Umberto Eco ( On Literature ) explores the phenomenon of the “quality best seller,” the book that gains a wide readership for compelling story or characters, yet at the same time employs sophisticated literary devices that entertain and delight more serious readers. This is . . . . Continue Reading »
Voices cry out with fair regularity against the vapidness of contemporary public discourse. Lots of voices. Enough for a quorum, if not a consensus. Less consensus is evident when those voices attempt to explain the causes of this situation. Bad education? Video games? TV? . . . . Continue Reading »
According to Paul, all human beings lived under the “elementary principles” ( stoicheia ) until the coming of the Son and Spirit. As he elaborates on this theme in Galatians 4 and Colossians 2, he identifies several features of stoicheic life: 1. Stoicheic life is the life of a . . . . Continue Reading »
Texts are musical. How? Both texts and music display a paradoxical quality. Let’s start simple. On the one hand: The sequence of words is a temporal sequence, and we couldn’t recognize a sequence of words as a sentence unless one sound or written word yielded its place . . . . Continue Reading »
In a chapter of Robert Wuthnow’s Rethinking Materialism: Perspectives on the Spiritual Dimension of Economic Behavior , Emory’s John Boli explores the “economic absorption of the sacred.” For Boli, the sacred is not some distinct realm of culture but rather the . . . . Continue Reading »
A number of my students did papers on the robe motif in the Joseph narrative and came up with some fresh (to me) thoughts. Here are a few of them. 1. At the beginning of the Joseph narrative, Jacob the faterh bestows a robe on his favored son, Joseph. At the end of the narrative, . . . . Continue Reading »
Isaiah is full of wordplay. A number of examples come up on chapter 2:5-22. 1. It seems to me that the word for “idol” ( eliyl ) puns on various words for God: el and elohim . Eliyl means nothing, vapor, empty, which is precisely the opposite of the character of Yahweh. 2. . . . . Continue Reading »
Translations confuse the point of Isaiah 2:9. The NAS has “So the common man has been humbled, and the man of importance has been abased, but do not forgive them.” The italicized words are not in the Hebrew, which reads more simply: “And bowed down will be man ( adam ) . . . . Continue Reading »
Isaiah uses the word “fill” four times in 2:6-8. A fourfold fullness is a fullness that extends to the four points of the compass. From one boundary to another, Judah is filled from the east, with gold and silver, with horses and chariots, with idols. There is a progression . . . . Continue Reading »
Initially in the Bible, Yahweh alone has a treasury. His heaven is a treasury of rain, and therefore of abundance (Deuteronomy 28:12). When Joshua defeats the Canaanites, the plunder goes into Yahweh’s earthly-heavenly treasury, the tabernacle (Joshua 6:19, 24). One of the . . . . Continue Reading »
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