Book Release Day: Perpetual Fire

Today, my new book is being released! The title is “Perpetual Fire: Temple, Ritual, and Biblical Theology.” What is Perpetual Fire about? I am proposing the book as a motif study in biblical theology. It seeks to answer “What is the ritual and theological meaning of the perpetual fire on altar?” It focuses on the ever-burning fire on the altar of sacrifice at the heart of the Temple. The story of the fire is a long story–from the theophany experiences of God-as-fire in the story of Abraham and the Burning Bush scene in the life Moses to the fire that descends on Mount Sinai at the giving of the Law to the fire that comes forth from the sanctuary of the Tabernacle in Leviticus 9:24. God reveals himself as “a consuming fire” (Deut 12:29). In Leviticus 6, the priests are charged by God with keeping the fire on the altar of sacrifice perpetually burning: “it shall not go out.” But why? I take a winding tour through the early cultic legislation, prophetic metaphors for divinity as brightness, through the meaning of the Wood Offering, the significance of darkness as shrouding the brightness of divine light and the cultic meaning of radiance. As the book comes to identify the ritual signi...