This post was prompted by a few responses on The Biblical Principle of Cycles Within Cycles. The Feast of Weeks is unique among all of God’s feasts. Every other appointed time sits on a fixed calendar date — Passover on the fourteenth, the Day of Atonement on the tenth of the seventh month, and so…
This post is a follow-up to The Feast of LEAVENED Bread. The Feast of Weeks and Jubilee share the same structure — seven sevens plus one. But one has a defined beginning and end. The other does not. Pentecost is where the finite count connects to the eternal cycle. Fifty days. Fifty years. The same…
This post is a continuation of The Tower of Babel. The Feast of Weeks is the longest feast in the Leviticus 23 calendar — seven full weeks of counting, from the wave sheaf offering to the fiftieth day. Most readers pass through it without noticing that it can be called by what it contains. Not…
In the beginning there was one language. One people, one speech, one shared understanding. Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. Genesis 11:1 Then came an aim: Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves. Genesis 11:4…
Something interesting happens when I share certain things on Facebook. One camp reads it and responds with enthusiasm — clearly hearing confirmation of their position. Then I share something else and the other camp does the same thing. Both camps think I’m with them. Neither can see what is only observable from a different perspective….
A friend named George responded to a prior post (The Mask and the Metamorphosis) with a question worth taking seriously: “Perhaps in your next essay it is your intent to explain what ‘Spirit’ means and how it presumably functions within a person to bring about change… Your comments, I believe, presume a force outside of…
The word most English readers of the Bible encounter as “law” is the Greek nomos, which the translators of the Septuagint used to render the Hebrew Torah. The translation is understandable. It is also misleading. Torah does not mean law in the legislative sense — a code of statutes, a set of enforceable regulations. It comes from yarah:…
The Greek behind it is hypokritēs. In the world Jesus spoke into, that word had a specific, concrete referent: a stage actor. Someone who puts on a mask and performs a role for an audience. The mask is not incidental to the image — it is the image. The face the audience sees is not the…
The English word “repentance” has done considerable damage. When we read the word “repentance,” we think of guilt or behavior changes. But the original Greek text uses a word that explodes past those limits: Metanoia. Not because it’s wrong exactly, but because it’s so small. It points to guilt, remorse, a promise to do better….
When you read the opening line of John’s Gospel — “In the beginning was the Word” — the English gives you almost nothing. A word is something you speak or write. It lives on a page or in the air for a moment and then it’s gone. That’s not what John said. John wrote Logos. Logos vs. Rhēmata…