A Feast to Forget

Be silent before the Lord God!  For the day of the Lord is near, because the Lord has prepared a sacrifice, He has consecrated His guests.  “Then it will come about on the day of the Lord’s sacrifice that I will punish the princes, the king’s sons, and all who clothe themselves with foreign garments.”   Zephaniah 1:7-8  NASB Sacrifice – Robert Alter makes an important comment…

Little Foxes

But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit,  Jude 1:20  NASB The Holy Spirit – “Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom” (Song of Songs 2:15).  Now wait a minute!  What does Song of Songs have to do with Jude? …

Extra-terrestrial

It was also about these people that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord has come with [n]many thousands of His holy ones, 15 to execute judgment upon all, and to convict all the ungodly of all their ungodly deeds which they have done in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.” …

Yoda-Speak

Can you discover the depths of God?  Can you discover the limits of the Almighty?  They are as high as the heavens; what can you do?  Deeper than Sheol; what can you know?  Job 11:7-8  NASB Depths of God – First, let’s put the emphasis in the right place.  To do that, we need to read Hebrew…

Silent Partnership

Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; with [a]hard labor you shall eat from it all the days of your life.  Genesis 3:17  NASB Listened…

Theological Correctness

Are You not from time everlasting, Lord, my God, my Holy One?  We will not die.  Habakkuk 1:12a  NASB We – What is a tiqun sofrim? As you might guess, it is a written restoration, a place where a scribe corrected the text because of the theological implication.  In this case, the Masoretic text reads “we,”…

World-weariness

How long, O Lord, shall I cry out, and yet You do not listen?  I scream “outrage” to You, and You do not rescue!  Habakkuk 1:2  Robert Alter Outrage – Taken directly from the Psalms, the prophet Habakkuk applies David’s words to his circumstances.  We might do exactly the same. “How long?”  That’s the real…

Generational Trauma

“Listen now, you rebels; shall we bring water for you out of this rock?”  Then Moses raised his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff; and water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their livestock drank.  Numbers 20:10b-11  NASB Struck – We know this story from Sunday school days.  The ensuing punishment given…

First and Last

And the man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed.  Genesis 2:25  NASB Naked – Camile Paglia made this observation about the Bible: There are no sexual personae in the Bible, except among harlots.  Biblical character is unitary and homogenous.  Psychic splits are of the ‘whited sepulcher’ kind, where the self…