Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and in today's episode, I would like to welcome you to exile. Well, at least that's our topic today. And it's very interesting to me because when I started approaching this topic, I thought it would be fairly straightforward.
And it kind of is, in a way, but as I was researching, and as I was reading, and as I was thinking of this topic, there was something in the back of my mind that just kept bugging me. I just kept feeling like there was something I was missing in this whole discussion and the way that I was thinking about exile.
Because exile is a really big topic in the Bible, and you [00:01:00] hear quite a bit about it from different people here and there, but there's just something about it, and the way that I was looking at it, that I couldn't wrap my mind around. And it took me a while to figure out what that was, and I'll tell you about it in this episode today.
And I'll tell you about some of my reservations I have with the way that people talk about this topic. And another reason why this is actually not that simple of a topic to discuss is because, quite honestly, it can get really political really fast, and I'm not going to be totally keeping that off limits here because this is a political reality we're talking about.
We're talking about the history of the nation of Israel, and we'll talk about what nation is and what the idea of Israel is. But if I could kind of summarize my problem with the way that we talk about exile is, we tend [00:02:00] to over spiritualize the conversation.
And that's really been bothering me, because we want to reduce theology and doctrine and what we're reading in the Bible to this set of propositions and dogma. And to some degree we can do that, but to some degree we're also doing a disservice to the way we should be reading the Bible, I think. I mean, I will just state outright that I think the theme and idea and the concept of exile is very intimately wrapped up in the work of the Messiah.
And so it would be easy to take these ideas and then systematize them, right? Make them into a set of propositions. Well, here is what the work of Jesus means, and we give off this little list of things. We have our list of the problems. We have our list of the solutions. We have our list of the [00:03:00] outcomes that we should see from the solution.
And, I mean, we have to talk about this, right? So we have to talk about it in the way that we talk about things in our culture. So usually we're giving propositional statements, and there absolutely are outcomes to the work of Jesus. So I'm not trying to downplay that kind of stuff, especially because I do think that it speaks directly into our actual lives here. Like the way we should live our lives.
So in theory, when we're studying something like a theme-- a really broad theme, like the exile-- that stretches across the Bible, all kinds of authors talk about it. We see it in different ways from different angles and different stories. At the end of that study, we ought to come away with something applicable, something practical, something that actually involves the [00:04:00] living out of our lives.
All right, so to lay out a little bit of what I'm going to do here in this episode, so that I don't wander too much around because that was my other problem, is, trying to nail down a specific angle from which to come at this at, because again, the theme of exile is so exceptionally broad in the Bible, and it covers a lot of territory, like a lot of territory. I'm not saying it's like the only theme of the Bible. Or that everything can be read from the angle of the exile, but I think you'll see as I talk about some of the history, how much it really is integral to the story of the Bible. But at any rate, we will be talking about the history, we will be talking about the ways that scholars talk about this history, and we'll be using a wide variety of scholarship here, a very, very wide [00:05:00] variety. I will also be giving you my personal opinion of the good and bad of some of that.
But what I really want to drill down into here is something that I don't see enough of in the scholarship, not to mention the way that pastors talk about this and Bible studies talk about this. And that is the fact that exile isn't just about how much your life is painful because you're in exile. Although, there is definitely some of that going on, and we need to speak directly about that. But there's also the concept of identity formation. And included in that is the idea of transformation. Transformation into something better.
Yeah, so if you are used to hearing people talk about exile, maybe this is already sounding a little bit different because the way you usually start [00:06:00] out talking about exile is the discussion of how this home isn't our real home, and of course we should be longing for a new spiritual home in heaven, and things of that nature, right? That's usually what you hear when you hear somebody, like a pastor for instance, talking about exile. And that's what I'm reading about in many of these biblical theologies as well.
And it might be surprising that I am not starting out this way because I really do love the theme of Eden and sacred space. And I absolutely am just really thrilled and excited about the idea of our recreation and the coming of the new heavens and the new earth, or the renewed heavens and the renewed earth. Those are all really good things to be thinking about as we are reading our scriptures and pondering about our purpose in life and what the end state is going to end up [00:07:00] looking like. I'm just not convinced that that is what the theme of exile is entirely wrapped up in.
All right, so for those of you who are interested in reading a biblical theology book that traces the theme of exile, I have a couple of recommendations for you. But also some caveats, because remember, I told you I'm going to be complaining about how some of this is talked about.
The first one I will mention is called The Story of Israel, a Biblical Theology. This is by quite a few authors. C. Marvin Pate, J. Scott Duvall, J. Daniel Hayes, E. Randolph Richards, W. Dennis Tucker Jr., and Preban Vang. This was published in 2004. It does a really good job of laying out the idea of the [00:08:00] theme of exile, because what we have in the theme of exile is a pattern.
Now, not every instance of exile is actually going to correspond to this, and that's okay. That doesn't mean it can't be part of our picture of exile. But generally speaking, the pattern that we're looking at here is that of sin, exile, repentance, and restoration. I'll even say that again in case you're taking notes. The pattern is Sin, Exile, Repentance, and Restoration. Now some formulations of this pattern might be a little bit different than others. Another idea is Sin, Exile, and Restoration, skipping out this idea of repentance. And honestly, I think that's generally what this book actually does, is it kind of just has that three fold structure of it.
[00:09:00] Now, if you're familiar with biblical studies and a lot of the famous names in biblical studies, when we're talking about exile, a name that might pop into your head is that of Dr. N. T. Wright. He talks a lot about exile. When we're looking at and thinking about the theme of exile, a really big question that we kind of need to tackle is, did the Jews of the time of Jesus believe that they were still in exile, or, did they think that they had returned to the land in full?
