Tag: Yahweh
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A Picture or 1000 Words
The old saying tells us that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament contains thousands of words about God, but it seems to me that it also contains two ‘pictures’ that put all these thousands of words in their proper place, and warn us against understanding them in any crudely literal […]
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The Tower of Babel – or Babble?
This story begins by stating that “the whole earth had a common language and a common vocabulary”, which is a splendid example of ‘never let the facts get in the way of a good story’ since we’re told, in the previous chapter, that the nations had been “separated into their lands, every one according to […]
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Genesis 6 – Who were the Nephilim?
Following on from the Cain and Abel tale of blood-stained misadventure, here is an even more ambiguous, if not totally obscure, story. It concerns dubious goings-on involving, of all people, the “sons of God”. The phrase בְנֵי־הָאֱלֹהִים (beney haʾelohim) is found only here and in the Book of Job, but occurs outside the Hebrew Bible […]
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Cain and Abel – A Different Slant
Why, in Genesis 4, does this strangely ambiguous and shockingly bloodthirsty story make its appearance, about the two brothers Cain and Abel? Cain was not, of course, a historical person but an invention, a character in a story intended to portray something ‘true to life’. Needing to find him a name, the storyteller came up […]
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Genesis One – Us, Images, and Subduing
“God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule … over all the earth … and subdue it.’ Firstly, to whom is God referring when he uses the plural “us” and “our” in relation to “image” and “likeness”? The answer is to be found in the literary and […]
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Genesis and Ugarit
From 1939 onwards, the excavation of a mound on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria, (called Ras Shamra), uncovered the ancient Canaanite city of Ugarit. Included in the finds were tablets containing texts recording the religious beliefs of its people, which show that Ugarit and Israel shared a common linguistic and literary heritage, and provide […]
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Exodus – A God who Mugs and Kills People
Some people have a simple approach to the Bible. If you want to know what God is like, the Bible will tell you all you need to know. There’s a problem with this approach. On some occasions. what we’re told about God is unacceptably shocking. For example, he kills people. At a global level, in […]
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Exodus – God reveals his Name
God, in the story we’re told in Exodus 3:13-15, speaks to Moses from a bush “ablaze with fire, but not being consumed“, and tells him that he is “to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt“. Moses is not exactly ‘up for this’, and begins to think up a variety of reasons why the […]
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The Tower of Babel – We’ve been Warned
In Genesis 11, the last chapter of its opening ‘primeval history’ (an oxymoron) section, there’s the story of the Tower of Babel. Why does it appear here? In 587 BCE, the remaining southern Israelite kingdom, like its northern counterpart previously, was defeated and most of its people taken into exile in בָּבֶ֫ל (babel) which is […]
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