A great🧵 One day somebody’s going to write a PhD on Charlie Kirk’s funeral as the consummation of American evangelical syncretism. Like, there’s so much text and sub-text here. Just deeply disturbing.

Brilliant #MinuteCryptic today for this religious space lover: "Religious space cosmonaut struggling with lack of oxygen" (7) www.minutecryptic.com?utm_source=s...

just hit Amos 8. two things to note 🪔 1. there's a pun on the word translated "summer fruit", because it sounds like the word for "end". it's קיץ and קץ. Yhwh shows Amos the basket of קיץ and says the קץ is coming. I like how the NIV tries its own pun - here's some ripe fruit; the time is ripe.

hadn't come across the verb נטף before today. it is in parallel to נבא (to prophesy) in Amos 7:16, but HALOT tells us the base meaning is about dripping, so they conclude that in the Hiphil it must mean something like ecstatic prophesying, foaming at the mouth etc. it seems a little dramatic but 🤷‍♂️

Two blogs in two weeks?! What's going on here?! This time, on how Psalm 33 continues Psalm 32 👀. (At least, that's the trashy clickbait.) Simply put, 32:11 is restated in 33:1. Almost as if we were supposed to read them as one... Have a look! duck5.blogspot.com/2025/09/psal... 🪔📜 #chiasm #psalms

Stoked to smash 23 mins yesterday at #Parkrun. Think I can retire now and/or become a professional trainer.

In Amos 6 at the moment. 3 quick things which stood out: 1. Amos is not a fan of David. He pictures him as this bloke strumming away on his harp while the world burns. (6:5-6) 2. There's an interesting phrase in this context: ”וַעֲגָלִים מִתּוֹךְ מַרְבֵּק“ (6:4) - calves from the midst of the stall.

Quote post with an album you'd rate a perfect 10 out of 10.

Liebe deutsche/Schweizer Bibelwissenschaftskolleg:innen: Ich suche jemanden vielleicht auf der fortgeschrittenen PostDoc-Stufe, der/die als Spezialgebiet Qumrantexte hat? Für eine kleine Fortbildung für Neutestamentler:innen. Meine Recherche/Anfragen waren nicht sonderlich erfolgreich bis jetzt.

Had a charming zoom meeting with someone in the US who contacted me after reading my Ecclesiastes research and is thinking about building on it. So encouraging to hear it's opened up Ecclesiastes for him and he now can't see it any other way (pun intended, for those who have read the book 😉)!

Some of the most remarkable lost artefacts from the ancient world were the titanic wrecks of the Nemi ships, built for a Roman emperor. In their first-century heyday they held gardens, palaces and baths in a floating wonderland. But barely a decade after their recovery, they were lost forever.

Where are we up to in terms of translating ἀδελφοί μου as "my dudes"?

Happy Chiasm Monday! I have not blogged since last year. I had a bit too much to say on Amos 5:21-27 to turn into a post so blogged instead. Have a read if you enjoy chiasms and sweet biblical Hebrew structures. #chiasm 🪔 duck5.blogspot.com/2025/09/amos...

Stay tuned for the collision of three protest marches and the marathon in Sydney tomorrow. 35,000 runners, a pro-Australia march, a pro-Palestine march, and a pro-refugee march, all converging within a few square hundred metres of each other. (Link to video in alt text)

Engaging Fellowship of Biblical Studies lecture today on Archaeology in the Study of Early Israel. The main take away was don’t listen to anyone who says their discipline has all the answers. 🪔📜

I’ve been an Essendon supporter since before I was born, but there’s a special kind of masochism that would enable me to watch the rest of this game. Until next season!

This is not the first time I’ve heard of this and similar dodgy uses. I keep being told by AI truthers that there are good uses of AI but this certainly ain’t it.

Thanks to @joshuaalfaro.bsky.social I've been able to read through Jerome's comments on Psalm 90 (Lat:89). He says some fascinating things. 1. Psalm 90 being a psalm of Moses means all the following psalms are Moses', until another psalm comes along with a different author (101 is David's).

The enttäuschung when I find a potentially wonderful article (with a title in English) only to find it's in modern Hebrew and I can't read a flipping word. Yes I'm talking about you E Fleischer author of "Eretz-Israel Prayer and Prayer Rituals as Portrayed in the Geniza Documents"

I've been thinking about my preaching program for next year. I tend to do: term 1: Gospel term 2: OT term 3: doctrine term 4: NT epistle So for 2026: Luke (this will be my fourth year crawling through it at paragraph-pace) Zechariah Church 2 Timothy I'll also sneak in 4 weeks on Ruth

I've spent today looking up Hebrew Psalms Codices and I've learned a couple of things. 🪔 1. I'm really bad at searching for them. They are all catalogued differently. 2. There doesn't seem to be a rule on whether the "books" of the psalms are acknowledged or not. It's random.