It is an open question in scholarship. We have some who are on the side of the idea that they still thought they were in exile. We have other scholars who are on the opposite side, and they think that the Jews thought they weren't in exile any longer, that they had returned to the land, but maybe it just hadn't been fully consummated yet, so they were still looking for a messiah, at [00:10:00] least some of them were. And they were still looking for at least some level of restoration, but the repentance of the exile was done, over, and they were moving on with their lives.
So both Dr. N. T. Wright, as well as this book, The Story of Israel, take the position that the Jews did think that they were still in exile. And some of that evidence is the fact that the glory had never returned to the temple and they weren't rulers in their own land. And things like this.
The reason why it's a bit hard to understand whether or not they were landing on one side or the other of this issue is because not everyone had the same idea of what restoration would look like. The thing is, we tend to have an oversimplified view of what the views were at the time of Jesus.
We often think, and [00:11:00] are taught by our Bible studies, that they all had this expectation of the Messiah. And that's simply not the case. They didn't all expect a messiah. And they certainly didn't all expect the same kind of messiah. So neither did they all have the same idea of what restoration would look like. They didn't even have the same exact idea of what it meant to be a Jew, or to be the people that they were. What we do is we implant our notion of the nation and we put that on what we're looking at here in the first century. They didn't have our concept of nation, ethnicity, religion. The way that they were thinking of those things was vastly different than the way that we think about those things today.
Alright, so this isn't the place to lay out the concept of [00:12:00] what people were expecting of the Messiah and of themselves as a people in the first century here, but I just want to lay out the fact that it's not what we think it was, quite likely, and it's also probably the case that there was no consensus view on whether or not they were in exile or what the end of exile might look like. I mean, I'm not trying to push back on N. T. Wright's ideas here or anything like that. I'm just saying, there's options, you can land different places, and people do.
A second biblical theology book on the exile that I will mention is called Rebels and Exiles, A Biblical Theology of Sin and Restoration. This is by Matthew S. Harmon and Benjamin L. Gladd. And it was published in 2020. I liked parts of this book, and I didn't like other parts of this book, but I mention it [00:13:00] because they make use of the work of N. T. Wright, but they also do some pushing back against him. Like, yes, we agree with N. T. Wright here, but we think that he's not going nearly as far in the direction of this particular atonement theory that we want to see.
If you're in the circles of talking about atonement theory, you know what I'm talking about. Honestly, I had to chuckle when I read a review of this book, where the reviewer said, This is a great book for pastors if you want to explain the theme of exile, but beware, he uses N. T. Wright. So you might need to expound to your church members that N. T. Wright is not always a trustworthy source. But thankfully, this author nuances his own views away from Wright's errors. All right, okay, so I'm laughing a little bit here because, guess what, [00:14:00] nobody, not a single person, is completely trustworthy on theological matters. We all have our own biases. We all have things that we're wrong about and that we're right about. Hopefully, hopefully we're not so wrong that nothing we say is right, and you ought to be encouraging your church members to read a wide variety of theologians and materials. If you can't trust them to discern things, well, that's a matter of discipleship and teaching as a specific matter itself, right? And absolutely, we need to be teaching people how to discern.
Alright, so if you're in the market for just a nice overview, through the Bible, of the theme of exile, you know, taking the theme of exile and looking at it in different parts of scripture, then either one of these books is pretty good on this.
Alright, but now I want to talk [00:15:00] just for a minute about the thing that kind of gets under my skin in these. And I've already kind of broached that topic earlier. The idea that we can button it down so tightly that the conclusion of a book kind of gives you this whole picture of the work of Jesus. And look, I get it. A book has to have a conclusion. And if you're reading a theology book, You want some answers at the end, right? You want something that you can kind of concretely take home. So I'm not trying to be overly critical to this here, but to me, the beauty of biblical theology and tracing these themes is that we see it in this wholeness of a narrative. We see it in this complete picture of what the Bible is bringing out in these various nuanced ways in different stories [00:16:00] In different parts of the Bible.
The Bible is speaking in the language of story rather than this list of truth propositions. And again, like I just said earlier, we do have to communicate in the way that we are used to communicating. So I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't do this, but I'm suggesting that as readers, we shouldn't read a book like this, come to the end, come to the conclusion and go, well, got that understood! Because that's, that's not how this works. There are so many other things to talk about and to see here. And there's a broader picture that we're kind of going to miss when we boil it down that concretely.
So let me talk a minute about this whole idea of what we hear so often when we talk about the theme of exile, this idea that " this isn't our home." [00:17:00] Once again, please don't mishear what I'm saying. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing to say, or even to focus on. But here I am, reading all of this literature about exile, and how people are talking about it, and how people see it, and there's just something that's weighing on me. Like, there's something that's missing here.
Is this the way that the Bible is presenting the concept of exile? To a point, yes, it is, but the more I'm reading and the more I'm seeing some other ideas that I wouldn't have looked at or even given the time of day, honestly, in a previous life, I would be like, no, I'm not reading that, that's nonsense. When I start listening to other voices and listening to different perspectives, I'm realizing there really is something missing here.
And when I'm talking about listening to other voices, primarily what I'm specifically referring to [00:18:00] here in this case is listening to secular scholars, for instance, because the history of Israel is a really big topic for a lot of secular scholars. They might not be confessional, they might not be Jewish, they might not be Christian, but that doesn't make what they're saying and what they're studying invaluable. So, there's one voice that we need to listen to.
