Some time ago I posted a link to a course by John Strong called Literature and World of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible on the courses page of this site. I was browsing YouTube a bit and found that there is a video preview to the course. So, if you want to find out if this…

I apologize for linking to the same blog two days in a row, but Dr. Brady has noticed a Neo-Marcionite trend among current comic strips. And, I find this tendency very interesting. Marcionism was a movement related to early Christianity that saw a dichotomy between the Old Testament and New Testament, going so far as…

I was browsing through the blog of Dr. Chris Brady this morning and came across a post from back in February of 2009. He deals with the issue of whether or not the material in the Bible can be or ought to be systematized. The post is quite interesting because he is writing in response…

As an academic, I am well aware of the difficulties involved in using the terminology “Old Testament.” The technical term for the problem presented by this terminology is Supersessionism, roughly the idea that the “New” Testament has done away with the need for the “Old.” I am also well aware that other terminology is available,…

I wanted to let everyone know about a new blog related to Biblical Hebrew. This blog is by one of my friends and peers through the University of Stellenbosch Karyn Traphagen, who is doing doctoral work in Biblical Hebrew Pedagogy. On her blog she gives some helpful resources for learning Biblical Hebrew, discusses methodology, and…

In my recent reading, I have come across a commonly occurring mistranslation of the Hebrew of the Old Testament. It involves the word ספר (sorry, have not figured out how to add vowels without creating problems). This word is commonly translated “book” as in the NRSV, ESV, NASB, NIV, and KJV renderings of Deut. 30.10,…

If you are looking for a good site for learning the Hebrew Aleph Bet, I would recommend the Hebrew site of the University of Texas at Austin. Esther Raizen has put together a number of helpful tutorials for learning the Aleph Bet (though these are for Modern Hebrew) all in flash format. The tutorials are…

Bryan over at Hevel.org has started and intermittently adds to an introduction to the Old Testament prophets. These posts are helpful as they are written for the general reader and they are succinct. If you are looking for a more thorough introduction to the prophets I have linked to a couple of texts below that…

Recently, I have posted a number of YouTube videos on this site and the experience of searching YouTube has reawakened me to the problem of just how much nonsense there is online when it comes to the study of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (as well as the New Testament). Other places that make this apparent…

For quite some time I have known about the translation difficulties involved in the very first part of the very first verse of the Hebrew Bible; however, until I recently revisited the Hebrew I had forgotten just how complicated things are. Here are three potential translations: In the beginning when God created the heavens and…