Mark Baddeley has been posting about the impassibility of God over on the SolaPanel. I’ve always had reservations about the doctrine, so here’s a copy of the comment I posted over there:
Category: bible
job’s perfection and paul’s objection
Job, we are told in the opening verses of the book which bears his name, was תם וישר וירא אלהים וסר מרע — “blameless and just, fearing God.” Much of the point of the book rests upon the veracity of this assertion. Job did not deserve to suffer as he did. David Clines claims that…
the verb ברא in genesis 1
It appears that Ellen Van Wolde’s article about the meaning of ברא in Genesis 1 has appeared in JSOT (link to the reference is here). There has already been some discussion over her claim on other blogs, so I’m hoping to get a copy of her article soon (if anyone feels motivated to send me…
the shape of the ark
A recent article in the UK paper The Guardian reports that a newly translated by Irving Finkel (although not, apparently, newly discovered) tablet of Atra-hasis makes reference to the Mesopotamian ark as being “circular” (I assume it means more cylindrical than spherical). Although the provenance of the tablet seems unclear, there has been no doubt…
lamentable christmas carols
Yes, there are many lamentable Christmas songs and carols (“Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly” anyone?). Too many to mention. Nonetheless, since ’tis the season, and we’re subject to carols at every corner, I’m going to avail myself of the opportunity to complain a little. Perhaps my biggest gripe is with the common tendency…
luke 2:14
Jim West has posed a yuletide quest to uncover the “right” translation of Luke 2:14 (does anyone else get a Google ad inserted into that page for the “United Church of God”?). So here I’ll get into the spirit and have a go! First, for reference, Jim suggests the following: Glory to the highest God;…
bible software: what’s missing
OK, I’m not going to give a comprehensive list of what’s missing in the various incarnations of Bible software currently available, but there’s one feature I’d like to see which does not currently exist in any Bible software that I’m aware of — the ability to customise the morphological (and, when/where available, syntactical) tagging of texts….
more numerical fun
John Hobbins points to an article in the Jerusalem Post about a new book purportedly revealing startling new discoveries about truths hidden in the Hebrew text of the Bible by Professor Haim Shore from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. There’s endless fun to be had with such mathematical legerdemain, but for now let’s just look…
translating אמן “amen”
Working through some of Jeremiah lately I was prompted to think about the translation of the term אמן (“amen”). By way of reference I decided to see how a number of English translations rendered the term in two places — Jer 28:6 and Matt 5:18 (the latter uses the Greek transliteration ἀμήν). Here are the results:…
affirming inerrancy
Following up on my earlier post on the topic of inerrancy, Darrell Pursiful has recently posted on the topic and I, since I largely agree with his position, I encourage you to read it. To expand briefly on my thinking on the topic, some formulations of the doctrine of the Inerrancy of Scripture state that…