Author: Stewart Moore

I don’t mean to pick on the Hebrew Bible. It’s just that it’s so much bigger than the New Testament, with so many more voices narrating so many more events. It’s no surprise that we’ve found so many contradictions, and there are more to come. You’d think that with four different accounts of Jesus’s life…

Joel Baden, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) Today we’ll wrap up talking about those particular sorts of biblical contradictions generated when two texts have been combined into one by weaving the original sources together, sentence by sentence. We’ll do it by talking about a book…

If you’re getting tired of color-coded chapters of the Bible, I have good news: this is the last one we’ll do. There are very few other passages where two sources have been interwoven verse by verse (the parting of the Re(e)d Sea is one), and all of them are accomplished so artfully that they do…

Today’s biblical contradiction comes from the Joseph story in Genesis. It’s a tale of enslavement and dreams of freedom, but it begins with a contradiction that’s practically hallucinatory. The passage we’re looking at is Genesis 37:18-36, 39:1. Joseph is the youngest of Jacob/Israel’s sons, and he has dreams that all his family will bow down…

Today we’re getting intertestamental. This contradiction involves one text from the New Testament and one text from the Hebrew Bible. There’s an obvious objection to this sort of thing: since they’re from completely different contexts, they’re probably talking about completely different subjects, so how can they be sufficiently related to contradict each other? Of course,…

Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Nicholas Frankel. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press,  2011 [1890]). Robert W. Chambers. The King in Yellow. (London: Pushkin Press, 2017 [1895]). [This edition is out of print, but there are dozens of others available.] The first of these two books was a major omission on my part…

Today’s biblical contradiction results from a process much like that which produced the Noah story: two independent versions have been edited together. Unlike the Noah story, the discordances between the two versions are so great that a third voice, the editor’s voice, intrudes to smooth things over. David is such an important character in the…

At a recent scifi and fantasy writers’ critique group I was in, one of my fellow authors used Cleopatra as a character. If you’re a writer, I highly encourage you to do this; Cleopatra was an incredibly fascinating person. In this story, Cleopatra was mentioned to be dark-skinned. Based on my work on my dissertation,…

Today’s biblical contradiction involves an infamous text–or a famous one, if you’re a sexist. Today we pull no punches. In dealing with previous passages, I’ve often suggested that the essence of a paradox is that we cannot choose between them. Today is different. Today it is necessary to take a stand. In the immortal words…

Amanda H. Podany. Weavers, Scribes and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Like Deirdre in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Amanda Podany can take a pile of receipts and read vivid, compelling stories of real people’s lives. In this case, the receipts are made from clay…