The New Testament use of the Old Testament often seems arbitrary or bizarre to modern readers. Here I’ll suggest that Paul’s use of Genesis in Galatians 4 (while not only strange but also unfair to Hagar and over kind to Sarah) fits with thew intent of Genesis. I think this is an interesting example of [&hellip...
Here’s the first of a new series of podcasts on words that pose particular difficulty because English either lacks clearly similar concepts, or the word carries quite different connotations (emotional overtones and other baggage) from the word that denotes (points to) a similar thing. The first word is hesed a key virtue in the Bible [&hellip...
What does it mean to “believe”? Can Alice in Wonderland help us avoid a common Evangelical error? And does “it’s in the Bible” end conversation about the “Canaanite genocide”? (( The scare quotes round Canaanite genocide indicate my question, still as far as I am concerned unanswered whether such an “event” occurred, or even was [&hellip...
Genesis 12 marks the beginning of the real story of the Bible. Chapters 1-11 are a prologue both to Genesis and to the Bible as a whole. They introduced us to “characters” (not least God – singular and with a capital G) and to the central issue that the Bible addresses. In chapter 12 we [&hellip...
The first week’s readings covered the prologue to Genesis, the second week covers the Ancestors of Faith, the Matriarchs and Patriarchs of Israel. Here we begin to see the first outlines of God’s plan to restore a world warped and twisted by human sin. We also begin to discover what it means to be “people [&hellip...
