The Bible as Literature

Deliverance is not for sale.

Balak sent the elders of Moab and Midian to Balaam with the fee for divination in their hands. Pharaoh's magicians asked about their reward before they threw down their ropes. A frightened man with money hires someone to do what only the unseeable God is able to do.

In Luke 9:40 a father says, "I begged Your disciples to cast it out, and they could not." Fr. Marc Boulos takes the verse one verb at a time. To beg, in Scripture, is to soften a face, and the face is always God's. To cast out is God's own verb, from Eden to Egypt. And "they could not" is Paul's charge against Corinth, a church sorted into Paul, Apollos and Cephas, each party begging its steward for what a steward cannot give.

The Torah counts ten blows against Egypt. The Qurʾan counts nine signs. While Jesus is on the mountain with three, nine disciples are left on the plain. The father is walked past nine doors that will not open, so that he arrives at the tenth with his pockets turned inside out.

Hebrew, Greek and Arabic terms, triliteral roots and scripture quotations appear on screen as they are discussed.

SCRIPTURE DISCUSSED
Luke 9:1, 9:40–42 · Numbers 22:6–7 · Exodus 33:19 · 1 Samuel 13:12 · Genesis 3:24, 45:5–11 · Jeremiah 2:13 · Daniel 2:10, 5:8 · 1 Corinthians 1:12–13, 3:1–2, 4:7 · Galatians 4:30 · 1 Chronicles 29:14
Qurʾan: Sūrat al-Aʿrāf 7:113–114, 7:128, 7:137 · Sūrat Maryam 19:13 · Sūrat Āl ʿImrān 3:159–160 · Sūrat Yūsuf 12:67, 12:88 · Sūrat al-Anbiyāʾ 21:105

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Opening music: "Too Cool" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This week the Bible as Literature podcast steps outside its usual format. Fr. Marc Boulos sits down with two parishioners of St. Elizabeth: Bethany Saros, former parish council president, and Carter Grenz. Bethany describes leaving the church, trying other paths, and coming back once she read the Gospels straight through and found she had run out of options. Carter, who grew up non-religious and came to Christianity through evangelical churches, recounts how Fr. Paul Nadim Tarazi’s work dismantled the sectarian and nationalist assumptions he had absorbed there.

Fr. Marc Boulos presents "Crossing into Judgment: The ʿIbri, the ʿArabah, and the Philological Manufacture of an Ethnos" at the 2026 OCABS Symposium, held October 2–3, 2026, at St. Elizabeth Orthodox Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Drawn from his forthcoming book Man of Letters, the sequel to The Eucharist: A Grammar of Thanksgiving, the talk hears the Abrahamic text on its own terms: as a scripture that stands against Plato, against Homer, and against Odysseus. The 2026 OCABS Symposium gathered speakers in person and online around a single theme: Scripture, Bible and Qurʾan, heard on its own terms.

Fr. Paul Nadim Tarazi's final public presentation, "The Scriptural Canon," delivered as the keynote address at the 2026 OCABS Symposium, held Saturday, October 3, 2026, at St. Elizabeth Orthodox Church in St. Paul, MN.

In Episode 590, Father Marc Boulos examines Luke 9:39 through Ezekiel, 3 Maccabees, and the linguistic connections between Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. He challenges modern ideas of choice, agency, and the “pursuit of happiness,” showing how Scripture presents God—not the human being—as the true subject and actor.

Academic institutions, like religious institutions, are metropolitan in nature, gathering where the Scriptural God scatters. They are the elephant whose snout hoards knowledge for the tyrants of the earth like the Egyptian scribes (Genesis 41:8), inscribing their will with an iron stylus on the foreskins of human hearts, concealing them from God (The Eucharist, 270).

The psychē (ψυχή) fights against God by clinging to the sarx (σάρξ), desperately struggling to shut out the pneuma (πνεῦμα) with all its might, concealing the uncircumcised heart from the Almighty God under cover of the circumcision of human institutions.

Oh yes, Hellenists love the psyche. It’s what they “turn” (to) and in, epistrephein (ἐπιστρέφειν, Corinthians 3:16), away from him, spinning as they spin their rejection of the sufficiency of God. It’s the source of all they talk about on their podcasts. They gather it up in their communities to meditate on it and its endless crisis of “loneliness.” (2 Timothy 3:2–4) 

“If only they knew.” (Qurʾan, Sūrat al-ʿAnkabūt سورة العنكبوت “The Spider” 29:64)

But God, in his sufficiency, is all seeing and all knowing, and their schemes will fail.

Each moment in life, each kairos, each encounter with the unseen God in the crossing of neighbors in the ʿarabah terrifies the human institution, because the crossing presents each living, breathing soul with a divine uncovering, and the possibility of a revelation: we do not need the institutions.

We never did.

It’s ironic. The academy will insist it exists to question, to challenge and to tear down, but of its nature a building is incapable of the apostle’s turning in his withering, let alone the prophet’s birth-pains. Yes, they critique, but not to tear down, one stone from another.

No.

They critique in order to build their artificial mother. Their blasphemous alma mater.

“Because they disbelieved and uttered terrible slander against Mary.” (Qurʾan, Sūrat al-Nisāʾ سورة النساء “The Women” 4:156)

Yet, “God is not mocked” (Galatians 6:7), for everyone knows that milk sweetened with chemicals is toxic.

