Ah, America, what pride, luxury, lasciviousness, licentiousness, wantonness, drunkenness, cruelties, injustice, oppressions, fornications, adulteries, falsehood, hypocrisy, bribery, atheism, horrid blasphemies, and hellish impieties are now to be found rampant in the midst of thee! Ah America, America, how are the Lord’s sabbaths profaned, pure ordinances despised, scriptures rejected, the Spirit resisted and derided, the righteous reviled, wickedness countenanced, and Christ many thousand times in a day by these cursed practices afresh crucified. Ah, America, America, were our forefather... [read more]

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In Rom 11:26-27, Paul writes, I want you to understand this mystery, brothers, a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way all Israel will be saved."Some, perhaps many, seem to read this passage in this fashion: The Jews are being hardened now (that is, very few Jews are being saved), but once all of the elect Gentiles have been saved, then the hardening will be taken away from the Jews, and Jews will be converted in very large numbers." However, in the context, that is not what the passage says. Paul is writing about his present... [read more]

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Many Christians, in their discussions of eschatology, hold that there will be, near the time of Jesus’ return, the conversion of notably large numbers of ethnic/national Israel. First, I am uncomfortable with the terms "ethnic" or "national" Israel. "Ethnic," as it is commonly used, implies a racial/genetic connection. Modern Jews have only the most tenuous racial/genetic connections with Israel as it existed in the first century AD. It is true that there are distinctive genetic markers that those named Cohen (or some variation thereof) share, but that is limited to that particular li... [read more]

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The question has been raised (from my last entry) as to why the NLT would do this. The only answer I have is that it fits with the NLT's philosophy of translation. Much ink has been spilled over the last twenty years regarding translation philosophy; whether the translation should take a "formal equivalence" approach, or a "dynamic equivalence" approach. While that is a useful discussion, it does avoid questions about what a translation is supposed to do. If the only thing a translation is supposed to do is to transfer information, then I don't think it makes much difference how that is don... [read more]

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We left off last time with Joseph and his brothers. We pick up at that same place. Compare the following translations of Gen 43:33-44:3. The first is the ESV, the second is the NLT.Genesis 43:33 And they sat before him, the firstborn according to his birthright and the youngest according to his youth. And the men looked at one another in amazement. 34 Portions were taken to them from Joseph's table, but Benjamin's portion was five times as much as any of theirs. And they drank and were merry with him.44:1 Then he commanded the steward of his house, "Fill the men's sacks with food, as much a... [read more]

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Any translator of any text can tell you that picking an appropriate English word for a word from another language can be a nightmare. It is usually the case that more than one English word can share some connotations with a particular word from another language. Specifically, that is the case when rendering Biblical Hebrew and Greek into English.The English Revised Version attempted to solve that problem by always rendering a particular Hebrew/Greek word by the same English word. Anyone who has read that version knows that that is not really a solution. On the other hand, rendering for the ... [read more]

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Now that the reading schedule has us most of the way through Job, I thought I'd put forth some information on the book. There are innumerable commentaries and study books on Job, most of them problematic for a variety of reasons. The critical commentaries all assume that the Book of Job was written very late. In addition, they mostly assume that some parts of the book are out of order (the reader can consult such study Bibles as the New Oxford Annotated Bible, or the Harper-Collins Study Bible to verify that much of modern scholarship holds these positions). The problem is that most of thes... [read more]

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Benjamin Glaser asked what I thought about Jesus' use of this passage. For those who are unaware, Jesus made a clear allusion to the account of Jacob's dream in his response to Nathanael (John 1:43-51). In this statement Jesus identifies himself as the ladder. The reference probably has no better concise explanation than that found in the comment on Gen 28:12 in the Geneva Bible (this is the 1599 Geneva Bible, recently republished by Tolle Lege Press, not the New Geneva Bible, which became the Reformation Study Bible). That note reads: "Christ is the ladder whereby God and man are joined to... [read more]

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The following is the note on this passage in the new Apologetics Study Bible: "Because Jacob's vision at Bethel was his closest encounter with God up to this point in his life, he was convinced this place was unique. For him it was 'the house of God,' (the literal meaning of Bethel, and 'the gate of heaven' (v. 17). At his stage in God's progressive revelation, he could not see that no earthly spot could play this role (Acts 7:48-50). Like his brother Esau, Jacob had not been a man of faith. But, even though the conditions he states toward the Lord (Gn 28:20-22) fall short of true faith, th... [read more]

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It's been about ten months since I posted anything, so it's time to get back to work. I'll be posting at minimum once a week this year. The posts will usually be prompted by the readings from my daily Bible reading calendar.I try to read through a different version of the Bible every year, so after thirty years or so of doing that, I've obviously read through the English versions that are readily available. I have not, for example, read through the 1881 English Revised Version. As part of my reading this year, I am reading through Robert Alter's The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with C... [read more]

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