Another type of voice that might be difficult to listen to is voices of people who are coming at things from a different political stance or a different scholastic stance. We also have many scholars who are from different cultures, and they're bringing different perspectives to their work. Now, of course, I will also say, just because somebody has a different perspective, doesn't mean that what they're saying is of value, or necessarily even worth your time. We all have limited time, and we need to be diligent in [00:19:00] how we're spending that time.
But occasionally, it is absolutely worth our time to try and understand a different perspective. One of the books that I read this week was A Biblical Theology of Exile, and this is in the Overtures to Biblical Theology series. It's by Daniel L. Smith- Christopher. Published in the year 2002, Smith- Christopher is coming from the perspective of the Quaker faith. So he is coming at this from the perspective of non violence, And I was also watching some sort of speech at a summit of some kind that was addressing topics about the Middle East. And so he's talking about the perspective of refugees and people on the fringes of society and what you do about people like that and how you interact with people like that.
And I think this may have been as part of a Q& A session in this [00:20:00] talk, but he said that he was not a Christian in the sense that he thought this was the only way to reach God.
So you know, you have somebody who's writing and they're writing about the exile from the perspective of the psychology of, like, modern refugees and from the perspective of nonviolence and even from the perspective of not really being a confessional Christian in the sense of the idea that you have to be a Christ follower. So with all of that, a lot of us might. Completely tune out to his ideas and say, this is nonsense. I'm not gonna listen to anything you say, but this was the book that I was reading that kind of tipped me over into realizing exactly what I thought was missing in a lot of these books about the exile.
So for those of you who are checking out the books that I'm talking about here, and you are curious about the [00:21:00] readability of them, like how easy are they to read? I would definitely say that the first two books that I mentioned are much easier to read than this one is. This one isn't, like, super difficult. It doesn't have Hebrew that you have to read or anything like that. But it is written to an academic audience. And if you're not used to reading academic material and hearing all of the lingo, you might not hear some of the things that I hear when I read this, like, you know, if you're in scholarship and you're writing in certain directions and you're kind of aligned with certain types of ideas in scholarship, then you're gonna start using certain words that you wouldn't otherwise.
Words like counter story or counter narrative. And the idea of a counter story or a counter narrative, it's an interesting idea and quite possibly very helpful to us. But you do tend to hear about it from certain angles of scholarship, so I just [00:22:00] want to point some of that out in case you're interested, in case you want to just have a little bit more understanding of the undercurrents that go on in some of these conversations with and between different kinds of academics who are writing kind of in response to one another. The idea of "counter story" is something that you'll hear about from scholars who are talking about things like critical race theory, for instance, and look, part of why I'm bringing this up is not to say that only one side of the aisle can use this word and if you hear it, you better run the other direction or you ought to import all of the ideas that you're going to have about something into what a particular author is writing about.
That is absolutely not what I'm saying. In fact, what I am saying is that when you see these, you might have some ideas. You might think certain things as to what the author is talking about, or you might be mistaken. And so, [00:23:00] this is why it's important to really listen to what somebody is saying, and not just be turned off to what they're saying because they're using certain terms, or they're using certain sides of the scholarship, or whatever it is. On the flip side of that, it's super useful to know where somebody's bias or leanings are. But please don't just import that wholesale.
At any rate, reading this book kind of opened the door to me to start looking at the idea of exile as something that is a little bit more than just missing your homeland. Certainly that is part of what it means to be an exile, and there are different kinds of exile, even in the Bible. We see exile as a kind of punishment, as a kind of consequence. But we also see exile in the sense of you're just kind of a fish out of water and it's [00:24:00] not your fault, but this is the situation you're in. And usually the situation you're in here, in the sense of exile, is it's not good. There's suffering that's going on. There are injustices. Perhaps you're being oppressed.
You can be in exile by your own choice. You can be in exile because of, like I said, a punishment. You can be in exile because that just happens to be the circumstances you're in and it's beyond your control. You can be a refugee. You might be a minority in the situation that you're in, whatever that looks like. You can have the same feeling and experience of exile even without leaving your homeland, even without leaving your house. If you're in a community and you are ostracized in some way, that might be the feeling and experience of exile. You might have done something to cause this, or maybe you [00:25:00] didn't. You might be completely innocent. This might be something that is completely unexpected and just falls upon you and you don't know what to do about it.
So it's totally fair that many of our books about exile are going to speak to our current situations. And they're going to apply this to our lives now, right? But what a lot of them seem to be missing is that the idea of exile in the Bible, like the main core archetype of exile in the Bible, is absolutely tied to the idea of judgment.
Okay, so I'm going to get back to this book that I'm talking about right now. I'll get back to that towards the end of the episode, along with at least one more book . But I think we need to get into this Old Testament context of exile. So what we're going to talk about now is [00:26:00] something that scholars call the Deuteronomistic History. And I really hate saying that word because it's really hard for me to say and I'm probably going to have to re record it every time I say it here in this episode.
Deuteronomistic History. I don't know how many times I have said this word to myself this week, trying to drill it into my head, and maybe I'm even still saying it wrong. I don't know. Go find somebody else to help you pronounce it, because the word Deuteronomy is hard enough, isn't it? Deuteronomy, but I'm used to saying Deuteronomy. Trying to make that into an adjective.... It really is a difficult word. So, sorry if I butcher it.
This is a phrase that I've heard many times for years without realizing that it has a particular meaning. Well, I figured it did have a technical meaning. I just didn't know what it was. And I wasn't [00:27:00] sure that every time somebody says this term that they were really even talking about the same thing necessarily.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of what the Deuteronomistic history is. So this is one of those things that we're looking at the sources of where we get the Bible from. And part of the reason I was excited to do this episode after my conversation with Dr. Tverberg last week was because we were talking last week a little bit about the idea of reading the Torah in light of the prophets and how this was a common thing that the Jews of Jesus's time were doing, right?
