Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01154. Wisdom literature, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes chief among the poetic and reflective books of the Old Testament, can feel like an odd fit within the larger redemptive story running from Genesis to Revelation, because none of these three books mentions the promised offspring of Genesis 3:15, the covenant with Abraham, or the coming…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01153. The Dead Sea Scrolls represent one of the single most important archaeological discoveries in the history of biblical studies, because they allowed scholars for the first time to compare our modern Old Testament text against manuscripts a thousand years older than anything previously available, and the results overwhelmingly vindicated the accuracy of the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1125. Biblical genealogies have glazed over more eyes than almost any other section of Scripture. “And so-and-so fathered so-and-so, who fathered so-and-so,” page after page, and it is entirely fair to ask whether God will be disappointed if you skip past them on your way to the story. Let me put your mind at…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1119. Old Testament prophets received God’s word through a range of different means, and Scripture itself is refreshingly candid about how varied that process actually was. Some received visions in the night. Some heard an audible or inwardly perceived voice. Some acted out symbolic dramas in public. What unites every genuine case is that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1118. The silent years sit between Malachi, the last prophetic voice of the Old Testament, and the opening pages of Matthew, roughly four centuries in which the Bible itself records no new inspired prophecy. People sometimes assume this means God simply went quiet, stepped back from history, and left His people to manage without…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1117. The imprecatory psalms are the prayers that stop most Bible readers in their tracks, the ones where the psalmist asks God to shatter an enemy’s teeth, to let their children be orphaned, or to dash infants against rocks. Psalm 137 ends this way, and it sits in the same book that gives us…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1116. The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest chapter in the Old Testament for most readers to sit with, because it involves God commanding Israel to remove entire nations from the land. I do not want to soften that fact or dress it up in language that makes it sound less serious than it…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1115. The harsh passages of Scripture are the ones people bring to me most often when they want to know whether the Bible can really be trusted. Someone reads of the flood, or the conquest of Canaan, or a psalm calling down disaster on an enemy, and the question follows almost immediately: how can…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1108. Hebrew vowel points are the small dots and dashes printed above, below and inside the consonants of our printed Hebrew Bibles, and the question of when the Hebrew vowel points were added takes us into one of the more fascinating corners of textual history. If you have ever opened an interlinear Hebrew Old…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 1084. Biblical genealogies can seem tedious to modern readers, long lists of unpronounceable names we are tempted to skip on our way to the next narrative section. Yet these genealogies serve real theological and legal purposes in Scripture, and they have been the subject of long-running debate regarding their completeness and their historical accuracy….