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 →
Author: Joshua BowenBook: Did the Old Testament Endorse Slavery?Publisher: Digital Hammurabi PressYear: 2020Total Page Count: 243Price: $19.99 (print) I. INTRODUCTION “Slavery in the Bible,” writes biblical scholar Wil Gafney, “represents more than the ubiquity of slavery in the ancient world; it represents the theological bulwark on which the Atlantic slave trade rested.”[1] This fact makes modern Christians uncomfortable. How could the god... Continue Reading →
To see other posts in this series, please go to the series’ page. Among the most memorable and iconic verses from the King James Bible is the one with which it begins: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Other translations follow suit, including the NIV, ESV, and NASB.[1] And like the... Continue Reading →
I became an atheist in 2013 after a yearlong battle staving off doubt and unbelief through prayerful meditation over the Bible and by reengaging apologetic literature that had helped me in the past. When my journey to atheism first began, I read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and was thoroughly turned off. Still feeling apprehension about... Continue Reading →
Over at the website The Bible and Interpretation there is a piece by religious scholar Jay Williams on "Eden, the Tree of Life, and the Wisdom of the Serpent." It is at once both a very interesting and very bizarre piece. Williams points out not long after the piece begins that the serpent isn't Satan as Christians would like... Continue Reading →
Note: This is a post written by Chris H. (@unicornwiz) in response to a recently published piece by @GodlessEngineer entitled "Inanna's Descent Matches Jesus' Passion Narratives." Chris can be reached on Twitter or at his email address biblicalhistoryskeptic32ad@gmail.com. *Prenote: this revision was made possible thanks to Digital HammurabiWell, today I’m going to do a basic... Continue Reading →
"All translations of great works are of course no more than approximations of the original, in some places happy ones, in some necessarily imperfect. But respecting the sheer physicality of the Bible’s language together with a stylistic decorum appropriate to the Hebrew diction can help readers sense something of the world quite different from ours... Continue Reading →
To see other posts in this series, please go to the series' page. In the previous installment of "Invasion of the Bible Snatchers" you were introduced to Ray Comfort and his book Scientific Facts in the Bible. As we saw in that post, his first example of a "fact" was anything but a fact. Furthermore, his hermeneutic... Continue Reading →
Steven DiMattei, Genesis 1 and the Creationism Debate: Being Honest to the Text, Its Author, and His Beliefs (Wipf & Stock, 2016), 10-11. In general terms, then, the authors and cultures of these ancient Near Eastern creation myths, Genesis 1 included, did not conceive of creation as an act of creating matter, but as an act... Continue Reading →
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