Ezra is far from the funniest book in the Bible, or the easiest read. Yet even here there are hints and traces of that most human of phenomena, humour. In Ezra 3:12-13 (as often) one either has to laugh or cry. Throughout the book something funny is going on with language and translation (see e.g. [&hellip...
My tradition (the Baptist part of the Nonconformist or radical Reformation) has stressed the idea that Scripture is perspicuous, that the Bible is easy to understand, and that anyone can understand it – or at least grasp its essentials – without special training or equipment. Yet there are for sure some difficult passages. There are [&hellip...
At the end of the book of Ezra there a horrid account of Ezra and the “officials” gang up to force Judeans who have married foreign women to divorce them and send away them and their children. What do we do with passages like this? And as part of our thinking on this, where DO [&hellip...
