Dr Paul Allen

Little is known about the extent of literacy among the ancient Israelites and other Near Eastern societies. For the most part, only scribes, certain religious and governmental officials, and some wealthy businessmen, along with other elite persons, could read and write beyond the basics. Possibly those with lower socioeconomic standing would have had basic literary training, but the evidence is small. The invention of writing appears to have occurred in Egypt and Mesopotamia at about the same time—​the late fourth millennium BC—​but neither of those writing systems is alphabetic like ancient Hebrew.  One must presume that some predecessor of ancient Hebrew, a Northwest Semitic language, is the language the Biblical text refers to in Ex 17:14 since the writing is to be preserved for future reference.  Ancient Hebrew and most other alphabetic languages (including modern languages such as English) all derive from the same alphabet—​likely a Semitic invention in the first half of ...

The Bible is not, overall, a piece of coded literature written in an elaborately allegorical manner with all sorts of hidden meanings, which needs to be decoded to be understood.  Thank goodness.  Just to be clear what allegory is– it is a story that has a surface meaning within the story, but in fact, those story elements refer primarily to things outside the story.   Typical allegories are the Christian example Pilgrim’s Progress or the literary example Spencer’s The Fairy Queen.  One has to be able to distinguish between a straight-up allegory where so very many of the elements in the story are symbolic and refer to something outside the story, or an allegorizing of a non-allegory, which is what we find in Philo in various of his books, or once in Paul in Galatians where he allegorizes the story of Sarah and Hagar, and finally, there can be a few allegorical elements in a non-allegory, for example in a parable. Perhaps the most classic example of the over-allegori...

Despite how we know we should feel, even Christians who deeply love the Bible often feel a bit less than enthused if the preacher uses an obscure portion of the Old Testament as his sermon text. Some Old Testament books seem so foreign to us, or at least so incomprehensible, that we struggle to know what to do with them. How might we reinvigorate our reading of the whole of God’s Word? The best way to energize our explorations of what God revealed to His people before Christ’s first coming is to recognize how deeply the Old Testament Scriptures are about Christ. The covenant of grace is God’s one plan to bring all His people to salvation, describing how God distributes His grace to believers. Reformed Christians readily affirm that the whole Bible tells the one story that culminates in Christ. Still, they may not as thoroughly realize that Christ is not simply the climax of the story but also the major character even before He explicitly appears by name. Christ’s role in this sense is ...

B.B. Warfield once summarized the mystery surrounding the two natures of Christ when he wrote, “Because he is man he is capable of growth in wisdom, and because he is God he is from the beginning Wisdom Itself.” The Scriptures, at one and the same time, insist that Jesus is the same, yesterday, today, and forever and that He “increased in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and man” ( Luke 2:52 ).  Believers profess to understand what it means that Jesus never changes inasmuch as He is God, but they have a harder time understanding what it means that Jesus grew in wisdom as a true man. The explanation that we discover by means of scriptural allusions might surprise many Christians. In short, as a man, Jesus needed to learn the Scriptures. Jesus had to grow in His capacity for sinless human development to the extent that one can grow at each age and at each stage of human experience. As a twelve-year-old, Jesus was filled with divine wisdom to the extent that a twelve...

Words (Photo credit: Southernpixel - Alby Headrick ) Think with me for a moment about when you started learning to read . After you had listened to your parents reading to you for several years, you started learning the letter sounds yourself. Then you started to learn to sound out two- and three-letter words. Then you learned to read those words in a short sentence. And then after a time of doing that, you learned to understand what you were reading. Reading really is amazing. What's most amazing about it is that God has  spoken to us  in such a way that we get to  read His words . Step by step, as God's little children, we need to learn how to read the Word, beginning the process from learning letter sounds to understanding what we are reading. In Deuteronomy 4, the Lord exhorts His dear children to hear, to know, and to do His Word. He exhorts them to "listen to [His] statutes and [His] rules" (v. 1) and not to "add to the word . . . that you may kee...