This looks like it’ll be a fantastic resource: the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israel Museum. Still many more manuscripts to go, but a fantastic start, and just in time for the Dead Sea Scrolls Conference in Memory of Emeritus Professor Alan Crown to be held in about one month’s time. H/T Jim West.
Category: old testament
the silence of god
On a recent Q&A one of the viewers asked about God’s silence: My question is: why has God gone so quiet? Just a few thousand years ago he appeared to people quite regularly. He turned rivers to blood, he parted seas, he flooded the world etc. He provided us with people like Moses, Jesus &…
yabt (yet another bible translation): the common english bible
The Common English Bible has been completed, the result of an impressive array of scholars, with admirable goals. A page comparing it with the NRSV and NIV is available here. Some brief and very initial observations based primarily on a few passages I like to check follows.
“is a word-for-word translation unbiblical?” — part 2
Another illuminating example is Deut 6:5 — the greatest commandment. Again there’s little substantial difference evident between the MT and the DSS: ואהבת את יהוה אלהיך בכל לבבך ובכל נפשך ובכל מאדך These reflect a tripartite division of “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (NASB). The LXX follows…
are children always a blessing?
Let me begin with a warning. What I’m about to suggest is probably to be perceived as sacrilegious to many and tantamount to heresy. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve heard/read/been told that children are only and always a blessing in the Bible. The assertion is frequently made, but rarely demonstrated….
an ancient perspective on day and night in genesis 1 before the creation of the sun
Many readers of Genesis 1 have noted that day and night exist before the record of the creation of the sun in Gen 1:14. This has been met with numerous imaginative attempts to account for this apparent discrepancy between the Genesis account and a modern scientific understanding of the universe.
niv 2011/tniv and ecclesiastes 11:1–2
John Hobbins raised the 2011 NIV’s rendering of Eccl 11:1–2 (although it really just retains the TNIV’s translation and so isn’t a new feature of this translation). The 2011 NIV/TNIV render these verses as follows: Ship your grain across the sea; after many days you may receive a return. Invest in seven ventures, yes, in…
kirk patston on ecclesiastes
A friend of mine who pastors a church asked my opinion of Kirk Patston’s interpretation of Ecclesiastes which he had promulgated in a series of talks at the Katoomba Easter Convention in 2009. I hadn’t heard them, but did find a copy of some talks he had given at SMBC which were based on his…
malevolent or mysterious? god’s character in the prologue of job
My latest article on Job will appear in the next volume of Tyndale Bulletin with the above title. Here’s the synopsis: Readers of the Book of Job often believe that the prologue reveals the entire reason for Job’s loss and suffering and so the full background for all that transpires throughout the remainder of the…
parting the sea
Once again someone has proposed a scientific model for a miraculous event, this time the parting of the “Reed Sea” (ים סוף). The model requires an easterly wind of about 100km/h to blow for about 12 hours to leave bare ground almost 5km wide through which the Israelites could pass. Let me add my voice…