“The Babylonian captivity figured out our spiritual bondage under sin and Satan”

Matthew Poole was a seventeenth century English Presbyterian minister. Towards the end of his life he started work on a commentary on the Bible called Annotations upon the Holy Bible. Wherein The Sacred Text is Inserted, and various Readings Annex’d, together with the Parallel Scriptures, the more difficult Terms in each Verse are Explained, seeming Contradictions Reconciled, Questions and Doubts Resolved, and the whole Text opened. They don’t write titles like that any more, sadly.

Poole got as far as Isaiah 58 and then died, but the work was completed by friends and colleagues largely on the basis of Poole’s earlier Synopsis criticorum aliorumque Sacrae Scripturae interpretum. The section on Romans in Annotations was written by Richard Mayo.

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Who is my enemy? The parable of the good Samaritan
I came across this intriguing perspective on Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan in an article by Amy-Jill Levine in the Biblical Archaeology Review (2012). She dismisses a number of what she regards as misinterpretations of the parable of the Good Samaritan and comes to this conclusion: ()