Joe Carter at the evangelical outpost has written a post titled How to Change Your Mind. I’m not going to steal the thunder of his post, other than to say that it deals with reading passages multiple times. I have long been recommending reading a book of the Bible, or any passage you are about…
Over the last few years I’ve tried to learn a great deal about baseball, because I have a stepson who is a professional pitcher. It has taken me some time to learn, because I didn’t grow up with baseball, and there are quite a number of subtleties. When I first started watching, for example, I…
More than a year ago I wrote a post titled Just Your Interpretation. In it I challenge the idea that just any interpretation will do, and suggested that there are right and wrong interpretations, and we should aim for right interpretations. I know this goes contrary to the post-modern trend. But I also mentioned another…
Suzanne McCarthy has a series of posts on the Better Bibles Blog about the name “Junia” in Romans 16:7. I’ve discuss this before on the Compuserve Religion Forum, but Suzanne covers all the major points. Here posts are, in order: Junia, the Apostle, Part 1 Junia, the Apostle, Part 2 Junia, the Apostle, Part 3…
This is a long delayed continuation of my series on Isaiah 24-27, an early apocalypse. To get the background, look back at my entry on Isaiah 24 and possibly even follow the links there to my material on this topic on Threads from Henry’s Web. For those who may not want to follow the links…
One of the things that I recommend for Bible study is reading a passage 12 times before you start examining the details. This is, of course, intended for serious study of a passage. I discuss various types of reading here. This is easily my most ignored recommendation. In fact, I have yet to find anyone…
One of my Old Testament professors once told me that he thought survey courses might better be left to the end of one’s program, that one could greatly benefit by a survey course after one had studied more deeply into the various elements. I agree, though I would suggest a starting survey and then a…
A post by Peter Kirk over on Speaker of Truth, titled Deborah and a woman from Bethlehem, and some interesting comments made there suggests to me some more writing about my favorite topic: the SHARING stage of Bible study. (For an outline of my method, see The Participatory Study Method. Some of the foundation for…
An excellent technique for digging deeper into a Bible text is to formulate questions about the text, and then look for answers to those questions. I discuss this briefly in my essay Reading the Text Precisely. A starting point for this is simply to ask basic fact questions about the text. Many difficult and angry…
I’m trying to take this passage in smaller chunks than I usually do so that I don’t end up with so many incredibly long posts. We’ve been watching the deterioration of the human race throughout these chapters. Genesis 3 gives one view of the start. Chapter 4 carries that story forward. If viewed in conjuction…
