Pens With Bible Quotes

Believing this country to be a political and not a religious organisation ... the editor of the NATIONAL CITIZEN will use all her influence of voice and pen against 'Sabbath Laws', the uses of the 'Bible in School', and pre-eminently against an amendment which shall introduce 'God in the Constitution.

My heart is inditing a good matter: I speak of the things which I have made touching the king: my tongue [is] the pen of a ready writer.

This Jesus of Nazereth without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander, Caeser, Muhammad and Napoleon; without science and learning, He shed more light on matters human and divine than all philosophers and scholars combined; without the eloquence of schools, He spoke such words of life as were never spoke before or since and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of orator poet; without writing a single line, He set more pens in motion and furnished themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art and songs of praise than the whole army of great men of ancient and modern times.

So St Matthew, St Mark, St Luke, and St John, penned their Gospels for the use of the Church, the one supplying often what another omits, but yet none pretending to give an exhaustive or perfect account of all that Jesus Christ said and did, for if this had been attempted, St John tells us, “the whole world would not have contained the books that would be written” about it.

Sir Winston Churchill, one of the truly great writers ever to put pen to paper in the English language, often said that when he was stuck on a passage that just would not come out well in a draft, he would put aside the writing and pick up the King James Bible, letting its beautiful phrases and cadences wash over his mind. He would then return to drafting whatever he was working on and invariably found the correct “turn of phrase.

If the Bible is called the Good Book, it's not because its people are. Blood flows as freely through the stories as the ink through the quills that penned them.

God's justice will always be found at the end of a pen.

7 No hoary falsehood shall be a truth to me; no stifling dogma shall encramp my pen! 8 I break away from all conventions that do not lead to my earthly success and happiness.

The late Chuck Missler would often describe the sixty-six books of the Bible, penned by more than forty different people over a period of several thousand years, as a highly integrated message system from an extraterrestrial source outside of time. Like a hologram, a facet of the message is encoded on every page that, when illumined by the light of the Spirit, projects a multidimensional portrait of its divine Author and communicates his plan to redeem, reconcile, and restore the sons and daughters of Adam to the glory of their original estate in the family of God.

Though the fig tree does not bud and there is no fruit on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, 18 yet I will triumph in •Yahweh; I will rejoice in the God of my salvation!  19 Yahweh my Lord is my strength; He makes my feet like those of a deer  and enables me to walk on mountain heights! 

Never under estimate the power of words. I believe my pen may actually be the sword helping me to break through black shatter proof glass that's been standing between me and my brighter past. ~PoetQs

But about then I began to get into different trouble and more serious. You might call it doctrinal trouble. The trouble started because I began to doubt the main rock of the faith, which was that the Bible was true in every word . . . They had staked their immortal souls on the infallible truth of every pen scratch from "In the beginning" to "Amen." But I had read all of it by then, and I could see that it changed. And if it changed, how could all of it be true? For instance, there is a big difference between the old tribespeople's coldhearted ferocity against their enemies and Jesus' preaching of forgiveness and of love for your enemies.

The Bible was penned by men. The Epistles of Paul were penned by that evangelist salesman and his students, desperate to bring mystery and excitement into a quiet philosophy, turning it into a religion promising the secret of an afterlife, answers to questions that previously no one could answer. Always remember, words written by men have an agenda. Sometimes their agenda is for the better, but it's usually for the self, and that almost always leads down a dangerous path.” ~Character Mark from The Awakening, book one of The Judas Curse series.

Listen to a warning from the 1960s, sent from the pen of Jacques Ellul: “A while ago, people made the monumental error of saying that democracy, liberalism, competitive capitalism were all expressions of Christianity. Today they make the same monumental error for the benefit of socialism.”26 Let us not, in our own day, make a further monumental error by hitching Christianity to whatever political cart happens to be passing. Our grandchildren will not thank us for it.

