2014-02-05T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 5, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

If you read about a character who visited friends one day and stormed in like a thundercloud the next, who visited unexpectedly and shared a meal but then withdrew into a closed palace, who blew smoke from his nostrils and then spoke with magnificent gentleness and compassion, you’d be inclined to think: What an interesting, varied, complex, volatile, unpredictable character! You’d be inclined to find the character interesting. Not critical scholars. They read about Yahweh majestically speaking a world into... Read more

2014-02-04T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 4, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

Yahweh enters into covenant with Israel at Sinai. It is a kind of wedding event. Yahweh commits Himself to Israel, Israel to Yahweh, and they end with a wedding feast on the mountain. Then Yahweh gives instructions for a bridal house – the tabernacle, a home where He can dwell with His bride, in the midst of His bride. The tabernacle curtains and adornments are bridal clothing, as Ezekiel 16 makes clear: Yahweh says that He “clothed [Israel] with embroidered... Read more

2014-02-04T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 4, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

Moses ascends (‘alah)  again and again into the cloud on Sinai (Exodus 19:3; 20:21), but nobody else does.  As Morales says, this marks Moses as the “ascender” to God (The Tabernacle Pre-Figured, 219). He adds, “As mediator between God and the people, he is able to ascend to God whereas the people may not, and able to descend to the people whereas God may not (lest they perish)” (220).  If the tabernacle is a portable Sinai, Israel needs a portable... Read more

2014-02-04T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 4, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

While David is in the midst of his enemies, the Lord spreads a table, anoints him with oil, gives him a cup (Psalm 23). It’s a symbol of communion in the midst of danger. But the full cup is not just a cup of joy. It’s a cup of judgment.  The word for “overflow” means being satisfied with drink (cf. Psalm 36:8), but it also describes swords that are satisfied with the blood of enemies (Isaiah 34:5) or of sacrifices... Read more

2014-02-04T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 4, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

Ezekiel tells a parable of exile (Ezekiel 17) involving a cedar in Lebanon, two eagles, and a vine. The great eagle plucks twigs off the top of a cedar and takes them away to a “city of traders” (vv. 3-4). The eagle also takes some of the seed from the land (apparently Lebanon) and plants them beside abundant waters, where they grow into a vine (vv. 5-6). Another eagle appears, and the vine reaches toward him, only to be withered... Read more

2014-02-03T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 3, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

Noah is named as the rest-bringer for the human race. And he does just that, not simply by enduring the flood but by offering righteous worship on the holy mountain after the flood.  Yahweh initially repents that He made “the man”; in the end, He has a change of heart and promises not to destroy the earth, even though “the man” has an evil imagination from youth (Morales, The Tabernacle Pre-Figured, 187). E. van Wolde points out how this is brought... Read more

2014-02-03T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 3, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

Metz (A Passion for God, 49-53) suggests that the “sickness unto death of religion is not naivete, but banality.”  Banality arises from some of the deep seeds of modernity. Our “cult of possibility,” our confidence that “everything is possible” has an underside, resignation to the fact that everything will be superseded. Thus “the cult of managing our fate on the one hand and the cult of apathy on the other belong together like two sides of a single coin.”  On... Read more

2014-02-03T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 3, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

Memoria passionis is a central feature of Johann Baptist Metz’s “postidealist theology,” a theology that is founded in practice and knows its own historical embeddedness. For Metz, this doesn’t just involve memory of Christ. For moderns, it’s equally the memory of Auschwitz. In A Passion For God, he recalls that “the way Auschwitz showed up—or did not show up—in theology” made it “clear to me how high the apathy content in theological idealism is, how incapable it is of taking on historical... Read more

2014-02-03T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 3, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

When Jeroboam I split the northern tribes from the house of David, he secured the unity of his area by establishing shrines for golden calf worship at the northern and southern borders of his territory—at Dan and Bethel respectively. Both were obvious choices. Bethel had been a holy place since the theophany to Jacob (Genesis 28) and Dan had been a center of idolatry for centuries. Judges 17-18 gives an etiology of Danite idolatry, telling the story of the Danites... Read more

2014-02-03T00:00:00+06:00

Last updated on: February 3, 2014 at 12:00 am   By

Andrew Solomon begins his NYTBR review of Jennifer Senior’s All Joy and No Fun with the arresting claim that “parenting as we know it—predicated on the unconditional exaltation of our children—is no more than 70 years old.” The key shift in the past century has been, Senior says, our children’s transition “from being our employees to our bosses.”  This shift, Senior argues, is the background fact for the debates and confusions we have about being parents: “Every debate we have had... Read more

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