Mar 30, 2022
Inside and outside of Christian faith, many ask, "why did God command the Hebrews to utterly destroy the nations?" "Doesn't that indiscriminate slaughter make God an evil being?" Fair questions, indeed. We work through the context for that kherem/destruction and how the land came into play for the ancients in this...
Mar 23, 2022
The common Christian expectation is that final judgment awaits the end of history. That's not bad, but the Bible sees judgment at work now in life. Even corrupted "sons of God", immoral angels, have already been judged and taken somewhere. This episode explores what 1 Enoch, Jesus, Peter, and Jude all say about the...
Mar 16, 2022
With great detail the Jewish apocryphal book 1 Enoch delineates Genesis 6. What is apocrypha? How did Enoch inform the worldview of Second Temple Judaism? (What is Second Temple Judaism?) What kinds of specific sins does 1 Enoch describe sinful Sons of God committing? When giants die where does their spirit go? What...
Mar 9, 2022
Paleo (most ancient) cultures were aware of the existence of giants. Most of those cultures viewed them as great warriors, heroes, and transmitters of divine oracles. The Bible, in clear contrast, views them as abominations, corruptions, and transmitters of evil. This stems, at least, from the Bible's sensitivity to...
Mar 2, 2022
"There was a serpent in the garden of Eden." What does that mean? First? I erase some glosses that get overlaid onto the text. Then, we work through both some historical-cultural and textual framing of the story of the serpent. What would ancient readers immediately have recognized about that creature, that story?...