What is culture? Why study biblical culture? Different cultures bring different assumptions to life and act in different ways. In our first video, we provide an introduction to understanding biblical culture. How have we gotten our images of what the Bible is like? Which are correct and which are wrong? How can we be more responsible readers of the Bible and engage it more faithfully?
Author Archive: Brian Johnson
The End of the Egypt Excursion
I’ve certainly taken my time writing about my trip to Egypt! It’s time to wrap it up, considering it was about 10 months ago now. After our few days around Luxor, we hopped on a short flight back to Cairo to spend our last day. We stopped at the bazaar for an hour. We wandered around, taking in the mixture of sights. We went to bed early that night because we had an early morning flight to London, where we would spend the next couple days, mostly taking in the British Museum with all its Bible-related artifacts (including a large […]
Jeremiah 39
Exiled The Babylonians set fire to the royal palace and the houses of the people and broke down the walls of Jerusalem. Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard carried into exile to Babylon the people who remained in the city, along with those who had gone over to him, and the rest of the people. Jeremiah 39:8-9 What Jeremiah had been predicting all along finally comes to pass. The wall is breached and the city falls. Flames engulf the buildings. The temple is destroyed. The people are led away in exile. Thus it ends. The fall of Jerusalem is duplicated […]
Jeremiah 38
In the Mud It wasn’t enough for Jeremiah to be off the streets. The king’s officials wanted him dead. Because of how he discouraged the people, they convinced the king to have him put into a pit/cistern (בּוֹר, bor). Cisterns typically hold water, but “it had no water in it, only mud” (Jeremiah 38:6). This hints back to Joseph. Rather than outright killing him, his brothers threw him into a pit (bor) which had no water in it (Genesis 37:24). The imagery of being in a muddy pit is used metaphorically for death or being in a difficult situation. For […]
Jeremiah 37
Confined While the Babylonians are besieging Jerusalem, the army of Egypt marches out to confront them. The Babylonians break their siege to meet them. Is the country being delivered from destruction? Has the Lord saved them? No, Jeremiah says, it is only temporary. They will return to finish the job. This chapter helps shed some light on other passages we’ve already seen. In chapter 34, the people temporarily released their fellow Israelites from slavery, only to enslave them again. This probably coincided with the Egyptian army coming in (see Jeremiah 34:22 where the Lord says he will bring the Babylonian […]
Jeremiah 36
Write this Down There are not a lot of places in the Bible where it talks about actually writing it. This chapter is an exception. The Lord commands Jeremiah to write down what he has prophesied so far. Presumably, this would be part of what we have in the book today. There are two responses to the scroll he writes: the first group is very concerned (responding like the previous generation in 2 Kings 22:11 of King Josiah and his officials) while the second blows it off. There’s a bit of word repetition where the king cuts the scroll (Jeremiah […]
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Jeremiah 35
The Recabites The book jumps back over ten years to the reign of King Jehoiakim. The Lord sends Jeremiah to meet with the Recabites. Their ancestor Jonadab son of Recab commanded his sons and their descendants to not drink wine and to not live in houses or plant vineyards. Essentially they were to always live as nomads. Jonadab also shows up in 2 Kings 10:15-23 where he encounters Jehu as he becomes king and works to root out Baal worship from Israel. This means that his descendants have been following his commands for over 250 years! God rewards the Recabites. […]
The Temple at Twilight
After the sun dipped below the horizon, we set off on another walk along the Nile to another site: the Luxor Temple. Technically, this temple was part of the greater Karnak Temple a couple of miles away, connected by an avenue of sphinxes. Visiting at night gives this temple a different aura than during the day.
Jeremiah 34
Burning This is what the LORD says: I am about to give this city into the hands of the king of Babylon, and he will burn it down. Jeremiah 34:2b In the first part of this chapter, the Lord declares that Jerusalem will be “burned with fire” (see also verse 22; the NIV quoted above drops the “with fire” part as redundant – how else will the city be burned?). The Hebrew verb used here to burn is saraph (שׂרף), meaning “to burn completely”. While that doesn’t change the meaning of this passage, it’s interesting how else it’s used. For […]