Bible Review, February 1990

For 2,000 years Jews and Christians have mentioned Queen Esther and the widow Judith in the same breath. And it’s not surprising. Both women are Jewish heroines in popular books named after them. Both women were beautiful, resourceful and brave. And the books bearing their names are among the most interesting and best-written in […]

I intend to argue that the New Testament Gospels are biographies! Until quite recently that would have been a surprising position for a modern scholar to take. True, that was the general view from about the second century A.D.1 to the late 19th century. But, beginning at about that time, the view that the […]

Let’s face it. Christians have a problem when it comes to the use of the Old Testament in the church. We have found a variety of ways of overlooking or de-emphasizing or simply dismissing the Old Testament and its inherent value for the church.

Sacred sex, child sacrifice, the cult of the dead—these are the subjects of a powerful, 11-verse poem in Isaiah 57:3–13. Our task will be to understand how the poet makes his points, why he juxtaposes these three seemingly different subjects and what they tell us about the times in which the poet wrote. In […]