Scriptural Works

The book of Nahum is one of the most neglected texts in the Bible. The Revised Common Lectionary never reads it, the Roman Catholic lectionary uses it once on a weekday, and many commentators have dismissed it as a dangerous book with a violent, vengeful God and perhaps a false prophet. Fr. Dr. Jacob Onyumbe, a Congolese priest and professor of Hebrew and Scripture who grew up amid decades of war in eastern Congo, challenges that verdict. He argues that Nahum is not a gloating celebration of Nineveh’s fall in 612 BC. It is lyric poetry shaped by trauma, best read against Sennacherib’s destruction of Lachish in 701 BC. Bringing together poetic analysis, the Lachish reliefs and Assyrian royal propaganda, ancient Near Eastern city laments, trauma theory, and his own interviews with war survivors in Goma and Bukavu, he shows how the book’s graphic violence works as an indirect lament for Judah’s lost cities.

That reframing changes how the theology of Nahum reads. God is not urging Judah toward military revenge. God is the guarantor of hope against an empire that celebrated its own brutality, the one who ensures the perpetrators will not have the last word. Onyumbe also explains how Nahum reworks the oracle against the nations, how collective memory carries violence across generations, why parallels between ancient Judah and the eastern Congo must illuminate rather than flatten each other, and how a contextual biblical hermeneutics of reconciliation can serve communities divided by war. This episode offers a clear way to read, teach, and preach Nahum in its historical context, while recovering a prophet whose words still speak to people who live after violence.

Book: Piles of Slain, Heaps of Corpses: Reading Prophetic Poetry and Violence in African Context: https://www.amazon.com/Piles-Slain-Heaps-Corpses-Prophetic/dp/1725268310/ref=sr_1_1
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How did Assyria and Babylon shape the seventh-century prophets? Most readers picture Judah under Assyria as a broken vassal waiting for the end. Dr. Nathan Lovell, senior lecturer in Old Testament and Hebrew at George Whitefield College in Cape Town, South Africa, tells a more complicated story. Imperial roads, trade networks, and tribute brought real prosperity to Judah under Manasseh, along with the social inequality the prophets condemn. Kings gives Manasseh's 55-year reign barely twenty verses, every one of them damning. Lovell reframes Isaiah's Immanuel sign as a claim about divine presence under empire, not a riddle about which child it names. He also reads Hezekiah's standoff with Sennacherib in 701 BC as a choice between covenant and Assyrian peace, and he asks why Josiah, the most faithful king in Kings, dies so abruptly at Megiddo as Assyria collapses and Babylon rises to take its place.

That historical context changes how the seventh-century prophets read. Lovell shows how Kings functions as literature for a traumatized community, using the remnant to give exiles an identity once land, temple, and Davidic king were gone. He sets Kings beside Chronicles, written under Persian rule, to show how each book shapes Israel's memory for its own audience (only Chronicles lets Manasseh repent), and he explains why Jeremiah and Ezekiel begin to speak of a new covenant after Josiah's reforms fail. For pastors, priests, seminarians, lay leaders, and Bible teachers, this is the essential background for preaching and teaching Isaiah, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Nahum, and Zephaniah, and for tracing the question that drives Israel's literature from Assyria through Babylon and Persia: how does a conquered people keep its covenant identity under empire?

CV: https://www.gwc.ac.za/about-us/faculty/dr-nathan-lovell

What happens when Paul’s defense before King Agrippa in Acts 26 is read alongside Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Apology? New Testament scholar Jihye Yu examines the Greco-Roman rhetorical world behind Luke-Acts, arguing that Paul’s speech is forensic in form but reaches beyond legal defense toward persuasion, witness, and theological interpretation. The conversation explores ethos, divine commissioning, Paul’s Damascus Road account, Agrippa’s response, and the striking phrase “kicking against the goads,” which carries wider Greek literary resonance. Yu shows how Luke reshapes the courtroom scene so that the question is not simply whether Paul is innocent, but whether his mission, resurrection message, and appeal to Israel’s hope are credible—and how the audience will respond. The comparison with Socrates highlights how Luke presents Paul as a public witness under accusation.

