To understand this verse, we need to talk about numbers, and vocabulary, and also poetry. You have been warned.

Who is being told about God’s name, and in whose midst is God being praised? I bet you can already tell what the problem is going to be.

Jacob, aka Israel, is famous for having sons. Like, really famous. So famous that Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote a song about it, although he also wrote a whole musical about cats, so Jacob probably shouldn’t let it go to his head.

The most famous of Jacob’s famous sons is Joseph, and this is how he is introduced: “Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children…” Genesis 37:3a, NRSVUE.

Just how dysfunctional was this family, anyway?

You can usually count on Paul to give you some nice, complicated grammar to argue about, but this one is not even a little bit ambiguous.

The word we are translating here is “uioi”, which, in Koine Greek, can refer to children in general, or specifically to male children (sons).

Ah, Junia. Her name appears in the Bible exactly once, in this verse. The name, however, is a perfectly normal name for a woman in that time and place. Lots of women were named “Junia”. So, why is this difficult, exactly?

Acts 2:15 is hilarious to start with, because what just happened? Oh, right, a bunch of people came pouring out of this house and they were all talking at once, and yet absolutely everyone could understand them perfectly. If that happened, I would not be thinking “these people must be drunk”.