Like Esther, Daniel is set in a foreign court and telling to the trials and triumphs of exiled Judeans and is packed with humour at the expense of the imperial overlords. In this podcast I’m following an article by Hector Avalos from CBQ and focusing on the repeated lists of Dan 3. For his comparison [...]
Browsing Posts in Humour
If podcasts can have dedications, then this one is dedicated to Robert Carroll. The podcast is full or irony, first that of an introvert who spoke before thinking and who failed to read or digest a fine work by an admired teacher and friend, and then that of a frequently (and often mordantly) humorous Irishman [...]
Back to the longer series, just in case you thought I’d forgotten. Jeremiah has a harsh and cutting humour on almost every page. In this post we’ll look at Jer 2:26-28. And just so you don’t think I am inventing the humour I find there I’ll cite some proper scholarship.1 Here’s the audio: Humour in [...]
At last, I’m on the home straight, the first of the prophets The prophetic books are packed with humour. But right at the start we’ll need to get one thing clear. Humour is not just the comic, entertainment that promotes a giggle or a smile. There is humour also in tragedy, at times when “you [...]
If you ever want to provoke laughter in church in the 21st century, just read a chunk of the Song of Songs, of course it works better if you get a couple to read to each other! The imagery is just so strange to our culture that almost any passage will achieve laughter in moments. [...]
Never one reluctant to ask for more, David Ker has rightly pointed out that I did not explain how/why Ecclesiastes 10:5-15 is (and was meant to be) funny. So here goes…1 Oh, don’t worry, this won’t be a dull dissection or a boring breakdown, I’ll just show you how several of the signs of humour [...]
This series is just getting more and more interesting For Ecclesiastes I came across: Levine, Étan. “The Humor in Qohelet.” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 109, no. 1 (January 1997): 71-83. As well as all its other strengths Levine begins with a nice catalogue of the stupid scholars who have pompously declaimed the absence of [...]
There certainly should certainly be humour in Proverbs, after all the books says: A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit saps a person’s strength. (Proverbs 17:22) And sure enough when I went humour-hunting Google quickly fitted me up with Hershey H. Friedman, he used to be Bernard H. Stern Professor of Humor [...]
When looking for humour in Psalms, towards the end of the marking season, when teachers are always at a low ebb, I again cheated, asking Bob MacDonald (who has been studying the psalms closely for years now). I’ll repeat some of his general insights about the book, and then take up his suggestion about Psalm [...]
After some quite difficult books, suddenly a couple in a row that are easy. Job is full of humour, for all its dreadful topic and storyline, or perhaps because of them, almost every page sparkles with fun, or with sharp irony or more pointed sarcasm. The big question, of whether the book as a whole [...]
