Logos Field Notes – JAYMS.COM

Symbols That Changed Sides: The Pentagram, the Seal of Solomon, and the Devil’s Wardrobe

A synagogue in Capernaum carved a pentagram, a six-pointed star, and a swastika into the same stone frieze. All three mean something else now. A follow-up to Guess My Names on how symbols change sides.

Guess My Names: Satan, the Nachash, Lucifer, and the Devil

Ask most Christians who the devil is and you get one composite figure built from five or six passages that were never written about the same thing, plus a costume from medieval art and nineteenth-century opera. Here is what each name actually is.

Science Is Not the Enemy of Your Faith

The claim was wrong, the kids repeated it at school, and the correction took thirty seconds. The war between science and faith was invented in the nineteenth century, and the church is still fighting it.

Where Is the Ark of the Covenant?

Raiders of the Lost Ark ends with the Ark crated up in a government warehouse, and every tradition has its own warehouse. Here is every serious claim about where the Ark is today, ranked by what actually backs it, and the verse in Jeremiah that nobody quotes because it tells you to stop looking.

Reversing Hermon: The Watchers and the Mission of Jesus

Genesis 6 gets hurried past. The New Testament writers did not hurry past it. A chapter-by-chapter guide to Heiser’s Reversing Hermon and the Book of Enoch underneath it.

The Names I Didn’t Know

I started with a simple question: how did the Bible on my desk get here? The material wasn't too hard. It was full of people I had never heard of, mentioned as if I already knew them. Chasing those names down turned out to be the whole method.

Jerome: The Man Who Went Back to the Hebrew

He learned Hebrew in a desert in his thirties, when almost nobody in the Latin West bothered with it, and then spent thirty-four years translating the Old Testament from the original. The Bible on your desk still carries the shape of that decision, and so does the most famous mistranslation ever pinned on anyone.

The Book of the Watchers: 1 Enoch 1–36, Read Aloud

1 Enoch chapters one through thirty-six, the Book of the Watchers, in the R. H. Charles 1917 translation. Not a summary and not commentary, just the book itself, formatted to be listened to straight through in five movements.

Which Book of Enoch? 1, 2, 3 Enoch, Jubilees, and Why None of Them Made the Cut

Someone hands you "the Book of Enoch" like it's a lost chapter of Scripture. There is no single Book of Enoch. There are at least four Enoch-branded works, written centuries apart, in three languages, and Josephus already told the Romans why none of them counted.

What the Image of God Actually Is, and What It Means to Be an Imager

Ask most people what the image of God is and you'll hear the same answer: our reason, our conscience, the divine spark inside us. It sounds right, and it does not survive contact with the text. What replaces it is bigger, stranger, and far more useful.