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Free Course Guide – Eric Cline History of Ancient Israel
Today’s lectionary reading was on the ark of the Lord being brought to Jerusalem. And, it reminded me of an audio lecture by Eric Cline dealing with modern speculation about the current location of the ark. It is a very interesting lecture in which professor Cline laments the fact that such endeavors waste research efforts…
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Interesting Post on God's "Jealousy"
HERE is a link to an interesting post on Hebrew and Greek reader about YHWH’s “jealousy” in the Hebrew Bible. It demonstrates a shift in the use of the Hebrew word underlying many occurrences of “jealousy” in English translations. And, it is a clear illustration that when interpreting a given passage it is important to…
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Thoughts on Psalm 136
Today’s response is Psalm 136. Our Sunday night music group plays a song based on this Psalm with some regularity, but I must admit that this is one of the texts that I struggle with a great deal. The refrain is “His love endures forever.” If you have been around the field of Biblical Studies…
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Tim Bulkeley on Different Tools for Different Tasks
HERE is a post in which Tim Bulkeley discusses the use of Bible dictionaries and Bible commentaries. He gives some very good advice, which has served me well when interpreting given passages. “So on the whole avoid consulting commentaries as long as you can. The more you work at a text before reading one the…
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Joshua the Prophet
Now that I have gotten over the shock of the fact that the lectionary skips over almost the entire Book of Joshua, I can make a few comments on the reading for today (Jos. 24.1-13). Here we have Joshua functioning like a prophet. We found out in Deut. 34.10 that Moses was a prophet. A…
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Skipping the Book of Joshua
Wow! The lectionary readings skip way ahead today. Yesterday was Joshua 3 and now we are at Joshua 24. I can somewhat understand this since I’m not a huge fan of conquest narratives myself. But, this caused me to step back a bit to check on how much of the Book of Joshua is actually…
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John Anderson – Outlines on Research Pertaining to The Composition of the Pentateuch
John Anderson over at hesed we’emet has put together what looks like two nice resources concerning research on the composition of the Pentateuch. He has provided two outlines that he created in preparation for his PhD comps. Considering the thoroughness of the outlines it is no wonder that he passed. Thanks to him for making…
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Scott Bailey on Flying Rabbis Fight Swine Flu
Well, with a title like “Flying Rabbis Fight Swine Flu,” it doesn’t seem like there is really any more to say to introduce the post. It is something you just have to read for yourself. To get the story as well as some of Scott Bailey’s thoughts click HERE.
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Audio – Chris Brady on David
Chris Brady has posted audio for a sermon he recently gave on King David. He is associate professor of ancient Hebrew and Jewish literature and dean of the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State University. He says David “is one of my favorite biblical figures, but not always for the reasons people expect.” The sermon…
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Translation ≠ Reading
I recently got my copy of Donald Vance’s A Hebrew Reader for Ruth back from a friend to whom I had loaned it as a resource for a class on Ruth in Hebrew. I had purchased the text as a part of my doctoral research in Biblical Hebrew teaching methodology. As I glanced back through…