This podcast, suggesting a gentle wry smile in Dt 1:6 was inspired by a blog post from Rabbi Michal Shekelk1nsh2s2 “Could it be possible to stay too long at the site of Revelation?” There are also quotes from: Tigay, J. Deuteronomy. Jewish Publication Society, 1994, 8; and Rashi on Dt 1:6. As well as Dt [&hellip...
No one has get suggested humour in Leviticus, so I’m moving on while I think… Numbers 11 provides a fun story with several wry smiles, and Moses tells God that as Israel’s mother (which role Moses himself is not at all keen on) Yahweh should feed and care for these “babies&#...
I never said all the humour in the Bible was gentle or polite. We have come to expect harsh even toilet humour from the prophets, but in this reading Leviticus outdoes Ezekiel sharpening his toilet humour and even making it shorter and more pointed. In this podcast I’ll compare Ezek 6:3-6 with Lev 26:30, and [&hellip...
In this post we’ll discover some humour from below. The humour of the oppressed often pokes fun at the oppressor. Those who subjugate others fear them, and this fear generates feelings of inferiority that in Exodus some oppressed women manipulate delightfully. Please open your Bibles at Exodus 1-2. The original audio only version of this [&hellip...
In a post Why the Bible is just not (so) funny David returned to a theme he’s argued before, that the Bible is not funny. Aparently back in 2007 he issued a challenge that readers of his blog could not give examples of humour from every book in the Bible: Funny Stuff in the Bible. [&hellip...
Obadiah’s not a comedy. It is nasty, brutish though thankfully short. It is harder than usual to talk about this book as Israeli defense forces continue to rain destruction on Gaza though perhaps the placing of the book of Obadiah and my trip (starting Wednesday) to what was till recently war-torn Sri Lanka provide glimpses [&hellip...
You cow! Is neither clever, nor funny, in today’s world. So why do I think Amos 4:1 was intended to be funny? Listen to find out 🙂 There is a post with more detail on this verse on my blog here: The works referred to in this podcast were: King, Philip J. Amos, Hosea, Micah: [&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...
“…the more I have read and studied Scripture over the decades the more I become aware that the writers were more often sharp-tongued trouble makers with a biting sense of humour than they were safe moralisers like the LXX translators The Ltalians have a saying: “Traduttore, traditore.” about how translators often betray their text. [&hellip...
In this podcast I’ll again argue that Robert Carroll gets it wrong. Despite his own fierce black humour he fails to acknowledge its presence or at least its prevalence in the prophets. He writes about humour in Hosea in: Carroll, Robert P. ‘Is Humour among the Prophets’. On humour and the comic in the Hebrew [&hellip...
