The Metamorphosis of Lot’s Wife (Plus a New Video)

Recent scholarship on the Sodom and Gomorrah story increasingly explores the long-ignored connections with Greek mythology — and in particular, the theoxeny motif that typically involves one or more gods visiting human civilization in disguise. This motif forms the framework for chapters 18 and 19 of Genesis, and it occurs in the Greek New Testament as well, but it is absent from other Near Eastern literature.

I first wrote about Sodom and Gomorrah several years ago. I’ve created a new video on the topic that covers much of the same material, but with some new insights and approaches. You can find it on YouTube here.

One aspect of the story I do not address in the video is that of Lot’s wife. The instantaneous transformation of the unnamed Mrs. Lot into an upright mineral formation is unique in all the Bible, and apparently unique among Near Eastern literature as well. What should we make of it?

Babel: History, Mythology, and Meaning (Video)

Episode 2 is now up. This time, it’s about the Tower of Babel story and how it fits into both the biblical narrative and the typical patterns of Near Eastern mythology. It’s broadly based on this article about Babel that I wrote several years ago, but I have some new material and a new approach to the topic that I think many of my readers will find interesting. The YouTube description also links to a transcript if you prefer to read that instead.

Announcing a New Video Project

My media consumption increasingly comes in the form of YouTube videos these days — particularly documentary-style video essays on a variety of topics that interest me. One of my primary interests is obviously biblical studies, but there aren’t a lot of video channels that take biblical research seriously and communicate it to general audiences. So I decided I would give it a try.

Noah’s Flood: Competing Visions of a Mesopotamian Tradition

December of 1872 marked a watershed in biblical studies. At a highly publicized lecture for the Society for Biblical Archaeology, with British Prime Minister William Gladstone in attendance, an Assyriologist named George Smith revealed the startling contents of a tablet he had recently discovered. The tablet, one of 25,000 or so that had been excavated from the ruins of ancient Nineveh and sent back to the British Museum in London, told the story of a universal flood that sounded very much like the tale of Noah’s Ark that every churchgoer is familiar with. The tablet turned out to be one of twelve that made up the now-famous Gilgamesh Epic.

Michael the Great Prince and Saviour of Israel

 

In the New Testament, Christ is mankind’s divine mediator and intercessor, their high priest in the heavenly temple, the Holy One who sits at God’s right hand, and the saviour who descends to earth at the end of the age to vanquish Satan. But this multifaceted, cosmic identity wasn’t introduced by an itinerant Galilean preacher, nor did it originate with the teachings of the early apostles, for the notion of a divine saviour described in these terms was already widespread in Judaism before Christianity was born. He went by many names, but the one he was known by most often was Michael. In this article, I want to explore his development and his importance to both Judaism and Christianity.

The Structure of Heaven and Earth: How Ancient Cosmology Shaped Everyone’s Theology

The Bible is often difficult to make sense of without the proper conceptual framework. Why is Paul concerned about mysterious angels, principles, powers, forces, and archons in his epistles? Why are interactions with demons at the forefront of Jesus’ ministry in Mark? Why is heaven sometimes described as having different levels? Why does Paul describe people under the law as being enslaved to the elements? What motivated early Christians to worship a heavenly saviour? It’s hard to answer these questions without a detailed understanding of ancient Jewish and Greek cosmology, so I’ve spent a great deal of time reading the best books I can find on the subject. Much of what I learned surprised me; perhaps it will surprise you too.

This article might seem to ramble at first. There are dozens of different threads that need to be explored before we can see the tapestry they produce in Christianity.

Shamgar Son of Anat and Israel’s Age of Heroes

Few biblical characters are as obscure as Shamgar ben Anat. To be sure, there are many names that appear just once or twice in the genealogies, but Shamgar is a character whose actions distinguish him within the biblical narrative, and not just a forgotten name on a list. Although he is mentioned in only two verses, he is supposedly one of the judges of Israel who was remembered for a mighty feat in battle. However, I knew practically nothing about him beside the name before I set about writing this article, and I chose him as an experiment to find out how much biblical studies could tell me about such a marginal character. 

Gog and Magog: Israel’s Mysterious Northern Foes

Like many children raised in an Evangelical, charismatic church environment in the 80s, I was surrounded by a simmering fervour regarding the End Times and the Rapture, which we were constantly reminded could happen at any time. And like so many Christian households of that era, our bookshelf held a copy of Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth¹, which warned of a looming world war that had been foretold in the Bible. When we visited certain friends of my parents, the grown-up conversation would inevitably turn to current events and biblical prophecy, and my curious ears always perked up. I also remember my first encounter with the extremely lucrative End Times media industry — an episode of Jack Van Impe Presents — which left a lasting impression on me. Host Jack Van Impe would quote snippets from Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation in rapid fire, showing how they all described the coming apocalyptic war against Israel. Even the identities of the participants were helpfully provided by the Bible, Jack assured his viewers; Russia would be the main aggressor, leading a coalition of such diverse nations as Iran, Germany, Egypt, and Ethiopia against Israel and her Western allies. To reach this undeniable conclusion, one simply needed to convert the names provided by Ezekiel — Magog, Meshech, Tubal, Gomer, etc. — into their modern equivalents. Welcome to modern dispensationalism.

The Story of Ezer and Elead (and What It Means for the Exodus)

Tucked away amidst the genealogies of Chronicles almost no one reads, the tale of two cattle-rustling brothers from Ephraim might just be the most obscure story in the Bible. Like many such tales in the Old Testament, this one is brief and contains only the most essential details:

The sons of Ephraim…Ezer and Elead. Now the men of Gath, who were born in the land, killed them, because they came down to raid their cattle. And their father Ephraim mourned many days, and his brothers came to comfort him. He went in to his wife, and she conceived and bore a son; and he named him Beriah, because evil (beraah) had befallen his house. His daughter was Sheerah, who built both Lower and Upper Beth-horon, and Uzzen-sheerah. (1 Chr. 7:20-24)

Reading the Fractures of Genesis: Noah’s Flood

In 1996, Old Testament scholar David Carr published the results of his study into the history of Genesis’s formation. This book, Reading the Fractures of Genesis, made significant progress in unravelling the mystery of how the Pentateuch was composed. I’d like to write a few articles about Carr’s model and how it applies to various passages, beginning with the flood.

It has been recognized by scholars since the 18th century that Genesis and the Pentateuch were composed from multiple sources. The dominant model that most are familiar with today is Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis (DH) from the late 19th century, which proposed four independent sources (J, E, D, and P) whose texts had been combined to form the Torah. Today, the original DH has been largely abandoned in favour of newer models, although many of its fundamental principles are still widely accepted.

Carr’s book gets back to basics and focuses solely on Genesis for developing his source theory. He draws attention to the presence of “fractures” or fault lines in the text of Genesis that cause problems for interpretation. According to another scholar — G.H. Hartman, whom Carr quotes — these fractures indicate “the tension that results between producing one authoritative account and respecting traditions characterized by a certain heterogeneity” (p. 11). In other words, Genesis attempts to create a unified story out of traditions that aren’t always in agreement, as demonstrated by clues throughout the text.