They would read some of the Torah. They would read a passage in one of the prophets that kind of lined up and matched. And so actually understanding the Bible from the perspective of the Deuteronomistic history is really helpful to understand why that would be, [00:28:00] why that's important. Why the Bible might be structured in this way.
Like, when was Genesis written? When was Exodus written? When was Deuteronomy written? When was Joshua written? Those are all questions that might be important. And then again, they kind of almost might not be important at the same time. And I say that because we really do have an idea of when the Bible, as a whole, in its canonical shape, at least in some canonical shape, it was all compiled.
And this is when we can say we have the Bible in the form of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. We don't have that until the exile. And this is, I think, really important. I really do think this matters. Because, yeah, there's old documents here. There are documents and texts and [00:29:00] things that are very ancient in our Bible. I really do believe that. I think that any scholar who says there isn't ancient material is really on something because it doesn't make any sense to say that everything was written during the exile. That's a position that just doesn't make sense because we do see that Egyptian context in the Torah and all of these other things, like, you can't say that there weren't older documents that were used. But does that mean that the Torah existed perfectly since the time of Moses?
I mean some people will say that and some people do believe that and, you know, there are arguments to be made there. But I think it's the case that in Genesis in particular we have such a heavily Mesopotamian context there that it's really hard to see that as being a book that was never touched in the exile. And then you have things like the death of Moses being written in, and place names being [00:30:00] changed. So just because there was editing and redaction being done, that doesn't harm the idea of inspiration and divine guidance and providence and all of these things.
Now, that reminds me, let me spend just a moment talking about what redaction is. Because maybe not all of us understand that term. The term redaction, or the person who is doing the redaction, is called a redactor, in simplest terms, they're the editor. But, I think that the term editing has a particular type of connotation, right? An editor is taking material and changing it and doing a lot of adjustment and maybe writing in new sentences and suggesting all of these changes throughout the whole document, right?
That's what we think of as an editor. You need an editor for your writing if you're going to publish something. But a redactor [00:31:00] is, well, maybe they're doing the same kind of thing. But they might also be doing things like compiling different texts to put them together. They might be taking parts out. They might be inserting parts in in order to help the narrative flow and to get the theological point across and things like that.
So, a redactor is like an editor, but they might be doing a lot more than just proofreading the text and suggesting changes, right? And we have proof of redaction and proof of an editorial process in the Hebrew Bible. We just do. I'm not going to get into all of those details right now, but we do have this reality that the text wasn't just written down by one person, and then there we go for all of history.
There is some sort of editing going on, and when you look at the various manuscripts we have, our most ancient manuscripts, things in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and things like that, [00:32:00] some texts are even longer or shorter. So, you know, how did that happen? The idea that a divine text couldn't have possibly been touched by a redactor, I mean, that's not necessary. Like, if God can reveal his truth through one person, well, he can also do it through multiple people, and it can be a process.
And this is where we have the potentially helpful idea of the counter narrative. What a counter narrative is, is it takes old material and old stories and it kind of reframes them. So, the idea of the Deuteronomistic history is the idea that during the exile, there was a Deuteronomist, or multiple Deuteronomists. And this person, or people, were the ones who put together the history of Israel from the book of Deuteronomy through [00:33:00] to the end of the book of 2 Kings that we have now in our Bibles today.
So, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, sometimes we'll include Ruth in this and sometimes we won't. 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel, which, you know, was probably originally one book. 1 Kings and 2 Kings, again, we could roll those up into one book. That's the Deuteronomistic history. All of that was compiled and or written during the time of the exile.
And most people are going to say that there is ancient material in there. There is original material in there, but the Deuteronomist took all of the material and they put it together in a theological way so that it told the story of Israel from the perspective of the exile. Again, this doesn't mean that there is false narrative here and that things in the Torah didn't happen.
Right? What, what this is, is the idea of a counter narrative, [00:34:00] taking the stories of the people and saying, okay, here's our main idea that this is all wrapped up in, and it's wrapped up in the experience of the exile. So, you tell me, how important is that history? How important are the prophets? How important is all of this narrative to how we should read our Hebrew Bible or Old Testament?
And, again, remember I said that it's not the case that the theme of exile is the only theme in Scripture, or necessarily even the main theme, but even the Torah was compiled together with this Deuteronomistic history because Deuteronomy has this really unique place in the canon. It is the end of the Torah, the end of the five books of Moses, but it's also clearly the beginning of this historical section of the text.
This [00:35:00] has made people say, well, maybe we shouldn't talk about the first five books. Maybe we should talk about the first four, or maybe we should include Joshua. Talk about the first six. So the reason we can say these kind of things and kind of think about it is because the book of Deuteronomy is looking back on those earlier books, but it's also looking forward.
And while there's different ways of talking about this editorial process and who actually did it and exactly when they did it, it's pretty stringently the consensus that there is this idea of the Deuteronomistic history. In some way, shape, or form, there was editing done and it was compiled to view the nation and the people from this perspective of the exile.
Now, we can certainly debate how much editing there was, how much theological twisting is happening here, and we could talk about how much of the writing was done during [00:36:00] the exile and how much wasn't done during the exile. We can have all of these conversations, and we can have a whole bunch of different views here.
But I don't know about you, but when I turn to the Bible and I read it in the light of this is a sacred scripture that was compiled and organized for a people who were in exile, and they were trying to experience and understand their situation, well, that's going to color the way that I am reading my scriptures.
