Usually I try to present the ideas in these podcasts so that anyone can understand. However, this time if you cannot read Scripture except in translation and you have not learned to use an interlinear or computer Bible to get beyond that handicap, this podcast may be less accessible. It deals with the naming of [&hellip...
A series of passages in Jeremiah stand out because of their contents which presents itself as powerful debates about Jeremiah, his call, his enemies and his God. In some of them Jeremiah seems to be speaking alone, in otgher God responds. These “Confessions of Jeremiah are: Jer 11:18-20; 12:1-6; 15:10-21, 17:14-18; 18:18-23; 20:7-13 (the exact [&hellip...
I has been too long since I added to my (very) slowly growing series on Jonah. So, when I saw that this magnificent little book was among the ones otherwise missing from the April carnival I could not resist. We like our stories (fairly) simple, we want to know who the goodies and the baddies [&hellip...
The story of the “Golden Calf” episode, offers three different answers to the question: Who brought Israel out of Egypt. And they are attributed to different people and recounted to us by different people! This opens lots of interesting possibilities for interplay of points of view. When there are “rough edges” like this in a [&hellip...
Here’s the video version of this podcast (the audio only version is here). It offers another approach to Ruth, this time borrowing from the Swiss scholar Crapon di Caprona and suggesting a reading of Ruth 2 that takes account of the cultural discrepancy implied in the text… what DO you think...
There are many ways in which the story-tellers of the Bible ensure that their tellings are lively and engaging. One is through the way they report speech. There is usually more “direct speech” (where the words of a character are “quoted”) then “indirect speech” (where the teller tells us the gist of what the character [&hellip...
Often in biblical narrative things “just seem to happen”, rather like they do in our lives 😉 But are such “happenings” chance or divine providence at work? We’ll try to decide, using Gen 37:12ff. (read with Gen 39) and Ruth 2 as examples. ...
Gapping, where hearers have to “fill in” information that is missing in the text, is a really significant part of biblical story-telling. So, I’ll need to introduce the idea to next year’s Biblical Narrative class. Normally we “gap” unconsciously, and not just when reading narratives as I hope I’ll show you in this podcast. We’ll [&hellip...
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...
