Tommy Mann

  The old prophets rarely used years to date their work, and instead chose to tie their writings to events in history. In the Old Testament Amos said he wrote, “in the days of Uzziah…two years before the earthquake.” (1:1) His fellow minor prophet Zechariah mentioned this same earthquake, saying that on that future day of the Lord (a time of judgment), “you shall flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of Uzziah, king of Judah.” (14:5) Uzziah’s story is found in both 2 Kings 15 and 2 Chronicles 26, but neither account mentions an earthquake. But since two prophets later referenced it, it must have been a doozy. The fact that the narratives about Uzziah do not cite this earthquake has given scoffers some ammunition to say the Bible is not credible.  But not anymore. Archaeologists now believe a massive earthquake rocked the Middle East in 760 BC, during the reign of Uzziah. They estimate that the quake would register a staggering 8.2 on today’s Richter scale, which mea...

We all learned about the water cycle when we were in school: through the steps of precipitation, evaporation, and condensation, water cycles from the sky to the ground in a continuous loop (there are other steps in the process, but that is what most of us learned in elementary school). The Bible speaks to this cycle. In Ecclesiastes 1:7 the author observed: “All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full.” It is amazing to think about how much water from streams flow into the sea. Consider this: every single day the Mississippi River dumps 518 billion gallons of water into the Gulf of America, and that is just one of thousands of rivers doing the same thing. But the seas are not full. That water is going somewhere. In the 17 th  Century scientists figured out this puzzling water cycle. But the Bible actually cracked the code long before these scientists did. In Amos 9:6 the prophet asked and answered his own question:  “Who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them o...

  There are some lines or phrases in the Bible that do not make sense to us on the surface. When we come across some of these seemingly random phrases, the issue may be that something was lost in translation. A good example of this is Amos 8:1-2:   This is what the Lord GOD showed me: behold, a basket of summer fruit. And He said, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the LORD said to me, “The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass by them.”   Why did God give the prophet a vision of a basket of summer fruit, and then not mention it again? Did I miss something?    If we were reading Hebrew, not only would it make sense, it would be kind of funny. There is a play on words here, specifically, word sounds. The Hebrew word for fruit is pronounced like  ka-yis,  and the word for end is pronounced  kes.  The basket of summer fruit is no longer random. It was an object lesson to drive home the poi...