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Psalm 27 is strikingly parallel to the famous 23rd Psalm: a testimony of personal trust in Yahweh, launched by a very direct metaphor and a possessive: “Yahweh is my light,” but then extended differently: “and my salvation… my strength.” The 15th-century illuminated manuscript called The Visconti Hours illustrates this Psalm with a picture of King David kneeling before the Lord, pointing dramatically to his eye. This probably means that the Lord is David’s light, by which he perceives. But it may also evoke the beloved verse four, which has a reference to sight: One thing have I asked of the Lord,that will I seek after:that I may dwell in the house of the Lordall the days of my life,to gaze upon the beauty of the Lordand to inquire in his temple. When I study the Psalms, I love to work my way through a…

George Muller (1805-1898) was a 19th-century pastor famous for trusting God to meet his daily needs, even when his daily needs grew to include caring for thousand of orphans. His life story has been told many times, but the classic version, approved by his family, was written by A. T. Pierson (1837-1911), himself an important figure and the subject of a recent biography. Pierson’s biography of Muller doesn’t just report the dramatic events and miraculous occurrences in Muller’s life —though there were plenty of both, and they do show up in the book. But Pierson has an eye for real life, and for the daily grind that forms the horizon against which such dramatic events occur. So he gathers a host of details, reporting all the little events and influences that formed the life of Muller. Along the way, Pierson interjects this little meditation on how the…

For penetrating insight into the character of Old Testament revelation, there are few scholars of the caliber of Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889). Edersheim was a Viennese-born Jew who converted to Christianity under the ministry of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries, and he turned that unique formative experience into the basis for a scholarly career: He is most famous for writing massive books on the Hebrew cultural background of the New Testament. Scholarship has made appreciable strides since the days of Edersheim, but his heavy tomes are still hard to beat if you’re looking for a readable presentation of all those details that make up the background of the Bible. His best-selling works include The Temple: Its Ministry and Services at the Time of Jesus Christ (1874); Jewish Social Life in the Days of Christ (1876); and a 7-volume Bible History (1887). (By the way, he also published some fragmentary thoughts, all jumbled up,…

The Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) once said that a true poem would still be poetical even if you rearranged all the words in it. Or perhaps what he said was that a good poet would still be poetical even if you hacked his body to pieces. Horace seemed to think that word order was important for doggerel (his own verse, or the work of someone named Lucilius), but that a really great poet (he cites a few lines from one Ennius) could be transposed, reversed, and jumbled, and still come out recognizably poetic. Of course, he could have been joking. With Horace, there’s always the chance that he was actually making fun of people who would say that sort of thing. Through all the levels of Horatian irony, it’s hard to be certain. One thing that’s certain is that he…