According to Paul, all human beings lived under the “elementary principles” ( stoicheia ) until the coming of the Son and Spirit. As he elaborates on this theme in Galatians 4 and Colossians 2, he identifies several features of stoicheic life: 1. Stoicheic life is the life of a son in his minority, the life of a son who is treated as no better than a slave. 2. Stoicheic life involves submission to beings that are not god. 3. Stoicheic... Read more
Texts are musical. How? Both texts and music display a paradoxical quality. Let’s start simple. On the one hand: The sequence of words is a temporal sequence, and we couldn’t recognize a sequence of words as a sentence unless one sound or written word yielded its place to the next. Each word in the sequence must die if the next word is to live; each dies for the sake of the whole sentence. But it’s through that death that the... Read more
In a chapter of Robert Wuthnow’s Rethinking Materialism: Perspectives on the Spiritual Dimension of Economic Behavior , Emory’s John Boli explores the “economic absorption of the sacred.” For Boli, the sacred is not some distinct realm of culture but rather the “deep structure” of culture, “comprising the fundamental ontological, epistemological, and procedural assumptions that ground social behavior.” His argument is that “the sacred order which structures individual action in American, Western, and, increasingly, world culture is primarily ‘represented’ in the... Read more
A number of my students did papers on the robe motif in the Joseph narrative and came up with some fresh (to me) thoughts. Here are a few of them. 1. At the beginning of the Joseph narrative, Jacob the faterh bestows a robe on his favored son, Joseph. At the end of the narrative, Joseph, now elevated to the position next to Pharaoh, bestows robes on his estranged and reconciled brothers. Benjamin particularly is singled out, receiving five changes... Read more
A number of my students did papers on the robe motif in the Joseph narrative and came up with some fresh (to me) thoughts. Here are a few of them. 1. At the beginning of the Joseph narrative, Jacob the faterh bestows a robe on his favored son, Joseph. At the end of the narrative, Joseph, now elevated to the position next to Pharaoh, bestows robes on his estranged and reconciled brothers. Benjamin particularly is singled out, receiving five changes... Read more
Isaiah is full of wordplay. A number of examples come up on chapter 2:5-22. 1. It seems to me that the word for “idol” ( eliyl ) puns on various words for God: el and elohim . Eliyl means nothing, vapor, empty, which is precisely the opposite of the character of Yahweh. 2. Verse 18 first rhymes then alliterates: eliyl caliyl yachaloph . 3. When Yahweh arises in His power, people who have exalted themselves will be brought low,... Read more
Translations confuse the point of Isaiah 2:9. The NAS has “So the common man has been humbled, and the man of importance has been abased, but do not forgive them.” The italicized words are not in the Hebrew, which reads more simply: “And bowed down will be man ( adam ) and lowered will be the man” ( ish ). The verse makes perfect sense in the context of v. 8, which describes the land filled with idols that men... Read more
Isaiah uses the word “fill” four times in 2:6-8. A fourfold fullness is a fullness that extends to the four points of the compass. From one boundary to another, Judah is filled from the east, with gold and silver, with horses and chariots, with idols. There is a progression here. ”Filled from the east” is obscure. Say what? Filled with gold and silver is clear; but in isolation it might be a positive statement. Judah is rich, just as in... Read more
Initially in the Bible, Yahweh alone has a treasury. His heaven is a treasury of rain, and therefore of abundance (Deuteronomy 28:12). When Joshua defeats the Canaanites, the plunder goes into Yahweh’s earthly-heavenly treasury, the tabernacle (Joshua 6:19, 24). One of the innovations of kingship is that the king has a treasury that is mentioned in the same breath with Yahweh’s own treasure house (1 Kings 14:26; 15:18; 2 Kings 12:18; 14:14; 16:8; etc.). At times, the king’s treasury becomes... Read more
Isaiah charges that the people of Judah are “filled from the east” (2:6). What does that mean? As the passage goes on, Isaiah condemns Judah’s “filling” with silver and gold, horses and chariots; these are the things that Judah is bringing from the east. There might be another aspect to this. The filling from the east is paired with a reference to the Philistines, who lived to the west of Judah, and in other passages of Isaiah the Philistines are... Read more
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