Sunday School, and most of our quick summaries of the contents of the Bible present Exodus as telling the story of how God frees Israelite slaves from the powers of Egypt. But, a closer look at the book shows that’s just half the story! Here we’ll focus Exodus as a book in two halfs. Doing [&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...
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...
It is about time I finished this casuistry thing (unless any of you know different), but first I think I should show that this approach to Scripture is not just a Matthew thing, but does indeed come from Jesus. We’ll look at a neat case from Mark ...
This is the video version of the second part of this three part series. (Part one, explained the difference between the two sorts of law.) Here I claim that the distinction helps us make sense of Jesus seemingly contradictory teaching about Old Testament law. I was a bit careless in narrating this one, note that [&hellip...
Here’s a video version of a podcast I did a while back, about one of the most dull-sounding topics in biblical studies 🙁 Yet distinguishing these two (whether or not you remember the names) is vital to understanding the New Testament! Tomorrow I’ll explain why 🙂...
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. So, here’s the link to [&hellip...
This passage was probably chosen because it contains two famous “Bible stories”, the Golden Calf (in which a priest does what the people want, and becomes so successful that drunkenness, idolatry and other stupidity reigns) and the time Moses got to see God’s backside. But more troublingly it is another passage where God commands and [&hellip...
This reflection focuses on two things from this reading, the significance of calling Israel (in the context of making a covenant) a priestly kingdom and a holy nation, and how we should read/understand the ten commandments. (For that part it may help to listen to some of the podcasts here, in particular Casuistic and apodictic: [&hellip...
Despite its title this five has little about the law, and not enough about the covenant (binding agreement) to which this law belongs. The selection of passages (the first time I have strongly differed from the choice made by the organisers) is weighted towards American Evangelical favourite Sunday School stories. Having got that gripe off [&hellip...
