When I teach biblical hermeneutics, before we actually get to biblical interpretation I try to put down three boundary stones within which we will seek to determine the interpretive perspective of the biblical authors. The first of these has to do with clear thinking. This is a very basic introduction to logical and rhetorical fallacies. …
Author Archives: JMH
What Helps Me Most As I Prepare to Preach
This post is a quick response to a question in a comment on my post on Jane Austen and Jeremiah 20:7. The question was what commentaries have helped me most as I’ve worked through Jeremiah. My answer is along the lines of what I recently said about what seminaries are for, because what has helped …
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A Really Cool Math Fact About the Squares
My kids are in Classical Conversations (CC), which we love. This year they learned the squares (a number times itself) to 15, and they learned them to a song. The information in CC is wonderful. I wish I knew all this stuff. But apparently when I was in elementary school the “educational experts” had decided …
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Jane Austen and Jeremiah 20:7
The Lord provided for me on Saturday morning. I was preparing to preach Jeremiah 19–20, and I was really stuck on Jeremiah 20:7, which reads in the ESV, “O LORD, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed . . .” Some scholars say that Jeremiah …
Camus’s Translator on Translation
I have posted before on Dostoevsky’s translator, and I was pleased to read the “Translator’s Note” to Albert Camus’s The Stranger. Matthew Ward is the translator, and it seems to me that his comments weigh against “dynamic equivalence” in favor of a more literal rendering. Ward is actually critiquing the earlier more dynamic translation of …
Gerald Bray’s God Is Love
Crossway continues to bless us with great resources. I have long appreciated Gerald Bray. My favorite book of his (perhaps until I finish the book featured in this post) is his history of biblical hermeneutices: Biblical Interpretation: Past and Present. My deep respect for Bray made me really happy to be alerted by Andy Naselli …
What Makes a Translation Accurate?
What makes a translation accurate? Its ability to preserve the way that later biblical authors evoke earlier Scripture. The Bible was written by at least 40 authors from Moses in the 1400s BC to John around AD 90. Everyone who followed Moses learned from his work, and the later authors made heavy use of what …
What difference does it make if we capitalize son in Psalm 2?
The promises to David from 2 Samuel 7:4–17 are clearly in view in Psalm 2, especially in verses 5–12. In 1 Kings 2:1–4 and several other passages these promises are specifically applied to Solomon. These promises are also significant in the accounts of kings such as Hezekiah and Josiah. There is a sense, then, in …
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Should I consider using multiple translations or stick with one?
Stick with one, for one main reason: it facilitates the memorization of Scripture. If you are always reading, always studying, and always consulting the same version, you will be constantly reinforcing what you have memorized. It is so frustrating to have a text memorized, or almost memorized, then to hear it read or quoted in …
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Read a Great Book with Leland Ryken
I love literature, and when I read Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot they shook me to the core. I read literature looking for truth, and these books challenged the truths I believed. By God’s grace he caused a faith that could not be shaken to remain in me, and as …
Review of Moyise, Paul and Scripture
Steve Moyise, Paul and Scripture: Studying the New Testament Use of the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010. 151 pp. $21.99, paper. Published in The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 15.4 (2011): 79–81. The best thing about this book is its interaction with modern scholarship. The best thing about the book’s interaction with modern scholarship …
On the Third Day
This also appears as a guest post on the Crossway blog this morning: The Lord called Abraham to take his son, his only son Isaac, whom he loved, up to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering there. As Abraham left the men who were with him, he said, “I and the boy …
Allen Ross’s Commentary on Psalms
Allen P. Ross’s first volume on the Psalms has appeared in the Kregel Exegetical Library: Psalms, Vol. 1 Psalms 1–41. From what I can tell having skimmed through the introduction, this appears to be a responsible, evangelical, careful, traditional, academic-with-a-desire-to-be-pastoral commentary on Psalms. I don’t detect much influence from Jamie Grant’s argument that the law …
Kingdom through Covenant by Gentry and Wellum
I happened to be in Dr. Gentry’s office yesterday afternoon, and I was delighted to see the page proofs of this forthcoming book. In the course of our conversation, Gentry said something like this: “I’ve been developing these lectures over the course of my 30 years of teaching, and students have urged me to put …
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Congratulations to Eckhard Schnabel on his 40 Questions about the End Times
I’m glad to see Eckhard Schnabel’s 40 Questions about The End Times appear, not least because it puts me in good company! His book appeared in 2011, my book Revelation: The Spirit Speaks to the Churches appeared in 2012. I had turned my manuscript into Crossway before Schnabel’s work appeared, and I didn’t know he …
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Steinmann’s Intermediate Biblical Hebrew
The standard Hebrew reference grammars (GKC and JM) are not for the light of heart, so I’m always glad to see new efforts to bridge the gap between the elementary textbooks and the reference grammars. Enter Andrew Steinmann with his Intermediate Biblical Hebrew. Reading books like this one is like eating your broccoli. Other things …
The Life We Long for Is the Life We Have: Some Thoughts On Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
I mentioned that I was hoping to post a reflection on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and the piece I was referring to has appeared on The Gospel Coalition site. I argue that McCarthy is trying to help us enjoy our lives as we have them in his novel The Road. This understanding of the book …
The Hebrew–English Old Testament (BHS/ESV) and Crossway’s Commitment to the Bible
I have commented before on how much I appreciate having a Hebrew–English diglot of the Old Testament. I’ve heard someone say that there are over 3,000 forms in the Hebrew Bible that only occur once. I haven’t gone through and counted, and I’m not about to try to memorize all those nonces. So if I’m …
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Use the Right Tool for the Right Job: Gospel Maturity for Seminary
In my humble opinion, seminary students should seek from the seminary what the seminary exists to give them, and the seminary exists to give them the Bible. Let me be quick to add that the seminary’s main purposes include systematic theology and church history, but God has revealed himself in the Bible. Let me say …
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The Scribes Didn’t Just Copy the Text
They also left some comments in margins, like these listed by Tommy Wasserman: “New parchment, bad ink; I say nothing more. “I am very cold.” “That’s a hard page and a weary work to read it.” “Let the reader’s voice honor the writer’s pen.” “This page has not been written very slowly.” “The parchment is …