Remember a time, a few years back, when the Internet, instead of arguing about masks and viruses and protesters, instead argued about a dress and whether it was white and gold or blue and black? Sigh… good times. Besides harkening to a slightly different internet age, this is an example of what psychologists call “motivated perception”—that our biases reflect how we see and interact with something—like a picture of a dress. I bring this up because it seems like there are parts of Scripture...

In the board game “The Settlers of Catan,” the object of the game is to build roads, villages, and cities faster and more efficiently than the other players to become the most powerful person on the island of Catan. A vital resource in the game is… sheep. You can’t be the lord or lady of Catan without having access to sheep. Sheep are a valuable commodity. It was no different in first century Palestine: sheep were commodities. They were kept for their wool, for their milk, and as a source of...

Ezra-Nehemiah (while we separate them into two books, in the Hebrew Bible it is a single book: Ezra) is a story of return from exile and...