“Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of Yahweh has risen (zarach) upon you,” Isaiah announces (60:1). It’s a rich statement. Yahweh’s glory is said to “rise” in Deuteronomy 33:2, as the Lord moves from Sinai to Seir with his 10,000 holy ones shining with Him. The coming of light in 60:1 thus reaches back to the end of chapter 59, where Yahweh promises and threatens to put on His armor and go to war. Light comes... Read more
Psalm 37 is a wisdom Psalm that assures Israel that Yahweh will not let the wicked flourish forever. The faithful should persevere in seemingly fruitless faithfulness because the wicked who spring up like grass will also wither like grass. Part of this assurance is that the Lord will rescue His people from the wicked. Though evil people spy out and plot against the righteous (v. 33), the Lord will not let wicked hands prevail. He will not leave His people... Read more
The NYTBR reviewer of Martin Gardner’s Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardnerrecounts some of Gardner’s many pranks. “Once, a houseguest left behind a single glove at the home of Gardners friend Bob Murray. Murray went to several local department stores until he found a pair of gloves that matched the glove the woman had left behind. Then he mailed her a glove of the same handedness she already had. He never heard from that houseguest again.” “An April Fools... Read more
I have commented in the past on the bizarre Eucharistic imagery that ends Isaiah 49: “And I will feed your oppressors with their own flesh, And they will become drunk with their own blood as with sweet wine; And all flesh will know that I, the LORD, am your Savior, And your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.” On further reflection, there is perhaps something more to say. This is not just a judgment on the nations that have tried... Read more
Throughout the 40s of Isaiah, Yahweh promises to do something unprecedented, something new, for Israel. He will bring them from bondage – but he’s done that before. This time, he will bring them back by using Gentiles as agents of Israel’s liberation. That’s a new thing, better than the Exodus, Isaiah says. He declares it again in chapter 48, but with an intriguing twist: “I proclaim to you new things from this time, Even hidden things which you have not... Read more
Linda Colley doesn’t think that the United Kingdom can remain united. In Acts of Union and Disunion, she following Benedict Anderson’s lead in claiming that nations are Imagined Communities, formed from myths and, as Colley says, “an attractive idea of what they are.” As summed up by the Economist reviewer, Colley identifies several English myths: “the idea of Britains ‘liberty-drenched ancient past.’ This began with the Magna Carta, a document that was signed in 1215 in an attempt to limit... Read more
In his TLS review of Andrew Sanders’s In the Olden Time: Victorians and the British Past, AN Wilson suggests that Dickens was representative of his age in his “open hatred of the post, and his perky lower-middle-class joy in nowadays.” Not all Victorians shared Dickens’s progressivism: “Ruskin deplored Dickens’s anti-historicism, seeing him as ‘a pure modernist – a leader of the steam-whistle party par excellence – and he had no understanding of any power of antiquity except a sort of... Read more
A sketch of a Jensonian critique of historical criticism of Scripture: The Bible must be understood in its historical context. In practice, this means that the Bible’s historical claims are relativized to the discoveries of ancient historical investigation, archaeology, etc. If the bricks and pottery shards say that Jericho didn’t exist when Hebrews entered the land, then the claims of the book of Joshua are historically inaccurate. Joshua is then re-read as a mythically enhanced account of what actually happened.... Read more
The book of Genesis is neatly divided into sections by toledoth statements: “These are the generations of” or some variation. The phrase means “these are the things generated by” so and so, and the things generated are often children. But there is a variation within the book between genealogies and narratives. The first toledoth begins a narrative: The things generated by the God of heaven and “mother” earth are human beings, Adam and Eve (2:4). The second is a straightforward... Read more
As many have observed, Paul alludes to Psalm 106 in his condemnation of the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men in Romans 1. Paul writes that human beings “exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and of four-footed animals and crawling creatures” (Romans 1:23), thereby exchanging the truth for a lie and worshiping “the creature rather than the Creator” (v. 25). Psalm 106 says that at Horeb Israel “exchanged... Read more
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