If the only book you ever read is the Bible, you will never know what you don’t know. “Just me and my Bible” sounds right at home in the hyper-individualistic culture of the modern West. But it is the very opposite of how Jews have always studied. No one sees …

The band decided to band together to band the injured bird’s wing, just as a band of color appeared in the sky, providing a beautiful backdrop for their band’s impromptu concert. Question: in that sentence, what does the word “band” mean? Answer: wrong question. The word “band” does not have …

God has a long nose. I realize how that sounds, so let me say it again properly. When Moses hides in the cleft of the rock and the glory of God passes by, God proclaims his own name: “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, …

This morning, before breakfast, you read a weather forecast, two text messages, a cereal box, and a road sign, and you did not read any of them the same way. Nobody taught you this. You simply know that “70 percent chance of rain” is a probability, that “we need to …

“There is no God.” That sentence is in the Bible. Twice, actually. If verses were bullets you could fire one at a time, Scripture would be an atheist tract, and your pastor would owe the congregation a very awkward retraction. Of course, the verse in full reads: “The fool says …

Allow me to write a short letter to a reader in the year 5025. “Dear future person: today was rough. My phone died this morning, so I missed the meeting, and my boss hit the roof. My wife says I need to touch grass. Honestly, this whole week has been …

Frank kicked the bucket. Go ahead and translate that sentence into Japanese. If you translate the words, Japanese readers will spend the rest of the chapter wondering why Frank assaulted a pail. So you do what every translator does: you translate the meaning instead, and you write “Frank died.” Clean. …

I’ve been getting this question a lot lately, so let me offer a short, honest answer. First, the real thing. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church preserves one of the largest biblical canons in Christianity, usually counted as 81 books, although you will sometimes see the number 88 advertised. The difference …

The link between the city of Sodom and homosexual acts, from which the word “sodomize” comes, is largely a later cultural reading rather than a careful one. In Genesis 19, the sin of Sodom is indeed an attempted act of collective sexual violence, but it was directed at visitors who …

It was five years ago that Dani finally told me what had happened. He had disappeared, and it took him a year to reach out and tell me why he, an Israeli Jew who had accepted Yeshua as his Messiah, had walked away from the messianic faith. Some context before …