Ahab and Jezebel had little interest in Torah, the commandments that Yahweh had delivered to Israel on Sinai. Ahab continued to promote the idolatry of Jeroboam the son of Nebat. He discovered that Jeroboam?s idolatry was not robust enough for his tastes, so he promoted Baal worship, and sat by silently as Jezebel persecuted and killed the prophets of Yahweh. In today?s sermon text, Ahab and Jezebel persist in their antinomian ways. Ahab does not acknowledge Naboth?s right to keep... Read more
A number of recent studies of the Elizabethan stage have emphasized its Christian dimensions. Debora Shuger writes, “if it is not plausible to read Shakespeare’s plays as Christian allegories, neither is it likely that the popular drama of a religiously saturated culture could, by a secular miracle, have extricated itself from the theocentric orientation informing the discourses of politics, gender, social order and history.” In his 2002 Shakespeare’s Tribe , Jeffrey Knapp argues that these scholars do not go far... Read more
The obituaries and eulogies for John Paul II will be written in superlatives. That is as it should be. A handful of men were responsible for the collapse of the Soviet regime, the evil empire that tyrannized millions and cast a shadow over the 20th century, and the Pope was one of that handful. George Weigel was not exaggerating when he wrote that the Pope?s visit to his native Poland in 1978 was the beginning of the end for that... Read more
The following notes repeat a number of things from previous posts on this site. INTRODUCTION How does Romans 8 fit into the overall flow of Romans? First, Paul has announced the gospel of God?s righteousness, revealed from faith to faith (1:16-17). God?s righteousness involves His faithfulness to His promises to Israel, His promise to bless the nations through Abraham and his seed. Righteousness also means something like ?right order,?Eand describes God?s commitment to establishing right order in His creation. Thus,... Read more
I have found it useful to think about hermeneutics by considering how jokes mean what they mean. Jokes mean “intertextually,” that is, only in relation to presupposed texts and discourses and cultural practices that are present in the joke only as a “trace.” Shrek is a great example; nothing in the film is funny if you don’t know fairy tales, nursery rhymes, popular culture, previous films, pop music, and so on. If you don’t have access to these prior “discourses,”... Read more
John Scott offers this rich interpretation of Inferno 19, where Dante comes across a collection of popes and other churchmen stuck upside-down in the rocks of Hell, their feet “licked” with fire: “Instead of turning their desires heavenward, these corrupt churchmen had sold the things of the Holy Spirit (just as Simon Magus had attempted to buy them from St Peter: Acts 8.9-20): so, their heads are now pointing down toward Satan, imprisoned at the earth?s center. Their feet are... Read more
Why is it Virgil who leads Dante through Hell and as far as the top of Mount Purgatory? Well, he’s a poet for one thing, the greatest poet of all by Dante’s reckoning. Plus, for the medievals, he had taken on the role of sage and magus, and was widely lauded as a great pagan prophet for his apparent prediction of Christ in the Fourth Eclogue. In his recent Understanding Dante (Notre Dame, 2004), however, John Scott offers a more... Read more
Why did Naboth refuse to sell his vineyard to Ahab? Ray Dillard pointed to Leviticus 25 for the answer: “Because the land represented the fruit of the nation’s redemption, God commanded that it remain in the hands of the families to whom it was originally allotted. The land had been provided by God as part of his grace toward Israel; therefore, no one was to take the land of another away from him. The law provided that the land could... Read more
Why did Naboth refuse to sell his vineyard to Ahab? Ray Dillard pointed to Leviticus 25 for the answer: “Because the land represented the fruit of the nation’s redemption, God commanded that it remain in the hands of the families to whom it was originally allotted. The land had been provided by God as part of his grace toward Israel; therefore, no one was to take the land of another away from him. The law provided that the land could... Read more
INTRODUCTION Ahab?s sin begins in idolatry. But his sin is not a ?private?Esin, nor is it confined to a ?religious?Earea of life. In 1 Kings, as in all the prophets, idolatry always leads to social oppression and injustice. The sin of Ahab foreshadows the later oppressions of Manasseh and other kings of Judah, oppression that led to the Babylonian exile. THE TEXT ?And it came to pass after these things that Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard which was in... Read more
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