While Genesis 1:1-2:3 (or 4a) comes from the Priestly source and continues with Genesis 5, our first dose of the Yahwist begins with Genesis 2:4 and goes through the end of chapter 4. We have plenty of opportunity to see the difference between the two sources. The Yahwistic story will pick up with the description…
Now that we’ve looked over the text and found a set of transitions in it, we can start looking at how critical methologies will apply to this material. Will they help us interpret and apply the passage? This is a moment to look at some of the reasons I’ve been writing this series. Frequently, Bible…
Form Criticism involves identifying smaller units in a composition that might have been transmitted separately, especially orally, prior to being included in the composition you are studying. There are quite a number of sections in our selection (Isaiah 24-27) that can be examined in this way. Since I am writing this series to help people…
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…
In a previous post, The Best Place to Teach the Bible, I discussed my view that home and church or other private organizations were the best way to teach the Bible. I’ve had a couple of comments to that post that I think deserve some comment, and since I don’t like to make post-length comments…
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 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…
To conclude the content part of my series on Biblical criticism, I want to discuss literary criticism. Much of the practice of literary criticism is similar to genre and to a lesser extent canonical criticism. Essentially, literary criticism involves forgetting about the historical and theological aspects and simply reading the Bible as literature. One can…
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…
