Category: The Book of Daniel
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The Great Date Debate
I feel a sense of professional responsibility to write this particular post, though I am prepared for all of you except my sister to bail out before the end. Prove me wrong… If you have spent any time studying the book of Daniel with the aid of commentaries, books, or Bible study notes, you are…
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Danny Boy of Babylon
I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about death and my dissertation. (Sometimes I’ve thought I would experience death by dissertation, but I am beginning to believe I might come out of the process alive after all.) Death has been on my mind because, if I lived closer to the land of my…
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How to Read a Biblical Story
The Bible is full of stories – more properly called narratives—and most people don’t give a second thought to how they should be read. They’re stories, for crying out loud. Who doesn’t know how to read a story? Why are you wasting Web space – and my time – on this post? But it’s not…
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What Is It, Anyway?
Daniel is a one-of-a-kind book in the Bible. In case this is news to you, let me tell you what’s so unusual about it: (1) Your translators had to do double duty in Daniel because the original is written in two different languages (Hebrew in chapters 1, 8–12, and sister-language Aramaic in chapters 2–7 );…
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Being Fair to the author and the Author
There are all sorts of preliminaries you have to take care of before you can read a book of the Bible in fairness to its author and its Author. John Walton (of the Bible department at Wheaton College, not the lumber mill on Walton’s Mountain) likes to say that the Bible wasn’t written to us,…
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Never Say Never
It is a lovely twist of irony that I, the one who said I’d never blog, am blogging first about a book I never wanted to study. I have spent most of my adult life successfully avoiding the Old Testament book of Daniel – a success only matched by my avoidance of the New Testament…
Three Rubies Press 