With income inequality and social mobility in the air, two articles in the Economist challenge the conventional wisdom. One is a report on a study conducted by economists at Harvard and Berkeley that concludes, in the Economist’s words, “Despite huge increases in inequality, America may be no less mobile a society than it was 40 years ago.” This study is based on a larger collection of data than any previous study —“over 40m tax returns of people born between 1971 and... Read more
Revelation 1 describes Jesus with three titles: faithful witness, firstborn of the dead, ruler of the kings of the earth. Revelation 1 describes Jesus work with another triad: He loved us, loosed us from our sins, made us a kingdom of priests. The two triads match: Jesus loves us as a faithful witness, giving Himself for us as witness to death; Jesus looses us from our sins by His resurrection as the firstborn of the dead; Jesus is ruler over... Read more
Who is the one who “is, was, and coming”? In Revelation 1:4, it’s the Father. In verse 8, it seems to be the Triune God. Who is “Alpha and Omega”? In Revelation 1:8, it’s the Triune God. In 22:13, it’s Jesus. As Joseph Mangina has put it, John indicates that the Triune persons are fractals. Each Person manifests the pattern of the whole. Each of the three is Himself triadic. And that works even if 1:8 is a statement of... Read more
Richard Hays proposes the follow explanation of the title “faithful witness,” applied to Jesus in Revelation 1:5 (Revelation and the Politics of Apocalyptic Interpretation, 78-79): “‘the testimony of Jesus’ must include the memory or message of Jesus’ own faithful suffering and death. This is suggested first of all by the interesting fact that the martyr Antipas in Pergamum is described as ho martus mou ho pistos mou (2:13) – precisely echoing Revelation’s programmatic description of Jesus Himself as ho martus... Read more
What was Noah’s ark? A boat? Not really. As Morales points out (The Tabernacle Prefigured, 157), the word used for ark (tabah) isn’t a normal term for a sailing vessel. Some have suggested the word derives from Egyptian words meaning coffer, chest or palace, house. The Akkadian flood story uses ekallu, normally “palace,” and the odd babu (related to Babel) to describe the door of the ark, a term usually reserved for the gates of a city or a magnificent... Read more
More specifically, what’s in Noah’s name? Much, says Michael Morales in The Tabernacle Pre-Figured (164-7). “The keys words of [Genesis] 6.5-8 form a paranomastic allusion to the name of Noah (nch): ‘regretted’ (nacham) 6.6, 7 (which meaning is contrasted to its use in 5.29 as ‘relief, comfort’); ‘wipe out’ (machah) 6.7; and ‘favor, grace’ (chen) 6.8.” The last is especially brilliant, because the central statement that “Noah found grace” is surrounded by a palindrome: nch found chn. The etymology given at his... Read more
In an essay in the Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora, Edrel Arie explains the dramatic effects of the fall of the second temple on Jews outside Judea. “Diaspora communities naturally vacillate between the desire to preserve all three: their unique identity, their connection to their cultural center, and their desire to integrate into the broader cultural context in which they live. . . . The destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, by its very nature, upset the balance between these... Read more
In a previous post, I noted how the testimony of John the Seer parallels the testimony of John the Baptist. But there’s more to it. There’s something structural going on. In that post, part of my evidence was the unusual (though not unique) doubling of martur– words in both John 1:7 and Revelation 1:2. Both John the Baptist and John the Seer “testify to testimony” or “witness to witness.” The structural significance is that both of these figures of witness appear... Read more
When the glory of Yahweh appears to Ezekiel by the Chebar river, it appears as a teeming cloud of cherubim surrounding a throne on which a molten figure is seated (Ezekiel 1:22-28). The glory is a model of the cosmos; or, better, the cosmos is modeled on the glory. The clue is in the description of the sound of the cherub wings, which are like “the voice of many waters” (v. 21). In ancient cosmology, the land emerges from the... Read more
Kant likes Plato the academic. He doesn’t like Plato the letter-writer, teacher, and sender of messages. The latter is, through no fault of his own, too much the Schwarmer for Kant’s tastes. The dividing line between the good and bad Plato – or, more accurately, between Plato and Kant – has, Derrida says, to do with mathematics: “Plato, enchanted by geometric figures, as Pythagoras was by numbers, would have done nothing but have a presentiment of the problematic of the... Read more
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