Psalms
From a naïve confidence to an enduring hopefulness.
Scholars have deciphered three ancient psalms.
In a biblical book many of whose poems express anxiety and apprehension, Psalm 104 is a confident and joyous singalong.
Heartless psalms.
David deserves our respect not despite his sins, but because he sinned and repented.
It’s a poem, not an instruction manual.
Some ancient Jewish kvetching.
Hebrew scribes take great pains to copy faithfully. But, as a passage in Proverbs shows, once an error creeps into the chain of transmission, it can be there forever.
At Israel’s Bible Lands Museum, on display for the first time is a collection of some 100 clay tablets documenting the lives of Jews exiled. . .
The figurative description of God in Psalm 23 expresses stewardship, companionship, attendance, nurturing, and love: qualities as precious today as then.
The Song of Songs, the Bible’s most profound meditation on love, projects a Judaism of lived experience, not abstract principle. (2010.)