One of the things I find difficult to present to lay audiences is the range of options that a translator has in dealing with any passage. In particular poetry offers may options. One is not presented with just a couple of binary yes/no choices; rather, one is presented with a huge range of options, each…
Working on the book of Hebrews over on my Participatory Bible Study blog has led me to do some additional thinking about revelation or inspiration, and how it functions. One of the key claims of the book of Hebrews is that Jesus is a greater revelation than that provided by the Torah. In order to…
I’m approaching the textual issues for these four chapters from the point of view of English translations. I want to look for those textual issues that actually have an impact on major English translations. This is a procedure you can follow any time you study a Bible passage, assuming you don’t know Greek or Hebrew…
Many of the issues of Biblical criticism are illustrated in these four chapters from the book of Isaiah. The book of Isaiah as a whole is fertile ground for such study, but one has to take a reasonable sized bite for an illustration. What I want to do with these chapters is discuss how various…
I’ve just run through another commentary on Daniel, in this case the Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Volume 7, section on Daniel, by Gleason Archer. (See my notes on this commentary.) You can review my more detailed view in those notes, but I would simply state that this is one of two carefully conservative, scholarly commentaries on…
In my earlier post on the Biblical Doctrine of Creation, my second element of a Biblical doctrine of creation was that God creates by simple command, in other words, God’s word and will is reality. This is commonly used as an argument against theistic evolution, and even in some cases against old earth creationism. Duane…
Read the story of Belshazzar’s feast in Daniel 5. The stories of the book of Daniel all have something to do with worship. Often we read them as unconnected stories about Daniel and his friends, but they have a common theme. Daniel 1 shows us the faithfulness of Daniel and his friends to their God,…
In an earlier post, Dating the Book of Daniel, I mentioned that I had ordered Ernest Lucas’s volume on Daniel in the Apollos Old Testament Commentary series. I now have received, read, and returned that volume, and I thought I would post a few notes. I have to admit that I continue to be puzzled…
Why is it that some people resist evolutionary theory so stubbornly? Many times I have used the argument that evolutionary theory is more complex than creationism, and that we are asking people to go against their intuition in favor of the evidence. But the more I think about it, the less I think that is…
In my previous post on this passage I stated that I was ignoring one textual issue that was really quite minor, but on thinking about it, it seems to me that it will illustrate one of the points that makes textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible different. We have relatively few Hebrew manuscripts, and most…
