Pisteuomen - πιστευομεν - T. Michael W. Halcomb

I just received word that my recent submission to the Review of Biblical Literature has been published.  For those who are subscribed to RBL (if you'd like to be, it's free and you can sign-up HERE ), a link to it will appear in your weekly email.  For those who are not subscribed or who might be interested in going ahead and reviewing it, you can click HERE .  The title of the book I reviewed is Reel Revelations: Apocalypse and Film, of which you can read the back matter of the book HERE .

So, last night as we were working through the LXX text of Daniel 7, we came across an interesting term in verse 19, that is, the word κυκλόθεν. Of course, this adverb comes from the noun κύκλος, which means "circle." So, in Dan. 7.19, we read of an image of a beast stomping or trampling around in circles. In the Gospel of Mark, we get a different adverbial form (I'm not sure if the nounal form appears in the LXX or New Testament) in 3.34. There, were read: "καὶ περιβλεψάμενος τοὺς περὶ αὐτὸν κύκλῳ καθημένους λέγει..." A literal reading is something like: "And he was looking around at those circle-sitting (or, sitting in a circle) around him and he said..." You may have already made the connection but it is this idea of "circling" (κύκλῳ) that originally contributed to the name & practices of the infamous Ku Klux Klan. However, the Klan members actually cannot be credited with creating the name. In fact, they took it from the colle...