De profeet Jeremia [...] had zo zijn bedenkingen tegen een geschreven wet: de 'pen van de schrijvers' kon de traditie door een simpele schrijffout vervalsen en een geschreven tekst kon een oppervlakkige manier van denken in de hand werken, gericht op informatie in plaats van wijsheid. In een studie over moderne joodse bewegingen stelt de vooraanstaande geleerde Chaim Soloveitchik dat de overgang van een orale traditie naar geschreven teksten kan leiden tot religieus fanatisme, doordat de lezer een onrealistische zekerheid wordt voorgespiegeld over in wezen onverwoordbare zaken.

The unity of Scripture also means we should be rid, once and for all, of this “red letter” nonsense, as if the words of Jesus are the really important verses in Scripture and carry more authority and are somehow more directly divine than other verses. An evangelical understanding of inspiration does not allow us to prize instructions in the gospel more than instructions elsewhere in Scripture. If we read about homosexuality from the pen of Paul in Romans, it has no less weight or relevance than if we read it from the lips of Jesus in Matthew. All Scripture is breathed out by God, not just the parts spoken by Jesus.

As I sat and wrote line after line in one of the stories included in this book, I thought about the guy who wrote the Koran and the guy who wrote the Christian bible ( I know it was a great many people), and admired their resilience and skill at creating stories so incredible that they not only stood the test of time, but people took them as literal and believed them to be true, and still do today. They were guys just like me, pen in hand, and a bottle of wine on the desk. Maybe the woman would come in once and awhile and say that dinner's getting cold, and how much time are you going to spend writing when the kids need to go to practice? And the only time you spend with me is when we fuck....

I found Lord Emsworth, Lady Constance, and told him the car was in readiness.’ ‘Oh, thank you, Miss Briggs. Where was he?’ ‘Down at the sty. Would there be anything furthah?’ ‘No thank you, Miss Briggs.’ As the door closed, the Duke exploded with a loud report. ‘Down at the sty!’ he cried. ‘Wouldn’t you have known it! Whenever you want him, he’s down at the sty, gazing at that pig of his, absorbed, like somebody watching a strip-tease act. It’s not wholesome for a man to worship a pig the way he does. Isn’t there something in the Bible about the Israelites worshipping a pig? No, it was a golden calf, but the principle’s the same. I tell you …’ He broke off. The door had opened again. Lord Emsworth stood on the threshold, his mild face agitated. ‘Connie, I can’t find my umbrella.’ ‘Oh, Clarence!’ said Lady Constance with the exasperation the head of the family so often aroused in her, and hustled him out towards the cupboard in the hall where, as he should have known perfectly well, his umbrella had its home. Left alone, the Duke prowled about the room for some moments, chewing his moustache and examining his surroundings with popping eyes. He opened drawers, looked at books, stared at pictures, fiddled with pens and paper-knives. He picked up a photograph of Mr Schoonmaker and thought how right he had been in comparing his head to a pumpkin. He read the letter Lady Constance had been writing. Then, having exhausted all the entertainment the room had to offer, he sat down at the desk and gave himself up to thoughts of Lord Emsworth and the Empress. Every

Many people today acquiesce in the widespread myth, devised in the late 19th century, of an epic battle between ‘scientists’ and ‘religionists’. Despite de unfortunate fact that some members of both parties perpetuate the myth by their actions today, this ‘conflict’ model has been rejected by every modern historian of science; it does not portray the historical situation. During the 16th and 17th centuries and during the Middle Ages, there was not a camp of ‘scientists’ struggling to break free of the repression of ‘religionists’; such separate camps simply did not exist as such. Popular tales of repression and conflict are at best oversimplified or exaggerated, and at worst folkloristic fabrications. Rather, the investigators of nature were themselves religious people, and many ecclesiastics were themselves investigators of nature. The connection between theological and scientific study rested in part upon the idea of the Two Books. Enunciated by St. Augustine and other early Christian writers, the concept states that God reveals Himself to human beings in two different ways – by inspiring the sacred writers to pen the Book of Scripture, and by creating the world, the Book of Nature. The world around us, no less than the Bible, is a divine message intended to be read; the perceptive reader can learn much about the Creator by studying the creation. This idea, deeply ingrained in orthodox Christianity, means that the study of the world can itself be a religious act. Robert Boyle, for example, considered his scientific inquiries to be a type of religious devotion (and thus particularly appropriate to do on Sundays) that heightens the natural philosopher’s knowledge and awareness of God through the contemplation of His creation. He described the natural philosopher as a ‘priest of nature’ whose duty it was to expound and interpret the messages written in the Book of Nature, and to gather together and give voice to all creation’s silent praise of its Creator.