And that's also going to help me understand the history of the Jewish people a whole lot better, and the history of the world, because there's absolutely no doubt that the Bible has had the most massive impact of any text in the history of the world. And we'll talk a little bit about some ideas as to why that is. And I know what you're going to say, I know the cookie cutter Sunday school answer [00:37:00] for why that is. And I'm not in disagreement of that, but there's still a little bit more we can talk about as far as that goes.
The context of the exile is actually a really important player in why the Bible is so powerful and why it looks the way that it does. And because we believe that the Bible is the authoritative, normative Word of God, and we believe that that's the case for it in its canonical form, rather than trying to divide it up into bits and pieces and say that that's the authoritative part. It's actually the canonical shape of the Bible that matters.
And so, if the Bible attained its canonical shape in the exile, then that's where we need to be looking for as far as how to interpret things, how to understand the Bible, what the original readers of the Bible would have understood and thought.
[00:38:00] Now, I don't want to disparage, like, the context of the Torah, and the context of Moses, and the context of the Exodus, because those are also exceptionally formative. It's really important that we look at and understand the patriarchs in their context, and how God was working throughout all of these different periods of time in history. But, again, once we realize that it's in the exile that all of the redaction is done, all of this formation of the canon is actually complete, or at least pretty much complete, then that's the kind of thinking that we should look at and be thinking about when we're thinking about how do we get our heads into the ancient biblical reader's heads, right?
How do we understand the Bible like they did? Because it is this Bible, the Bible we have in our canonical [00:39:00] form, that is authoritative to us. And not only that, but if the redactors were doing a type of counter story, or counter narrative, where they were taking their previous documents and stories and things, and they were arranging it in a certain way to make sure they understood themselves as a people, And, of course, remember, I'm saying that this was all guided by the Spirit of God over what was happening here, because this is inspired sacred literature.
If this is a counter narrative so that they are forming this canon to influence and form their identity, then the way that we're going to read that is going to be a little bit different than if it's just this chronological historical narrative that is unedited, right, that doesn't have that kind of a.... I mean, I don't want to really even say spin, but that's kind of what I'm talking [00:40:00] about here.
And again, this isn't really impacting the divine providence of this, because the spin that they're giving it is, they're doing this on God's authority, because this is our revealed truth. And the reason that I say this is because the Bible in its form, that we have it, that's what has impacted us. This is an amazing thing that we don't see anywhere else in the ancient world. Like, we see parts of it that are similar, we see wisdom literature, we see poetry, we see creation accounts, we see patriarchal accounts, we see accounts of kings, we see all of these types of literature everywhere.
But nowhere, nowhere do we see anything that is like the Bible in this compiled set of literature. Like it's a library, but it's a type of [00:41:00] canon that is authoritative to a group of people. No other group of people were doing this at the time. So there's similar wisdom literature, there's similar poetry, but nobody is compiling it like the canon that we have in the Hebrew Bible.
And the fact that this happened had a really big impact on the people of Israel and the world at large. And there's a reason that I'm pointing this out specifically, because when we look at history, we see the empire of Assyria, and we see the empire of Babylon, at two different times, they're doing the same kind of thing to other areas and other people groups that they did to Israel.
So there were a lot of oppressed people groups out there. But nobody was doing what the Israelites were doing. This is a unique thing. This is a special thing. This [00:42:00] is an impactful thing. While it's true that every bit of the Bible is important and inspired, you know, you could take just a small bit of the Bible and say, this is inspired literature.
The impact of the Bible and the formation of the people of Israel didn't happen because of only this little bit of literature or that little part of the Bible. These are all important elements of the story of the history of Israel. You have the Torah, you have the time of the judges, you have the kings. You have all of these times that are individually very important to the nation of Israel. And again, we're going to talk about that word nation. But to really understand Israel and God's relationship to Israel and God working through history, we need to understand the Bible as a whole. And the entire thing is what is having this massive impact.
So you could conceivably have [00:43:00] inspired literature at different parts of the history of Israel, right? Like, during the time of Moses, we could have the Torah, perhaps. During the time of King David, we could have at least some of the Psalms. So my point isn't that Israel couldn't have had inspired history until the exile. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is our form of that inspired literature, the thing that is inspired for normative practice in all of history, is this canonical form of the Bible that we get at the time of the exile or just after it. It depends on how you're going to categorize that.
So going back to the point about the Deuteronomystic history, see I didn't, I messed it up, Deuteronomystic history. The point is that it's a theological history. Not that it's made up, but it is structured in such a way as to [00:44:00] point out very, very clearly to anyone who's reading or listening to this that there is a reason for the exile and that there is a hope for the end of the exile. And again, I'm not saying that the exile is the only theme or the only point of all of this. But that is their framework that they're coming at this from. That is their experience.
All right, so let's think a minute about the experience of being in exile. Now, technically, any kind of estrangement or displacement from the physical to the geographical to the spiritual could be a type of exile. So just in the framework of exile, it's not something that we always choose, or perhaps it might be a thing that we choose, but there might be some pain associated with that. There's a disconnect. Being [00:45:00] estranged, being displaced, those things put us as outsiders, or often much worse than that.
One of the points that Smith- Christopher was trying to bring out in his book, A Biblical Theology of Exile, was that there was a very physical component to the Israelites exile. Like, this genuinely happened, and it was genuinely exceptionally painful. They were an oppressed people, like, to the point of things like starvation, being ripped from your family and being placed down somewhere else, being a second hand citizen in the place you are now at. And I think it is the case that when we take this theme of exile and we're only spiritualizing it, or we're only talking about our pain and our situations, there is a genuine possibility that we are downplaying the situation in its historical context.
And the [00:46:00] point in saying that is not necessarily to say, Oh, poor Israelites compared to us, because many people today are in exceptionally hard circumstances. But if you understand that that is the context of the exile and the people who are experiencing that, then it does point to the seriousness of this whole idea and theme.
