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Zhubert Gone for Good
3–4 minutesOr should I say that Zhubert is gone for bad? It is truly lamentable that Zhubert.com and other Greek New Testament (GNT) projects utilizing the MorphGNT database are running into copyright issues with the German Bible Society (GBS). For example, where Zhubert once provided a portal for the study of the GNT it now reads: It has come to my attention that the MorphGNT team has had to pull their text offline at the request of the German Bible Society, so this site is offline as well. As their database was the heart of the window-dressing we provided here, there’s…
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Word Transforming
2–3 minutesAt my seminary aspiring preachers are encouraged to preach through entire books as a series instead of preaching topically every week from different books. I’ve applied the same principle to my personal Bible study and now work through a psalm or two almost daily. (I miss a day here and there.) What’s great about Psalms is that by reading one a day or something similar one covers more topics than would be covered by doing a topical study. Topics emerge which you might not expect to research or do more reading on or even think about. When we think of…
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Etymological Root Fallacy and Dunamis
1–2 minutesIn my own words, an etymological root fallacy is anachronistic retrospective eisegesis. Dunamis (power) is most often the unfortunate victim of such shoddy (mis-)interpretation. What do I mean by this cumbersome phrase “anachronistic retrospective eisegesis”? Well, it is a looking back (retrospective) on a word which predates English (anachronistic) and forcing the meaning of a present day English word back onto that Greek word (eisegesis) from whence the English word came. So, for example, people read dunamis in Romans 1:16 and think that dynamite’s root in this Greek word gives the reader license to read dunamis with this present day…
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Waw Consecutive in the Theology of Rihanna
1–2 minutesYou’ve heard Rihanna’s song Live Your Life? It sounds an awful lot like she’s using wayehi, a Hebrew waw consecutive. Anyone who’s heard this song now knows how to say “(And) there was” in Hebrew. This word is all over the place in Genesis 1. “And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was [wayehi] evening and there was [wayehi] morning, the second day” (Genesis 1:8). Anyways…that’s what I think of when I hear this song…not that I listen to that kind of music…Who’s Rihanna?