Mike Blogs

Hannah had yearned for a child to love, and to take away her shame of childlessness, so common a problem in village cultures, ancient and modern. She poured out her heart before God and was overheard by Eli the priest at the worship center of Shiloh. God heard that prayer, and it was granted. Hannah had a son. Significantly, she named him Samuel meaning ‘I have asked him of God’ or ‘I have borrowed him from God’.   In her prayer, she promised that, if she had a son, she would

Hannah (Grace) and her husband Elkanah are making their annual visit to Shiloh to worship YHWH, the Lord God Almighty, and to make sacrifices. Shiloh was a major religious site during the time of the judges and before the time of the kings. For a while, it was the home of the Tabernacle (the tent that Moses used during the Wilderness Wanderings) and the Ark of the Covenant. Later, King David conquered the remaining Canaanites (Jebusites, actually) who held Jerusalem. Then Dav

Turn the page on the Book of Ruth and you will find yourself on page one of the Book of I Samuel. That book begins with an...

And so, Ruth and Boaz were married and lived happily ever after. Hah! Like that’s ever gonna happen!  We can presume that they were...

Boaz was an honorable man, a God-fearing man. From a lifetime of devotion to God and through following the practices prescribed by the...

The next event in the Naomi and Ruth story reveals again just how far removed their time is from ours. Some people think that we can just...

Ruth went to work, and “as it happened” she joined the gleaners in the field of a rich relative of Naomi’s husband. The man’s name was...

“ As it happened,” that’s what the text says (Ruth 2:3). Ruth went out to glean barley in order to provide some food and income for her...

If the Book of Judges was written to show how ruthless life in Israel could be without a king, then the sinful Israelites certainly...

The Book of Judges ends with a terrible story about a village within the tribal allotment of the Benjamin where the men demanded that a...

After Jephthah was given a victory by God, he rashly made a promise to offer as a sacrifice to God the first thing to come out of his...

This is a difficult story. The distance between our culture and the culture of the Israelites and surrounding people during the period of...

Read Judges Chapter 5. It is a psalm, that is, a song. The psalms were written to be sung or chanted back and forth by the worship leader...

You know the story of the children of Israel; God broke them out of captivity in Egypt through the work of Moses. There was the...

I said that we were ready to leave the Pentateuch in our survey of women with a story to tell, but I missed an important group (which, to...

God’s interest in socially marginalized people, especially widows, is clear throughout the Old Testament. I presented passages to this...

Before we leave the Pentateuch, that is, the first five books of the Bible (called in Swedish Mosesbuk 1, Mosesbuk 2, etc.), I have...

And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, for the rest of the story.   “ Then she let them down by a rope through the window, for her house...

The previous story of Tamar was a difficult read for modern Christians. The key points from the Bible’s perspective are that Judah left...

Dinah was a woman with a story to tell, but the biblical text never told that story. By contrast, Tamar is a woman with a story to tell,...