So, my point is that we should be careful not to reduce this to, like, some metaphysical yearning for heaven. I mean, that might have its part in the discussion, okay, so, I'm not saying we toss that idea out wholesale, but I am saying that we should look at this situation as a historical reality and a very painful one.
But it's also not just about the pain of it. It is not just about the yearning to be home. So for the last part of the episode, what I want to focus on here is [00:47:00] the idea of identity formation and transformation. I expect you'll already have some ideas in your mind as to how important those two things are to a Christian.
Now there are a lot of ideas and frameworks for what I'm talking about here. Like what do you think repentance is? Is it declaring allegiance to Jesus? Is that a one time thing? Is repentance something that you have to do for each one of your sins or else you're not really repentant? How does repentance fit into the concept of following Jesus? Like is that an aspect of your salvation? Like, you're not saved unless you repent from your sins and each individual sin?
There's a lot of ways that people think about this whole idea of living the Christian life, being conformed to the image of the Son, and all of these things, like, [00:48:00] what is salvation? What does that look like? What does that mean? If we talk about things like repentance in this life and living out a godly life here on earth, then, are we suddenly talking about a salvation by merit, and by works?
There's a lot of people who break this down into the idea that you confess Jesus as Lord, then you are justified, so that takes care of all your sins, and you're sanctified later at some point in time. Or maybe there's some sort of process involved with that, but the justification and the sanctification are two entirely separate things. And there's this order of salvation, right? A lot of people think this way because it's been framed in some systematic theologies in this way. My personal stance on that is that that's a really good example of the overuse of systematic theology, of the abuse of theology in general, because [00:49:00] systematic theology itself, there's nothing wrong with the concept.
We kind of need it. And it, this is kind of our reality as Christians. We have this long history of Christian tradition that is dogmatic, but our systematic theology should be based on the biblical context. But here's an interesting thing about systematic or dogmatic theology that kind of plays into the whole idea of the concept of religion as a whole that we have in our minds today.
Because the early church, they were doing their thing, they were living their lives and dealing with people who had different ideas, forming an identity. Again, we're going to be talking about identity. And there was this interplay between early Christians and people who weren't going to follow Jesus, but who were still Jews. And so the Jewish people and the early Christian church were kind of interacting in this interesting way.
[00:50:00] Prior to the formation of Christian dogmatic theology, that's really not what we were seeing in the early church, and it's certainly not what we were seeing in Judaism. And that's pretty obvious if you know or read anything about the rabbis and that kind of thinking, this pushback of on one hand and on the other hand, and here's our options and let's talk about it and let's discuss it, and we're not necessarily going to drill down into one option.
Like, I might prefer one option over another, but let's talk about it. Let's hash it out. Let's have this great conversation. That was the type of things that the Jews were kind of thinking of. But Christians come along, and now we're trying to form our identity, and we're trying to understand how that's distinctive, and we don't want a whole bunch of different ideas in this realm of Christianity, right?
We want people to understand how to follow God, what that means, [00:51:00] what Christianity is. And this was all in the time before everybody had the New Testament in hand. So, Christians were moving away from the idea that the Jews were using, like, you could just hash things out and have differences of opinions, and it was fine.
For the early church, that wasn't fine. It wasn't fine at all. So you look at the early church and you see this history of people who are talking about heresies, people who are talking about orthodoxy, people who are talking about dogma and doctrine. Suddenly there was this whole set of ideas that is now associated with Christianity.
And now we have the idea of a religion. A religion that unites people in the fact that they have similar doctrine, similar beliefs, similar allegiance to a deity. Now you might say that the Jews already had that, because they were allegiant to Yahweh, they had a set of scriptures, they [00:52:00] were a people of the book.
But a lot of scholars look at this history and they go, well, yeah. But they weren't really a religion in the sense that, of the way that we think of the term religion today. That kind of happened because of this back and forth and this pushback and what was going on in the early church. There was this idea that you could convert from one religion to another.
There was this idea, suddenly, that you could be allegiant to this God here and not all of the gods. As far as the people of Rome went, this was a new idea, too, because suddenly you had to have allegiance to one God rather than multiple gods. That was a new idea. These were new concepts. This was a new framework that we can now call religion.
And I know for some of you, you're thinking, that's just splitting hairs. Of course, [00:53:00] the Jewish people had a religion, and it was Judaism. But let's look at the Jewish tradition in the first century. They were united as a people in some ways. Why is that? It's because of their scriptures. But they didn't all have the same ideas.
They didn't all have the same interpretation. There were different places that had different ideas, and you might call those dogmatic ideas in some sense, but one Jew wasn't calling another Jew a heretic. That idea arose with the development of Christianity. So the idea of dogma, orthodoxy, heresy, all of these things originated because of Christianity.
And to be clear, some of the Jews were calling early Christians heretics. But aside from that, it's not that people didn't have different ideas, but you could be a Jew [00:54:00] and not believe the same kind of quote unquote doctrine. I'm definitely not saying that they didn't have splits, and people who are saying, "We're right, and you guys are wrong," because there was plenty of that going along. But historians see that as a different thing than what's going on with the claims of heresy in the time of the early church.
So that's the idea of religion that kind of developed with the early church. But now let's talk about the idea of the nation of Israel. Because this is the context of the exile and the formation of the Jewish people as a people. And I'm specifically talking about the Jewish people as opposed to Israelites, because this was going on after the first deportation of Israel, northern Israel, right? There was an exile for them, and they technically never returned [00:55:00] to the land. And then there was another separate, different exile for the nation of Judah in the south. And they were allowed back into their land.
