Field notes on the biblical text, divine council, and the ancient world. Working-class IT guy in Ohio. Door open.
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His friends sit with him seven days in silence, which is the best thing anybody does in the book. Then they open their mouths. Their theology is airtight and wrong. God is just, the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer, Job is suffering badly, so Job sinned badly. By the third round Eliphaz is inventing sins to fill the hole, accusing Job of stripping the poor and withholding water from the thirsty. Job answers with what he can see: the wicked often die rich and comfortable.
Genesis has two Enochs, and most people only know one.
The first is the son of Cain. Cain builds a city and names it after him (Gen 4:17). He is third from Adam: Adam, Cain, Enoch. His line runs Irad, Mehujael, Methushael, Lamech. This is the line of city building, tent dwelling, metalwork and music, and it ends with Lamech boasting about killing a man.
The second is the son of Jared. He is seventh from Adam, through Seth: Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch. Genesis says he walked with God, and then he was not, because God took him (Gen 5:24). Hebrews 11:5 says he was taken so that he would not see death. Jude 14 calls him “the seventh from Adam,” and that phrase only works for this Enoch. Jude then quotes a prophecy that appears in 1 Enoch 1:9. The Book of Enoch is attributed to him, not to Cain’s son.
The confusion runs deeper than the shared name. The two genealogies mirror each other. Cain and Kenan. Irad and Jared. Mehujael and Mahalalel. Methushael and Methuselah. Both lines end in a Lamech. Whether that is deliberate literary design or two traditions that drifted together, the names sit side by side in Genesis 4 and 5 and are easy to blur.
So when someone says Enoch built a city, they mean the third from Adam. When someone says Enoch was taken, or Enoch wrote a book, or Jude quotes Enoch, they mean the seventh. Same name, different men, opposite ends of the story.
In a world today, where I think we've lost the appreciation of true beauty. @JamesLucasIT he's doing a wonderful job sharing it here.
If you look closely at the forearm of Michelangelo’s Moses, you’ll find a tiny muscle that only tightens when you lift your little finger, and since Moses has his little finger raised, Michelangelo carved that muscle tensed beneath the marble...
He poured that extraordinary knowledge of the human body into a statue carved between 1513 and 1515 for one of the most ambitious projects of his life: the tomb of Pope Julius II.
The horns on his head, which surprise almost everyone who sees them, come from the Latin Bible of the time. In the Book of Exodus, the Hebrew word describing Moses’ face as he came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments is usually translated today as “shining,” but it is related to the Hebrew word for “horn,” and Saint Jerome’s Latin translation rendered the passage as “his face was horned.” By Michelangelo’s time, artists across Europe had been showing Moses with horns for centuries, and he followed that long tradition.
Today Moses sits in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, looking so alive that it’s easy to forget he’s made of stone. Michelangelo seems to have felt the same way: according to a famous story, when he finished the statue, he was so proud of how real it looked that he struck it on the knee with his hammer and shouted, “Why don’t you speak?”
I’ve stood in front of him, and I can tell you that in person it really does feel as if he might answer at any moment…
Quote posting me on the site that built Grok to preach the Butlerian Jihad. The jihad starts with your phone. Every post you write goes into the thinking machine you claim to hate.
I don't think Moses forgot. I think he was hedging. He'd had the burning bush. He knew what he was supposed to do. Leaving his son uncircumcised kept an exit ramp open, a way back to Egypt for the boy if this Yahweh business didn't work out. Yahweh's answer is immediate and severe. You don't get to do this halfway. Being called doesn't let you carry it out on your own terms.
Vote for Cover 8 if you genuinely think it’s the best cover here.
Vote for Cover 8 if you genuinely think it’s the best cover here.
cleanfictionmagazine.com/vot…
Run reason, intelligence, or conscience through that and they fail. They are not held equally, since a person with advanced dementia or a severe brain injury does not have them the way a healthy adult does. An unborn child does not have working rational thought yet. And they are not unique. Animals reason, and a chess engine out-thinks every human alive. If the image is a brain-based quality, you have written the unborn, the disabled, and the dying out of it, and made it something a smart enough machine could earn.
Asked why the boys were still alive, the midwives told Pharaoh the Hebrew women were vigorous and gave birth before a midwife could reach them (Exodus 1:19). God was good to the midwives, and because they feared Him He made households for them.
Saga of the Forgotten Warrior is one of my favorite series. Larry Correia writes books for men who like books about men and plenty of us are out here reading them.
Academy of Outcasts 3, Reap the Whirlwind, audiobook is now up for preorder on @audible_com
audible.com/pd/Reap-the-Whir…
1 Chronicles gives Saul a single chapter of story, his death on Mount Gilboa. It ends with Yahweh turning the kingdom to David, and chapter 11 opens with all Israel gathering to David at Hebron.
Most of what we know about Marcion's Bible comes from the men who wrote against him. Tertullian spent 5 books on him, and book 4 tests Marcion against his own cut of Luke, working through it chapter by chapter.
As a huge Sci-fi and Fantasy fan, I am excited about diving into this series.
Nine days left in the Kickstarter campaign. We've revamped the project page a bit, to make it more image-forward for the final quarter.
This week, we'll share more information about the launch event. I've got guests lined up, and a band.
Learn more about and back the campaign here:
kickstarter.com/projects/hap…
James McLaughlin retweeted
Nine days left in the Kickstarter campaign. We've revamped the project page a bit, to make it more image-forward for the final quarter.
This week, we'll share more information about the launch event. I've got guests lined up, and a band.
Learn more about and back the campaign here:
kickstarter.com/projects/hap…
I’ve been building a Bible study app, and I need people to test it before I share it more widely.
There are a lot of free Bible study tools out there, but they’re scattered across a dozen sites. I wanted one place where they work together beside the text, and I built it around how I actually study. It’s free and runs in your browser, on a phone or a computer.
Some of what’s in it:
Maps that explain what’s happening and why. Each comes with a short account of why the road runs where it does, and every stop is numbered with its verse. A year slider redraws the kingdoms of that year, and you can lay today’s map over the ancient one.
Several translations side by side, and a Hebrew and Greek mode that marks where the original words change what the English says.
What the early Church Fathers wrote on each verse, cross-references, and open study notes.
The ancient world behind a New Testament passage: what a first reader knew without being told.
Reading plans that keep your place.
My personal notes intergrates with Logos and quite a bit more..
What I need from you: open it, read a chapter or two, and try to break it. If something is wrong, confusing or missing, tap Help, then Report a bug or Ask for a feature.
if you are instrested in seeing or testing it out please message me.
Irenaeus used succession as a public record against Gnostic secret teaching, and he ran the same test through Smyrna and Ephesus as well as Rome. Against Heresies 3.3
Then he runs the same test elsewhere. Polycarp was appointed bishop at Smyrna by apostles in Asia, and Irenaeus heard him as a boy. The church at Ephesus was founded by Paul, and Acts 19:10 has all Asia hearing the word during his 2 years there, with John staying until the times of Trajan, and he calls it a true witness to what the apostles taught.
Book 3 opens on the Gospels, which the apostles preached and later handed down in Scripture as the ground and pillar of the faith. Succession backs the written Gospels against secret teaching. jayms.com/?utm_source=x&utm_…
Romans 16:7 says more about Andronicus and Junia than the apostles phrase. Paul calls them his kinsmen and his fellow prisoners, and says they were in Christ before him. 2 believers who had been prisoners like Paul and came to Christ ahead of him.
