The time has come the walrus said ...

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...": ...

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...

Why is there so little archaeological evidence of the Israelites from the time of the Exodus until that of Solomon or even later?... Archaelogical evidence comes in various flavours, but it depends primarily on pottery, buildings and burials. Pottery styles help with the cultural identification and dating of occupation periods; buildings (or at least the act of rebuilding) indicate activity, which can often be at least tentatively dated with the help of pottery or organic material (e.g. ash layers from destruction events); the style of burials and their associated burial offerings can also be used to identify and date cultures. I suggest in this post that there are good reasons why these should be largely absent for the early Israelite nation, leading to their effective invisibility. As the well-known aphorism puts it, 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. The Exodus The Biblical accounts of the Exodus describe a mass migration of people and livestock numbering a ...

A Simple Overview of the MEANINGS of the Old Testament Sacrifices Reference to sacrifice is widespread throughout the Bible. Whilst the first record of offerings being made (by Cain and Abel) occurs in Gen 4:3-5, implementation of the full sacrificial system does not occur until the period of the Exodus with the erection of the Tabernacle. The types of sacrifice and the procedures associated with each of them are detailed primarily in Lev 1-7. Regulations for when to offer them are found in various parts of Leviticus and Numbers. Numerous articles may be found describing the intricacies of the sacrificial system, but in this post I want to try to present a structured overview. The sacrificial system as a whole functions to atone , that is, to bring man into harmony with God. From a New Testament perspective it could not ultimately accomplish this as 'it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins' (Heb 10:4). However the sacrificial system provided a mech...

Between Josiah's death in 609BC, and the fall of Jerusalem in 587/6BC, Judah gets through four more kings; about par for Israel in one of her more unsettled phases, but decidedly high for Judah. There is considerable disagreement as to the precise year that each event in the period happened (due to uncertainty as to when the new year was considered to begin), but the sequence is clear. Below I suggest a possible sequence of events to try to explain why things happened as they did. My sources are the Old Testament (2 Kings, 2 Chronicles and Jeremiah) and the Babylonian Chronicles. I have not included Josephus' commentary as he is unlikely to have had access to any first-hand information. Firstly, one must understand that the Babylonian Chronicles (which unfortunately are not extant as far as the fall of Jerusalem) primarily record what the emperor (Nebuchadnezzar for the years of our interest) is doing, rather than what his army is doing. Nebuchadnezzar may be at home with his ...

In an accompanying post I propose a model to explain how the verb conjugations function in Biblical Hebrew. Here I seek to put my money where my mouth is by applying the model to the translation of a psalm. I should stress that the model was developed and tested on prose, as only with prose are clause boundaries (usually) obvious, and furthermore poetry may override standard word orders for stylistic effect. Thus some of the analysis and translation below is tentative as it depends on assumptions as to clause boundaries and structure. I chose Psalm 44 as it exhibits a good mix of clause-initial and non-clause-initial qatal and yiqtol verb forms, as well as frequent wayyiqtol . The accompanying gloss is stilted as I wanted to highlight the verbal semantics for each verse. The comments explain the resultant pragmatics and semantics, but you will need to read the post describing the verb model, and preferable the full paper to really get to grips with it. The NIV translation uses a ...