Try opening it.” He was doing that as she spoke, gently twisting the acorn in its cup without any success. It didn’t unscrew, so he tried harder, and then tried to pull it, but that didn’t work either. “Try twisting the other way,” said Asta. “That would just do it up tighter,” he said, but he tried, and it worked. The thread was the opposite way. “I never seen that before,” said Malcolm. “Strange.” So neatly and finely made were the threads that he had to turn it a dozen times before the two parts fell open. There was a piece of paper inside, folded up as small as it could go: that very thin kind of paper that Bibles were printed on. Malcolm and Asta looked at each other. “This is someone else’s secret,” he said. “We ought not to read it.” He opened it all the same, very carefully so as not to tear the delicate paper, but it wasn’t delicate at all: it was tough. “Anyone might have found it,” said Asta. “He’s lucky it was us.” “Luckyish,” said Malcolm. “Anyway, he’s lucky he hadn’t got it on him when he was arrested.” Written on the paper in black ink with a very fine pen were the words: We would like you to turn your attention next to another matter. You will be aware that the existence of a Rusakov field implies the existence of a related particle, but so far such a particle has eluded us. When we try measuring one way, our substance evades it and seems to prefer another, but when we try a different way, we have no more success. A suggestion from Tokojima, although rejected out of hand by most official bodies, seems to us to hold some promise, and we would like you to inquire through the alethiometer about any connection you can discover between the Rusakov field and the phenomenon unofficially called Dust. We do not have to remind you of the danger should this research attract the attention of the other side, but please be aware that they are themselves beginning a major program of inquiry into this subject. Tread carefully. “What does it mean?” said Asta. “Something to do with a field. Like a magnetic field, I s’pose. They sound like experimental theologians.” “What d’you think they mean by ‘the other side’?” “The CCD. Bound to be, since it was them chasing the man.

The connection between theological and scientific study rested in part upon the idea of the Two Books. Enunciated by St. Augustine and other early Christian writers, the concept states that God reveals Himself to human beings in two different ways – by inspiring the sacred writers to pen the Book of Scripture, and by creating the world, the Book of Nature. The world around us, no less than the Bible, is a divine message intended to be read; the perceptive reader can learn much about the Creator by studying the creation. This idea, deeply ingrained in orthodox Christianity, means that the study of the world can itself be a religious act. Robert Boyle, for example, considered his scientific inquiries to be a type of religious devotion (and thus particularly appropriate to do on Sundays) that heightens the natural philosopher’s knowledge and awareness of God through the contemplation of His creation. He described the natural philosopher as a ‘priest of nature’ whose duty it was to expound and interpret the messages written in the Book of Nature, and to gather together and give voice to all creation’s silent praise of its Creator.

Pick a passage. You can do this randomly (my favorite method) or look up a passage that suits your concerns of the day, or go to your favorite book of the Bible. Still your mind and invite God, the Holy Spirit, or whatever you want to call the Divine, to speak to you through your reading. You can say this out loud or within. ​“Then, read the passage until a word or phrase jumps off the page. You may have to read one verse, several verses, or just a few words until this happens. Use your heart to sense it, not your mind. Don’t analyze or think, ‘Oh, I know the origin of that word, I’ll choose that one.’ Let the words do the work of jumping. ​“When the word jumps, take it into your heart. Let it work in there until you start to hear or see something. Let the words or pictures flow in your imagination. Try not to let your analytical mind hijack the flow. Let the words paint the images or realizations via the subconscious, or whatever you want to call that intuitive part of you. When the flow slows or stops, grab your journal and write. Write fluidly as if you are letting the flow continue. Don’t judge your words or ideas. That’s not your job here. You are a pen in God’s hand. Write what comes.

