The second in what is becoming a series on Jephthah’s story (( I need to do another on “history” when I get back home and have better access to the literature. )) I examine the question my friend actually asked, which was whether or not we the people should find Jephthah guilty of killing his [&hellip...
A friend on Facebook asked about her pastor’s interpretation of the story of Jephthah’s daughter, since that’s a “difficult” passage I thought it would make an interesting podcast. The trouble is I got waylaid, I spotted a distraction in the story.. Jephthah’s story (I have to return with another podcast about his daughter’s story!) may [&hellip...
This is the first part of a short series (it might only be two parts, who knows 😉 on passages where God exegetes his own words. In this part we’ll look at 2 Samuel 7, where David wants to build a ‘house’ = temple for God, since he already has a nice ‘house’ = palace [&hellip...
In this post I’ll start looking at how we respond to the Bible’s silences, often there are questions we want to ask the Bible, which the Bible does not answer. What do we do then? Some of these questions, like the one I start with produce classic biblical puzzlers… By the way, if the sound [&hellip...
To complete my little trilogy of ‘casts I turn to suggest a richer approach to “kingship” in Samuel than the simple messianism my previous ‘cast suggested. With the help of Oscar Wilde’s poems: Libertatis Sacra Fames (text and comment), and Sonnet to Liberty I suggest we listen to both “majority view” and the “minority report” [&hellip...
Following the Twisted Tales of the book of Judges (in the Hebrew Bible) comes Samuel. The opening of Samuel responds well to the questions posed by the horrid stories that ended Judges...
Judges is definitely not suitable for Sunday School reading, the bits that are told are firmly censored, and few of us go back to notice what we are missing. But, if we do, what we find is a book chock full of horrid twisted tales, brutal, brutish and sadly not short. Why? Can such a [&hellip...
Jeremy Thompson pointed out on Facebook the interesting verse in 1 Kings 20:18 where Ben-Hadad having had a bit too much too drink when Israel comes out for battle: Says: 18 “If they have come out for peace, take them alive; if they have come out for war, take them alive.” Which as far as [&hellip...
Like soap-operas, and other serials, biblical narratives with several episodes often seek to bridge between two parts. These bridges are often verses that serve to link one episode to another. We’ll look at examples from Ruth, Jonah and Genesis 2-...
Nehemiah seems like a typical Sunday School story of a book, a sort of hero story made even less interesting by being told by the hero. Like Ezra it is not the first place I’d look searching for humour in Scripture. Yet, I think reading Nehemiah 6 we can trace more than one example of [&hellip...
