Satan

Last updated on: June 17, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Partly based on the association of “Satan” with accusation in Revelation 12:10, commentators have widely taken the Hebrew word to mean “accuser” or “prosecuting attorney” throughout the Hebrew Bible. In a recent essay in JBL, Ryan Stokes questions that conclusion. Instead, he claims that the word means “adversary” and specifically refers to adversaries that physically attack and harm. Rather than accuser, Satan is “YHWH’s Executioner.” Stokes’s argument is strongest in his survey of the narrative uses of satan. The Philistines... Read more

Living Color

Last updated on: June 17, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Daniel Lewis goes bird watching, and bird watchers need to know their colors. Lewis is also an historian, so he got interested in how color terms came to be standardized. The work of another bird-watcher was decisive: “Other important color dictionaries were published at the start of the 20th century when [Robert] Ridgway published his work—some of them strange and wonderful. The French Society of Chrysanthemists, for instance, created a two-volume set of swatches and names in 1905 for their own botanical... Read more

Meeting the Protestant Prejudice

Last updated on: June 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

RJ Snell is aware of what he calls the “Protestant Prejudice” against natural law, and, though himself an advocate of natural law, admits that Protestants lodge “reasonable and sensible objections” against theoretical models of natural law (The Perspective of Love, 12). Snell, though, argues that these Protestant objections don’t touch natural law worked out “from the mode of interiority,” which is capable of making ample room for “the effects of sin on intellect and will, the role of grace, the... Read more

Book of Beginnings

Last updated on: June 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

James Jordan teaches the first course of Trinity House’s 2014-15 year, an August course on the book of Genesis. Click here for information and registration. Read more

World’s Policeman

Last updated on: June 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Writing at the New Yorker, Dexter Filkins argues that America’s withdrawal from Iraq left the Iraqi Prime Minister with freedom to destroy the country: “When the Americans invaded, in March, 2003, they destroyed the Iraqi state—its military, its bureaucracy, its police force, and most everything else that might hold a country together. They spent the next nine years trying to build a state to replace the one they crushed. By 2011, by any reasonable measure, the Americans had made a lot... Read more

Spirit in the Midst

Last updated on: June 16, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Isaiah 63:10-14 reviews Yahweh’s history with Israel. He saved them through the “angel of His face,” lifted them up from the sea and carried them (like the daughter of Pharaoh rescuing Moses from the Nile). He put His Spirit “in the midst” (qereb) of Israel. But they rebelled, so Yahweh turned and fought against them. The picture is of Yahweh inserting His Spirit into “him,” into the inner parts of a man. But in fact the Lord sent His Holy... Read more

Climate Change, Religious Change

Last updated on: June 14, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his contribution to Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions, Noel Robertson argues that “Archaeology and epic poetry both fix on climate change as a fundamental cause of the Mycenaean collapse.” As the climate cooled and became wetter, the population shifted east, adopted warmer types of clothing, abandoned cultivated land. He finds this reflected in legends and myths: “The same conditions appear in legends as caused by Zeus and Athena – the sky god Zeus and the maiden Athena who... Read more

China’s Religious Boom

Last updated on: June 14, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a National Interest review of Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition, Dan Bluemnthal writes that “neither money, nor nationalism is satisfying the Chinese urge for the good life.” He quotes Haruki Murakami’s observation that nationalism is like “cheap liquor” whose effects don’t last. Blumenthal suggests that “There is a spiritual and moral void in China. People do not trust the institutions around them: the Party is corrupt and hypocritical, business is corrupt and political patronage is rampant, and the media is censored... Read more

Dan Brown and Euripides

Last updated on: June 14, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Oliver Harris begins his TLS review of Theodore Ziolkowski’s Lure of the Arcane by pondering why two million people went out to buy Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol the first week it was out: “If those who rushed to consume this tale of ancient mysteries and secret societies were not buying it for its sinuous prose, might their enthusiasm be due to what Ziolkowski describes as the lure of the arcane? The arcane – from Latin arca, signifying a chest in which something is... Read more

Aporia of Purity

Last updated on: June 13, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Michael Guichard and Lionel Marti offer an outstanding survey of purity in ancient Mesopotamia in their contribution to Purity and the Forming of Religious Tradition. Among the many details, two particularly stand out. The first was the connection between purity and luminosity, purity and glory. Referring to Sumerian terms for purity, they write that “a distinction might be made between an instrinsic state of purity . . . , the effect of brightness and/or of whiteness that calls for the idea... Read more