Hiking 2,663.5 miles for street kids in Africa

By | March 28, 2009
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At IBEX, I got to meet all kinds of people.  Only a few were what I would call radically crazy (cf. Est 4:16; Phil 1:20-21).  Emily Lawlor Aaston (Spring 2004) is a standout in that category.  After her time in IBEX, she spent a semester in Uganda, part of which she spent working with “street boys” through Off Tu Mission.  To raise money for them now, she is going to hike the entire length of the Pacific Crest Trail, from the border of Canada to the border of Mexico. Alone. Here’s what one hiker said about it:

Nothing can prepare a hiker for the despair, the alienation, the anxiety, and especially the pain, both physical and mental, that slices to the very heart of the hiker’s volition, which are the real things that must be planned for. The ability of the hiker lies in his personal adaptations. The desire to do the long-distance hike is the only thing that can get a person through.

Emily’s goal is to raise one dollar for every mile she hikes.  She is going to suffer for each and every dollar.  I would encourage you to consider either a one-time donation (X number of miles) or a per-mile pledge.  If 100 people pledged one penny per mile ($26 total), she would meet her goal and know that she has 100 people standing with her, especially when the going gets tough.  All of the funds will go to helping support these children in the mission.

You can donate here.

She starts hiking on April 16.  Blog updates will be posted here.

March 16

By | March 16, 2009
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Car seats are killers.  The Washington Post has a heart-breaking story on parents who have left their children in cars. 

I don’t know who this guy is, but you don’t often hear Arabs saying these kinds of things.  (That probably means he ‘ll be dead soon.)  7 minute video.

When you watch this video from the Onion about the effects of stab wounds on monkeys, think of PETA.

What if Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians was Published in Christianity Today?  This blog suggests some of the letters to the editor that would be written.

It is now spring break, and I do not expect to be able to post much this week.

Blessing Over the Sun, Every 28 Years

By | March 13, 2009
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Interesting.  I had no idea.  From Arutz-7:

Though the sun is some 400 times larger than the moon, a blessing over the latter is made nearly 350 times more often than over the former.  This coming month will see that rare occasion when the Blessing Over the Sun is recited.

Jewish Law stipulates that a special blessing is to be recited when we see the sun at the same place, on the same day of the week, and the same time of day as when it was created.  The first chapter in Genesis, which tells the story of Creation, tells us that the sun was created on a Wednesday.  Precisely one solar year, or 365.25 days (52 weeks and 1.25 days) later, the sun was in the same place – but not on the same day of the week, nor at the same time of day; it was rather but rather a quarter of a day later. 

The “quarter-day” problem is solved every four years, and the “same day of the week” issue is resolved every seven years – and both problems are solved simultaneously only once every 28 (4×7) years. 

This year marks the culmination of a 28-year-cycle since Creation (5769-1= 5768 = 28×206). Thus, four weeks from now, on Wednesday, April. 8, the vernal equinox, the sun will be in the same position, on the same day of the week and the same approximate hour, as it was when it was created.  This “starting position” actually occurs the previous evening, but we recite the blessing over the sun to mark this anniversary only when it is visible – that is, the next morning.

The special blessing  – – “Blessed are You… Who fashions the work of Creation” – commemorates the vast greatness of G-d’s Creation.

The last time this special blessing was recited, April 8,1981, special gatherings were held in various locations for the public recital of the prayer – including atop one of the Twin Towers of the no-longer-extant World Trade Center in New York. 

The story continues here.

March 10

By | March 10, 2009
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All of you who come here regularly looking for recommendations of good TV shows are pretty disappointed, I know.  But I have one for you.  This was a Discovery Channel series that is now on DVD, which we checked out of the church library in preparation for a trip to the Kennedy Space Center.  Entitled “When We Left Earth – The NASA Missions,” this 6-part series has original footage narrated by recent interviews with the astronauts.  It is very good, and I recommend it to those who are interested in space exploration and those who are not.

The JPost Magazine has a pretty fair article about Messianic Jews in Israel.

You can now download tracts from Jerusalem Assembly for all of your Hebrew-speaking friends.

This World Clock is quite interesting.

Square Root Day

By | March 3, 2009
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Watch flight 1549 land in the Hudson.  Animation with audio from flight control.

The Pomegranate is a phone that can do it all.

Everything is possible, with practice.  A nice 3-minute compilation.  I really like the wave.

Today is Luke’s 11th birthday.  It is also “Square Root Day.”  From BOTWT: 3/3/09, 3 x 3 = 9, get it? Math nerds all over are celebrating the holiday by making bad puns:

Celebrations are as varied: Some cut root vegetables into squares, others make food in the shape of a square root symbol.

The last such day was five years ago, Feb. 2, 2004, which coincided with Groundhog Day. The next is seven years away, on April 4, 2016.

Pole Vaulting Photo

By | February 27, 2009
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Take a close look at this picture. (Click to enlarge)

13764u YMCA athletic events, mat13764First, try to guess where it was taken.  If you guessed Jerusalem in the 1930s, you ‘re right.

