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Philo, that brilliant Jewish philosopher from Alexandria, had thoughts on this. He saw the story of the "younger" son not just as a matter of birth order, but as a reflection of th...
Take Noah’s blessing of his sons after the flood. It's a doozy. Specifically, let's zoom in on Japhet. Noah says, "God shall enlarge Japhet, and bid him to dwell in the house of Sh...
Take the story of Noah and his sons after the flood, specifically Ham and his son Canaan. We read in Genesis 9:27 that Canaan, not Ham, is cursed to be a servant. Why? What's going...
They tell a story. They hint at something deeper. Take Noah's sons: Shem, Ham, and Japhet. You'd think their order would be consistent. But it's not! Isn't that peculiar? Sometimes...
We're so used to breezing past those genealogical lists in Genesis, but tucked within them are echoes of ancient understandings about the world and its peoples. Today, let's zoom i...
You might recall Nimrod from Genesis 10:8. It's a brief mention, almost a genealogical footnote: "Chus was the father of Nimrod, who began to be a giant and a hunter before the Lor...
That struggle, that internal tug-of-war, is something ancient thinkers grappled with too. And one place we find it explored is in the writings attributed to Philo of Alexandria. No...
"I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of the Chaldaeans to give thee this land for an inheritance" (Genesis 15:7). It's not just a generic "Hey, I'm God!" introdu...
Even Abraham, the patriarch of faith, had moments of doubt. Our question comes from the Midrash of Philo, an exploration of the Hebrew Bible through the lens of the writings of Phi...
