Back to Witherington, and I discern that nuance and subtlety are not Witherington’s style, at least not in these posts. He writes, “Gen. 3.15 is not in any way shape or form a messianic prophecy about a warrior messiah. The ‘he’ in question is the descendants of Eve of course and in any case, even if it were a reference to Christ, Christ solved the Satan problem not by being a warrior messiah and thus by killing but by dying... Read more
Who is the angel in Revelation 22:6, 16? Both of the verses echo the opening verse of Revelation, especially 22:6. The opening verse says that Jesus send and signified by His angel to His slave John, and earlier used the verb “show.” 22:6 states that the Lord sent His angel to show His slaves things that will take place shortly. The two verses share the verb “sent,” the fact that the angel is the agent or the one sent, the... Read more
A student, Leta Sundet, wrote a quite brilliant paper on Romans 7. The entire paper is posted below. “I do not understand my own actions,” Paul says helplessly. “I do the things I hate. Oh wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Christians have struggled for a long time over how to interpret Romans 7:13-25. Who is Paul speaking for? Is he remembering his pre-conversion plight? Or is he describing himself in the... Read more
A friend sent me a link to a Wall Street Journal column by William Deresiewicz describing how studying Jane Austen taught him the meaning of manhood. Reading about Elizabeth Bennet’s failures and her resulting humiliating, Deresiewicz learned what real manhood, and real education, was all about: “Humiliation, I realized, was exactly what I needed, too. Our egos, Austen was teaching me, prevent us from owning up to our many errors and shortcomings, and so our egos must be broken down.... Read more
I skip over Witherington’s second complaint for a moment and move to #3. For this one, he uses two exclamation points!! More than once!! Witherington writes, “the enmity set between humans and ‘the serpent’ has nothing to do with an endorsement of war, it has to do with a spiritual battle against evil and the Evil One more particularly, or, if you prefer literalism enmity between Eve’s offspring and those of snakes!! Either way, the text has nothing to do... Read more
Isaiah famously prophesies about the Branch ( netzer ) that will spring from Jesse’s root, life from the dead tree of the Davidic line. There is another branch in Isaiah: The king of Babel who tries to climb above the clouds but then falls to earth is never going to find a glorious resting place. Other kings have their pyramids, but the king of Babel will “be cast out of your tomb like an abominable branch” ( netzer ; 14:19).... Read more
Over on his blog (I can see it in the distance), Ben Witherington has been working through my book on Constantine. His latest post criticizes my biblical arguments at the end of that book. I hope to address some of his criticisms over the next few days, and I’ll start with his charge that my reading of the Adamic mandate is “atrocious” because I claim that Adam was called to “guard the garden”: “Adam was not called upon to guard... Read more
When the king of Babel falls to Sheol, he will be covered with worms and worms will spread out beneath him (Isaiah 14:11). Two words are used for “worm,” and the most commonly used of them is most often used not to describe worms per se but the scarlet coloring that comes from the worms. The tabernacle texts of Exodus use the word over 25 times in this sense. Yahweh’s house, and His priest, are covered with worm-dye, scarlet covering.... Read more
Isaiah 14 moves forward by a series of puns on the Hebrew mashal . The noun form means “proverb” or “parable,” and describes the poem that Israel will take up on the day when Babel is overthrow (14:4). The mashal is about the fall of those with rods and scepters of rule. The word “ruler” in verse 5 is a verb form of mashal , the term for the original dominion of the stars of heaven in Genesis 1:18. The... Read more
Fir and cedar were among the materials for the temple (1 Kings 5:8, 10; 6:15), as well as Solomon’s other building projects (1 Kings 9:11). Elsewhere in Kings these trees refer to the great and mighty of the land, the ones that Assyria intends to cut down (2 Kings 19:23). The two uses are related: The temple forms the great trees of the land into a house for Yahweh, and it symbolizes the formation of the people, including the great... Read more
Leithart
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