Can we believe that “all Scripture is inspired by God” (2 Timothy 3:16)? Here is why I think we can. It is remarkable in composition. Composed over sixteen centuries by forty authors. Begun by Moses in Arabia and finished by John on Patmos. Penned by kings in palaces, shepherds in tents, and prisoners in prisons. Would it be possible for forty writers, writing in three different languages and several different countries, separated by as much as sixteen hundred years, to produce a book of singular theme unless behind them there was one mind and one designer? It is remarkable in durability. It is the single most published book in history. Translated into at least twelve hundred languages.17 Bibles have been burned by governments and banished from courtrooms, but God’s Word endures. The death knell has been sounded a hundred times, but God’s Word continues. It is remarkable in prophecy. More than three hundred fulfilled prophecies about the life of Christ,18 were all written at least four hundred years before he was born. Imagine if something similar occurred today. If we found a book written in 1900 that prophesied two world wars, a depression, an atomic bomb, and the assassinations of a president and a civil rights leader, wouldn’t we trust it? Glory Days

The heart is more treacherous than anything else and is desperate. Who can know it?” Penned by the ancient prophet Jeremiah in the Holy Bible, never were truer words spoken.

truly I tell you. Lit. “Amen, I tell you”; “amen” normally concluded a prayer, and most scholars believe that beginning a saying this way implied distinctive authority. smallest letter. The smallest Hebrew letter was a yod, formed by a single stroke of the pen. One Jewish story recounted that the yod removed from Sarai’s name (when it was changed to Sarah, Ge 17:15) protested to God from one generation to another, lamenting its removal from Scripture, until finally God put the yod back in the Bible. When Hoshea’s name was changed to Joshua (Nu 13:16), a yod was reinserted in Scripture. “So you see,” remarked Jewish teachers, “not a single yod can pass from God’s Word.” In a similar Jewish story, a yod protested that King Solomon was trying to remove it from Scripture; “A thousand Solomons shall be uprooted,” God declared, “but not a single yod will pass from my Word.” Such illustrations were merely graphic ways of emphasizing that all of God’s Word must be respected; no part was too small to matter.

Long before the first line of Scripture was penned on papyrus scroll, the Word, unwritten, existed as the mind of God. Before the books were gathered collated as sacred text, the Word, intangible; invisible, was planning, was ordering the ages that were to come. This Word predates the Bible, this Word predates creation, this Word is alive and active and speaking still today.                                     — Andre Rabe

Since the dates are referenced to Noah’s age, it makes the most sense that Moses kept the dating system that was utilized on the ark while penning Genesis 7–8. Keep in mind that the later Israelite calendar (i.e., the Babylonian calendar) was lunar.12 The months alternated with 29 or 30 days. In the Bible, we find that 150 days was equivalent to 5 months based on the context in the Flood account (Genesis 7:24–8:413). This would yield month-lengths of 30 days each, not 29 and 30 days alternating for 5 months (as in a lunar calendar).

Christianity and Judaism place great emphasis on a God of love, although some verses of the Bible appear to really jumble this message. What are we to think of a God who allows – or even orders – some of His holy men to commit mass murder? In Elijah’s slaughter of the Baal priests, he does not even say this was commanded by the Lord as is the justification in some other Old Testament atrocities. Should any serious Bible student just ignore such mayhem? Or should one accept that this is God’s way of punishing the wicked and no man has the right to question His methods? I say this is totally contrary to the action of love. Honesty demands that we recognize that much of the Bible was not inspired by a God of love. A God that commands or disregards mass murder by his holiest people is not a God most people would like to spend eternity with. I think the better view is that God did not inspire the writings of the Bible to any more of a degree than He inspired the writing of this book or any other book. What we read in the Bible came from the thoughts of the biblical authors. Many penned their best understanding of God within the cultural and social fabric of their day and age.

Proverbs doesn’t have a story line—it’s simply a collection of practical tips for living. Mainly from the pen of King Solomon, the wisest human being ever (in 1 Kings 3:12 God said, “I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart; so that there was none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee”), the proverbs speak to issues such as work, money, sex, temptation, drinking, laziness, discipline, and child rearing. Underlying each proverb is the truth that “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (1:7).

