026 The recent discovery at Tel Dan of a ninth-century B.C.E. inscription—the first extra-biblical reference to the House of David—is causing extraordinary contortions among scholars who have maintained that the Bible’s history of the early...

038039 “tradition (which is a product of oblivion and memory)” —Jorge Luis Borges The Exodus from Egypt is a focal point of ancient Israelite religion. Virtually every kind of religious...

His curved tail tipped with a poisonous barb, the scorpion signals peril in Scripture as in life. The word for scorpion (akrab) appears nine times in the Old Testament and five times in Greek (scorpios) in the New Testament. It occurs dozens of times in the rabbinic writings of the...

023 If the Bible is the ineffable word of God, then it makes sense that all truth is to be found in it. An early rabbinic sage by the delightful name of Ben Bag-Bag said, “Turn it and turn it again, for all things are in it.”1 The history of...

018019 019Try to imagine flying to a non-existent island on an airplane that has not yet been invented. Even if this impossible trip were to...

028 I believe that we are ready for a new critical edition of the Hebrew Bible. We now have sufficient ancient texts and critical tools to improve the Hebrew text that has come down to us as the textus receptus, the Masoretic Text, or MT...

020 The first half of this decade has been a busy one for questers after the historical Jesus. The Jesus Seminar capped a decade of self-promotion with the publication of The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus.1...

024025 024 This article will offend some readers. It will jar many more. Why then are we publishing it? Because it makes us think. If we...