Bible Review, Spring 1985
Features
Unlocking the Poetry of Love in the Song of Songs
At barely eight chapters with a total of 117 verses, the Song of Songs is one of the shortest books of the Bible. In 1977, Marvin Pope of Yale University published his massive, 750-page commentary to the Song of Songs. That’s an average of nearly...Read more ›
“As The Seal Upon Thy Heart”
Glyptic roles in the biblical world
Over 50 years ago, Robert Hatch Kennett described Ancient Hebrew Social Life and Custom as Indicated in Law, Narrative, and Metaphor1 in one of the celebrated Schweich Lectures, a series dedicated to illuminating biblical issues in concise but authoritative fonm. More recently, Roland de Vaux covered the...Read more ›
Words That Occur in the Bible Only Once—How Hard Are They to Translate?
For over a thousand years, students of the Hebrew Bible have been intrigued by the fact that some words in the text occur only once. Medieval Jewish manuscripts mark these unique forms with the Hebrew letter lamed, an abbreviation for the Aramaic word layt, which means “there...Read more ›
Different Ways of Looking at the Birth of Jesus
Narrative strategies in New Testament infancy narratives
Biblical scholarship has long recognized the significant differences between the details of the birth of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Luke—the only two gospels to contain an account of his birth, Rarely, however, have biblical scholars gone beyond the basic observation that the...Read more ›
What the Ass and the Ox Know—But the Scholars Don’t
The first chapter of Isaiah contains one of the most powerful prophetic passages in the entire Bible. The Lord, through the prophet, castigates his people Israel for rebelling. As a result, the country lies desolate, devoured by Israel’s enemies. The Lord rejects the sacrifice of his people...Read more ›