Consider this: on the first day of creation, before God picked up the pen to scribble in stars and moon, sun and sky (and the sea monsters of the deep); the Lord God looked at the margins around and wondered what might come to life in those edges of existence. What we would see as void and empty, God saw as opportunity. Eugene Peterson, in The Message, describes it this way: “Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness” (Genesis 1:2).

This yields a practical help for Bible study: read the Bible with a red pen in hand. I suggest that you put a question mark in the margin beside every passage that you find unclear or hard to understand. Likewise, put an X beside every passage that offends you or makes you uncomfortable. Afterward, you can focus on the areas you struggle with, especially the texts marked with an X. This can be a guide to holiness, as the Xs show us quickly where our thinking is out of line with the mind of Christ. If I don't like something I read in Scripture, perhaps I simply don't understand it. If so, studying it again may help. If, in fact, I do understand the passage and still don't like it, this is not an indication there is something wrong with the Bible. It's an indication that something is wrong with me, something that needs to change. Often, before we can get something right, we need to first discover what we're doing wrong.

Lord said to me: “Take up for yourself a large book, and with a man’s pen write in it: ‘Take away the spoils quickly; plunder swiftly.’ ” {8:2} And I summoned to myself

When we met God tested me and I failed, but he gave me a second chance and a pen. This time I won.

Though the fig tree does not bud and there is no fruit on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, 18 yet I will triumph in •Yahweh; I will rejoice in the God of my salvation!  19 Yahweh my Lord is my strength; He makes my feet like those of a deer  and enables me to walk on mountain heights!

The person holding a pen influences the most.

The global economy is collapsing, and we can't rely on the government to bail us out. They've "shut down" until they can reach a consensus on a hundred separate topics on their plate, and the government hasn't agreed on much since the Declaration of Independence was penned.

A young woman's ability to read beyond the bible had little practical value.

That like the pigs, we all have our heads in the trough. While the hogs don’t believe in God, the American dream, or the pen being mightier than the sword, they do believe in the feed in the same desperate way we believe in the Sunday paper, the Bible, black urban radio, and hot sauce. On

If the Bible is called the Good Book, it’s not because its people are. Blood runs as freely through the stories as the ink through the quills that penned them.

In 1843 he declared: “I believe the bible, as it ought to be, as it came from the pen of the original writers.” He then gave an example of a problematic text that was resolved in his revision of the Old Testament, implying that he had corrected the text to its original reading.11

Merril Unger who penned Unger’s Bible Dictionary in the mid-1900s wrote: (Hebrew tannin) This word is used in the Authorized Version with several meanings: (1) In connection with desert animals (Isa. 13:22; 34:13, 14, etc.), it is best translated by wolf, and not by jackal as in the Revised Version. The feminine form of the Hebrew tannah is found in Mal. 1:3. (2) Sea monsters (Psa. 74:13; 148:7; Isa. 27:1). (3) Serpents, even the smaller sorts (Deut. 32:33; Psa. 91:13)….one of the Hebrew words, usually rendered dragon is in some places translated serpents (Exodus 7:9, 10, 12).27 Unger was still debating against jackals in the mid-1900s for another creature — a wolf!

I have never purchased a Bible that came with a complimentary white-out pen.

Entitled "Remarks on the Amendments to the Federal Constitutions," the Reverend Nicholas Collin of Philadelphia, writing under the pen name "A Foreign Spectator" (from Sweden), opposed any amendment. If the Constitution contained "a scrupulous enumeration of all the rights of the states and individuals, it would make a larger volume than the Bible . . . ."117 Further, an army was no danger "especially when I am well armed myself." "While the people have property, arms in their hands, and only a spark of noble spirit, the most corrupt Congress must be mad to form any project of tyranny.

