Old Testament Archives - Page 5 of 6

6 Aug 2019

The Ezekiel Mural at Dura Europos

by Trey Wallis | | 0

One of the most stunning archaeological finds of the last century was the accidental discovery in 1920 of the ruins of Dura Europos, “a frontier town of very mixed population and traditions” located on a cliff ninety meters above the Euphrates River in what is now Syria. This Helenistic city had been abandoned following a Sassanian siege in AD 256–57 and was eventually buried by the shifting sands. Among the structures uncovered by excavation was a small Jewish synagogue with elaborately painted walls, preserved only because the building had been filled with earth as a fortification during the siege.

6 Aug 2019

Understanding the Abrahamic Covenant through the Book of Mormon

by Trey Wallis | | 0

The revival of scholarly interest in Abraham in recent decades provides a timely opportunity to explore the contemporary findings of biblical scholars from a Latter-day Saint perspective. This review leads to an in-depth exploration of how the Lord’s covenants with Abraham were understood by the Nephite prophets in the Book of Mormon, how their perspectives compare with contemporary biblical scholarship, and how the Nephite perspective may modify or expand standard Latter-day Saint approaches to understanding the Abrahamic covenant. This article identifies three interrelated streams of covenant discourse in the Book of Mormon—each defined by its respective focus on the (1) Lehite covenant, (2) Abrahamic covenant, or (3) gospel covenant. Though these three streams of covenant discourse are closely related, each is distinct in purpose. Nephite prophets integrated these three in unique ways to develop one larger understanding of God’s use of covenants to bring salvation to the world.

6 Aug 2019

The Five Books of Moses

by Trey Wallis | | 0

There are Bibles aplenty in our world, hundreds if Amazon.com is any guide. In late 2009, Amazon listed over one thousand books on its Bible hit list that have not even been released yet. Over one thousand new books of the roughly 450,000 listed Bible hits portend heavy reading this year for those who try to keep up with things biblical. A beneficial search in this swim through the Amazon of books is for new Bible translations, which now seem plentiful, although there were very few in the years after King James. An almost three-century gap separates the King James Version (KJV) in 1611 from the next major English translations, the English Revised Version (ERV) in 1881–85 and the American Standard Version (ASV) in 1901. And even though new translations were more frequent in the 1900s, it was not until 1988 that another version, the NIV (New International Version, first published in 1973), outsold the Bible of the Reformation and Restoration that Latter-day Saints still use.

6 Aug 2019

A Plain and Precious Part Restored

by Trey Wallis | | 0

A “prosopological exegesis,” which Matthew Bates uses in his book The Birth of the Trinity, presupposes that ancient texts contain conversations between different persons. When understood in this manner, some Old Testament passages read like lines from a play, with different actors playing various parts. Bates argues that a prosopological reading of the Old Testament led early Christians to find three distinct persons in the Godhead. This essay explains Bates’s novel yet ancient exegetical approach and then applies that exegesis to Psalm 110:1–4 to gain insights of particular relevance to Latter-day Saints, particularly regarding the nature of Christ.

6 Aug 2019

In God’s Image and Likeness

by Trey Wallis | | 0

Author Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, PhD in cognitive science and a senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), has written professionally on various topics in human and machine intelligence, has presented at meetings of the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research (FAIR), and has published articles on Mormon themes appearing in 2009 and 2010. The central focus of this book is an exegesis of the “book of Moses, a revelatory expansion of the first chapters of Genesis” and “Joseph Smith’s translation of the early narratives of Genesis.”

At 1,102 pages, this tome is not for the casual reader. It appears to be intended not only as a commentary but a reference book, amalgamating in one place all the current scholarly and prophetic knowledge concerning the Book of Moses and the doctrinal subjects it treats. This is an ambitious project. Its value to each reader will be determined by careful reading.

6 Aug 2019

“In the Land of the Chaldeans”

by Trey Wallis | | 0

Readers of the Bible discover that Abraham was the son of a certain Terah and claimed “Ur of the Chaldeans” as his home (Gen. 11:28). Many scholars identify modern Tell el-Muqayyar in southern Iraq as Abraham’s Ur.

