Deliverance is not for sale.

Balak sent the elders of Moab and Midian to Balaam with the fee for divination in their hands. Pharaoh's magicians asked about their reward before they threw down their ropes. A frightened man with money hires someone to do what only the unseeable God is able to do.

In Luke 9:40 a father says, "I begged Your disciples to cast it out, and they could not." Fr. Marc Boulos takes the verse one verb at a time. To beg, in Scripture, is to soften a face, and the face is always God's. To cast out is God's own verb, from Eden to Egypt. And "they could not" is Paul's charge against Corinth, a church sorted into Paul, Apollos and Cephas, each party begging its steward for what a steward cannot give.

The Torah counts ten blows against Egypt. The Qurʾan counts nine signs. While Jesus is on the mountain with three, nine disciples are left on the plain. The father is walked past nine doors that will not open, so that he arrives at the tenth with his pockets turned inside out.

Hebrew, Greek and Arabic terms, triliteral roots and scripture quotations appear on screen as they are discussed.

SCRIPTURE DISCUSSED
Luke 9:1, 9:40–42 · Numbers 22:6–7 · Exodus 33:19 · 1 Samuel 13:12 · Genesis 3:24, 45:5–11 · Jeremiah 2:13 · Daniel 2:10, 5:8 · 1 Corinthians 1:12–13, 3:1–2, 4:7 · Galatians 4:30 · 1 Chronicles 29:14
Qurʾan: Sūrat al-Aʿrāf 7:113–114, 7:128, 7:137 · Sūrat Maryam 19:13 · Sūrat Āl ʿImrān 3:159–160 · Sūrat Yūsuf 12:67, 12:88 · Sūrat al-Anbiyāʾ 21:105

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Opening music: "Too Cool" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This week the Bible as Literature podcast steps outside its usual format. Fr. Marc Boulos sits down with two parishioners of St. Elizabeth: Bethany Saros, former parish council president, and Carter Grenz. Bethany describes leaving the church, trying other paths, and coming back once she read the Gospels straight through and found she had run out of options. Carter, who grew up non-religious and came to Christianity through evangelical churches, recounts how Fr. Paul Nadim Tarazi’s work dismantled the sectarian and nationalist assumptions he had absorbed there.

Fr. Marc Boulos presents "Crossing into Judgment: The ʿIbri, the ʿArabah, and the Philological Manufacture of an Ethnos" at the 2026 OCABS Symposium, held October 2–3, 2026, at St. Elizabeth Orthodox Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Drawn from his forthcoming book Man of Letters, the sequel to The Eucharist: A Grammar of Thanksgiving, the talk hears the Abrahamic text on its own terms: as a scripture that stands against Plato, against Homer, and against Odysseus. The 2026 OCABS Symposium gathered speakers in person and online around a single theme: Scripture, Bible and Qurʾan, heard on its own terms.