Usage Determines Pronunciation, Even of Obscure Old Testament Names
My post on Puritan names brings up an incidental point. I have heard preachers and laypeople alike trip up many times over the pronunciation of obscure Old Testament place and people names. I myself recently flubbed “Kibroth-hattaavah” in Sunday School. Who can blame us? These words just aren’t normal! People often say, however, “I wonder how this word is supposed to be pronounced,” and the impression I get is that they believe the answer comes from a true knowledge of Hebrew or Greek. If I...
Does God Have Feelings? Does God Have a Body?
In a section of my dissertation critiquing the view that God has no emotions, I wrote the following: If God is impassible, Zephaniah 3:17 is puzzling: “[The Lord] will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.” God would have no reason to pile up these emotional descriptives—rejoice, love, gladness, exult, loud singing—if His emotional life had no correspondence with the one He gave to the human race. He gives explicit indications...
Religion and Sex in the Bible when Viewed Through the Lenses of Liberal Presuppositions, Or, Nick Kristof Needs to Read More than One Book on This Controverted Topic
I have long enjoyed reading about the globe-trotting adventures of Nick Kristof, arch-liberal and New York Times columnist. Whatever his political ideology, he has literally given his own blood to save lives and shelled out his own cash to buy two girls out of sexual slavery. Sure, he did all this in front of the cameras… but I’m not that cynical. I think he has a heart of real compassion for oppressed people, a heart that conservatives should have, too. But Kristof is indeed driven by an...
A Sword that Cuts Off Liberals’ and Conservatives’ Heads
Sometimes the principled reasons people give for taking a position are just window dressing, good for public display but only incidental to the heart of the matter, which is the state of their hearts. —Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 33.
Zeal-of-the-Land Busy
I’m still reading God’s Secretaries, and I’ve arrived at a section in which Nicolson details the umpteen rules the KJV translators were supposed to follow. The second is this: 2. The names of the Profyts and the holie Wryters, with the other Names in the text to be retayned, as near as may be, according as they are vulgarly used. I agree with that, but it would seem hardly worth saying. Why translate “John” or “Timothy” or, for that matter, “Jesus” with “Ioann,” “Timotheus,” or “Yeshua”? Well,...