One of the nice things about blogging is that the genre allows one to write about anything and everything that seems important. Politics is important and, in the United States, we are in an election year. As usual, almost everything that is said for political consumption is either tasteless or tastes too good to be true. Read More »

    Joseph Kelly and Charles Halton are to be thanked for drawing attention to a new volume of biblical theology, Der Gott der Lebendigen: Eine biblische Gotteslehre (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011) by Hermann Spieckermann, an Old Testament professor Read More »

    There are three principal reasons why the scholarship of Daniel Bodi deserves to be better known. First of all, Bodi is not afraid to offer bold hypotheses, plough new ground, and make fresh connections. If only more biblical scholars fit this mold. Read More »

    A Methodist tradition I cherish is the Watch Night service. It all began, as John Wesley recounts in his Short History of the People called Methodists (1781), on Monday 11 August 1755, at the French church at Spitalfields in London (thanks to Google books, online here ). 1800 people were in attendance. Read More »

    How shall we remember Christopher Hitchens? For his short-fused, slashing style? No one was more accomplished than he at firing rhetorical salvos at real or imaginary enemies. “Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate, if I had a rocket launcher, I would retaliate. Read More »

    Is that just another way of saying, “Jews behaving badly”? Not according to Amy-Jill Levine , the co-editor, along with Marc Zvi Brettler , of The Jewish Annotated New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). “The more I study New Testament,” Dr. Levine told the New York Times , “the better Jew I become. Read More »

    I had a great time at the annual meetings this year.     I heard some very fine papers, for example, one by Eric Cline announcing the end of Finkelstein’s low chronology; another by Cheryl Exum in which she masterfully described what we know and Read More »

    Two poles of a false binary continue to play an inordinate role in the study of the history of ancient Israel and of Syria-Palestine. Read More »

    30 years ago, Mario Liverani delivered a lecture that outlined a research program for the disciplines of the history and archaeology of the Ancient Levant. The essay is also a masterful description of salient long-term trends that characterized Bronze and Iron Age Syria-Palestine. Read More »

Here is a bilingual edition of Psalm 26:                                                           Psalm 26 Be my judge, יהוה! שָׁפְטֵנִי יְהוָה    For I have walked with integrity; כִּי־אֲנִי בְּתֻמִּי הָלַכְתִּי    in יהוה I have trusted, wavering not. Read More »

    In the ancient world, the universal solution to the question of who could present what animal offerings to deity was the following: priests without physical imperfections presented animal offerings without physical imperfections. Read More »

    Kindness, whenever it amounts to giving someone a free pass, is dangerous. It is the door abusive people walk through when they want to abuse again. More damaging still, it puts a damper on discovery and the search for truth. Read More »

According to Dan Friedman : a fundamentalist religious zealot who, by opposing the global superpower of the age using terrorism, was able to drive western civilization out of the Middle-East.     Too much candor in the characterization, one might say. Read More »

    What reward awaits the one who makes Torah, the words of Holy Writ, the foundation of her life? Judaism has a realistic view of the matter. The reward of a chasid or faithful one is the privilege of living and dying for the sake of the truth embraced. Read More »

    The text of Jerome’s letter of dedication to Paula and Eustochium of his translation from the Hebrew of 1 Samuel – 2 Kings presented here is from the Biblia Sacra Vulgata (Robert Weber, ed.; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1984) 364-66. I collated the translations of W. H. Read More »

    Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (347-420), Jerome as he is referred to in English, is one of the most significant figures in the history of the reception of the Bible. In an age not known for polyglots, Jerome was a vir trilinguis who translated from Greek to Latin and, his crowning achievement, from Hebrew to Latin. Read More »

    Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (347-420), Jerome as he is referred to in English, is one of the most significant figures in the history of the reception of the Bible. In an age not known for polyglots, Jerome was a vir trilinguis who translated from Greek to Latin and, his crowning achievement, from Hebrew to Latin. Read More »

    World Christianity is a complex animal. So, of course, is world Judaism. Liberal formations matter less and less whereas evangelical Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism and even evangelical Judaism are surging. Read More »

    One of the things I miss at the moment is not having among my current face (as opposed to Facebook) friends someone who is head over heels for Brecht. You have to be seriously messed up in a deep and ultimately positive way to appreciate Brecht. I cannot remember a time in which trust in government has been so low . Read More »

    Eugene Nida is an absolutely towering figure in the history of Bible translation. In good ways and bad, few people more than Nida impacted the way the Bible is “received” in the modern world – in what guise and in what form. Read More »