Features

The Assassination of Eglon
The first locked-room murder mystery By Baruch Halpern

Ancient Israel’s authors wrote for Israelites, in Israelite language, with Israelite assumptions. That audiences on distant continents, millennia later, would be trying to piece together what they meant was a thought that never occurred to them. Changed language and changed assumptions obstruct our view of what the ancient authors meant to tell their audiences. […]

Isaiah
The impractical prophet By Yehoshua Gitay

010The book of Isaiah begins with a superscript:

Two Master Portraits of Isaiah

Two masterful portraits of the prophet Isaiah were painted in Rome at the beginning of the 16th century. The first, by Michelangelo (see below), was painted on the Sistine chapel ceiling between 1500 and 1510.1 The second, by Raphael (see front cover), was painted in the Church of Saint Agostino barely two years after […]

Corinth & Ephesus
Why did Paul spend half his journeys in these cities? By Dan P. Cole

Paul’s three missionary “journeys” form a standard feature in New Testament maps and histories. The impression that emerges from the account in Acts of the Apostles 1–21 in the New Testament is that Paul three times set out from Antioch in Syria on a succession of missionary “journeys,” during which he preached and founded […]

The Meeting Season
A time to learn, a time to drowse, a time to mingle with colleagues from around the world By Hershel Shanks

Summer is the time for alphabet-soup scholarly conferences. Some are held annually, like those of the International SBL (Society of Biblical Literature), the CBA (Catholic Biblical Association) and the SNTS (Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas), which met last summer in Sheffield, England, San Francisco and Cambridge, England, respectively. Others meet less often. Next summer the […]