Q. The Inscrutable God chapter is certainly very challenging. It reminded me of the end of a poem I wrote some time ago which says ‘God’s way are not our ways/ our eyes cannot see/ the logic of love/ nailed to a tree.” My point is that ‘all is not made plain’ even in the NT when it comes to the ultimate mysteries of God’s ways with us. Our tendency to want simple and clear answers to everything leads to... Read more

Q. On p. 153 you enunciate a principle of how to read the OT which in fact I have stressed throughout my treatment of such things in my Biblical Theology volume. You say, “The OT does not address the issue of eternal destiny (however much its content may be open to being developed in such terms) but rather is concerned with the relationship with God and the purpose of life in this world.” The only caveat I would have to... Read more

Q. One of the things your discussion of the Cain story does is remind me that Hebrew is often allusive and elusive as well, since so many renderings are possible of a verse, not least if we think the vowel pointing may not be definitive but rather a later imposition on the text. How exactly does one avoid the paralysis of analysis, or say anything definitive or likely at all with a text that has so many possible renderings? If... Read more

Q. I was glad to see you tackling the conundrums of the story of Cain and Abel, which do indeed suggest other human beings are on the face of the earth, and this is implied before any mention in Gen. 5 that Adam and Eve had further children. Have you considered that the way to look at such stories is that they are stories told to explain the origins of God’s people, the Hebrews and not necessarily everyone on planet... Read more

Q. On p. 120 you raise one the endemic problems for Biblical interpretation for people of Christian faith— how literally should one take the text? How much imaginative flexibility should we exercise in the faithful interpretation of Scripture? One rule of thumb I always employ is begin with being aware of the kind or genre of literature one is interpreting. It’s one thing to interpret a psalm, like Ps. 82 which is indeed in poetic form. It’s quite another entirely... Read more

Q. I take the point that the speaker is disappointed in the behavior of the Elohim, and tells them that they shall die like mortals, which in turn suggests they are not human beings but will share the fate of humans. This however does suggest they are other created beings, like angels who could die. And if Ps. 82 is sharing the divine perspective, do we really want to say that God discovered he was mistaken about these beings? That... Read more

Q. I wonder if you have come across the work of Michael Heiser? He has a whole book on Angels, and quite a lot to say about Ps. 82 as a conversation between God and other supernatural beings, not between God and human beings. I wonder what you think about that idea? The concept involves angels being related to different nations or ethnic groups and being partially responsible for their living in accord with God’s will. A. No, I haven’t... Read more

  Q. Let’s talk about divine accommodation. This is such an important topic and involves not just the limitations of the language by which God is revealed but in fact much more. For example, Jesus tells us that the OT rules about marriage and divorce were given ‘due to the hardness of human hearts’. And Jesus then offers dictums which are more strict about such matters. Jesus’ words suggest that a good deal of the material in OT law was... Read more

Q. Your discussion of whether Christians should go with Yahweh or with ‘the Lord’ as in many translations raises a further dilemma. The reason many Christians prefer Yahweh, the personal name of the God of the OT, is because they do not want to denude the name of its Jewishness, in some sort of supersessionist fashion. Indeed, they want to stress the Jewishness of God’s name as a way to counter the anti-Semitism of so much of the sad part... Read more

Q. You go on to look at the LXX rendering of Exod. 3.14 which, as you say is more an interpretation of the assumed meaning of the Hebrew rather than a more literal translation. And this produces a dilemma. I once had a Greek Orthodox monk as a student at Ashland Seminary and we were discussing Isaiah 7.14 both in the Hebrew and in the Greek. He was insisting that no matter what the Hebrew meant, for the Christian the... Read more