Bible Review, December 2000
Features
My mother is a Martha; her best friend, a Mary. My mother raised five children while working, for almost all of her adult life, as a schoolteacher. My mother’s best friend had, well, more fun.1 Which is why my mother, as she cooked dinner or sat correcting spelling tests while her friend cheered on […]
The patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob invoked the Lord at simple outdoor altars apparently built for the occasion. King Solomon, however, built the Lord a permanent home, the Temple in Jerusalem. Midway between these two biblical traditions stands the portable Tabernacle that housed the Ark of the Covenant during the Israelites’ desert trek from […]
022 Yahweh could have asked Moses for just about anything—a temple, a palace, even a pyramid. Instead, Yahweh requests that Moses build him a tent (Exodus 25:8–9). Once the tent has been constructed according to Yahweh’s exacting instructions, the Israelite deity moves in. For the rest of the Israelites’ stay in Sinai, throughout […]
035 King David: A Biography Steven L. MacKenzie (New York, NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000) 232 pp., $25.00 (hardback) 034 I started reading this book with high hopes. Despite its title, which suggested (at least to me) a novelized treatment of Israel’s great king, the book is an attempt to find the historical […]
One Sunday morning several years ago, a most astonishing thing happened to me. I was attending services at a local church in Claremont, California, where I was a graduate student working on a (then) relatively obscure text known as the Gospel of Thomas. I rose and began to sing the announced hymn with the […]