the idea that the list of names in Genesis 5, stretching from Adam to Noah, can be read as...
Exposing the Work of Zecharia Sitchin, Part 1: ELOHIM in the Hebrew Bible
Prior to this blog, I created a website devoted to exposing the flawed teachings and research of Zecharia Sitchin. Next to Erik von Daniken, Sitchin is easily the most well-known articulator of the ancient astronaut theory--the idea that the gods of ancient texts and...
Are the Hebrew Letters to be Interpreted from their Original Picture Signs?
I recommend the video below created by Dr. Michael Brown. It's more than a debunking of the deeply flawed, nonsensical idea that the meaning of Hebrew letters is to be found in their original pictographic (picture) representations. Like myself, Dr. Brown is a trained...
Of Yehovah and Jehovah’s Witnesses
A week or so ago I saw something on Twitter that made me shake my head. An apparently well meaning Hebrew enthusiast gleefully reported that, after searching through hundreds of manuscripts, he'd found thousands of places where the divine name (YHWH) was vocalized by...