Category: The Bible as Literature

The West Side is a haven for immigrant communities arriving in St. Paul, Minnesota. Historically, it has included people of German, Roma, Polish, Swedish, Irish, Jewish (fleeing Russian pogroms), Latin American, Middle Eastern (among them after 1948, Palestinians), and African heritage. It is a place where different languages, religions, and cultures coexist in the womb…

The biblical text is epic, expansive, and integrated in specific and articulate ways. After 500 episodes (over 800, if you add in Tarazi Tuesdays), I am convinced that the biblical genre’s complexity is far beyond the reach of contemporary literature and artistic expression. This is not intended as hyperbole. People get excited about modern literature…

In 1 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul, with all authority, does not speak on human authority, “for it is written in the law of Moses, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain.’ Is it for oxen that God is concerned? … but we endure anything rather than put an obstacle…

To understand the power of the Semitic triliteral root, consider the grammatical, functional, empirical, and, thus, anti-Platonic literary interconnection between DaBaR (word), keDoBRam (pasture), yaDBeR (subdued), watteDaBBeR (destroyed), beDaBBeRo (at his speaking), miDBaRek (your mouth), and miDBaR (wilderness). Only in the original Semitic do we hear and see the consonantal link between the shepherd’s pasture,…

The same Hebrew word, shebet, refers both to the staff of a shepherd and the tribe. It is the exact same word. The staff of God is the premise, the reference, and the totality, not the community. In the land of Scripture, which is not your land, does not speak your language, does not conform…

A listener wrote us this week to share a passage from Letter 57 of Jerome that captures (with respect to the terrorism of translations) what we said recently about Semitic languages in opposition to Hellenism and what we explain in today’s episode about Semiticized Greek in opposition to imperial Latin: “Time would fail me were…

In his 1990 article, “Fundamentals of Grammatology,” Peter T. Daniels proposed the Arabic term “abjad” to describe a type of Semitic script “that denotes individual consonants only.” Such languages force the reader to infer vowel sounds as they read the text. The term abjad is derived from the original (pre-Islamic) order of the first four…

Christians love to talk about glory and victory because we are all Roman imperialists in our secret hearts—in the thoughts that we imagine God cannot hear. We lust after victory. We want to conquer and control. We are the colonial occupiers. We plan and strategize on how to spread our dung piles around. What is…

In Luke 4, it is striking that the text refers to the opponent of Jesus, not as Satan, the “obstacle” or “roadblock” of the gospel, but as the deceiver, the Devil. It’s easy to dismiss this as poetic license or other such nonsense, but that is the point in the discussion when your English teacher…