How to Read the Bible

Thus the Temple must on occasion be ritually purified.

Here the Priestly conception seems to assume that the Temple absorbs different types of impurities at different loci.

Contemporary Hebrew is not a reliable source for understanding the biblical idiom; too much time has passed-the language has evolved meanwhile.

On merisms, see Luis Alonso Schokel, A Manual of Hebrew Poetics (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1988),

Unfortunately, we can no longer know which laws recorded in the Laws of Hammurabi were real, and which were ideal-there is no textual distinction

encouragement-it might seem impossible for the promise to be fulfilled, yet the promise is renewed time after time.

the biblical authors understood all law as divine law11

Rather, all biblical texts changed during their transmission. They were updated, expanded, and made to fit their broader context.21

Prophetic literature and Psalms offer many opportunities to encourage the people to emulate their ancestors, but this is never done once, implying that they were not viewed as role models in the biblical period.In