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The Different Sacrifices in Leviticus

Pdf chart of the various sacrifices outlined in Leviticus.

Pagan Gods of Egypt and the Plagues

The plagues on Egypt are, among other things, a grand display of the Egyptian gods' lack of power. This pdf file lists some of the main gods of Egypt and also the ten plagues.

The Role of Archaeology

This article, written by a Jewish Rabbi, contains a good discussion of the role of archaeology in understanding the Bible.

Balthasar on Prayer

"Prayer, both ecclesial and personal prayer...ranks higher than all action, not in the first place as a source of psychological energy ('refueling', as they say today), but as the act of worship and glorification that befits love, the act in which one makes the most fundamental attempt to answer with selflessness and thereby shows that one has understood the divine proclamation. It is as tragic as it is ridiculous to see Christians today giving up this fundamental priority--which is witnessed to by the entire Old and New Testament, by Jesus' life as much as by Paul's and John's theology--and seeking instead an immediate encounter with Christ in their neighbor, or even in purely worldly work and technological activity. Engaged in such work, they soon lose the capacity to see any distinction between worldly responsibility and Christian mission. Whoever does not come to know the face of God in contemplation will not recognize it in action, even when it reveals itself to him in the face of the oppressed and humiliated."

Han Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, 109

Augustine on Evil

"Evils therefore, have their source in the good, and unless they are parasitic on something good, they are not anything at all. There is no other source whence an evil thing can come to be. If this is the case, then, in so far as a thing is an entity, it is unquestionably good. If it is an incorruptible entity, it is a great good. But even if it is a corruptible entity, it still has no mode of existence except as an aspect of something that is good."

Augustine, Enchiridion 14

Meredith Kline on God's Naming the Creation

God’s interpretive activity was another aspect of the divine work of creation that was to have an analogue in man’s cultural program. One of the recurring motifs in Genesis 1 is God’s naming of his creatures. In ancient texts, when deities give names to things they are assigning them functions and ordaining their destinies. Similarly, God’s naming of the products of the six creation days was a sovereign defining of nature and determining of the purpose of things. And God summoned man to imitate him in this interpreting function of assigning names. God brought to Adam the birds and beasts to see what he would call them (Gen 2:19). Man’s interpretive role would become of increasing practical importance as an instrument for gaining mastery of the earth in fulfillment of his cultural task, for more and more man’s growing knowledge of his world would be the key to his power over it.

Meredith Kline, Kingdom Prologue

Interconnectedness of Scripture

This is a graph of some of the cross-references in Scripture. This is a powerful witness to the overall unity and interconnectedness of the Bible. No more can we say that the New and Old Testaments are separate - it is clear that all of Scripture speaks from itself and of itself.

Here is what Chris Harrison, who worked to design this graph, writes about it:
Together, we struggled to find an elegant solution to render the data, more than 63,000 cross references in total. As work progressed, it became clear that an interactive visualization would be needed to properly explore the data, where users could zoom in and prune down the information to manageable levels. However, this was less interesting to us, as several Bible-exploration programs existed that offered similar functionality (and much more). Instead we set our sights on the other end of the spectrum –- something more beautiful than functional. At the same time, we wanted something that honored and revealed the complexity of the data at every level –- as one leans in, smaller details should become visible. This ultimately led us to the multi-colored arc diagram you see below.

The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc - the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.

More on Ur of the Chaldeans: This is a documentary in Spanish, but the images are self-explanatory.