Genesis 10 The descendants of Noah’s son Ham are listed in what is commonly called the Table of Nations, the Israelites’ oldest catalog of the peoples of the ancient Near East. While it is difficult to identify with certainty where many of these peoples lived, generally they are believed to have been located as shown […]
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Places Referenced by Trees in the Bible
When modern readers encounter a verse in Scripture that references a “great tree” to locate where an event took place, there is a good chance they will dismiss it as somewhat irrelevant to the significance of the passage. But for the original audience of Scripture, these tangible references provided a very real connection to the […]
Deborah and Barak Defeat Sisera
Judges 4-5 The story of the victory of Deborah and Barak over Jabin and Sisera is well known, and the location of the battle is clear. Less clear, however, are the locations of other places mentioned in the story, but the context of the story and Joshua’s descriptions of Israel’s tribal boundaries (Joshua 19) enable […]
Jehu Executes Judgment
2 Kings 9-10 More than two centuries before the prophet Habakkuk struggled to understand how God could use the wicked Babylonians to accomplish his good purposes (Habakkuk 1), a man named Jehu rose to power over Israel and carried out deeds that were similarly God-ordained yet incredibly brutal. We first hear of Jehu while the […]
The First Jewish War against Rome
Much like the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 B.C., the ill-fated Jewish war against the Romans from A.D. 66-73 became a defining event in the history of Israel, and it affected the nascent Christian church as well. Tensions between Jews and Romans had run deep ever since Pompey first seized the land […]