I became a Christian when I was 16 and my friends told me to get a Bible, so I did. When I was at university I decided to read the Bible from start to finish. I did it in about 18 months. It was amazing. When I was 30 I was having my second child. Sh...

In 2001 my husband and I did up the bathroom and we had fun doing it. We didn’t often have fun. We worked hard and were ships in the night. It was his birthday and I bought him a card with two rabbits in a bath, and inside I wrote words from Psalm ...

Why did I get this tattoo of Jonah and the whale? In Jonah, you see that holiness is about blessing. If you receive blessing, you should in turn bless others. Jonah preaches to the Ninevites. They repent, and God forgives them. So, Jonah goes and sul...

Many of the Old Testament leaders had more than one wife. At what point in Jewish history did monogamy become the accepted norm?

How did the tradition arise that Christ appeared four times in the Old Testament prior to his incarnation?

Just over nine per cent of adults in England and Wales have been divorced; that’s according to the 2021 Census. So what does the Bible have to say about divorce, and how should we understand it? The words of Jesus in Matthew 5.31–32 seem quite cl...

The usual way that Christians understand the Bible to be a book from God is to say that he inspired it.

In Britain, Mother's Day falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent and started as a church tradition. While you won’t find many verses in the Bible directly hailing motherhood, it’s easy to see through the stories of Bible moms the love that God ha...

What was Jesus was writing in the sand when the woman was caught in adultery? Was it the 10 commandments, or was he writing down all the sins of the Pharisees? Maybe by writing in the sand and not in stone, he was indicating that the laws of the reli...

The Bible changes lives. One particular book with a great record for this is Paul’s letter to the Romans. Dr Andrew Ollerton, author of The Bible Course, is someone who’s been transformed by this standout book.

I love the story of Thomas in John 20.24–29. He knew that there was such a thing as fake news. People didn’t rise from the dead, did they?

I was one of those boys who didn’t sit still for a minute. I left school before taking the equivalent of GCSEs. I went to church. My reputation preceded me and they all thought I was there for the girls. But it was there that I made a commitment. P...

I grew up in Yugoslavia. Christianity wasn’t banned, but nobody ever spoke about faith. I never heard anything about it. I thought the Bible was make-believe and fairy tales. I thought that people who read the Bible were off their heads in la-la la...

A non-Israelite prophet who features in Numbers 22-24 who was sent by King Balak of Moab to curse the Israelites but initially refused because that was not what God told him to do. After giving into inducements he did go but was prevented from getti...

A prophet who lived and prophesied in the northern kingdom during the ninth century BC. Best known for his conflict with 400 prophets of Baal on the top of mount Carmel during which God sent fire from heaven to consume an altar. He became viewed as...

One of the big concerns and anxieties among early Christians concerned food. In the Gentile world the vast majority of meat had been offered to an idol in a sacrifice before being sold in the marketplace. In Christian communities which had both Jew...

To gather the leftover grain from a harvest. Leviticus 23.22 instructs farmers to leave enough grain after the harvest for the poor to collect, Ruth did this in Ruth 2.15.

The name later given to Jacob in Genesis 32.28 by the angel with whom he fought at Peniel. The term later became used for the whole of the Kingdom (i.e. the land of all 12 tribes named after Jacob's sons), particularly during the reigns of Davi...

An ancient Israelite city located in the territory of the tribe of Issachar. It was the location of battles and the place where Jehu confronted Queen Jezebel and encouraged her eunuchs to throw her from a window (which they did). Her body was scatt...

A group of Jews, often mentioned alongside the Pharisees in the Gospels, but very different from them. We know much less about the Sadducees than about the Pharisees but they seem to be a group of aristocratic Jews, particularly connected with the T...