Stephen Smoot first looks at what Genesis says about Abraham and his sojourns throughout Mesopotamia and Syria. He provides a brief history of the excavation of Tell el-Muqayyar and recounts what modern scholarship says about Ur in various parts of its history. From there he compares the picture in Genesis with the archaeological picture provided by this scholarship. He then highlights the work of scholars who have placed Abraham’s Ur not in southern Iraq but in various sites in Syria or northern Mesopotamia. Finally, he brings the book of Abraham into the equation to explore the significance it carries when it comes to locating Abraham’s Ur.

6 Aug 2019

The Ancient Doctrine of the Two Ways and the Book of Mormon

by Trey Wallis | | 0

The Bible describes a bifurcated world in which God bids, commands, and teaches the people he has created to follow him in the way of righteousness, and in which the devil leads people into wickedness. This way of seeing things surfaces explicitly in various texts and is known among scholars as the Doctrine of the Two Ways. While the same teaching has been noticed in the Book of Mormon, there is as yet no study that examines the Book of Mormon presentations systematically to identify the ways in which they might follow any of the ancient versions of the Two Ways doctrine, or the ways in which these might feature original formulations.

In this article, Noel Reynolds shows that the Book of Mormon writers did retain most elements of the earliest biblical teaching, but with enriched understandings and original formulations of the Doctrine of the Two Ways in their prophetic teachings. He documents twelve exemplary passages in the Book of Mormon that explicitly refer to two paths or ways and assesses the extent to which these follow or vary from each other or from Jewish and Christian models.

6 Aug 2019

The Latter-day Saint Reimaging of “the Breath of Life” (Genesis 2:7)

by Trey Wallis | | 0

Many Latter-day Saints have come to transform the traditional biblical meaning of the phrase “the breath of life” into a new, Restoration-oriented use that refers to the embodiment of the first human’s premortal spirit and, by extension, the embodiment of all other people’s spirits. However, the phrase “the breath of life” as found in Genesis seems to best be understood as a figurative designation for a divinely originating animating “breath” or life-force that enlivens all human and animal flesh, and is something beyond mere respiration. Such a divine breath/spirit is also referenced elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, especially in poetic passages. It is no surprise that this is not depicted as or in association with the embodying of premortal spirits, since that doctrine is so rarely and so obtusely evident in the Hebrew Bible as it has come down to us. Reimaging the phrase diminishes consideration of the life-generating and life-sustaining power of God manifest in humans.

6 Aug 2019

Birth and Calling of the Prophet Samuel

by Trey Wallis | | 0

Samuel is rightly considered to be one of the preeminent personalities of the Hebrew Bible, and his remarkable ministry makes the brief narrative of his birth, childhood, and divine calling worthy of serious examination. Steven Olsen argues that the literary craftsmanship of the text is as expressive of its meaning as are its descriptive contents. He focuses on several recurrent literary conventions that so thoroughly unite the biblical account of Samuel’s birth and divine calling that its craftsmanship aptly serves as a vehicle of its meaning. This study claims that the significance of the story cannot be fully apprehended without an in-depth understanding of the expressive qualities of the text. Recurrent literary conventions that form the interpretive fabric of this account include parallelism, characterization, key words (Leitwörter), type scenes, patterns of customary behavior, and structuring devises like Sternberg’s “play of perspective.”

6 Aug 2019

Mormons and Midrash

by Trey Wallis | | 0

Different groups and religious traditions create different genres of interpretation to work with and understand their scriptures according to the needs of their traditions. One form of interpretation involves reopening the Bible and expanding on the narrative of the already canonized text, such as is found in the rabbinic genre of midrash and in Joseph Smith’s New Translation (JST) of the Bible. While some scholars have compared the JST to Jewish midrash, such comparisons often misrepresent the nature of midrash. Evaluating the content of these two literatures shows that there are places where comparison can be productive but also places where key formal differences can be found.

Old Testament

The Ezekiel Mural at Dura Europos

Understanding the Abrahamic Covenant through the Book of Mormon

The Five Books of Moses

A Plain and Precious Part Restored

In God’s Image and Likeness

“In the Land of the Chaldeans”

The Ancient Doctrine of the Two Ways and the Book of Mormon

The Latter-day Saint Reimaging of “the Breath of Life” (Genesis 2:7)

Birth and Calling of the Prophet Samuel

Mormons and Midrash

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