Bible Review

Brackets [] indicate where Mark’s gospel contains material not found in Sources A and B.

This story is the subject of the Supporting Roles column by Elie Wiesel in this issue.

For more on variations in the order of the books of the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament, see “How the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament Differ—An Interview with David Noel Freedman—Part I,” BR 09:06.

The NJPS renders this passage “Late one afternoon, David rose from his couch and strolled on the roof of the royal palace and from the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful” (2 Samuel 11:2).

Under certain circumstances, the Hebrew letter waw, when placed before a verb, changes its tense; future becomes past, and past, future. This is, of course, a gross simplification of Hebrew grammar. Any basic text, such as Choon-Leong Seow’s A Grammar for Biblical Hebrew (Nashville: Abingdon, 1987), will discuss the waw consecutive.

Among Millerites, this phrase came to be associated with Jesus Christ’s failure to return.

The common explanation of the name Q is that it is short for the German Quelle, meaning “source.” See Stephen Patterson, “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Q,” BR 11:05.

The term synoptic, from the Greek for “seeing together,” refers to the fact that Matthew, Mark and Luke share so much material that when printed in three parallel columns, their correspondences can be “seen together” at a glance, as in the sidebar to this article.