The forced migrations in the eighth-sixth centuries BCE stimulated Israelite prophets, poets, and storytellers to find metaphors for the horrors of those recurring experiences. The surviving texts also show a concerted effort to visualize return and renewal, especially via metaphors of the renewal of nature, the revival of agriculture, urban reconstruction, and renewal of the temple cult, family, and (limitedly) kingship. The biblical texts, especially in the prophets, blend these metaphors to create theologically rich visions of human flourishing. As such, the texts in question provide important raw material for contemporary movements for renewal.

Although subject, time, place, and characters differ in these three texts, many of the plotlines and themes that appear in the narrative that addresses Tamar (Gen. 38) reappear in the narrative addressing Abigail (1 Sam. 25), and then also reappear in the book of Esther. This article points out those matters showing how this really is a thrice-told tale.

I defend an interpretation of Jesus’s ethics of wealth according to which possession of wealth beyond what is required to satisfy minimal daily needs conflicts with the central commandment to love God with all one’s heart. On Jesus’s view, possession of (surplus) wealth inevitably leads to love of wealth – “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Accordingly, Jesus lays down a set of principles regarding wealth that, if followed, will quickly lead to the loss of at least most of one’s wealth. I defend this interpretation against some commentators who argue that Jesus’s more demanding statements about wealth are hyperbolic. Finally, I draw on contemporary work in psychology to show that Jesus’s principle that “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” captures important truths to which everyone – Christian or not – should pay careful attention.

In their most recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender , Judith Butler documents how gender has become the phantasm that has ignited the deeply divisive “culture wars.” Butler concludes that there needs to be two responses: 1) to recognize that meaning is always open and occurs only in context, and 2) to form intersectional coalitions in order to find common ground to counter dangerous, fascist, and eventually fatal ideologies. This essay provides an example of biblical untranslatability with Matthew 5:22 and the word raka , and offers glimpses into powerful coalitions that have already begun; this essay interprets Jesus in ways that counter oppressive hierarchies, and recognizes the boundary-dissolving, binary-blending WNBA phenomenon that has united millions of extraordinarily diverse people.

This essay brings the nascent field of dehumanization studies into conversation with an uncomfortable moment of dehumanization in the early Christian movement: namely, Jesus Christ’s animalization of a Canaanite woman and her gentile kin as “dogs” (Matt 15:26–27). Recent scholarship on human animalization has shown that dehumanizing animal metaphors have an uncanny ability to hijack humans’ moral inhibitions against killing one another. Too often, animal metaphors have been wielded to legitimate structural and direct violence against the oppressed, including serving as a precursor for enslavement and genocide. In the context of the United States, animal metaphors thrive in Donald Trump’s fascist politics and far-right MAGA movement to scapegoat and essentialize immigrants as subhuman creatures. Disturbingly, this anti-immigrant foment is especially pervasive among adherents of White Christian nationalism. To confront this moment of democratic backsliding and Christian power worship, this essay brings recent scholarship from dehumanization studies into conversation with animal metaphors in Greco-Roman antiquity and Trump’s fascist politics. This background is then brought to bear on Jesus’ confrontation with the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:21-28. The essay concludes with reflections on how Jesus’ changed mind and benefaction toward the woman’s daughter undermines White Christian nationalists’ nativist and dominionist interpretation of Matthew’s Great Commission.