A Virtual File Cabinet for Our Studies of Christian Origins & Hebraic Faith
Dr. Christine Hayes, Yale Online Lecture 12. The Deuteronomistic History: Life in the Land (Joshua and Judges). Italicized paragraphs below are from her book related to the course. The book of Judges is set in the transitional period between the death of Joshua and the establishment of the monarchy (1200–1020 B.C.E.) and is an imaginative and embellished […]
Continue ReadingFirst and second Kings contain the history of Israel from the death of King David to the fall of Judah and the Babylonian exile in 586. These books appear to be based on older sources, some of which are explicitly identified, such as the subsequently lost “Book of the Acts of Solomon” (1 Kings 11:41) […]
Continue ReadingThe following table was created from the text below the table. Formatting Event Hebrew Bible Christian Bible Spaces Between Words c. 200 BCE–100 CE c. 200 BCE–100 CE Book Order Standardization – HB by c. 2nd century CE by 4th century CE Vowell Introduction 7th-11th centuries CE 7th and 10th centuries CE Upper and Lower […]
Continue ReadingFrom ChatGPT Prompt: Which versions of the ancient manuscripts were used to create the NRSV and the ASV bibles? Cite the sources. The American Standard Version (ASV) and the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) were based on different sets of ancient manuscripts, reflecting the textual scholarship of their respective times. American Standard Version (ASV) (1901) […]
Continue ReadingFrom OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chatgpt.com. Below Chat’s response is the scholarly response from Claude.ai, which has a lot more story as well as the name of the Jewish Rabbi that divided the Hebrew Bible into verses. The same question was posed to both. Prompt: Provide dates and who was responsible for dividing […]
Continue ReadingFrom ChatGPT 2/2/2025. Critical Bible scholars often identify Luke’s Special Section as Luke 9:51–18:14, commonly referred to as the “Travel Narrative” or “the Great Insertion.“ This section is unique to Luke and contains a significant amount of material not found in Matthew or Mark, making it a primary source of Lukan special traditions. Why Scholars […]
Continue ReadingFrom Elizabeth Hayes, Christine. Introduction to the Bible (The Open Yale Courses Series) (Chapter 9, p. 128). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. Modern source theory assigns the varied bodies of legal material found in the Pentateuch to the main biblical sources as follows: In all cases, it is supposed that the sources drew upon much […]
Continue ReadingFrom Yale Bible Study: Back-to-back bits of wisdom that completely contradict each other: From: Enns, Peter. How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That’s Great News (p. 29). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Proverbs wasn’t written for twenty-first-century Western churchgoing […]
Continue ReadingLinks in addition to those below this list with extracts. Who Returned First—Ezra or Nehemiah? at BAS by Aaron Demsky, April 1996. Forty-seven years after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 B.C.E. and deported many of the people to exile in Babylon, Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, who had conquered the Babylonians and […]
Continue ReadingFrom Searching for the “Original” Bible. Do the Dead Sea Scrolls help? By Emanuel Tov Were the nations divided according to the number of the sons of God? Did God have sons? (Deuteronomy 32:8) The first 43 verses of Deuteronomy 32 comprise the beautiful poem of Moses. Deuteronomy 32:8 in the King James Version reads: “When the Most High divided to the […]
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