Next, tell me what’s wrong with it.  Unbelievable.  And we think we ‘re tough.

Third, I wonder if a photo exists of me anywhere from my pole-vaulting days.  Landing on big mushy pads.  I can say that I water-skiied on the Sea of Galilee, but I never tried pole-vaulting in Jerusalem.

This photograph belongs to a collection of photos from 1898-1946 that I’ve been working on lately.

The Glorious Hope of Isaiah (#12: Will Egypt Seek God?)

By | February 26, 2009
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I did not originally intend to write another post on chapters 13-23, but a prophecy of hope to foreign nations has forced me to re-consider.  After condemning Egypt to the degree that by the end of the judgment, “there will be nothing for Egypt that head or tail, palm branch or reed, may do” (Isa 19:15), Isaiah predicts a radically new future.  Verses 18-25 predict a glorious hope for Egypt.  First, verse 18:

Isaiah 19:18 (ESV) “In that day there will be five cities in the land of Egypt that speak the language of Canaan and swear allegiance to the Lord of hosts. One of these will be called the City of Destruction [or Heliopolis].”

I think the most natural question for us today is how this will be fulfilled.  Since I don’t think anyone would argue that cities in Egypt were speaking Hebrew in the past, we must consider what this means.  One possibility is that this is a failed prophecy; Isaiah was simply wrong.  Another possibility is that this was a conditional prophecy, and since Egypt (or someone else?) didn’t meet the conditions, the prophecy never came to fulfillment.  There are conditional prophecies in the Bible, to be sure, but there is nothing in the context to suggest that this is contingent upon anything else.  If such contingency is implied, that would seem to throw into question all biblical prophecies. Are they all contingent, even if there is no indication of such?  Is Jesus’s return contingent?  Is our salvation contingent?  I do not see contingency in this passage.

Another view is that this prophecy should be understood for its “essence,” but not for the literal details.  I am not opposed to this approach in principle, but again, I need to know what clues Isaiah gives that he intends to speak of Egypt as an archetype of a future enemy that turns to the Lord.  We might have such an indication a few verses down:

Isaiah 19:23 (ESV) “In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and Assyria will come into Egypt, and Egypt into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians.”

Egypt still exists today, even if it is significantly different than it was in the 8th century BC, but Assyria is no more.  How can this prophecy be literally fulfilled if there are no Assyrians alive?  Thus one might conclude, as the ESV Study Bible notes read, that “The whole world—represented by Egypt and Assyria, at either end of Isaiah’s historical landscape—unites in worship.”  There’s a real sense in which I appreciate this conclusion.  It certainly keeps the element of hope (even expanding it), and it does not remove it from one people group to another.

But there’s a problem, and I ‘ll use another quote to capture it.  “Though Isaiah may not have realized it, God contextualized the prophecy for him and the people of Judah.”  I’m bothered by a couple of things here.  First, this approach says that Isaiah did not know what he was saying.  Or, to say it another way, Isaiah said one thing but God meant something else.  I struggle with that.  How is anyone to know God’s “true meaning”?  If Assyria wasn’t mentioned in the passage, and if it was no longer in existence, I don’t think anyone would have ever guessed.  It’s only because of these external realities that we have a different understanding of the prophecy.  What if external realities change (e.g., Assyria comes back into existence)?  Does the text mean one thing in the 8th century, something else in 2008, and yet something else in the future?  If so, we really should not have any confidence in interpreting the Bible.  What is right today is wrong tomorrow.

Second, this approach renders meaningless most of the rest of the prophecy.  For instance, what does this really mean?:

Isaiah 19:19-20 (ESV) “In that day there will be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar to the Lord at its border. 20 It will be a sign and a witness to the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt. When they cry to the Lord because of oppressors, he will send them a savior and defender, and deliver them.”

Is the altar a church?  Is it in the middle of Russia instead of Egypt?  What is the pillar, and where is the border, if not at the edge of Egypt’s territory?  You see where this goes.  Suddenly the details don’t matter.  All we can reasonably get out of Isaiah’s prophecy is that nations will turn to the Lord.

I am not denying the problems that the text presents.  It does seem “incredible” that Egyptians would speak Hebrew, and that a pillar would be set up at the Gaza crossing in the Lord’s honor, and that there will be a freeway from Egypt to Iraq.  But it’s also “incredible” that Egypt would worship the Lord, as much in Isaiah’s day as in our own.  It actually seems less difficult for me to believe that the Egyptians would put up a monument to their hero (they have them all over the place) than that they would actually worship the God of Israel.  The problem is more with the “essential” meaning than with the “literal.”

