Gen. David Petraeus is not the first famous David in history to be ensnared in the web of infidelity. King David was an adulterer and a fellow military hero as well. However, the similarities end there. While the biblical David was able to retain his kingship because he repented and was forgiven, the contemporary David…
Suppose we were applying biblical theology to the events of today: We might say that God listened to the two major candidates for president of the most powerful nation in the world refusing to say the words “climate change” or “global warming” in a single one of their major speeches and debates. And then God,…
The Vienna-born Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) is best remembered by English readers for such texts as “Tales of the Hasidim,” “Between Man and Man,” and “I and Thou.” Yet German readers also relish Buber’s skill as a translator, notably in his mighty version of the Bible, in collaboration with the German Jewish theologian and…
On a hot August day in the Galilee, a group of schoolchildren in the Arab Christian village of Jish counted diligently, from one to 10, after their instructor. But the words, though similar to Arabic and Hebrew, were neither. ”Chada, tarteyn, telat, arba, khamesh,” they recited, ”shet, shva, tamney, teysha, asar.” At this unique summer…
‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” As often as we read these words, which we do every Simchat Torah when beginning the…
In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible. By Michael Walzer Yale University Press, 256 pages, $28.00 In the early 1980s, the late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin was slugged by many American Jews for what some on the American Jewish center-left perceived as an unsavory embrace of Fundamentalist Christians, who had expressed warm support…
In response to my column of two weeks ago in which I objected to the use by Jews of the term “Old Testament,” several of you have expressed the opinion that the best alternative to it is “Hebrew Bible.” Miriam Segall of Minneapolis, on the other hand, wants to get even more Jewish that that….
It is a typical, even stereotypical, West Bank settlement scene: bearded young men pruning vines while enthusing about the Chosen People’s God-given right to this region. But in this case it is Jesus, and not Jewish identity, that animates these tillers. For years, Westerners have flocked to the Israeli-occupied West Bank to help Palestinians with…
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