014 At the very end of Martin Scorsese’s film version of Nikos Kazantzakis’s now famous novel. The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus returns to the Cross, from his out-of-body temptation sequence, to those last, agonizing moments of death...

040 To the uninitiated, the Bible is the Bible. To get one, you go to a bookstore and ask for a Bible. Readers of BR know better. The English-speaking student of the Bible is blessed with dozens of translations in hundreds of editions. What...

043 Every December, concert halls and churches throughout the English-speaking world resound with the strains of George Frederic Handel‘s mighty Messiah. For centuries, music lovers have gone home humming the arias and choruses that Handel‘s...

014 Pazuzu...Lamashtu...Khatyu...Sheseru...Sasam...Lilith...Asmodeus...Beelzebub.... Names to conjure with. Literally. Years ago, when I was a student at Harvard, my teacher Frank Moore Cross raised a puzzling question: Why do demons—so prominent...

022023 022 In an article I recently wrote in Bible Reviewa on the problems of Bible translating, I distinguished two styles of translation:...

027 Acrostics are alphabetical texts. Bible scholars disagree on their purpose. Consequently, translations differ. Despite differences in emphasis, Every translator acknowledges that Form and meaning are connected. Given the strictures of...

Ancient versions of the Bible are far from error-free. Happily, a better understanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of how manuscripts evolved has helped resolve some of the vexing textual problems.

034 The object of translating seems simple enough: to transfer meaning from one language to another. For public notices, traffic signs and other everyday needs, this is not difficult. But for literature—even such pseudo-literature as political...

022023 022 A century is a wholly arbitrary block of time. History surely does not proceed by 100-year chunks. And to mark the beginning and...