Throughout the Pentateuch and into Joshua, the land of promise is a land “flowing with milk and honey.” After that, the phrase virtually disappears. It is used in the prophets to describe the land given to Israel after the exodus (Jeremiah 11:5; 32:22; Ezekiel 20:6, 15; the partial exception is the “curds and honey” in Isaiah 7:22). Why? Hippolytus may give us a clue. He describes an oblation of milk and honey alongside the oblation of wine; the milk and... Read more
Gregory Beale writes ( We Become What We Worship ) that by the first century, Judaism had turned its own tradition into an idol. Citing Paul’s claim that demons are behind the idols, he asks whether Israel too was incited to worship of tradition by demons, and rightly answers Yes: “The upshot of this evidence and the presence of the devil and his demons in the Gospels shows that they were active in Jesus’ day as in Isaiah’s, though the... Read more
Psalm 115:4-8 is as ironic a blason as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. Like many of the descriptions in the Song of Songs, the Psalmist begins from the head and moves to the feet, but instead of celebrating the beauty of the idols of gold and silver he focuses on their incapacity at every point. They are un-creations, seven-fold nothings, possessing impotent mouths, eyes, ears, noses, hands, feet, and throats. Read more
Jesus never gives a straight answer. Tell us, his enemies demand, Are you the Christ? Frequently, He refuses to answer, and when He gives an answer, He says things like “You have said” and “You say that I am.” Maddening. Jesus could have pre-emptively silenced a century and more of scholarly debate with a simple declarative sentence. Something along the lines of “I am the Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of My Father before all world, God of... Read more
INTRODUCTION Jesus’ long day of battle in the temple began with three parables (Matthew 21:23-22:14 ) that condemned Israel ’s leaders. One by one, these leaders – Herodians, Sadducees, Pharisees ( 23:15 -40) – approach Jesus to trap Him, and one by one they are put beneath the feet of the son of David ( 23:44 ). THE TEXT “The same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Him and asked Him, saying: ‘Teacher, Moses said... Read more
Why do you seek the living among the dead? That was the angel’s question to the women who came to the tomb on the day of Jesus’ resurrection. Instead of finding Jesus, they found an empty tomb with the stone rolled away. Confused and desperate, they sought Jesus among the tombs, weeping. Someone has stolen His body. Where have you taken my Lord? Where have you laid Him? Tell us where you have hidden Him. But the angel asks, Why... Read more
Christensen quotes this stunning paragraph from Phillips, where a character muses on the dice-roll of artistic success: “Two months ago, she was raw and unblended; tonight she was reasonably effective; someday very soon she would be in danger of marbling over into a slick cast impression of herself. The target was only microns wide, and history’s great singers may simply have been those who happened to make a record in the brief time between learning and forgetting how to manage... Read more
In a NYT review of Arthur Phillips’s latest, Kate Christensen comments, “The male muse is an unaccountably rare thing in art, with the exception of the men who inspired the likes of Auden and O’Hara — that is, men who were as sexualized and fetishized as their female counter parts, celebrated for their beauty and passivity. Where does that leave female artists looking for inspiration? Stranded, as Robert Graves recognized. ‘Woman is not a poet,’ he wrote in The White... Read more
Carl Becker ( The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers ) writes that though the Philosophes were devoted to reason, “a skeptical lot, atheists in effect if not by profession, addicted to science and the scientific method, always ready to crush the infamous, valiant defenders of liberty, equality, fraternity, freedom of speech, what you will,” yet they “were nearer the Middle Ages, less emancipated from the preconceptions of medieval Christian thought, than they quite realized or we have commonly supposed.”... Read more
In an article on Constantine’s church-building, Gregory Alexander repeats a commonplace about the difference between pagan and Christian places of worship: “The temple is a house for the god; the church is a gathering place for communal worship.” Yes, but: Jesus says He’ll be there in our gathering, so the church-temple is still a house for God. Perhaps, though, the point is more radical. Perhaps the church is a temple in the ancient sense, a house not only for God... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In