The discussion then widens to Yu’s research on ancient biography, Gospel genre, and cultural memory. She explains why identifying Matthew and Luke as ancient biographies does not settle how they relate to history, since Greco-Roman biography ranged from historically oriented lives to more imaginative narratives. Yu also connects cultural memory in Deuteronomy with Gospel formation, showing how communities preserve, interpret, and transmit traditions for new settings. Throughout, she argues that the New Testament must be read within both its Jewish scriptural world and its Greco-Roman literary environment. The result is a richer understanding of Acts 26, Luke-Acts, Gospel composition, rhetoric, memory, and the literary sophistication of early Christian texts, with implications for how pastors, teachers, students, and scholars read the Gospels and Acts.

JGRCHJ: https://jgrchj.net/volume21/JGRChJ21.4Yu104-29.pdf

1 John has been read for decades as a window into one crisis: a Johannine community splitting apart over secession, docetism, and rival claims to truth. Dr. Ahreum Kim's work on the letter's Greco-Roman background argues that reading misses the letter's real target. The "conquering the world" and victory language running through 1 John draws directly on Νίκη, the goddess whose image, a six-foot statue in the hand of Zeus at Olympia and winged figures on the Arch of Titus, was inescapable across the Greco-Roman world. πίστις, usually flattened to "faith," carried the sense of loyalty owed to an emperor styled as a divine son. Read this way, 1 John's opponents are not simply a rival faction inside the church; they are the pull of an entire culture.

That shift matters past the seminar room. "Perfect love casts out fear" stops sounding like devotional comfort once you know Plutarch and Cicero both wrote essays on the anxiety of divine judgment gripping ordinary people; the verse answers that fear directly, not the Hebrew Bible's fear of the Lord. "Keep yourselves from idols," the letter's abrupt final line, turns out to be literal instruction, not a stray metaphor, and the Cain material in chapter three reads as a warning against real violence inside families and communities under pressure to conform. For anyone teaching or preaching 1 John, the payoff is concrete: a sharper account of what the letter is actually defending its audience against, and, as Kim argues, a modern equivalent hiding in plain sight: the smartphone. It's a case study in how much biblical interpretation depends on historical context.

Conquering the World: The Countercultural Victory of First John in Greco-Roman Context (LTNS 689): https://www.amazon.com/Countercultural-Victory-John-Greco-Roman-Context/dp/0567712079/ref=sr_1_1

1 John says God is love, but the letter spends most of its energy on who counts as a neighbor and what love actually requires of you. Dr. Jamal-Dominique Hopkins, a Dead Sea Scrolls specialist trained and author of the forthcoming commentary on 1-3 John in the Word and Spirit Commentary series, argues that Qumran's sectarian writings give this question its sharpest historical context. The Rule of the Community, the War Scroll, and 4QMMT all use language John's community would have recognized: a we group instructing a you group not to become a they group, sons of light against sons of darkness, a remnant marked by the spirit of truth rather than the spirit of deceit. Reading the epistles against that backdrop exposes how deliberately John's language of love and fellowship is drawing boundaries and crossing them at once.

Hopkins traces that tension through all three letters together rather than in isolation: 1 John's insistence that love is action and righteous justice, not sentiment; 2 John's puzzling elect lady and its early hint of a leadership question the church still argues about; and 3 John's public rebuke of Gaius against the model hospitality of Demetrius, read as Gentile believers learning to welcome Jewish outsiders, a reversal of the usual Dead Sea Scrolls pattern. He connects that reconciling impulse to his own formation in the Church of God in Christ and the Azusa Street Revival, where the Holy Spirit dissolved racial lines few institutions of the era would touch. For pastors, priests, seminarians, lay leaders, and Bible teachers preparing to preach or teach the Johannine epistles, this conversation recovers 1, 2, and 3 John as neglected, urgent texts about hospitality, diversity, and community.

Profile: https://truettseminary.baylor.edu/person/jamal-dominique-hopkins-phd