Bible Review, June 1990
Features
Three Ways to Look at the Ten Plagues
Were they natural disasters, a demonstration of the impotence of the Egyptian gods or an undoing of Creation?
When the enslaved Israelites sought to leave Egypt, Pharaoh said no. The Lord then visited ten plagues upon the Egyptians until finally Pharaoh permanently relented—the last of the plagues being the slaying of the first-born males of Egypt. Some of the plagues are the type of disasters...Read more ›
Bringing the Talmud into the 20th Century
A hurtling satellite peering down from Europe’s night sky during the past millennium couldn’t have missed the blazing emblems of Christendom’s sustained disapproval of the Talmud; pyre after pyre of burning books, ordered by pope after pope, in town after town—Paris, Toulouse, Perpignan, Rome, Bologna, Ferrara, Mantua,...Read more ›
Gauguin and Van Gogh
Self-portraits as Christ
Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh—whose brilliant coloring and radically individualized symbolism changed the way we view art—each painted portraits of themselves as Christ. Although Gauguin the Frenchman (1848–1903) and Van Gogh the Dutchman (1853–1890) were contemporaries and even lived together for a time, their self-portraits as...Read more ›
Classical Scholarship—Anti-Black and Anti-Semitic?
Have classical historians suppressed the black and Semitic roots of Greek civilization?
Whether ancient Egyptian civilization reflected an essentially black culture has recently been the subject of a spirited exchange in the pages of BR’s sister publication, Biblical Archaeology Review.a This discussion, however, is but a relatively faint echo of an intense debate heard most frequently in black academic...Read more ›
Americans and the Bible
Americans revere the Bible—but, by and large, they don’t read it. And because they don’t read it, they have become a nation of biblical illiterates.a Virtually every home in America has at least one Bible. Four Americans in five believe the Bible is the literal or inspired...Read more ›