Some of my friends who have worked with us, especially ones who are engineers, tell me that when they are wrestling with a particular problem, they will hold a pen in their hand and try to get to a place where they’re very relaxed but not quite asleep. If they fall asleep, the pen they are holding will drop and wake them up. They want to get to that place between wakefulness and sleep where their rational mind can expand outward. In this mental state they’re able to stop thinking of all the reasons why a particular problem can’t be solved. That’s how we think. We have a dream and then wake up. But once awake, we dismiss the dream or idea, often focusing on why the dream will never become a reality. These engineers are trying to get to the conceptual place where the it can’t happen doesn’t enter their mind. In this intuitive conceptual mental state, they can view a particular problem in innovative ways and search for solutions outside of restrictive rational thought. This intuitive state is also called prayer or meditation. We see it in the Bible in all the beautiful passages related to prayer and meditation. It’s not magic. Your mind/brain is designed to transcend the rational. That’s what it does; that’s what it longs to do.

The Bible should never close us to hearing God’s voice in other venues; rather it ought to o pen us to recognize it whenever we hear it. In a sense, the Scriptures are a tuning fork for adjusting our ears to the tone of God’s voice. It attunes us to the quality, the pitch and the cadence that His voice expresses, so that we can identify His true voice over false ones.

The room is full of color. Clothing strewn here and there, art, and posters. On the corner of a desk, a framed photograph. A girl my age leans into another girl, her hip cocked, arm slung over her friend’s shoulders. They are both smiling as though they’ve just shared a secret. One of the girls is clearly the one from the family portrait in the hall, but older here, with her friend. They wear ripped jeans. One of them has on a midriff-revealing tank top, the other what I think is a band or movie T-shirt, though I don’t recognize the name. Again, like the magazines, the sense that there is so much more color to these girls, to their lives, than my own. I turn my attention to the rest of the desk. Cluttered with rainbow pens, coins, to-do lists, jotted-down notes on scraps of paper, highlighters, stickers. A University of Wisconsin red hoodie draped over the chair. Photographs, drawings, ripped homework pages, clothes, and more variations of lip gloss than I would have thought existed. This is the bedroom of a teenage girl. Mine is that of a child. There are no crosses in this room. There’s no framed painting of Jesus, no stuffed animals or Bible.

And if we must take historical blunders in our stride, how will we cope with flat-out contradictions? Did Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb of Jesus see an angel of the Lord [Matthew 28:2] or merely a young man in white [Mark 16:5]? Or was it two men in shining garments [Luke 24:4]? Or two angels [John 20:12]? And how do we deal with the omission of pivotal events? Did Mary see Jesus himself near the tomb, at first mistaking him for a gardener [John 20:14-15]? Surely a sighting of Jesus is critically important evidence of the resurrection, the central mystery of the Christian faith. Yet the encounter at the tomb is mentioned only in the Gospel of John. How could Matthew, Mark and Luke have missed such a crucial point? Historical scholars, and most theologians, recognize that the authors who penned the ancient documents were doing the best they could with the sources available to them, writing in the traditions and expectations of their time, more concerned with presenting a coherent message than with precise historical accuracy. Some biblical scholars, however, even to this day maintain the inerrancy of scripture. They see the Bible as the Word of God, divinely inspired and supernaturally protected from error down the centuries. Unless one reads without comprehension (a distressingly common affliction), a belief in biblical inerrancy demands considerable mental gymnastics. Adherents typically construct a unified account of the gospel stories, not by resolving conflicts, but by adding together all the elements from the different narratives. Thus, Mary Magdalene visited the tomb several times, seeing the different combinations of divine presences on different occasions. For some inscrutable reason, God chose to drop the accounts of those visits into different gospels instead of presenting them logically in a single document.

{17:1} “The sin of Judah has been written with a pen of iron and a point of diamond. It has been engraved upon the breadth of their heart and upon the horns of their shrines.

In the textbook of revelation, the Bible, God has spoken verbally; and this spoken word has survived every scratch of the human pen.

Scripture is God speaking. Though the words they’d read had been penned more than a thousand years earlier, still God spoke in the reading of those words. Jesus held them accountable for the words of Scripture as if God Himself had spoken those words directly to them!

When we pushed away from the moorings various parents waved from the porch and others clustered on the dock. We rushed, worried that they’d betray us with last-minute asinine chitchat. Sure enough, one dimwit yelled: “Did you remember your inhaler?” (Two of us were asthmatics.) “Shut up! Shut up!” we implored, hands over ears. None of us wanted to see a man go down that way. “And what about the EpiPens?” shouted the low-status mother.

