Posts by Julia Blum

ISHMAEL In previous years, when the High Holy Days arrived, I would stop the series I was writing, in order to publish posts about the holidays. This year will be different, with my “Isaac and Ishmael” series: I can’t imagine a more fitting season to write about Isaac and Ishmael than during Rosh Hashanah (רֹאשׁ […]

Sarah’s Plan  Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. And she had an Egyptian maidservant whose name was Hagar.[1] From this opening sentence, one can already guess that since Hagar first appears within the context of Sarah’s barrenness, the girl will have something to do with childbearing. We don’t know anything about Hagar’s […]

A painful decision  We continue with our dramatic story and move on to Sarah’s[1] part now. Remarkably,   the first thing we learn about Sarah is  the fact  of her barrenness (repeated twice):   But Sarai was barren; she had no child.[2] This short note occurs even before Abraham is told to go out of Haran, and […]

A “Perfect” Solution  Last time, we saw Abraham receiving the wonderful promise of God in Genesis 15. Thus, by chapter 16, where the story of Hagar and Ishmael begins, we already know two main things about Abraham: his faith in God, and his desire to have a child. Not only do these two things define […]

  AN AMAZING JOURNEY A few years ago, I started writing a book on Isaac and Ishmael—started reluctantly, responding to someone’s request, not altogether convinced that I was the right person to do it. There are so many people, I thought, who would be much more qualified to write about Ishmael and the Arab people. […]

We are back to our   discussion of the Book of Enoch   and of  the amazing parallels between this book and the Gospels.  We have seen already that “when we use Enoch as a context for the New Testament, many early Christian ideas come into a much clearer focus, and many of the gaps in the […]

WHAT IS TISHA B’AV? My dear readers, with all my excitement about the Son of Man and the importance of this topic, with all my desire to show you the amazing parallels between the book of Enoch and the Gospels, I do need to pause and write about this special day in the Jewish calendar […]

  SIMILITUDES By now we know that the Book of Daniel was one of the earliest apocalypses ever written and also one of the most influential. “Whenever in later works ‘that son of man’, ‘this son of man’ or ‘the son of man’ is mentioned, it is the quotation from Daniel.”[1] The later apocalyptic writings […]

A LESSON FROM SEMIOTICS We already know that “the Jesus folk were not alone on the Jewish scene”[1]. For the last several weeks, we’ve been trying to grasp the ideas and the concepts that were alive on this scene in this  time  – in order to be able to read the New Testament texts  through […]

TIKKUN OLAM AND THE REVERSAL OF EVIL Following the wonderful study of Dr. Michael Heiser[1], we have seen that Second Temple Judaism understood Genesis 6:1-4 not only as the story of a supernatural rebellion, but as one of the central passages in biblical theology. We have seen that this passage significantly influenced the New Testament […]