Features

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Early Christianity: Part One
How are they related? By James C. VanderKam

Almost from the moment the first Dead Sea Scrolls came under scholarly scrutiny, the question of their relation to early Christianity became a key issue. The early days of Qumrana research produced some spectacular theories regarding the relationship among Jesus, the first Christians and the Qumran community. In 1950 the French scholar André Dupont-Sommer […]

What’s a Massa?
The collection of prophetic books ends with three massas—but what’s a massa? By Richard Simon Hanson

The prophetic collection of books in the Hebrew Bible ends with three massa’ot (singular, massa’). So what’s a massa (pronounced mah-SAH)? The prophetic collection of books in the Hebrew Bible also ends with the little Book of Malachi. Who’s Malachi? Answer: He’s nobody. He’s simply the last massa. So, once again, what’s a […]

Eden
A well-watered place By Richard S. Hess

In 979, a bilingual inscription was found in Syria that provides new background for understanding two significant puzzles in the opening chapters of Genesis. The first puzzle is the statement that mankind was made in the “image” of God, in his “likeness” (Genesis 1:26), a metaphor that has teased scholars for millennia. The second […]

West Coast Obstetrician Discovers Bible Illustrated by David Roberts

My profession is medicine, but my passion is Egyptology. Whenever I travel, I visit museums and used-book stores. So it was that I found myself in a modest little bookshop in Seattle. “I do have something that’s sort of on Egypt,” the proprietor told me. “It’s a Bible, but I haven’t been able to […]

Departments

Hebrew for Bible Readers
Using pronouns and nouns By Keith N. Schoville
Greek for Bible Readers
A simple word study By David Alan Black
My View
What we learn from studying religion— and Judaism in particular By Jacob Neusner
Glossary
The ineffable name of Israel’s God By Choon-Leong Seow