Though it may at first seem counterintuitive, the most important Biblical text for understanding the Christian Gospel as St. Paul proclaims it is the book of Deuteronomy.  The book of Deuteronomy sums up the Torah, the Pentateuch, in presenting the Prophet Moses’ great final sermon to the people of Israel before his death and their entrance into the land promised to their forefathers.  It is, in condensed and pointed form, the covenant document granted by God to his people Israel.  In the ancient world, the type of covenant document, ‘berith’ in Hebrew, which is represented in the Old Testament is a particular type of ancient suzerainty treaty.  When a king conquered a new city or territory and took possession of…

In last week’s post, the story of Jacob and Esau and the histories of Israel and Edom, the nations which took their names from the twins, were seen to lies in the background of St. Paul’s discussion of election in Romans 9-11.  The Jewish people, which had been the primary recipient of God’s promises as a birthright, now found itself estranged, in large part, from those promises in favor of the recently redeemed Gentiles who already were coming to represent the great body of the Church.  St. Paul elaborates on the fact that this pattern has happened before in the scriptures, the disastrous effects of allowing this transition to evolve into enmity, and most importantly the blessings that are promised…

The story of twin brothers Jacob and Esau, or Israel and Edom, represents a major portion of the patriarchal narratives in Genesis.  St. Paul returns to this story in his Epistle to the Romans, chapters 9 through 11 in answering a particular situation in the life of the Roman church.  This major passage, separated from its original context in the Epistle to the Romans, the New Testament, and the scriptures as a whole, as well as from its historical context, has become one of the primary bases for an entire stream of Western thought regarding election and its relationship to the salvation of the human person.  In order to properly understand what St. Paul is teaching in the Epistle to…

In recent times, the rediscovery of the original ancient context of Genesis 6:1-4 has led to a fascination with the subject of the ‘Nephilim’, who are here said to be produced through sexual immorality involving angelic beings and human women.  In some quarters, this has been developed into full-fledged conspiracy theories regarding these ‘Nephilim’ still existing in our world today.  Those fascinated by crypto-archaeology produce doctored photos of what they hold to be gigantic human skeletons, the remains of these people.  This near obsession has exploded as a counter to a re-reading of the Genesis and later texts, begun by St. Augustine, which reads these texts in a de-mythologized way, seeing all involved parties as human.  The interpretation of these…

The first eleven chapters of Genesis have long been seen as a literary unit which serves as a sort of prologue to the rest of the book of Genesis, the Torah or Pentateuch, and the whole of the scriptures.  Within these chapters, we read of the creation of the world and of humanity, the expulsion from paradise, the descent of man, the flood of Noah, the descent of the nations, and the tower of Babel.  Theologically, particularly in the Late Antique West, Genesis 3 and the expulsion from paradise became the site of major focus, defined as “the Fall” of man.  Debate began as to what precisely this fall entailed and what it represented.  It was taken primarily as a…

In one of the earliest postings on this blog, the difficulty of defining the exact limits of the Old Testament within the many language traditions of the Orthodox Church was described.  Though there is clear agreement on a certain set of books and their authority across all of Orthodox tradition, the exact list of books found in a published Orthodox Bible will largely be a function of the language tradition from which that Bible comes.  Many of the books of the Old Testament which all of the local churches agree are authoritative are not read from publicly in our present liturgical life, which further complicates the issue of the canonicity of certain of those books.  One such text is 4…

Recent posts have discussed the divine council of angelic beings which surround the throne of God, the way in which certain individuals in the Old Testament were exalted to join that council, and the way the saints in Christ become members of the divine council, sharing by grace in Christ’s rule over his whole creation.  Within these themes, and the mediatory role of the saints and their patronage, the Theotokos, Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ, has a special role, as has been recognized within the Christian faith from the very beginning.  The veneration of the Theotokos in the West developed in ways which ultimately produced Marian dogmas which the Orthodox Church does not recognize.  In response to these developments,…

The word which we commonly read in English translation as ‘saint’ or ‘saints’, derived from the Latin ‘sanctus’, translates the Greek word ‘agios’ (plural ‘agiois’) which is seen constantly in the inscriptions of iconography.  In the New Testament, this word is used to describe both the worshipping community of the church in its sojourn on earth and the ‘dead in Christ’ (cf. Acts 9:13, 32, 41, Rom 1:7, 12:13, 1 Cor 14:33, 2 Cor 9:12, Eph 2:19).  This Greek term is actually the substantive form of the adjective ‘holy’, and could simply be translated ‘holy one’ or ‘holy ones’.  The reason it has traditionally been translated as ‘saints’ is to indicate that by the time of the New Testament, the…

In last week’s post, God’s divine council, the angelic beings surrounding his throne with whom He shares graciously his governance of the heavens and the earth, was introduced.  There are several ways in which human persons in the Old Testament encounter and interact with the divine council.  These encounters and modes of interaction lay the groundwork for a transformed relationship in the New Covenant, which will be the subject of next week’s post.  Simply put, every encounter with God the Father in the Old Testament is mediated either through God the Son, as was discussed in a previous series on this blog, or by angelic beings, as will be discussed here. Though these encounters are far from common, the most…

In the scriptures, when the hosts of angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, virtues, principalities, powers, cherubim and seraphim are described, they are described using predominately one of two metaphors.  The first of these has already been used here in the previous sentence, that of the ‘heavenly hosts’.  This reference to the multitude of angelic beings forms one of the names given to the God of Israel in the Old Testament, Yahweh Sabaoth.  Because of the similarity in English transliteration, this title is often confused with a reference to the Sabbath.  It is not, however, the Hebrew words ‘shabat’.  Rather, it is the plural substantive form of the verb ‘tsavah’.  This is the verb that is used in Genesis 1, for example,…