Bible Review

The Amalekites are an especially despised enemy of the Israelites because, without provocation, the Amalekites attacked the Israelites from the rear on their trek to the Promised Land after the Exodus from Egypt (Exodus 17:8–16; compare Deuteronomy 25:17–19).

AT (author’s translation) indicates a rendering that is improved (see especially David’s dirge) on the basis of the author’s Samuel studies or (once) the Greek version.

Almost everything in this article is based upon The Crossing Fates (Assen, Netherlands: van Gorcum, 1986), vol. 2 of my Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, a full interpretation based on stylistic and structural analyses; the second volume covers 1 Samuel 13–31 and 2 Samuel 1.

The pronounciation guides in this article follow the Hebrew; they frequently differ from the familiar English pronounciation.

Apocalypticism is the doctrine that concerns the end of the temporal world and the literature dealing with the “last things.”

Eschatology is the doctrine of the “last things” (eschata in Greek); it relates either to humans (concerning death, resurrection, judgment and afterlife) or to the world.

Up to the time of Barbet, stigmatists displayed their wounds in the palms, but the two stigmatists Brother Gino and an unidentified American priest, who received their stigmata after Barbet’s theories were publicized, display their wounds on the wrists.

Barbet located Destot’s Space directly under the hand wound on the shroud. This wound appears on the radial, or thumb, side of the wrist. In fact, Destot’s Space is on the ulnar, or small finger, side of the wrist—opposite to the location of the shroud’s hand wound. Barbet seems to have become confused about the shroud wound location; he demonstrated in several ways that Jesus was nailed through the small finger side of the wrist, all the while claiming that this location was that shown on the shroud.

Using the formula—the pull on each hand is equal to twice the cosine of the angle that the arms make with the vertical.