Against the background of the often female-focused view of sexual abuse victims, this paper addresses the issue of male-identifying victims of sexual violence through the lens of the Bible. I tackle one particular form of sexual abuse: female-on-male sexual violence, of the “forced/made to penetrate” type through a re-reading of Genesis 19:…[Read more]

In Judges 19, the Levite from Ephraim, together with his concubine, on their journey back home pass by Jebus and refuse to stay in the hometown of the Jebusites, remarking that “we will not stop at a foreign city where there are no Israelites” (Judges 19:12). It is an ironic comment made as it is precisely within the city of Israelites in Gib…[Read more]

Casebolt’s book, Child of the Apocalypse: Ellen White, brings a new hypothe-sis to the field of Ellen White studies by claiming that twelve-year-old Ellen Harmon was not consciously prevaricating but was consistently wrong and deluded in an objectively clinical sense. While other Ellen White critics have doubted her genuineness and t…[Read more]

It seems a legitimate question whether this autobiographical book merits a review in Spes Christiana. It was written by an academic but that, in itself, does not mean that the book can be classified as “academic.” Nonetheless, I believe the book is of real interest to historians of Adventism – not primarily because of author’s role in recent…[Read more]

Writing Adventist history from an organizational and formal perspective is very ambitious. In general Protestant mission texts, this is a rarity. In Adventist circles, I have not come across any attempt to write a monograph about the involvement of the General Conference and its secretariat in the Christian missionary enterprise. Perhaps Barry…[Read more]

Mark Young has written an important book on the centrality of the gospel for the future of theological education in evangelicalism in the United States. The book was published in January 2022 by Eerdmans. It contains three major sections, the first entitled ‘what matters,’ the second ‘past matters’ and the third ‘future matters.’ The book is wel…[Read more]

There is not a plethora of books in the area of biblical studies dedicated exclu-sively to the topic of the Satan, and even among those that have recently emerged, most simply serve as a recapitulation of the available information. Ryan Stokes’ new monograph however changes this, boldly suggesting a new hypothesis regarding the meaning of the w…[Read more]

Groups and individuals known as “elders” (Greek: presbyteros, gerousia; Hebrew: zaqan) are often found in ancient Jewish texts and inscriptions. Their ubiquity in such texts and inscriptions is accompanied by very little information about their actual function. Generally, this may be because we have some kind of impression that a group of old…[Read more]

Rufus’s mother features in Paul’s concluding list of church leaders such as Phoebe in Romans 16. Paul calls her his own mother. I argue that Rufus’s mother’s inclusion indicates higher status and influence within the Pauline house-churches, building on Elmer’s notion of corporate Pauline authorship.

The Woman clothed with the Sun makes a brief appearance in Revelation 12; however, her influence upon the imaginations of artists and interpreters is substantive. She is unnamed and yet multiple identities are ascribed to her including individual women (Eve, Mary), corporate institutions (Israel, the church), and ancient goddesses. In this…[Read more]

Americans overwhelmingly assume that Moses married a Black woman. Using sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article highlights interpretations of Moses’s marriage to the Cushite woman in Numbers 12. Utilising cultural-critical reception history—that biblical interpretation is culturally conditioned—readers in the United State…[Read more]

Typically, the cupbearer in Genesis 40–41 is interpreted only as a member of Joseph’s supporting cast. However, closely reading this minor character suggests more options for interpreting both him and other anonymous courtiers found throughout the Hebrew Bible. The cupbearer’s actions (and inactions) raise ethical and psychological questions about…[Read more]

This article suggests that in Ezekiel 13:17–23 we have an example of the ritual activities of Yahwistic women being undermined. However, rather than opening the hermeneutical crux of attempting to understand what it is the women are doing or how their ritual activity is functioning, I will focus squarely on the broader social dynamics in the t…[Read more]

Is anonymity a form of violence? The woman of Judges 19 endured gang-rape and dismemberment, and neither the Bible nor its ancient exegetes gave her a name. This article surveys the modern writers and scholars who chose new names for her, examining how their choices of names reflected their broader goals for retelling her story. From there, I turn…[Read more]

Editorial preface