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

Q. Put a different way, one wonders if Exod. 3.14 isn’t meant to tease the mind into active thought (a quote I borrow from C.H. Dodd speaking about parables), and so is meant to be evocative rather than definitive. Or is this just a partial unveiling of the truth about Yahweh, and Moses is being told wait and see? But how would that be what Moses would convey to the Hebrews in Egypt when asked about the name of God?... Read more

Q. Your discussion of Moses and the burning bush (where he nearly experiences pre-ministerial burnout J) is one of the best I’ve ever read. One of the things that struck me reading that story in light of the Stephen speech in Acts 7 is that Moses really is just making excuses…. including the notion that he can’t speak well. This hardly makes sense of the earlier part of his story while in Egypt or the sequel to this episode in... Read more

Q. If the beginning of wisdom is the fear or revering of the Lord, then it seems to me this implies that to really understand reality one must know and trust and respect and indeed worship the God who created it all. In other words, wisdom that begins with God is hardly secular in character. It is deeply personal in character but not a private matter since God and his wisdom should not be exiled to the margins of reality... Read more

Q. One subject that did not really come up in your first major chapter was the effect of the Fall both on nature and human nature. Yet I would suggest that Ecclesiastes and Job at least do come to grips with the fact that bad things do happen to God’s people or good people in general. If a good handling of life means being wise enough to be in tune with the nature of reality, I presume that would include... Read more