So in a sense, there is this end of exile, but you have to ask yourself, what does the end of exile mean, right? If it means everybody's there, right? Like, it could mean everybody is back in the land, or it could mean something else. It could mean that they had a temple. It could mean that they had autonomy. You know, there's all of these different ideas.
And the reason that there's different ideas was because the experience of the exile changed the people as a whole. It changed their ideas of who they were and what it meant to be a Jew. Previously, it really was very tied to the land. It was tied to the borders of the land. Once the exile happens and there's the dispersion, they had to form a new [00:56:00] identity. They had to decide, okay, well, what does it mean to be a people outside the land? And you know what? I've heard people say that before, but connecting this identity formation to the very concept of exile, that kind of blew my mind.
Like, the theme of exile isn't just about not being in the land. It is also about this identity formation that we have going on. And that's huge because when you consider the cycle of exile with sin, exile, repentance, and restoration, then that process of repentance is transformative. It makes you into a new human or a new group.
It creates a new thing when that happens. So if we're only talking about exile as this longing for home, and this pain of being in a situation we don't want to be in, and [00:57:00] this idea of suffering. Well, all of that matters, and it's part of this whole concept. But if we're missing out on the idea of identity formation, and transformation, and becoming new, well, that seems to be just as much a part of the idea of exile as the other stuff.
And, you know, maybe some of this is obvious. Like, I've probably thought a lot of these things before, but I haven't thought about them in the framework of the formation of the canon as a whole. Like, what does the Bible actually mean? And not only that, but what does Christianity mean? What does it mean to be a Christian?
Why do we see a whole lot of really weird stuff in the early church as far as the history of it and as far as so many heresies and the dynamic of the church fathers and these conversations that are going back and forth between [00:58:00] the church and responses with Judaism and this whole thing that's going on in history.
Why do we see that? How can it be that a single book, or really a library of books that we call the Bible, has been that transformative to the world. So I talked about the idea of religion, but the idea of the nation also stems from this history of the Bible and its formation. But honestly, even our ideas of what a nation is, is fairly recent.
In the Bible, when we see the word nation and when we think of the Israelite nation or the Israelite people as a nation, we're importing certain ideas there. And those might not be the way that people were thinking about during the exile, during the first century, and even during the early church.
And because the Jews of the first century had such a wide variety of interpretations [00:59:00] and views and understandings of themselves. That probably means that there was also not a cohesive view of what a nation was, right? When we talk about the nations in the Bible, we're usually talking about Israel versus the nations. So nations are defined by the nation of Israel. And again, prior to the exile, Israel would have been a nation quite similar to the nations around her. There was a border, there are leaders, there's people who have authority over this area. You know, all of these ideas here that it's very grounded in the land.
You didn't move somewhere else and retain your previous identity. That just really wasn't a thing until Israel came along and they decided, you know what? You've picked us up. You've moved us somewhere, but we are [01:00:00] going to retain our identity. And that was fascinating, because nobody else was doing that. So whether or not the people were back in the land, they had been formed by the exile. They had been formed by this canon of scripture that bound them together.
And it's not dogmatic, it's not systematic, it's full of stories that are formative. That is how they were forming their identity. And what's fascinating to me is that with the development of Christianity, they are still tied to the book, but we also tend to be very tied to our doctrine. You can't be called a Christian unless you affirm X, Y, and Z.
And you know, for a lot of us, we try and make sure that those requirements are about making sure we are allegiant to the deity of creation, right? To Yahweh, to [01:01:00] Jesus, but many of us have identities that are more specific than that. We have identities that are within a particular tradition, and it's rather fascinating to think about the fact that we also have gone through a formation of identity.
And it's fascinating that several authors of the New Testament refer to people who are Christ followers as being in exile, as being part of the dispersion.
And again, a lot of times we use this language of being in exile to indicate something about our suffering, or something about the fact that we have a future hope. But I bet a lot of us don't connect this to the fact that we too are called to repent, and we too are called to shape our identity in light of our exile.
And this includes a transformative process that [01:02:00] is making us new, it's making us something different than we were before. And I think it's a little bit hard to see, but if you go into the New Testament, and I'm not going to do this right now because I'm already kind of running out of time here, but if you go into the New Testament and you look at the places where people are called exiles, or part of the dispersion, or part of the diaspora. That a lot of times what those authors are talking about are things that relate to behavior. The New Testament authors are calling their people to repentance and to proper behavior.
If you go ahead and read this book by Smith- Christopher, he will talk a little bit about how refugee societies and people who are minority groups tend to behave. Like, if you are a new person in a new land and you are in the minority there, then a lot of times you're going to tend to keep your head down, [01:03:00] right? You're going to be like, okay, don't rock the boat. We got to get by. We don't want to get crushed by the people around us. So, we're going to kind of keep our heads down and let's behave like this. This is the right way to behave because you are a minority group, which means psychologically there are some rules associated with that.
So some of his conclusions and his suppositions, I don't know if we can really apply that to the Bible and what's going on there, but it's an interesting exercise to put ourselves in this mental space of being the minority, being an oppressed group. Saying, okay, this is how we have to behave. We need to make sure we are retaining our identity, doing things the right way, making sure that we're following our morals and our values, but we got to do it in this hard situation.
And so it's possible that [01:04:00] some of the wisdom literature of the Bible is written in these kinds of veins, with this view that some wisdom literature is clearly meant for, like, the Prince. This is how you are to behave as a leader, as a king, and that's applicable to the Christian. But also applicable to the Christian is wisdom that applies to when you are living in exile. So when you're looking at the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, and you see things that seem like they're polar opposites, well, maybe next time consider the potential people who are being addressed in those. Is this addressed to a person who is in power, who is in authority, who is a leader, or is it addressed to somebody who is in a potential place of oppression, where they just need to survive and keep their head down?
