Koinonia

Stairway to Heaven by Daniel B. Wallace

Meteora is one of the most stunningly beautiful and other-worldly places on earth. Over a millennium ago, monks traveled throughout Greece in search of a place where they could get away from it all. Ultimately, six monasteries were established there, all but one perched atop stone pillars rising hundreds of feet above the plain below.

Metéora (Greek: Μετέωρα, ‘suspended rocks,’ ‘suspended in the air’ or ‘in the heavens above’) is one of the largest and most important complexes of Eastern Orthodox monasteries in Greece, second only to Mount Athos. The six monasteries are built on natural sandstone rock pillars, at the northwestern edge of the Plain of Thessaly near the Pineios river and Pindus Mountains, in central Greece. The nearest town is Kalambaka. The Metéora is included on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

OK, I confess. The previous paragraph is lifted verbatim out of Wikipedia. But it’s a decent geographical description of the place. Photographs do not do this site justice, but below are a couple that at least give you a glimpse of what these natural monuments are like:

 

one of the smaller monastaries of Meteora 

 

Thoughts for Thanksgiving: Vows and Thank Offerings in the ANE

"I am under vows to you, O God;
I will present my thank offerings to you.
For you have delivered me from death and my feet from stumbling,
that I may walk before God
in the light of life."
- Psalm 56:12-13 (NIV)

Happy Thanksgiving from the Zondervan Academic team!

The following commentary on this passage is an excerpt of John Hilber's commentary on the Psalms, found in volume 5 of the Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary: Old Testament.

Win a Free ZIBBCOT Volume to Review!

We are interested in sparking some conversations on the recently-released Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary: Old Testament, which John Walton has been blogging about every Friday for the past 10 months or so.

The problem is that it can get pretty pricey to send out $250 sets! So we came up with this idea.

We will send you a volume of your choice to review (you pick the volume):

Vol. 1 - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy

Vol. 2 - Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 & 2 Samuel

Vol. 3 - 1 & 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther

Vol. 4 - Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel

Vol. 5 - The Minor Prophets, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs

Your only obligation is to review this volume on your blog within the timeframe of October 26 – November 9.

Once your review is up, let us know, and we’ll send you one more volume. We would like it if you review this one as well, but you’re under no obligation.

Here’s how you can enter: simply submit a comment below with the name of either (1) an Egyptian Pharoah (or Pharaoh) or (2) an Ancient Near Eastern text. The first 30 unique answers will get one!

Note: we’ll email you to arrange shipment and volume details.

Azazel and the “Scapegoat” (Leviticus 16)

Often we encounter sections and practices in the Old Testament that seem very strange to us. It should not be surprising that some of these can be clarified with knowledge gleaned from the ancient Near East. In what is arguably the most important ritual for ancient Israelites, the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), the people are instructed to designate one goat as a "scapegoat"—a ancient attempt to render an obscure Hebrew word, Azazel. In his Leviticus contribution to ZIBBCOT, ritual specialist Roy Gane writes:

Rather than the traditional "scapegoat" translating la ‘^aza,zel here, we should read instead "to Azazel" (NRSV; NJB).¹ We know that ‘^aza,zel should be the proper name of a party capable of ownership because a lot ceremony designated one goat layhwh, "belonging to Yahweh," and the other goat as la ‘^aza,zel , "belonging to Azazel" (16:8). However, we do not know what the name "Azazel" means.²

Tower of Babel (Genesis 11)

The account of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 offers numerous points for comparison with the ancient world. The narrative is set in the Land of Shinar, recognized as the region known as Sumer in southern Mesopotamia. The excerpt below looks at the materials and at the nature of the project. Our expectation would be that in order to understand how the project offended deity, we need to have a clearer idea of what the people were actually doing.

Let’s make bricks and bake them (11:3). Stone is not readily available in the alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia, so a logical economical choice is to use brick—there is plenty of mud. Mudbrick, however, is not durable, so it was a great technological development to discover that baking the brick made it as durable as stone.¹ This was still an expensive process, since the kilns had to be fueled. As a result, mudbrick was used as much as possible, with baked brick used only for outer shells of important buildings or where water-proofing was desirable.²

The Creation of Humankind in the Ancient Near East

We are all familiar with the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis two and their creation stands in contrast to the scientific theories of human origins in western culture. We will see as we look at the comparative data that the information offered in the biblical text would have been very comfortable in the ancient Near Eastern environment, though several noticeable differences are observable.

Creation of Humankind in the Ancient Near East

It is common that some part of deity is used in the creation of humankind. Although there is little information on the creation of humankind in Egyptian literature, the breath of the deity or his tears represents the endowment from the deity.¹