The time has come the walrus said ...

Revelation is probably the most contentious book of the Bible, and certainly the one with the most varying interpretations made about it. All too often these derive from the theological presuppositions of the authors. Is there any way of approaching the text without bias? It seems to me that determining the structure of the book is critical to correctly understanding it: even a cursory reading reveals a clear pattern in that the narrator's viewpoint shifts repeatedly between the heavenly realms and the Earth. We can thus divide the text into sections accordingly, with the earthly sections as follows: 1 2:1-3:22 struggles of the seven churches 2 6:2-7:8 effects of opening the seals; sealing of believers 3 8:7-11:14 effects of the trumpets; scroll of prophecy; two witnesses 4 12:13-14:1 anger of the dragon; the two beasts; Mt Zion 5 16:2-18:24 effects of the plagues; woman on the beast; fall of Babylon 6 19:19-21 defeat of beast and false prophet 7 20:8-9 defeat of Satan 8

Many trees are planted for their spring blossom, providing a splash of colour in an otherwise still rather drab post-winter landscape. All trees have flowers, either insect or wind-pollinated, but insect-pollinated flowers are larger and more showy: if the flowers appear plain white, they are usually richly patterned in the ultra-violet wavelengths visible to insects. It is not always visually clear whether a flower is insect-pollinated or not, but the presence of often strong-smelling nectar provides confirmation. Below are images of ten such insect-pollinated trees. Wild Cherry ( Prunus avium ) When one thinks of trees and flowers, the blossom of Japanese cherries immediately springs to mind. Japanese cherries are carefully bred and selected cultivars, nearly always grown by grafting onto a rootstock of Wild Cherry. In the British countryside Wild Cherry is the only large-flowered large woodland tree. Common Hawthorn ( Crataegus monogyna ) In May, after the Myrobalan Plum and th

It is a truth universally acknowledged ... that when you have a group of people living in some place A, some of them will wish to be in place B, and vice versa, hence travel. But how has travel changed over the last 2000 years? Let's have a look at the case where place A is Cambridge and place B is London... Precisely 2000 years ago in AD20 there may not have been much travel between the two, as London didn't really exist and Cambridge was in a different tribal region. However Claudius launched the Roman conquest of Britain in AD43, and by AD47 the whole south-east had been subjugated. Roman Cambridge, named Duroliponte, was founded around AD70, initially as a miltary camp on the site of an Iron Age fort. London, founded soon after the Roman invasion, was burnt down by Boudicca in AD61, but soon bounced back. Before long the Romans had constructed an extensive road network. London was connected to Cambridge by Ermine Street, which ran from Bishopsgate in London along the rout

The narrative of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 has traditionally involved a translation whereby the inhabitants gather to gang-rape the angelic visitors (v.5). I've long had problems with this interpretation, particularly because the subsequent offer by Lot of his daughters as substitutes is extremely hard to square with Peter's description of Lot as a righteous man in 2 Peter 2:7, but also because it does not seem to fit with the immediate and extended context. One suspects that the traditional interpretation may have become entrenched because a record of another nation behaving atrociously helped lessen the horror of the Israelite gang-rape recorded in Judges 19. The issue hinges on the translation of the Hebrew yd‘ in Gen 19:5. The base meaning of this verb is 'to know', for example Gen 29:5 "Do you know Laban?". The knowledge may be intimate, as at Gen 18:19 "For I know him [Abraham] so that he will command his sons...":

Google Search figured largely in my use of the internet right from the beginning. As an MS-DOS command-line user I was used to entering terse phrases such as "English county summits" or "longest suspension bridges" or even "full-contact origami" to retrieve that legendary college application that I had come across in pre-internet days. Why are there black bits in my ice-cream? However it took a number of years before I appreciated the true power of Google Search. One day, on an idle whim, I typed "Why are there black bits in my ice-cream?" and was amazed to receive a list of articles all answering that very question. (I was also impressed to learn that my four-for-a-pound Magnum lookalikes used real vanilla flavouring - a childhood of choc-ices, raspberry mivvis and arctic rolls had been noticeably free of crushed vanilla-pods). (I was less impressed by Google's lack of a sense of humour as none of the top ten answers to "Why do birds

Is it possible to make consistent sense of the censuses and other mustering counts recorded in the Old Testament? English translations of the Old Testament record some six hundred thousand men plus dependants leaving Egypt during the Exodus, and the mustering of even larger numbers during later periods, culminating with a figure of 1.3 million fighting men reported by Joab when David ordered him to conduct a census (1 Sam 24:9). Many scholars have cast doubts on these numbers, some regarding them as fiction, with others considering them to have been misunderstood during the transmission process. I suggest that a number of internal pointers exist within the Old Testament to indicate that these counts of fighting men are real counts, but are not to be understood as pure numbers. Firstly, let me introduce two very clear indications of this, before presenting more circumstantial evidence. Joshua's Assault on Ai The Old Testament records Joshua's strategy to capture the walled ci