And then you think, oh, well, no wonder the Bible is so very [01:05:00] interested in the idea of helping people who are oppressed. Hmm. Maybe that's grounded in their real experience. Right? And understanding also that we are going to be in that experience. Not just the aspect of suffering, but the aspect of maintaining our identity in that suffering and being transformed as part of that process, becoming even better people. Becoming a more solidified group.
And this would be a call that I would give to the church at large today. Where is our identity? How are we forming that? What are the practical ways in which we do that? Where is our transformative power? Are we even seeing that transformation? Are we paying attention to it? Are we guiding it in relation to the values that form our identity?
These are [01:06:00] all really important questions. I do have one more book to suggest, and this is interesting because I went to the library this week, and you know they have books on display where you walk past these display books and they just put their books that are prettiest, or that they've just gotten in, or you know, books like that.
Well, as I was walking in, I found a book called Why the Bible Began, An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins. This is by Jacob L. Wright. Now, he is coming at this from the perspective of a historian. So he's not confessional. He's not coming at it from the direction that scripture is inspired literature.
But he also makes the point that he is not coming at this from an antagonistic perspective. He's not trying to dismantle the idea of the sacredness [01:07:00] of the Bible. And I mention this book because I was so excited to see it because it speaks exactly to what I'm thinking about this week. And it's a very delightful book.
Again, it's not confessional. He doesn't come at it from the perspective that the Bible is normative for us, like it's authoritative to us. But he does make the point that the Bible is wisdom literature, and it's wisdom literature for everyone. And it's very, very useful for us to understand what the Bible is and how it can apply to our lives, even if we're not Christian or Jewish.
And his focus is on the Old Testament, rather than the Old Testament and the New Testament. But the question that Jacob Wright is asking is, Why do we have the Bible? Why is it special? And, you know, the cookie cutter Sunday School answer is, [01:08:00] Well, we have the Bible because God wanted this preserved for us. He wanted his wisdom and his interaction with humanity preserved. And, you know, fair enough, that's a good answer. But it doesn't explain this question from the perspective of a historian. Because as much as God had a part to play, humans also had a part to play. And they were doing things for reasons.
And so his question is, why? Why is the Bible, this formative book that has had this big impact, I mean, aside from it being amazing literature, what's the deal? How did this happen? And so he goes down this idea that the exile was the formative moment for it. Again, not that it was written all during the exile, but it was compiled and put into the form we have it today.
And it was very much about this idea of the Jewish people [01:09:00] and the idea of peoplehood. And he kind of goes through a lot of the Old Testament and explains, This is why it's so important, and this is how it's formative. And these are the things that are kind of counter narrative to what was going on, to what they might have been thinking otherwise.
It is a fascinating book, so if you get a chance, if you have it at your library, or whatever, It's a really good read. It's very interesting. Now, I will give a precaution because you do need some discernment here, because this isn't from a confessional scholar. And so we do need some discernment when we read this kind of material, right? How do we fit this into our worldview, rather than just buying wholesale into their worldview? So this book isn't for people who are brand new to the faith, or who are really struggling with questions, necessarily. But he asks such good questions. He talks [01:10:00] a lot about the importance and impact of women, for instance, and the concept that Jewish men had to reform their identity to be something that wasn't embedded in the military.
So I won't get into the details here, but this book is really interesting. And I was just thrilled to see it when I was looking at this topic and thinking about these things because suddenly, oh look, here's a person that agrees with me in some way. It's like, it's not just me thinking about these things and pondering them.
So you know what I'm going to do for this episode? Instead of putting all of these links into my show notes, because there's a lot of them, and honestly there's a lot of books I would add to this list of things that I've been talking about, I'm going to go ahead and write a blog post that will talk about those resources, and I will link the blog post into the show notes.
So you will still have all of the links to these [01:11:00] resources, plus a whole lot more. And it's not going to be, like, some comprehensive, this is the list about all of the books about the Exile. It's going to be the ones that I think are useful, that I have read, that I know about, and these kinds of things. So, if you're wanting a resource for looking at the exile, and looking at it from different perspectives, and seeing some of the things that I've been talking about here, you can go find all of that in that blog post.
There is so much to talk about in relation to the exile, so I'm sure this isn't the last that you'll hear about it. And I love that I'm talking about this topic today, because when this episode drops, it's going to be Good Friday according to the western liturgical calendar. And so this is the day, a lot of times we're thinking in terms of lament and sadness because Jesus goes into the grave.
And so that is a type of exile. [01:12:00] In fact, death itself is a type of exile. And we actually see that in scripture that's wrapped up in the theme of exile. And so today on Good Friday, Jesus is going into the grave. He is going into Sheol. He is going into Hades. But, take heart, because He is there to reign triumphant. He is there to break through the gates of Hades from the inside. And Alleluia for that.
This has felt like a different kind of episode to me. And I hope that it didn't seem too disjointed. As always, I appreciate you all for listening. I appreciate those of you who share the episodes with other people. I appreciate those of you who engage with me on social media, or through email, or through my website.
And a special thanks to all of you who are supporting me through PayPal or Patreon. I appreciate you all. If you're interested [01:13:00] in looking at some of my artwork, I do have some of that on my website. You can just go to the tab that says Store, and you can see some of my paintings there. And on my website at genesismarksthespot. com, you can also sign up for my newsletter if you haven't done so. But that is it for this week. I wish you all a blessed week, and we will see you later.
