The Land of Israel was not called “Palestine” in the 1st-century. The Romans referred to it as Judea and its inhabitants as “Jews” (regardless of which one of Israel’s twelve tribes they were descended from). The Jewish people referred to it as Israel and generally referred to themselves as Israelites – but also as Jews […]

Although anti-Semitism does not “begin and end with the Christian church,” for the last two-thousand years, anti-Semitism has been a primarily “Christian” phenomenon. And, while there is no doubt that Satan has had much to do with it, it wasn’t something that was a part of Egyptian, Persian, or Greek culture in the way it […]

The way that we understand the Bible is based on the idea that on the “surface” a text can only mean one thing. In Hebrew, the “surface” meaning of a text in known as a peshat. In other words, a text means what it says—whether or not it is intended literally or figuratively.