What about the Assyrians?  Well, there are Assyrians alive today.  And the place of Assyria still exists and is still hostile to Israel.  Tonight I read a report that says that 1 in 17 North Africans have Phoenician blood in them, and it doesn’t seem all that much of a stretch that those living in Assyria’s homeland today are descendants.  The question, of course, is what would you rather believe.  I’d rather hold to the “essential” and “literal” meaning wherever possible, avoiding that very real “slippery slope” that has has no guardrails once you start pitting “essence” against the natural meaning of the words.

February 22

By | February 22, 2009
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Care to hunt pigs in Israel?  They are fast critters.  Except the one I caught at Yad HaShmonah once, playing a game of flashlight tag.

Four new designs for the back of the penny (which, by the way, costs 1.4 cents to make).

Do you have trouble threading a needle?  This guy doesn’t!

A massive 2000 ft spinning ice circle at Gaspe Bay, Canada. 

And here’s something you don’t usually read in a commentary!

I remain convinced that the heart of the letter [of James] is a call to wholehearted commitment to Christ.  James’s call for consistent and uncompromising Christian living is much needed.  Our churches are filled with believers who are only halfhearted in their faith and, as a result, leave large areas of their lives virtually untouched by genuine Christian values.  Nor am I immune to such problems.  As I quite unexpectedly find myself in my “middle age” years, I have discovered a tendency to back off in my fervor for the Lord and his work.  My reimmersion in James has challenged me sharply at just this point.  I pray that it might have the same effect on all readers of the commentary” (Douglas Moo, The Letter of James, x).

Who Wrote the Book of James?

By | February 19, 2009
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Who do you think wrote the book of James?  The book identifies the author only as “James, the servant of Jesus Christ.”  The prevailing opinion, if one discounts a pseudonymous author, is that the epistle was written by the brother of Jesus.  I don’t find the evidence compelling.

There are four James mentioned in the New Testament.  Besides Jesus’s half-brother, two were apostles and one was the father of an apostle (Judas, not Iscariot).  Since we know nothing about him, I think it is unlikely that Judas ‘ father wrote the letter.  It also seems safe to discount James the son of Alphaeus, since he is essentially unknown.  But it appears to me that James the son of Zebedee is too quickly dismissed as a possibility.

Here’s how it happened in one (good) commentary I read and virtually the same scenario replayed in the class discussion this week.  James the son of Zebedee is considered, but because he was martyred so early (Acts 12), he is rejected.  Then James the brother is considered and deemed to be possible because he died much later (in AD 62).  But because the book talks about being “justified by works,” it is (rightly) concluded that it must have been written before Galatians and the Jerusalem Council, as James surely would have been more sensitive in his wording had he been aware of Paul’s letters and battles.  Thus James was written around 46-48.  No one stops to consider that this is not much later than the date of James Z’s death in 44.  In other words, if James may have been written by the brother in 46, why could not it have been written by James Z in 44?

The nice thing with a doctoral seminar is that you have many students who have recently studied the subject who can compare notes.  My query received two responses, both of which are reasonable but not, in my view, convincing.  First, tradition identifies the author as the Lord’s brother.  From what I can tell, though, the tradition is very limited.  Second, there are similarities in wording between the book and the words of James in Acts 15:13-23. This includes the use of chairein (“greetings”) in James 1:1 and Acts 15:23 (nowhere else in NT), the passive use of “call” with “name” in James 2:7 and Acts 15:17, and the phrase, “listen, my brothers” in both James 2:5 and Acts 15:13.  These are better arguments than the quick brush-off that James Z was “too early,” but it’s not enough to get me thinking about another subject.

I think that James Z deserves further consideration for a few reasons.  First, everyone recognizes the massive influence of Jesus’s teaching upon the author of the book.  This fits better with one of the inner three disciples than it does for a brother who rejected Jesus’s claims until after the resurrection and presumably was not privy to much of Jesus’s teaching (John 7:5; 1 Cor 15:7).  Second, James Z was an apostle.  In my (widely-rejected) view, there was one criterion for an inspired work of Scripture: it had to be written by a spokesman of God.  In the OT, these were called prophets; in the NT, they were called apostles.  James Z is eminently qualified in this regard.  [FN1]  His brother, John Z, wrote one gospel, three letters, and Revelation.  Peter, the other inside man, wrote two letters.  Third, the book employs terminology which would be quite appropriate for a fisherman, as James Z was before following Jesus (Luke 5:10-11).  This includes the references to the “wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind” (1:6), “enticed” (a technical term used by fishermen; 1:14), “ships guided by a very small rudder” (3:4), “sea creature” (3:7), and “fresh and salt water” springs (think of Heptapegon; 3:11).

I’m not saying this proves the case.  But I think it merits more consideration than it seems to receive.  As I thought through this tonight, I recalled a friend arguing something similar.  A quick Google search has revealed an article of his on the web for those interested in pursuing this further.  Perhaps the majority view is wrong.

FN1: The Lord’s brother is apparently called an apostle in Gal 1:19; this is surprising to me given the qualifications given in Acts 1:21-22.  In any case, James Z is not an inferior apostle to the Lord’s brother.