Over on his blog, blogger @bibhistctxt has posted the latest in his series on the origins of ancient Israel, this time covering the Song of Deborah found in Judges 5. There is a general consensus among scholars that the Song of Deborah is old, perhaps even one of the oldest texts in the Hebrew Bible. As @bibhistctxt points... Continue Reading →
Joshua Bowen, Did the Old Testament Endorse Slavery? (Mechanicsville, MD: Digital Hammurabi Press, 2020), 196-197. Slavery was not endorsed arbitrarily, as it was part of a common economic system that existed in ancient Israel and in the wider ancient Near East long before the biblical period. Both debt-slavery and chattel-slavery were also part of the... Continue Reading →
Joshua Bowen, Did the Old Testament Endorse Slavery? (Mechanicsville, MD: Digital Hammurabi Press, 2020), 16. When discussing slavery in ancient Israel, we are more limited in our sources than if we were discussing slavery as was known in the wider ancient Near East. Generally speaking, we are usually restricted to the information we can gather... Continue Reading →
To see other posts in this series, please go to the series’ page. If your upbringing was anything like mine, every Sunday morning, come rain or shine (but not blizzards), you were sitting in Sunday school hearing stories from the Bible. One of the many that probably stuck out was that of Jonah and “the whale.”... Continue Reading →
Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans' Apostle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 115. Israel's god, in Jewish tradition, stands at the apex of humanity. The other elohim bow down to him; he alone is supreme. But his universality is ethnically inflected: this god chooses Israel from among all the other nations, setting them apart... Continue Reading →
Wayne T. Pitard, "Before Israel: Syria-Palestine in the Bronze Age," in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, Michael D. Coogan, editor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53. It is no exaggeration to say that the Ugaritic tablets have revolutionized the study of the Bible. Until their discovery, we had almost no direct information about... Continue Reading →
Michael D. Coogan, "In the Beginning: The Earliest History," in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, Michael D. Coogan, editor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 20. The ancient Israelites did not live in a cultural vacuum. From prehistoric times on Palestine was linked by trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia, and one or the other... Continue Reading →
Over on the Digital Hammurabi YouTube Channel, Josh Bowen (PhD, John Hopkins University) interviewed renowned biblical scholar John J. Collins (PhD, Harvard University) on the subject of violence in the Hebrew Bible. Collins is the author of multiple books including the phenomenal textbook The Hebrew Bible: An Introduction which is in its third edition. Bowen... Continue Reading →
I had not planned to write about pop-apologist SJ Thomason for a while. Back in February she wrote a response to a piece I had written concerning the dating of the Gospels[1] and while I had been working on a rebuttal to it I gave it up because, let’s be honest, it would take way too... Continue Reading →
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