Micaiah is a prophet of Yahweh, the only prophet of Yahweh available to advise Ahab and Jehoshaphat as they plan to recover the city of Ramoth-gilead from the Arameans. As Ahab expects, Micaiah prophesies evil, warning that Ahab will die in battle and Israel will be left like sheep without a shepherd. Zedekiah, one of Ahab’s court prophets, slaps Micaiah across the face, and Ahab dismisses him from the court, sending him off to prison to be fed on bread... Read more
A thought on the coverage of the Pope’s funeral: When was the last time you saw so many old men on TV? Read more
At one point in Atonement, Briony sends a slightly fictionalized version of part of her story to a magazine. She writes in the style of Virginia Woolf, focusing on light plays on the surfaces of stone and water. The story is rejected, and in explaining the rejection the editor says that the story went nowhere, and it was little more than a sketch. Suggesting some directions for developing the plot, the editor stumbles on Briony’s actual story, and Briony realizes... Read more
With Ian McEwan’s recent Saturday getting strong reviews everywhere, I decided I needed to read the only McEwan novel that I possess, the 2001 Atonement . Atonement focuses on the story of the Tallis family. On a sultry day in Surrey in the 1930s, through a series of petty conflicts and misunderstandings, the lives of the Tallises are unalterably changed. Leon Tallis is coming home for a visit, and in preparation his imaginative little sister Briony has written a play,... Read more
From Luther’s Freedom of a Christian : “as our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christs to one another and Christ may be the same in all, that is, that we may be truly Christians.” And, we are Christians because “we are named after Christ,... Read more
The allusions to Exodus early in Matthew fit into a larger theological and literary thrust of the first gospel. Commentators have often noted that the gospel is organized around five large discourses, some of which are virtually monologues: The sermon on the Mount (chs. 5-7); Jesus?Emission instructions to His disciples (ch. 11); Jesus?Eparables of the kingdom (ch. 13); Jesus?Einstructions about the corporate life of the disciples (ch. 18); and Jesus?Eprophecies about the doom of Israel (chs. 23-25). Various schemes have... Read more
A discarded fragment from a paper: Virtually any passage of Eliot, even the briefest, would serve for hours of source-checking. Let me offer a brief interpretation of the closing lines of Part I of The Waste Land. The whole section is entitled ‘The Burial of the Dead.’ The final section, following on and growing out of a scene in a Tarot-reader’s parlor, describes a city, an ‘unreal city.’ Eliot writes, Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,... Read more
Roland Worth provides a valuable treatment of the Sermon on the Mount by discussing the OT background to Jesus’ teaching. His overall argument is that the antitheses of Jesus’ sermon do not offer anything especially new but are “firmly rooted in Old Testament teaching.” Jesus’ “I say” is not a challenge to Moses but to “popular (or clerical distortions of his own day. It was not a case of Jesus versus Moses, but of Jesus versus traditional interpretation, something profoundly... Read more
In his fascinating, if sometimes eccentric book, The Unity of the Bible: Exploring the Beauty and Structure of the Bible , Duane Christensen suggests that 1-2 Kings (like much of the Bible) is structured by a series of embedded heptamerous chiasms (“wheels within wheels” he calls them; also “menorah” structures). Here’s his analysis: A. United monarchy, 1 K 1:1-11:43 B. Divided monarchy from Solomon to Elijah, 1 K 12:1-16:34 C. Elijah, 1 K 17:1-21:29 X. True and false prophets and... Read more
INTRODUCTION Ahab?s life ends in a battle with the Arameans, but the story of Ahab?s death includes another, deeper battle ?Ethe battle between true and false prophecy. Ahab?s life ends the way it began, with Ahab ignoring Yahweh?s prophet. But he cannot escape the prophet?s word by ignoring the prophet. In spite of all his efforts to escape the word of Yahweh, his death fulfills that word. THE TEXT ?Now three years passed without war between Syria and Israel. Then... Read more
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