Category – Biblical Studies

Associate Professor of Biblical Languages, Charles Telfer, has a new book that has just been released, Wrestling with Isaiah: The Exegetical Methodology of Campegius Vitringa (1659-1722). Theologians in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth century acknowledged that Vitringa was a theologial giant, but sadly the sands of time have buried his…
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One Bible, Two Testaments Q&A 33-35 For many of us who have discovered the Reformed expression of the Christian faith after years in other traditions, “covenant theology” was one of the most eye-opening facets of it. It was more than just another part of theology, though. It was like getting…
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A recent article appeared over at MSNBC and it's certainly provocative. You can find the article here. The basic contention of the article is that the Old Testament's reliablity has been brought into question because of the latest findings of a small group working at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The…
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Linguists have provided significant help to biblical scholars, not the least in the area of lexical semantics. “Lexical” here means words and phrases and “semantics” deals with meanings, so that “lexical semantics” is the study of how words mean. One area of particular help is that linguists posit that individual…
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Last time, I mentioned that the great Aaronic benediction in Num. 6:22-27 concludes with the wonderful line: “So shall they put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them.” The notion of God putting his name upon someone is an interesting one. One passage that has…
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  Last time, we looked at the difference between glosses and word meanings. A gloss is an English word substitute and is of concern primarily to translators, while meaning is a brief description of a word’s referent. I illustrated this difference with some rather simple nouns, but now let’s look…
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  When working with foreign words, we should be aware of a very important distinction: the distinction between meaning and gloss. For our purposes, a gloss is an English word substitute for a Greek word. In simple cases, a gloss is perfectly satisfactory to get the job done. For example,…
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  I corresponded with John Hughes recently and complimented him on a detailed scholarly article he wrote some years ago where he gave a most helpful treatment of Heb. 9:15-22. He mentioned in return that it was disappointing that his work seems to have made no impression on English translations…
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  Word studies dominate the resources available for Christians. Some are good and some, well, not so good. With all the word pictures, Strong’s numbers, footnotes in translations, study Bibles and more, you would think that there’s nothing more that can be said about word studies in the Bible. I’m…
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