What GIF pops up when you type your username in? Unsurprisingly.

I'm having so much trouble finding what Jerome actually said about the Psalms. Schaff NPNF2 for instance just has a summary of Ep. CXL to Cyprian, but that summary sounds at odds with what I've read elsewhere about him. Then I found what I thought was him but it is a commentary on his commentary?!

I'm enjoying trying to figure out why they combined various psalms together. Kennicott 245 has: - 90:1-16 - 90:17-91:16 - 96-97 - and probably 103-104

Don't they say English is just French plus German times Norse or something? Trying to read this French article but I'm not sure where to add the German to turn it into English. Something about rotating psalms in the Hebrew tradition?! LA NUMÉROTATION DES PSAUMES DANS LA TRADITION HÉBRAÏQUE

If AI really was that intelligent, it would have surely learned that I will never accept its offer to summarise this pdf and would stop asking me.

[Insert "that escalated quickly" meme] MT: “because they have threshed Gilead with threshing sledges of iron.” LXX: “because they were sawing pregnant women in Galaad asunder with iron saws.” (Amos 1:3)

Trying to get my head around Saadia Gaon is not helped by everyone deciding to spell his name differently. Sa'adiyah, Se'adyah, Sa'adia, RaSaG, and probably a few others besides. Apparently he both minimised the significance of the psalms but also would have us re-interpret them as prophecy?

Some wonderful tidbits in this book, such as the Babylonian prayer bowl which intersperses the words of the Shema' with the words of Psalm 91:1 as follows: שׁמע יושׁב ישׂראל בסתר ה׳ עליון אלהינו בצל ה׳ שׁדי אחד יתלונן 🪔

It baffles me that @australianlabor.bsky.social wants to hang this failed, unfair policy around its neck, when they could condemn it as a folly of the unpopular Morrison government and ditch it. Sign our petition to urge them to abolish it now! www.openpetition.org/au/petition/...

Tuesdays work much better for me. I'd love to get some Saturdays back pls.

Don't want to boast but I worked out how to remap my (very unwanted) copilot key to ctrl.

This but for two days.

sounds about right

Shout out to the librarians at Bun-Gurion University of the Negev! Emailed me a scanned book chapter within 10 minutes of requesting it via Sydney University.

A pox on UPenn Press and your stinking endnotes. Otherwise I’m enjoying Berkovitz, “A Life of Psalms in Late Antiquity” But again, endnotes?!

I promise I don't spend my life searching out chiastic/envelope structures. But here's Romans 2:6-11

Wait there were other animals? 😮 Gen 9:10 מכל יצאי התבה לכל חית הארץ From all [the animals] who came out from the ark To all [the animals] of the earth

Up to Genesis 9:6. A beautiful and assonant chiasm to begin: שפך דם האדם באדם דםו ישפך Followed by a profound statement of theological anthropology: כי בצלם אלהים עשה את האדם

Chuckled when I got this one. Really fun clue. Minute Cryptic - 20 July, 2025 "Drinker’s release from prison initiated after back massage" (4) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 I scored: 3 under par www.minutecryptic.com?utm_source=s...

Really enjoying Barth on the end of Romans 1: “Hat Gott seine Herrlichkeit verloren, so verliert sie auch der Mensch.“ The thought is, if it’s God who has given us our honour and dignity, then as we reject him, so too do we lose what he has endowed us with.

The church I joined over summer had a number of MacArthurite refugees. They generally had good Bible knowledge but lacked genuine community and had all had issues with accountability from leadership. I'm glad they had the courage to leave and that they found a home.

“All good stories need embellishment.” - Gandalf I said something like that in an essay once - I didn’t get a great mark from memory!

Sent in a chapter today. The joys of part-time PhD and time-management (or lack thereof) means it took me 6 months to write 3 pages that I should have done before Christmas. All being well I’ll finish off the DSS part of my thesis and can move on to medieval Mss.

Of course, the problem of waiting so long to do a series on Romans means I have too much fodder to work through. I somehow keep accumulating books on and related to Romans.

Preaching through Romans for the rest of the year; I should probably start reading this bad boy. Let’s do this Karl! Oh and please don’t use any of that tricky theological German thx.

To see my skeet, please log in to my website, sign up to my newsletter, disable your ad-blocker, and allow cookies. And enjoy the pop-ups while you're here. Oh, and those x's in the corner are a trap.

💯 this. Just tell me what the article is about. If I think it’s click bait, I don’t click.

Today I completed #Parkrun #50 which also happened to be #25 at my favourite local, Wentworth Common Parkrun. And topped it off with a PB - pretty chuffed for this ageing man to get 23:24. A wonderful team of volunteers and a really friendly community. Obligatory completion photo:

I'm glad everyone has got the memo that if you go to Japan you must bring me back a bottle of scotch.