March-May 2013
"He [Jesus] is making a claim, a claim to be the one in and through whom Israel's god is restoring his people. The claim is highly controversial. It points, within his own teaching, to a final clash with the authorities, who will wish him dead and act on that wish. Like any good jew, he believes that if he faces this, in obedience to the divine plan, he will be vindicated. And the word for that is 'resurrection'."
-- N.T. Wright
February 2013
"What gets overlooked in this approach is that Job's wife is the one who recognizes, long before Job himself does, what is at stake theologically in innocent suffering: the conflict between innocence and integrity, on the one hand, and an affirmation of the goodness of God, on the other. It is the issue with which Job will struggle in the following chapters."
--Carol A. Newsom
January 2013
"So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless."
-- Victor Hugo
Nineteenth Dynasty 