All Episodes
The Meaning of Terms
This week, Fr. Paul explains the functional meaning of the term holocaust, deferring to the original Semitic and consonantal Hebrew text, noting both the utility and s...
God Does Not Speak English
A listener wrote us this week to share a passage from Letter 57 of Jerome that captures (with respect to the terrorism of translations) what we said recently about Sem...
Music and War
This week, Fr. Paul notes the diabolical link between the bards and troubadours, those who go from town to town, building the stories of cities, playing music on instr...
Abjad Languages
In his 1990 article, “Fundamentals of Grammatology,” Peter T. Daniels proposed the Arabic term “abjad” to describe a type of Semitic script “that denotes individual c...
Do Not Pray
In today's episode, Fr. Paul reiterates difficult words that few acknowledge. Plain words, even when rendered by translators: “As for you, do not pray for this people,...
Jesus Says, "No!"
Christians love to talk about glory and victory because we are all Roman imperialists in our secret hearts—in the thoughts that we imagine God cannot hear. We lust aft...
Right in the Eyes of the Lord
In today's episode, Fr. Paul highlights the stark dissonance between what humans perceive as right and what is deemed right in the eyes of the Scriptural God. (Episode...
The Most High is Your Dwelling
In Luke 4, it is striking that the text refers to the opponent of Jesus, not as Satan, the “obstacle” or “roadblock” of the gospel, but as the deceiver, the Devil. It’...
Love Those Shiny Buttons
This week, Fr. Paul highlights the presence of the teraphim, hidden in plain sight on Aaron’s vestments, daftly woven by Scripture as a test for those of us who love s...
The Colonial Plague
Everyone’s shit stinks. To your “civilized” ears, this sounds like a high-minded critique. It’s not. It’s just an observation about mammalian life. All animal life mak...
Statutes of Your Fathers
In this week’s program, Fr. Paul begins his discussion of Leviticus, drawing on passages from Ezekiel and Numbers to illustrate how characters in the story twist the c...
Bread and Stone
The interplay between the terms bayt and heykal in biblical Hebrew is simple. So simple that it can be explained to a child. A heykal is a building made of stone that ...
In the Wilderness
Imagine searching for guidance on the best way to live life. You have the chance to speak with two advisors. The first lifts your spirits. After listening carefully to...
Even AI Cannot Depict This
This week, Fr. Paul notes the grammatical interconnection between Exodus and Revelation, which highlights the iconoclastic function of the Tent of Meeting, in which th...
Epilogue: You Are Not Elohim
Yes, the Bible is about the propagation of God’s seed. Unfortunately, ignorant of biblical Hebrew, Christians of all kinds fall into the trap of Neoplatonism, misheari...
The Ultimate Covenant
In this week’s program, Fr. Paul explains that we are paying a high price for the false teaching of theologians who cannot hear or understand Scripture because they ar...
The Toledot of Elohim
From the beginning, the Scriptural God commanded biological reproduction—be fruitful and multiply. Reproduce biologically because the generation yet unborn cannot be c...
The Five Fingers
This week, Fr. Paul underscores the centrality of shepherd life over city life in the Book of Exodus, specifically in its presentation of the Tent of Meeting. He also ...
Glorify the Canaanites so That You May Live Long in the Land
After expending significant effort to construct a genealogy—almost from scratch, only now, as he approaches his knockout punch, "Son of Man (ben adam), Son of God,” Lu...
People Do Not Change
This week, Fr. Paul resumes his discussion of Exodus, noting that the story was written to test God’s people, taking their failure into consideration from the very beg...
Arise, O God, Judge the Earth
Thus far in Luke’s genealogy, the writer has emphasized two critical points within the broader storyline of the New Testament. First, after paralleling Matthew’s dismi...
A Process of Judgment
This week, Fr. Paul continues his exegesis of Ezekiel as a background for his comprehensive study of Exodus, taking time to explain that the parabolic admonition of Je...
No Security Blankets
When a person experiences cognitive dissonance, that is, when they find themselves in a situation where exposure to conflicting ideas and information becomes too stres...
I Gave Them Statutes That Were Not Good
In today’s program, Fr. Paul reads from the text of Ezekiel to illustrate how hearers of the Bible misconstrue the Book of Exodus. (Episode 277)
Heritage is Not Ancestral
As in the story of Genesis, for each generation of Luke’s genealogy, the functional names outline the literary framework of a recurring biblical dilemma: without God’s...
Set Free From You
This week, Fr. Paul explains that rest is assigned by God on the Sabbath and in the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, not for the sake of man but for the benefit of the ad...
Understanding Irrelevance
When we set out to start a business, a project, a book, or an endeavor of any kind, most of us begin by asking ourselves, who is my audience, and how can I make my wor...