Bible Review, June 1990

When the enslaved Israelites sought to leave Egypt, Pharaoh said no. The Lord then visited ten plagues upon the Egyptians until finally Pharaoh permanently relented—the last of the plagues being the slaying of the first-born males of Egypt. Some of the plagues are the type of disasters that recur often in human history—hailstorms and […]

A hurtling satellite peering down from Europe’s night sky during the past millennium couldn’t have missed the blazing emblems of Christendom’s sustained disapproval of the Talmud; pyre after pyre of burning books, ordered by pope after pope, in town after town—Paris, Toulouse, Perpignan, Rome, Bologna, Ferrara, Mantua, Florence, Venice, Cremona. In the last such […]

Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh—whose brilliant coloring and radically individualized symbolism changed the way we view art—each painted portraits of themselves as Christ. Although Gauguin the Frenchman (1848–1903) and Van Gogh the Dutchman (1853–1890) were contemporaries and even lived together for a time, their self-portraits as Christ have vastly different meanings. In his […]

Whether ancient Egyptian civilization reflected an essentially black culture has recently been the subject of a spirited exchange in the pages of BR’s sister publication, Biblical Archaeology Review.a This discussion, however, is but a relatively faint echo of an intense debate heard most frequently in black academic circles and on black campuses, and lately […]

Americans revere the Bible—but, by and large, they don’t read it. And because they don’t read it, they have become a nation of biblical illiterates.a