The Biblia Hebraica Blog

The next issue of Bible Study Magazine will ship soon and there is a very insightful, well-written article exploring the meaning of koinonia...

The Nov/Dec issue of Bible Study Magazine is now available! Subscribe by Nov. 30 to get it. You won't regret it. I've received tw...

About a year and a half ago, I reviewed Bernard Levinson's book Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel . I'm plea...

Back in 2008, I wrote a post dealing with the issue of whether the New Testament references to Old Testament characters can be taken as evi...

Those of us well-versed in the art of biblical exegesis – historical-critical style – have all been struck from time to time by a groan-indu...

Last weekend at the Upper Midwest Regional SBL meeting I heard a Hebrew Bible paper on Wisdom Theology in the Creation Psalms. At several po...

Continuing my occasional journey through rabbinic literature, I want to introduce readers to my all-time favorite collection of midrash – Me...

Why was the world created with a B? So asks R. Jonah in Genesis Rabbah I.X. Why was the world created with a word starting with B (Hebrew be...

One of the benefits of studying at a top university like Wisconsin-Madison is the opportunity to hear guest lectures by world-class scholars...

I just finished reading Original Sinners: A New Interpretation of Genesis by John R. Coats. (I received a review copy in mid-December fro...

This upcoming conference sounds really interesting, but unfortunately, I'm unable to travel to Bar Ilan University on such short notice ...

Since I'm kind of collecting books on Genesis lately (Walton's Lost World of Genesis One , Smith's Priestly Vision of Genesis 1 ...

Genesis Rabbah I.IV begins with a list of 6 things that might have been created or at least existed as a glimmer in the Father's eye lon...

Sometimes I think I picked the wrong corpus of texts to study. Don't get me wrong - I like Hebrew Bible a lot - but reading later interp...

Here is the text, my translation, and a discussion of the second half of Genesis Rabbah I.I (first half here ). Finally, we’ll find out what...

Many Christians aren't quite sure what to make of the Old Testament, having been taught that the laws of the OT are not applicable to th...

I love intertextuality. It's fundamental to how we interpret life. It shows up when we weave dialogue from TV and movies or song lyrics ...

Last week’s post on Gen 3 was made up of random musings gleaned from a cursory casual reading of the text, so I was gratified to see that o...

Since I haven't had much time for blogging lately, I've been marking posts in Google Reader to return to later. I have currently mar...

I had the random thought that I could look up the 9th verse of the 9th chapter of the 9th book of the Hebrew Bible for a good random verse f...