Weekly Roundup – 9.14.18

Here are a few things I’ve enjoyed this week.

• Twitter user @Elishabenabuya has a really good blog post on “Henotheism and the OT“ over at his website. As he points out, multiple gods are mentioned in the Old Testament, many of which were acknowledged to be real in some form or fashion, a sign of henotheism and not strict monotheism.
• Not too long ago I was sent a link to a post rebutting presuppositionalism entitled “The Executioner’s Argument“ by Twitter user @hackenslash1. It isn’t an exhaustive takedown but does highlight some of the problems inherent to the presuppositional approach to apologetics.
• Atheists love to point to the absurdity of the talking serpent in Genesis 3 but few consider the import of the serpent in the Ancient Near East. In an older article, biblical scholar John Day discusses the reason that it is a serpent in the garden and not some other animal. Check out “The Serpent in the Garden of Eden and Its Background.”
• Over at his website, Bernard Lamborelle wrote a short post on “Dissociative Exegesis for Abrahammies.” Lamborelle is the author of The Covenant: On the Origin of the Abrahamic Faith By Means of Deification (CreateSpace, 2017), a book I am currently about a quarter of the way through. In this post on “dissociative exegesis” Lamborelle shows that in the texts of Genesis 12-25 Yahweh virtually always appears anthropomorphized, a sign to him that perhaps Yahweh was originally an actual human king who only later turned into an immaterial deity.
• In response to the work of Lamborelle, Twitter user @mirascriptura has a blog post on his website which compares Lamborelle’s reading of Genesis 12-25, particularly chapters 13, 14, 18-19, and 20-22. The post entitled “Bernard Lamborelle vs. Mirror Reading” does raise some interesting points, though @mirascriptura and Lamborelle have common ground on some of the textual and historical issues. For those of you who are not familiar with “mirror reading,” check out this summary from @mirascriptura. What I like most about both Lamborelle’s take and @mirascriptura’s take is not that I find myself agreeing with all they say but that they force me to dig into the texts and take them seriously. And frankly, that is worth its weight in gold to me.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons.