Katie WoolstenhulmeA review of Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden’s recent monograph, Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Stigmatizing the Childless Modern Western society...
joeydodson“Revisionist history” is inherently redundant, since all history is revised. As George Bernard Shaw writes: “History is always out of date,” and is rewritten to lie, to burn, and to stick in our throats. That is to say, a revision may seek to...
Paul Himes“Context is king” runs the common mantra in biblical studies, and to a certain degree this is true. Yet the “king” cannot rule without some sort of legitimization from the people, and that’s where “semantic range” comes in. If “context is king,”...
Kris LyleThe first time I attended SBL, back in November 2015, I was fortunate to be in company with eight other colleagues who also had papers accepted. My own was co-authored with Jeremy Thompson and was presented in the Biblical Hebrew and Lexicography...
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially when it comes to biblical words in the original Hebrew and Greek. Quite often preachers of God’s Word put too heavy a load on biblical words, expecting them to carry a major point of their...
Tavis BohlingerWe’ve had a few significant posts on the Dead Sea Scrolls on the blog in the last few weeks, including Craig Evans’s breaking news of the discovery of Cave 12, and then a follow-up post that asked the question of the importance of studying the...
The big news of last week was the announcement by Hebrew University, and Craig Evans here on theLAB, that a 12th Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) cave was discovered just last month. But why are the DSS important? I’ll look at three main reasons...
Craig EvansA New Cave, an Old Controversy: Dramatic New Discovery in Israel will Re-Ignite Debates The last Dead Sea Scrolls cave, linked to the ruins on the marl shelf at the mouth of Wadi Qumran, was discovered in 1956, bringing the total number of caves to...
Marieke DhontFebruary 8 marks International Septuagint day, a day to celebrate the Septuagint and encourage its study. This date was established in 2006 because Robert Kraft observed that it is the only one we have record of being historically related to the...
Guest AuthorPaul Overland (PhD, Brandeis University) is Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages at Ashland Theological Seminary. There is a huge problem in the way that biblical Hebrew is currently taught: it doesn’t stick. Polytetrafluoroethylene, or...
The Feast of the Conversion of Paul Larry Hurtado, Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, has just written an eloquent post on the significance of January 25th in the church’s calendar: the Feast of the Conversion of Paul. His...
Josh WestburyThe following is Part 1 of a two-part guest post by Josh Westbury (PhD, Stellenbosch), a scholar-in-residence at Logos Bible Software. What comes to mind when you hear the word “Oath”? Perhaps you think of a politician taking an oath of office, or a...
The following is a guest post by Paul Nitz, who teaches at the Lutheran Bible Institute, Lilongwe, Malawi. From Seminary to Africa I took the requisite four years of New Testament Greek at a ministerial college. After some more Greek at seminary, I...
Book Review Garwood P. Anderson (IVP Academic), 2016, 457 pp. What began as a promising breakthrough in Pauline studies just three decades ago — “the new perspective on Paul,” as James D.G. Dunn famously dubbed it in 1982 — seems in...
Ryan BurnsMost of what we learn in life is determined by the questions we bring to it. As a young seminarian, fresh out of college, I don’t have significant pastoral experience. In my classrooms are older men and women, several of them in their sixties...
When I first arrived at seminary, they sat us all down and gave us lecture after lecture about all the rules and guidelines for graduating with our degrees. They told us the required courses, the available concentrations, and gave us tips on...
You have so many books to read, who can afford to read any more? That’s an excellent question, and a justification I used for burying my head in theology text after theology text. But I’ve starting asking a different question: “I...
I do not enjoy details. I do not enjoy rigidly structured environments. I do not enjoy tedium. And as a child, I loved the open window more than I loved the chalkboard. So why then, do I enjoy taking biblical Greek? Going into my first Greek class...
Imagine a very little boy sitting on his father’s lap, watching a basketball game. The father talks with the boy about the game as they watch, telling him all sorts of things about the players and the rules and things like that. Most of these things...
Is it worth it? The time? The money? The sacrifices? Those were just a few of the questions running through my head and heart as I stood over the washing machine a number of years ago moving a load into the dryer. It was not a good season in many...
Learning the biblical languages can be very discouraging and frustrating. Studies and experience have shown that this is the most difficult aspect of theological training for students over the centuries. Many theologians have come to believe that a...
Seana ScottIn the beginning of seminary, I felt like more of a distraction than a priority. If I needed to talk to my sem hub (seminary husband) about something, I tried to wait until his mind was not occupied with his work, but found those moments few and far...
There is a common misconception among Christians about Seminaries and seminarians in general. The misconception is that going to the Seminary gives one an automatic guarantee to be spiritual. In other words, people feel that by just being in the...
During seminary, you’ll develop a unique set of skills. You’ll be able to parse every Greek verb in the New Testament, list the minor prophets in canonical and chronological order, create Turabian or APA style footnotes in a flash, and...
Before arriving to seminary, sem hub (seminary husband) and I served in ministry for about 8 years. The thing that amazed me was how many times people talked to me expecting me to know everything my sem hub knows. The further we progressed in our...
One of my course mates shared an interesting lesson he learned early enough during orientation in the Seminary by one of the Professors. It was a word of caution about the danger of neglecting the family as a result of the academic demands. The...
Seminary doesn’t pay for itself, nor does the rent. But, what jobs are best to balance the study load and the budget? After talking with some seminarians, here are six ideas to get you started finding a job to help support your study habits. 1...
I read a book called Out of Context by Richard Schultz last semester for a seminary class. The author goes through common exegetical and interpretive mistakes in teaching the Bible, including those that famous preachers or authors have made, and...
Joseph SiacuncoIf you are like me, then the thought of preaching or even speaking in public has been a life-long fear. Maybe you feel called to attend seminary but are worried about the class called “Homiletics.” Maybe you’ve even said to yourself, “How can I get...
A young man working in the ministry is asked to visit an up and coming church. When he enters the church he is greeted by a group of men and their spouses. The young man looks around, asking some questions, trying to get a feel for the place...