Well, not everyone.

Against them, and all who are like them, the Abrahamic scriptures neither build nor synthesize. They present no dogma. People who “read” them do, of course. That’s how we end up with buildings and tribes, which all three scrolls summarily condemn.

Instead, what these texts offer is a method for hearing and seeing in daily living, so that each of us can hear how to walk our path in this life.

Indeed, God, who is the source of all knowledge, has assigned a path for each of us, and this life is your test. Only you can hear and see what he has presented for you to understand, for your sake. 

It is your test. 

On that day, you have no advocate but yourself and no recourse but him.

The sooner you stop covering your ears and hiding behind your eyes; the sooner you open your heart to his instruction, the better your chance of receiving his gift with empty hands.

God has assigned a lesson for you in your brief time on earth, which, as the song says, is as “but a dream.”

True knowledge does not come from men. It comes directly from him, and Scripture is a guide on the path through his wilderness. Unlike human institutions which traffic in recycled human words, Scripture offers only the witness—the martyrdom—of the unseen, of the done-unto by God, who stand by you on the path, bearing witness to your witness to his divine words.

And the words are signs along that path to help you find your way, as you uncover the test he has prepared for you, which is yours and yours alone.

The Bible was not written to establish anything. It was written to keep the path open, for your sake, so that nothing would ever stand in between you and God on the path, before the time, until the time he shall judge the living and the dead; and of his kingdom, there shall be no end.

This week, I discuss Luke 9:38

In episode 588, Fr. Marc hears the mashal of the Transfiguration as a warning against attempting to control what God gives freely. The Arabic root ش-ي-ع (shīn–yāʾ–ʿayn) spreads light naturally shedding itself without the inevitable fracture it finds in human hands. Peter's ploy to "make" tents for the prophets is a poor attempt to turn the gift of light into property. But the light, like rain, is lost the moment the human hands close around it.

In Episode 587, Fr. Marc Boulos hears the names Lyla and Elijah as rasm, unpointed traces, skeletons of consonants standing like the dry bones in Ezekiel's valley, waiting for a breath that is not their own. His baptism homily, dated July 25, 2026, follows the Arab grammarians, for whom the vowels are ḥarakāt, movements supplied by the one who formed the bones, into the night of Genesis 1, where darkness is called laylā by the same triliterals as in the Quran. Fr. Marc traces the turning of the letters, taṣrīf, as the work of an unseen hand: "thus we turn the signs" (Q 6:105).

In Episode 586, Fr. Marc Boulos asks what it truly means to welcome someone in Scripture. In Luke's account of the feeding of the five thousand, the answer is far richer than simple hospitality. Examining the Greek verb ἀποδέχομαι (apodechomai) alongside the Hebrew root צ-ר-ר (ṣ-r-r) and the Arabic ص-ر-ر (ṣ-r-r), Fr. Marc demonstrates that biblical welcome is not merely greeting a stranger—it is binding someone into the community of God.

Beginning with Luke 9:14–17, he traces the literary and lexical threads that unite the crowd's welcome of Jesus (Luke 8:40) with Jesus' welcome of the crowd (Luke 9:11), culminating in the wilderness banquet. Along the way, he explores Luke's distinctive vocabulary of reclining (κατακλίνω), the companies (κλισίαι) of fifty, Israel's wilderness camp, the Greek symposium, the Gibeonite covenant meal, Abigail's "bundle of the living" (1 Samuel 25:29), Abraham's guests in Sūrat al-Dhāriyāt (Qur'an 51), Noah's self-bound hearers, the manna traditions of Exodus, Psalms, and the Qur'an, and the recurring biblical contrast between those whom God binds to himself and those who bind themselves to the old.

Rather than treating Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic as isolated languages, this study follows their shared literary and lexical patterns to illuminate the grammar of the biblical text, revealing how the wilderness table gathers Jew and Greek into one people under one God.

In episode 585, Fr. Marc Boulos explores the profound linguistic and scriptural connections between Luke 9:10–13 and Sūrat al-ʿAṣr, showing how both texts speak a common Semitic grammar of time, need, loss, and divine provision.

As the day declines in Luke, the disciples conclude that the crowd must be sent away. They see the wilderness, the fading light, and their five loaves as proof that there is not enough. Yet Jesus reads the very same signs differently. Throughout Scripture, the wilderness is where God feeds his people, the declining day belongs to the God who stretches out the heavens like a tent, and apparent lack becomes the place where his provision is revealed.

Drawing on Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic, Fr. Marc examines the roots behind Luke's language of need (χρεία), the bending of the day (κλίνω / נ-ט-ה / ن-ط-و), and the Qurʾan's oath by the "declining time," al-ʿaṣr (العصر), arguing that both texts confront the same temptation: allowing the pressure of time and the appearance of scarcity to govern our judgment instead of the command of God.

The episode also considers the biblical understanding of desire, the guarding of the heart, the relationship between God's word and true provision, and the symbolic significance of the five loaves as the bread of the Torah. Rather than presenting the feeding of the five thousand as a miracle detached from its setting, Fr. Marc shows how every detail—the wilderness, the hour, the bread, and the command—belongs to a single scriptural grammar in which obedience transforms lack into abundance.

The Declining Day is an invitation to read the signs as Scripture reads them: not through the arithmetic of scarcity, but through the God whose provision is already present in the very place where the world sees only loss.