Bible Review, August 1990
Special Section
Through the Eyes of Artists
During the Second World War,” the guide was saying, “all these windows were taken out and put in storage. We were afraid of bombs.” We were standing in St. John’s Church in Gouda, just an hour’s bus ride from Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. Gouda is the town...Read more ›
Did God Play a Dirty Trick on Jonah at the End?
To the modern critical scholar, the Book of Jonah may be a romance, a short fictional delight with a moral. But that’s not what the author—whoever he or she was—intended. According to the author, our hero was an actual historical person, Jonah ben Amittai...Read more ›
Features
Laments at the Destroyed Temple
Excavating the biblical text reveals ancient Jewish prayers
In 586 B.C.E.a Jerusalem lay devastated—the Temple in ruins, the king’s palace destroyed. The Babylonians, led by the fearsome Nebuchadnezzar, had deported Judah’s most prominent citizens to Babylonia. There they lived in exile for 50 years until Cyrus, King of Persia, allowed them to return under Sheshbazzar...Read more ›
“An Enormous Horde Arrayed for Battle”
Locusts in the Book of Joel
We call them “acts of God”—the natural disasters over which we have no control. They fill us with fright and awe: fright at the possible human toll, and awe at the enormous force of nature. If we no longer regard these natural forces as...Read more ›