Balaam’s ass is part of an exclusive club in the Bible: animals that can talk. The only other creature gifted with the power of speech is the serpent from the Garden of Eden story, which we have analysed here. But what’s the meaning of the story of Balaam and his […]
The story of Aaron building a golden calf for the Israelites to worship may strike us a strange episode in the history of the people of Israel, as that story is told in the Old Testament. But there are some interesting reasons why the ‘golden calf’ makes more sense when […]
If it had been composed a little bit later, the Book of Daniel may have been consigned to the pile of texts labelled the ‘Apocrypha’, and the stories of Daniel in the lions’ den, the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, and Nebuchadnezzar throwing Shadrach and his fellow Jews […]
The Book of Ruth is one of the shorter books of the Bible, but the story it tells is one of the most movingly ‘human’ in all of the Old Testament. However, how the story of Ruth should be interpreted is not an easy question to answer. Let’s delve deeper […]
The Parable of the Good Samaritan has become one of the most famous stories among all of Jesus’ teachings. Indeed, many people now only know the name of the Samaritans because of Jesus’ story from the Gospel of Luke; the parable even inspired the name of a charity in the […]