I received an email recently from my undergraduate advisor and outstanding biblical scholar Gary Rendsburg announcing a new project: BenSira.org. This has been developed with one of his Rutger’s undergraduate honors students (of course!), Jacob Binstein. It looks to be an incredible resource. Please spread the word! Welcome to www.bensira.org, […]
Bible
353 posts
A month or so ago I was talking to an old and close friend and we began discussing reviews of our work. This led to discussing how one reviewer misunderstood my conclusions in The Rabbinic Targum of Lamentations: Vindicating God. Curious to look at it all again, I pulled up […]
We will be leaving first thing in the morning tomorrow, but had a great time. I heard a number of excellent papers and saw so many great friends who shared their love and concern for us. It was affirming, sad, and wonderful all at once. There is a consultation on […]
I have written a lot about this, as you might expect from someone who spent more than a decade working on lament, but it is always good to hear others say the same thing. Peter Enns has a nice summary of a lecture by Walter Brueggemann on “God’s Infidelity.” Brueggemann […]
I mentioned the other day that the Gospel for this week is a difficult passage: Luke 16:1-13. It is the parable of the so-called “unjust steward” and the parable ends with Jesus’ statement in verse 9 And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so […]
I will be preaching Sunday evening and I was looking over the lectionary for the day. It is Proper 20 Year C following the Revised Common Lectionary. While I will likely preach on the Epistle (not because I am avoiding the very difficult Gospel passage of Luke 16:1-13, what is up with […]
WARNING: This post will not be encouraging and might even frustrate you a good bit. It did me. As is often the case lately, I want to write this morning, but I am struggling to find the words or, more accurately, words that I think would be acceptable. Then I […]
A long title. I shall have to find a shorter version, but it gets at the challenge we often find in Targumic studies. For those who are not familiar with the Targumim a very simplistic description is this: Aramaic translation of the biblical text PLUS interpretive material. A little more […]
I am finishing off my paper for the 2013 IOTS Conference to be held in just over two weeks. I will be speaking “On Exegetical Similarities between the Targumim of the Megilloth” and in the course of my research I was reading Tg Qohelet again. The Targum transforms this nihilistic […]
The following is my sermon from this past Sunday. As you can see in the first paragraph, I am somewhat apologetic about the fact that I cannot read and reflect on our current readings without thinking of Mack and our loss. Then again, I realized that this is precisely what […]