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About Paul’s missionary journeys to the west much has been written. But almost nothing has been said of his trip to Arabia. No wonder; it is barely mentioned, almost as an aside, in Galatians 1:17: “I went away into Arabia, and again I returned to Damascus.”
More than two centuries ago, it occurred to a few European intellectuals that Jesus as a figure of history may have been quite different from Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels. With the awareness of that potential difference, the scholarly quest for the Jesus of history began.
When creating the first woman, God says, “I will make [the man] a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18).1
When reading Victor Hurowitzs Inside Solomons Temple, BR 10:02, a question suddenly occurred to me that I should have thought of years ago.
The lesson I was trying to teach by telling my class about the story in the Talmud involved the importance of intent in early Christian and early Rabbinic tradition. In the New Testament’s Sermon on the Mount, intent may seem tantamount to the act itself. In the Talmud, the act without the intent does not constitute a sin. In both instances intent is critical, however.
“Fundamentalist interpretation starts from the principle that the Bible, being the word of God, inspired and free from error, should be read and interpreted literally in all its details. But by ‘literal interpretation’ it understands a naively literalist interpretation, one, that is to say, which excludes every effort at understanding the Bible that takes account of its historical origins and development. It is opposed, therefore, to the use of the historical-critical method, as indeed to the use of any other scientific method for the interpretation of Scripture.
Recent research points to climate as the culprit in the widespread cultural upheaval during the transition from the Early Bronze Age to the Middle Bronze Age (23002000 B.C.E.).
Narrow rings indicate dry climate in northern hemisphere between 1300 and 1000 B.C.E. Very narrow tree rings in log from Gordion in Asia Minor, from about 1200 B.C.E., indicate severe drought.
Lake levels recede, glaciers shrink, indicating warmer, drier period from 1400/1300900 B.C.E.
Glaciers retreated around 1200/1150 B.C.E.
