I suggested in a post this past week that Jesus is the new Phinehaswhen he comes to judge the Balaamites of Pergamum (Revelation 2:14-16). I had in mind Numbers 25, where Phinehas arrests a plague that breaks out because Israelites are fornicating and committing idolatry with Moabite women who have been coached by Balaam. One problem with this analogy is that Phinehas stops the plague with a spear, not a sword. But Balaam was killed by a sword (Numbers 31:8), when... Read more
In the prim and sanitized West, we think of purity rules as superstitious and primitive. We have transcended such nonsense. Mary Douglas and other anthropologists have tried to convince us that we’re self-deluded, but leave that to the side. As Rose George reports, there are places in the world today where “Levitical” defilements still defile. During her menstrual period, 16-year-old Radha “can’t enter her house or eat anything but boiled rice. She can’t touch other women – not even her grandmother... Read more
Why do so many bad guys and sinister places have names using the syllable “mor”? James Harbeck mentionsMoriarty, Voldemort, Mordor, and Piers Morgan, though he ultimately dismisses the last. The answer that immediately occurs is etymological: mor– is linked to death in Romance languages, the Germanic mora means darkness, and murder comes from the old English morth. But Harbeck thinks there’s more than etymology here: “‘mor’ may be what is sometimes called a phonestheme: a part of a word that tends... Read more
Why do so many bad guys and sinister places have names using the syllable “mor”? James Harbeck mentionsMoriarty, Voldemort, Mordor, and Piers Morgan, though he ultimately dismisses the last. The answer that immediately occurs is etymological: mor– is linked to death in Romance languages, the Germanic mora means darkness, and murder comes from the old English morth. But Harbeck thinks there’s more than etymology here: “‘mor’ may be what is sometimes called a phonestheme: a part of a word that tends... Read more
John Bergsma observes that the year of Jubilee was proclaimed with a trumpet blast on the day of atonement (The Jubilee from Leviticus to Qumran, 92), and draws this conclusion: Since other ancient Near Eastern festivals of the seventh month—such as the akîtu—combined reassertion of the rule of the deity over his people (symbolized by enthronement), temple purgation, and (at least) symbolic acts of social justice,31 the proclamation of the year of jubilee on the Day of Purgation is fitting.... Read more
A friend and former student, Pastor C.J. Bowen, writes in response to my recent discussion of Jesus as “new Phinehas.”The remainder of this post is from C.J. Having recently preached through the early chapters of Acts, I was bothered by the interpretation that the early church was unfaithful to their mission, hunkering down in Jerusalem and failing to take the gospel to the nations until persecution drove them out. This is seen, via some sketchy post hoc reasoning, as a Divine... Read more
Slash me with a glance and purge me with your gaze. Consume me in your flaming eyes, and set my heart ablaze. Read more
John Smart’s Tarantula’s Web, on the circle of intellectuals around John Hayward and TS Eliot is, according to Lachlan Mackinnon, an unrivaled “demonstration” of “just how ‘unpleasant’ it might have been ‘to meet Mr Eliot.” Hayward and Eliot were “extremely” intimate Mackinnon writes, but they fell out over Eliot’s marriage to a lowbrow typist, Valerie Fletcher. According to Mackinnon, “Eliot behaved badly. He did not take Hayward into his confidence about his feelings or his intentions, and relations were never truly restored.... Read more
Responding to a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that Indian men spend only 19 minutes a day on housework, Chandrahas Choudhury rises up in witty defense of the Indian male. “Millions of Indian men do huge amounts of housework — but in single-man or all-male households. Three years ago, I spent a few weeks in Mumbai interviewing dozens of auto rickshaw drivers. . . . An overwhelming majority of them lived in all-male households, often sharing a... Read more
Novelist Amin Malouf was born in Lebanon, and now lives in Paris. He’s a Melchite Christian. As he points out at the beginning of In the Name of Identity, those few markers only begin to spell out his complex of allegiances and loyalties. Malouf is not claiming to be unique. On the contrary: One of the themes of his book is that many have a similarly complex heritage and identity, and we fail to see this only because we are still... Read more
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