Spinoza was the first to argue that the Bible is not literally the word of God but rather a work of human literature; that “true religion” has nothing to do with theology, liturgical ceremonies, or sectarian dogma but consists only in a simple moral rule: love your neighbor; and that ecclesiastic authorities should have no role whatsoever in the governance of a modern state. He also insisted that “divine providence” is nothing but the laws of nature, that miracles (understood as violations of the natural order of things) are impossible and belief in them is only an expression of our ignorance of the true causes of phenomena, and that the prophets of the Old Testament were simply ordinary individuals who, while ethically superior, happened also to have particularly vivid imaginations. The book’s political chapters present as eloquent a plea for toleration (especially “the freedom to philosophize” without interference from the authorities) and democracy as has ever been penned.

I’ll never be him,” I said, closing the Bible and setting it next to the stack of folders and notepads from school. She signed, “No. You’re not him. You’re more.” “I don’t know, Gabbs.” I laughed, staring at the Bible. “There’s a lot of him in there. Years of him. I don’t know if there’s room for anyone to be more. Don’t get me wrong, I’m okay with loving you more. That would make your Grandma Bonnie so happy. But I can’t help but see him inked in the margins of your whole world and not feel like there’s no room for me.” She reached for my face, and I shook my head. “It’s fine, Gabby. You don’t have to make me feel better. I don’t know if you can. I’m just working on accepting it. Ya know? We’ll be fine. We’ll have a good life. We’ll laugh like we’ve always done. We’ll be there for each other. Raise a family and all that comes with that. I’m just …” I ran my fingers through my hair. “I guess I’m still young and stupid, and I want to be the muse for all your poems. I selfishly want my name to be in the margins of your books. But I’m not, and that’s fine. I’ll grow up and focus on more important things like our baby. But right now, I’m struggling to be the man you need instead of the boyfriend you didn’t want.” She flinched, and that wasn’t my intention. In fact, it wasn’t my intention to tell her that I looked inside her Bible. But she caught me, and I couldn’t lie. Before her tears escaped, she blotted the corners of her eyes while squeezing between my legs and her desk, resting her backside on the edge while I leaned back in her desk chair and laced my fingers behind my neck. She stared at me for the longest time, like I was a riddle she needed to solve. Then she grabbed a pen and notebook and started writing … and writing.

For the record, I wanted you first, but you were with Susie, and you told me we could only be friends. And that, Benjamin Ashford, was just how long it took me to get the nerve to ask you to be more than friends. You were my first crush long before that, and I want you to be my last. And because you’re so STUPID, you didn’t think to look at the beginning. Genesis Chapter 1. I lifted my gaze from the paper to her straight face, then I opened her Bible to Genesis Chapter 1. After the first three words “In the beginning,” she drew a caret symbol and inserted “there was Benjamin Ashford” with a heart behind my name. Well, damn … I scooted the chair back and got on my knees, holding her left hand with mine. She grinned as I took the pen and drew a heart on her ring finger, then I drew a circle around her finger connecting the heart—a temporary ring for a forever promise. When I looked up, she nodded a half dozen times. There was no room in my mind or my heart for regret. Gabriella Grace Jacobson owned every inch. I lifted her shirt and drew a heart around her belly button. When I glanced up, Gabby rolled her eyes. “Your mom said yes.” I kissed her belly.

Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior.

With the flick of a quill, Biblical scribes cast the Divine Female out of mythology, just as Eve and Adam were cast out of the Garden of Eden. Scholars observe that evolutions of mythology from the Ugarit texts, dating from 1400 BCE, written centuries before the Bible, exist within the Old Testament. But what of Asherah? Are there traces of Her in biblical passages, other than those calling for Her destruction? We can imagine how Asherah’s existence challenged the authoritarian aloneness of the godhead because the patriarchal scribes slash her with their pens. Even though it is fragmented, the Baal Cycle paints a portrait of a supreme and stable Mother Goddess. Journeying through the texts, it appears the cultural memory of the Mother Goddess Asherah lives on and may also be present in the New Testament.