The psalm in Jonah 2:2-9 (2:3-10 in Hebrew) is a fine example of a thanksgiving psalm, and everything in its expression and theology would sound fine in the book of Psalms. However, on Jonah’s lips after we have heard the narrative of chapter one, it takes a different flavour. Read in its place in the [&hellip...
Spotting the exaggerations and humour in the book can help us understand, but it also acts as a warning!...
In this short series (of two podcasts) I’ll describe two things I think I know, two stakes in the ground when I come to think about the topic of “universalism” that has been much discussed (and even more an excuse for slanging matches) recently around the Bible-focused blogs. Let’s start by admitting there are many [&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...
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...
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...
Amos 7:14 is a striking problem for interpreters, not least because what Amos is reported as saying to Amaziah seems to contradict what he is reported to be doing in the rest of the book. This makes it fertile ground for us to incorporate either our presuppositions or rhetoric into the text. (I use the [&hellip...
Juxtaposition: putting things together to make something “more than the sum of the parts” is a common artistic skill, it is common (but often unrecognised) in the Bible. As my least favourite book of the Bible helps reveal!...
“…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...
