Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2075. The Canaanite conquest is the single hardest passage cluster in the Old Testament for most modern readers, the commands in Deuteronomy and Joshua to devote entire cities, men, women and children, to complete destruction. I will not soften this question or rush past it, because I think it deserves the same honesty I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2066. The names of God in the Old Testament form one of the richest veins of theological material in all of Scripture, and I never tire of returning to them. These are not arbitrary labels attached to God the way a nickname might be attached to a person. Each one emerged from a specific…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 2029. Is the Trinity in the Old Testament, or does it only appear once the New Testament arrives with Jesus and Pentecost? This question matters more than it might first seem, because if the doctrine of the Trinity suddenly appears out of nowhere in the New Testament, with no anticipation whatsoever in Israel’s own…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 1163. The documentary hypothesis has dominated critical Old Testament scholarship for a century and a half, and I think the evidence uncovered since its heyday has quietly eaten away at its foundations far more than most textbooks admit. I want to walk through what the hypothesis actually claims, what the Dead Sea Scrolls and…
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…