Bible Odyssey: People, Places, and Passages
Explore the fascinating origins of the Bible and its eventful history. On Bible Odyssey, the world’s leading scholars share the latest historical and literary research on key people, places, and passages of the Bible.


Focus On
The Bible and Violent Extremism
The book of Revelation has been a favorite in extremist canons.
Hagar
Hagar, the African mother of many nations, who saw and named God, was enslaved, impregnated, abandoned, and liberated by Sarah and Abraham.
Adam
Did you know…? Variant traditions of Adam may be found in other biblical texts. Adam’s counterpart in the Mesopotamian tradition is named Adapa. Some early biblical commentators, as well as some contemporary scholars, have understood Adam to be androgynous.
Isaac
Son of Abraham and father of Jacob, Isaac is the middle of the three patriarchs of the people Israel.
Paul’s Letters and Modern Race Relations
In the nineteenth century debates about slavery, Christians using the Bible were—those who were in support of a slavery position—really emphasized those Pauline epistles that were mainly written by his disciples that were really emphasizing the submission of slaves to their slave owners. And, those epistles are, were very, very, deeply unpopular, as you can […]