Back in June, the tag team of Josh Bowen and Megan Lewis (i.e. Digital Hammurabi) interviewed Hebrew Bible scholar Joel Baden on the subject of the authorship of the Torah. For a long time, it was assumed that Moses stood behind the books of Genesis through Deuteronomy, but with the rise of critical scholarship this... Continue Reading →
Author: S.J. ThomasonBook: Why Christianity Matters: Historical, Sociocultural, and Moral Reasons to Follow Jesus Christ (1st edition [out of print])Publisher: Kindle Direct PublishingYear: 2020Total Page Count: 410Price: $14.49 (print) I. INTRODUCTION From the time I was a teenager to just prior to my deconversion, I was an avid reader of Christian apologetics. If you could go back in time to the year 2000,... Continue Reading →
To see other posts in this series, please go to the series’ page. The psalmist wrote, You [i.e. Yahweh] have given them [i.e. humanity] dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and... Continue Reading →
In 2017, noted scholar of the Hebrew Bible Richard Elliot Friedman published a book with HarperCollins entitled The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters. Using the tools of source criticism, Friedman posits that what really happened is not that there was no exodus from Egypt but rather that it involved a group that... Continue Reading →
I’ve recently started reading Robert Fagles’ translation of Virgil’s Aeneid[1] for the first time,[2] beginning with the introduction to it written by the late classicist Bernard Knox. Knox traces Virgil’s works, beginning with his Eclogues, moving on to the Georgics, and concluding with the Aeneid. Concerning the Georgics, Knox notes that it is divided into four books: the first concerns farmers,... Continue Reading →
Recently on The Bible for Normal People podcast, Pete Enns discussed the work of Julius Wellhausen, a nineteenth century scholar who helped formulate what is today known as the Documentary Hypothesis. For those unfamiliar with the Documentary Hypothesis (DH), it is the idea that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were not only not written by Moses,... Continue Reading →
Over at ANE Today, Benjamin Noonan (PhD, Hebrew Union College) offers readers a preview of his book Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible: A Lexicon of Language Contact (Eisenbrauns, 2019). Like most languages, classical Hebrew was a hodgepodge of linguistic sources, especially Semitic. Noonan's work focuses on non-Semitic language influence on the Hebrew Bible, noting... Continue Reading →
Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 120-121. The pseudonymous authorship...is a literary ploy used by authors to convince their readers that they know what was soon to happen, and so to provide comfort for them in their time of trouble. That is certainly the case with... Continue Reading →
Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 113. Another reason for thinking Isaiah 53 does not refer to just one person, the future messiah who would die for sins, is that the passage describes the suffering of the servant as a past event, not future:... Continue Reading →
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