Category: Old Testament

My old bookshelf

Old Testament Resources Part 1: The Short List and Elder Ballard

November 23, 2017 /
My bookshelf

My old bookshelf

In this post, I’m not going to go into justifications of this vs. that, just recommendations of five basic books that will make anyone’s Old Testament experience much more rewarding. If you do want more detail, options, and justifications, look at the more detailed posts linked at the bottom.

(Disclosure: This post contains Amazon Affiliate links) Continue reading

Fireside books and references

October 25, 2017 /

1myxx4These are books/authors I quote or allude to in the slides of my fireside/Sperry Symposium presentation. The actual paper has many more references, of course. I’ll be posting it in entirety, first in chunks as posts, and then as a complete pdf file. What is listed below will also overlap with my Recommended Resource for the Old Testament posts, coming in November.

Becoming “Competent Readers,” Learning the “Rules of the Game,” Reading with Ancient Eyes

The Bible is Weird

Study Bibles

  • Harper-Collins Study Bible– Based on the New Revised Standard Version, this is often assigned for New Testament 101, or Hebrew Bible 101 at colleges. The publisher is the Society of Biblical Literature, and translation and notes are done by a variety of scholars, so there’s little religious bias.
  • NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible–  Based on the conservative Evangelical translation New International Version, this translation is demonstrably quite biased; it cheats. However, the notes (at least, the OT notes I’ve checked) are great. As you might guess from the title, the notes and essays focus on the cultural backgrounds, those things ancient audiences (likely) knew which moderns don’t. Review here. It’s edited by John Walton, an Evangelical scholar I like, and my understanding is that the notes and essays are derived or shortened from this stand-alone series. EDIT: I just learned that you can get these notes with the New King James Version (NKJV) translation, instead of the NIV. I strongly recommend that over the NIV. The NKJV is basically an update to the English of the KJV, so it retains most of the archaicness and problems of the KJV text. But that’s preferable over the deceptiveness of the NIV’s modern (but strongly biased) translation.
  • Jewish Study Bible– This translation and notes/essays are all written by Jewish scholars, which means it only covers the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. It’s a fantastic resource that will enlighten and challenge (since, for example, Jews are unlikely to interpret Isaiah as messianic prophecies of Jesus.) I enjoy contrasting its views with those of the NIV.
  • NET Bible-The advantage of this is it’s entirely free and online at http://Netbible.org, and in free App form, called Lumina. There are thousands and thousands of footnotes, often about translation or background.

Hebrew-focused translations with notes. 

On Bible translations, and using Free Greek and Hebrew tools, see

On genre, listen/read my podcast here.

Others Quoted/alluded to–

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.

Public domain, http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=8577&picture=old-books

Kenton Sparks on Genre

July 30, 2017 /
Public domain, http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=8577&picture=old-books

Public domain, http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=8577&picture=old-books

In the LDS Perspectives podcast, I alluded to this passage from Kenton Sparks’ section in Genesis: History, Fiction, or Neither?: Three Views on the Bible’s Earliest Chapters. (This post contains Amazon Affiliate links)

I think he captures very concisely and clearly the nature of genre; A genre is a pattern, established by identifying the characteristics it has in common with other similar things. This is why it’s so important to study ancient Near Eastern literature outside the Bible. By putting the Bible in conversation with texts from roughly the same time and place, we gain more examples and are  better able to identify shared characteristics. (Sparks does this here in a more academic handbook style.) Notably, many of these texts were undiscovered or unable to be read and understood until the last century. (See my screencast on the rediscovery of the ancient Near East.) Continue reading

Ben contemplates his words, at Petra.

My LDS Perspectives Podcast on Genre

July 19, 2017 /
Ben contemplates his words, at Petra.

Ben contemplates his words, at Petra.

I was interviewed last year for the LDS Perspectives podcast, which I recommend. Therein, I allude to a lot of different books and papers, linked below. I also cited John Widtsoe on genre, from his 1930 book In Search of Truth available online here.  Widtsoe said,

“As in all good books every literary device is used in the Bible that will drive the lesson home. It contains history, poetry and allegory. These are not always distinguishable, now that the centuries have passed away since the original writing.”

Continue reading

Truth, Scripture, and Interpretation of Genesis: A Conference Preview

July 14, 2017 /

In a little less than a month, I’ll be speaking at the FAIRMormon Conference in Provo. Titled Truth, Scripture, and Interpretation: Some Precursors to Reading Genesis, my paper will be about the importance of recognizing the presuppositions we make when interpretating scripture. We can use various metaphors for this. Each of us (including inspired prophets and apostles) has a Black Box made up of worldview and presuppositions about revelation, prophets, and scripture. The contents of the box differ for every person, time, and culture. 6a00d83451be8f69e201bb07e83109970d-800wiThe scriptural text gets fed into our black box, and out comes “what scripture says.” But since the content of those black boxes differs, so too does the end product of “what (we think) scripture says.” Continue reading

The Might of Assyria

10 Things for Understanding the Old Testament

May 21, 2017 /
The Might of Assyria

The Might of Assyria

My semester has ended, and now I enter into a busy summer of reading, writing, travel, research, and some public speaking. I do hope to be writing posts a little more often than I have in the last few months; at least, I have some posts on the back burner I’ve worked on sporadically, to finish off and post.

If you’re settling down for a serious study of the Old Testament, what ten topics do you need to know? I was part of a group discussing this recently, and this was my quick list. Long-time readers will probably recognize repeated themes from my blogging. (I’ve added a little bit of explanation and/or links)

  1. Translation mattersEveryone’s first and primary interaction with scripture is in a language not their own. The Bible, of course, is translated from Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, but even D&C is not the American English of 2017. This means that for most people, their sole understanding of what scripture says is contingent on what the translation implies. Well, what if it’s not a great translation?
  3. Genre is a thingWe recognize the existence of genre or kinds in movies, books, music, food, pretty much everything… but then throw all that out because of Enlightenment inheritance and default to the assumption that scripture is history, with rare and obvious exceptions.
  4. Genre matters tooBut it’s not all written as history (let alone “history written from a modern conception of history”) and misreading the genre creates problems.
  6. Revelation is responsive to questions and circumstances, but Israelites often had different circumstances and questions than most moderns.For example, the Israelites had serious questions about the problem of one God versus many gods. Who was really in charge? What if you only prayed to the God of Israel, but it turned out there was another god too, and as a result, your crops or wife got sick? What happens when your civilization gets destroyed, and you’re hauled off to another country with a different religion?
  7. There are different kinds of interpretation.It goes WAY beyond “figurative” and “literal,” which is really problematic as a binary.  The most important binary, I think, is something like “contextual interpretation” (i.e. what the author meant to say, in historical, cultural context) and “non-contextual interpretation” (i.e. what the passage might say without context, under the influence of the Spirit, to a later prophet, to me personally etc.) These are both legitimate and can coexist, provided we don’t confuse the latter with the former. Oftentimes, we either hear in Church or propound ourselves a personal non-contextual interpretation as if it were “what Isaiah (or Matthew or Deuteronomy) really meant.”
  8. The Old Testament rarely hits you over the head with the point; There’s no Mormon-like “and thus we see.” You have to pay attention and read between the lines.Once again, translation matters. A lot of hints and connections in the text are obscured through translation. This is why the best, most comprehensive understandings of the Old Testament are provided by people who know it deeply and thoroughly, who can pick out the connections, and read between the lines. Along those lines, I recommend Robert Alter’s translations  and the Jewish Study Bible.
  9. If line-upon-line is a thing, then we shouldn’t expect the Old Testament to reflect doctrinal understanding or policies of today.If God will reveal more in the future than he has now, it stands to reason that he has revealed more now than he did back then. So why do we insist on reading the Old Testament as if they had the post-1930 Word of Wisdom, or knowledge of three degrees of glory, as if they were basically modern Mormons living a long time ago? Sometimes, reading in our modern Mormon understanding gets in the way of what it is really trying to say.
  10. No really, translation matters.It does, I promise. Nothing will increase your understanding of and appreciation for the Bible than learning Greek and Hebrew, or (more realistically) getting a modern translation of the Bible. And the Church is fine with that! Really!
  11. Most of what prophets know and how they think comes from the culture and worldview they grew up with. They are not tabula rasa for God to program.Somewhere, the future President of the Church is in a Deacon’s Quorum. He plays video games. He reads books and watches movies. He has a few hobbies. He’s under the influence of his parents, friends, and teachers. He belongs to a culture, and that inevitably affects him.
  12. Culture mattersIn this last point, I was thinking about cultural context of scripture: customs, idioms, etc. What they knew living at the time, that we don’t, because no one bothered to write it down. Lots of great books on these, like this one (Old Testament oriented) this one (New Testament oriented),  or this series,

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.

Greek/Hebrew Followup: Another Demo and more Free Stuff Through March 1

February 17, 2017 /

Screen Shot 2017-02-17 at 2.20.18 PMIt’s Logos’ 25th Anniversary, and they’re offering a $25 coupon through March 1. That means it’s a great time to invest in some of the supplementary Old Testament resources I suggested (below), or N.T. Wright books, or Peter Enns, or John Walton, or Jodi Magness’ book on Daily Life in the Time of Jesus, or a line-by-line commentary on how the New Testament uses the Old Testament, or why modern translations differ in the New Testament, or Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s JPS Commentary on Ruth, or or or… There’s so much.

Here’s the Old Testament stuff I recommended.

Now, I know Logos looks intimidating, but you can treat it like a Kindle until you start figuring stuff out. Below, I walk you through another tool to help with words and translations.

 

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.

How to Use Greek and Hebrew: New and Improved

February 11, 2017 /

genesis-hebrew2I’ll get back to my Transitional Mormonism and Tradition, but I was really excited about this development. 

I’ve seen several bad uses  flagrant abuses of original languages recently by people who don’t actually know the languages. They’re typically relying on Strong’s Concordance, which can be used legitimately (see my article here, the section called “original language resources”) but 99% of the time, Strong’s is abused by people who just don’t know better. They use it as a lexicon, as a guide to meaning, but this is highly problematic. If you read something citing Strong’s to establish what a word means, you can be fairly certain the authors have not actually studied Greek or Hebrew, and I strongly recommend not giving that source any scholarly weight or authority in Gospel Doctrine or Seminary.

I am terribly pleased to inform you that there is a new technology-assisted way to move directly from the KJV to legitimate scholarly Greek and Hebrew tools. And it’s free! I’ll provide a description, then walk through the steps to get it, demo some things on video, and then make some suggestions.

Logos just released the free version of its new engine, Logos 7 for Mac, PC, iOs, and Android. Logos is like a supercharged Kindle on steroids, which I use as my research library. I buy all my academic and popular books in it when possible. Back in 2000, I started using it because there was a screaming deal on the Anchor Bible Dictionary (which has been cited in General Conference!) With the upgrades and free resources now provided in version 7, the Basic engine will let you jump directly from the KJV to a decent basic Hebrew/Greek lexicon, included.  Moreover, it comes with both a decent Bible Dictionary and Study Bible, free (both produced by Logos.)

You will need to create an account, but the basic engine is indeed free. You will probably get marketing emails trying to get you to buy a package of books and higher-level functionality. You don’t need to do this, but if you’ve got the cash, go for it. BTW, once you create an account AND fill out a marketing thing, Logos gives you $20 credit every year on your birthday.

How to Get the Free Stuff

  1. Go here to get the free engine. It should ask you to create an account.
  2. It will download an installer file, which will then download the rest of the program and (I believe) the free resources. After downloading and installing, it will draw some processing power to index the new books.
  3. If you don’t see them in your library after everything downloads and indexes, here are the links to some free stuff you should have.
    • Lexham Bible Dictionary
      • Lexham is one publishing name Logos uses (Faithlife being another.)
    • Abridged BDB
      • This is the Hebrew lexicon, a simplified version of the $20 100-yr old lexicon most first-year Hebrew students buy, named after its authors
    • Faithlife Study Bible
      • Essays, introductions, visuals, diagrams, and verse-by-verse notes.
  4. Logos also does a free-book-of-the-month, with one free and one related for $1.99. This month, two books by N.T. Wright.
  5. Other free books are here. Pick up the Greek New Testament, SBL edition, Lexham English Bible, Abridged Brown-Driver-Briggs, and perhaps the Classics, Arabic, or Civil War And 19th Century America collections.
  6. Other books and series go on sale regularly, with both monthly sales and specials, and you can get steep discounts on Pre-publication or Community Pricing.

Supercharge your Old Testament study for $70

Things to learn to take maximum advantage of the free stuff

    • Learn the Hebrew alphabet and vowels here. Hebrew alphabet intimidates more than it is actually difficult. Practice the consonants with Psalm 119 in our KJV. It’s a Hebrew alphabet acrostic, so the letters are printed there.
    • Both BDB and CHALOT will use some unfamiliar but important terminology for verbs. You should learn what qal, niph., hiph, etc. mean or you won’t understand the range of meanings in the definitions for verbs. This is a decent introduction to this vocabulary.

Things I’ll point out in the screencast demo 

  • Note the scripture pop-ups.
  • Lock panes to scroll together.
  • Corresponding Words visual filter. (Only in the KJV or other purchased interlinears. I don’t do much with this in the demo, so click the link and watch their video.)
  • Link Bible to a lexicon! This and the KJV interlinear are the key to cutting out Strong’s.

(I recommend watching 1080p so you can read the text.)

Logos has an active forum free of theological discussion (where I am the resident Mormon),  a good wiki, and lots of how-to videos linked within the wiki.

So, go forth and download, but remember to keep some intellectual humility! You still don’t know the languages, you’re just using much better tools.

As always, you can help me pay my tuition here, or you can support my work through making your regular Amazon purchases through this Amazon link. You can also get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader. I tend not to accept friend requests from people I’m not acquainted with.