“Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate.” So ran the solemn advice of one Horace Fletcher, the 1920s food faddist and evangelist for the idea that we should chew our food to a liquefied pulp ...

Like Proverbs, the Book of Ecclesiastes belongs to the category of wisdom literature, a description of which was given by the present writer in CHRISTIANITY TODAY (Oct. 26, 1959). The interested ...

Robert Alter’s ongoing translation of the Hebrew Bible into a new, more accurate and forceful English version is one of the most ambitious literary projects of this or any age. Turning the Bible into ...

This month, Robert Alter publishes a new translation of three Biblical books in “The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary.” Alter, a Hebrew literature scholar ...

Proverbs belongs to the so-called wisdom literature of the Old Testament and cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of this literary genre. In some measure wisdom is found amongst all ...

You know more of the Bible than you think you do, I often remark to my students. Phrases such as “As a dog returns to its own vomit” or “spare the rod and spoil the child” are well-known in English as ...

Unfortunately for the powerful, the plight of the biblical Job is a story with perennial resonance. A man seemingly rich in the gifts life has to offer, happy and blessed, finds himself — unjustly, ...

Sigmund Freud apparently never wrestled with Job or the Preacher of Ecclesiastes when he formulated his famous critique of religion in "The Future of an Illusion." Otherwise, the founder of ...

Tonight I’m attending a new support group for Christians who want to be better stewards of our money. This fall we’ll be reading from Mark Scandrette’s book Free: Spending Your Time and Money on What ...

Joel Baden (@joelbaden) is professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School. Marco Rubio had a message for his nearly 3 million Twitter followers on the morning of June 26: “As dogs return to their ...