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 this happens to be my 52nd episode, which means that I have been doing this podcast for an entire year. It certainly does not feel that long to me, but it feels great to reach this milestone.
And I want to thank all of you for listening and supporting me in various ways. As I'm recording this, I'm also preparing to launch a new YouTube show on the channel Faith Unaltered. This show is called Pilgrims in a Holy Land, and the trajectory is going to be similar to Genesis Marks the Spot, but it will broaden out into more historical and systematic [00:01:00] theology, and also working on cross denominational apologetics, and things like that.
I'm looking forward to it. By the time this episode airs, I'm supposed to have my first regular segment, and I'll leave a link to that in the show notes. If you follow my newsletter, you'll get regular notifications and links to the show's playlist. I didn't really think about how that show is corresponding to the anniversary of Genesis Marks the Spot, but that's pretty neat.
It is not quite the end of our calendar year yet, but this anniversary has been causing me to reflect on the last year as a whole, and it's been A very intense one in several ways with my work here and also some other things going on. And it's been a year of loss for myself and also for others I know.
It's always very surreal [00:02:00] to go through that and also just find yourself plugging away at normal things. But that is how life tends to go, isn't it? It doesn't stop for those left behind. And as much as it feels like things come to a crashing halt, well, they don't actually. Sometimes that bittersweet reality hits in a new way, and hopefully some new gratitude for what you have might grow from it.
Apologies if I seem too overly philosophical here, but as I was thinking on what might be an appropriate topic for this episode, I got to thinking about the flow of time and how that affects us. And then I started thinking about how that has radically changed for us today, compared to the ancient world.
I and many others have pointed out how the Bible is foreign to us today. This is true in culture, in worldview, and just in [00:03:00] daily life. We today are able to measure an exact year down to the day, down to the hour, down to the minute, the second even. The ancient world did not have that luxury, if luxury it even is.
When I think about it, it almost seems a curse that we're such slaves to time now. It means our clocks feel as though they are moving faster and faster as the years go on, and we are pressed into needing to keep exact appointments, and every day seems more urgent than the last. I can have confidence in the number of weeks that have passed since I've been working on this podcast, but how important is it, really, that it's been going an exact year?
Because our time is measured as it is, this does happen to be encouraging to me and a reason to celebrate, at least in my mind. And certainly the ancient world [00:04:00] also had that mindset of celebrating things, along with the passage of time. The ancient world celebrated milestones. And this is something that is very embedded into the Bible's meaning, so I figured we'd discuss some of that today, especially as it relates to Genesis and the creation narrative.
But in order to understand that, we really have to broaden our view again as we're looking at Scripture and see beyond Genesis into how the ancient person was thinking and reading their Scripture, and the Pentateuch in particular, as a whole. The Pentateuch is, of course, the first five books of Moses, as some of us know of it, or the Torah.
Torah is a word that is a bit hard to understand for us today, I think. We could define it as law or instruction, but we read the Torah and we go, this isn't just a set of rules. [00:05:00] It's not just a set of instructions. There are laws and rules and regulations and things of that nature in the Torah. But there's a whole lot of narrative as well.
To us, we kind of distinguish those two things. Narrative isn't law. It's not the commandments. It's not the rules and regulations. Or is it? Maybe an ancient idea of law and instruction includes the facet of narrative. That is one of the suggestions that is given in the book Liturgy of Creation, which I'm going to be bringing up quite a bit today.
And I'm sure I need to apologize for the way that I'm going to pronounce this name. I have listened to the author on YouTube, and he has stated that the way he pronounces his name has been changed from the original way, since they were immigrants to America. But I'm still worried I'm going to mispronounce his name, even [00:06:00] though I've heard him say it himself.
So, apologies if I do mispronounce it, but the Liturgy of Creation Understanding Calendars in Old Testament Context was written by Dr. Michael Lefebvre. His last name is spelled L E F E B V R E. As far as I can tell, in French, the B is silent, but I think that he was pronouncing the B when he said his name.
So that's what I got for the moment. Hopefully that's at least somewhere in the ballpark. Pronunciation is just not one of my strong suits to begin with. I know it, and yet here I am doing a podcast, so I don't know, I don't know what to tell you about that. I will tell you that I have greatly enjoyed his book, The Liturgy of Creation.
And I highly, highly recommend it to all of you. It's a very easy read. He writes in a very approachable [00:07:00] style, but there's a lot of meat to get into in his writing. I also believe it's a fantastic companion to the work of Dr. John Walton. So if you have read Walton or you're interested in reading Walton in the future, reading something like The Lost World of Genesis 1 from Walton and reading the Liturgy of Creation next to one another, it really gives you a very complete picture of what's going on for the days of creation, in my opinion.
The Liturgy of Creation brings forth the idea of the Days of Creation as liturgical calendar. And this, of course, fits quite nicely with the idea of the Cosmic Temple being described as being built in Genesis 1. If you have a temple, you're also going to have a liturgical calendar. When Dr. Walton describes the Cosmic Temple, he does tend to use a lot of the ancient Near Eastern literature and shows how these are comparative to the [00:08:00] Bible.
And that's a great approach, but in the Liturgy of Creation, what Dr. Lefebvre is doing is he is looking within the Pentateuch itself and trying to see how to read Genesis 1 from a hermeneutical lens that is embedded into the Torah itself. And because the Torah is law, we should also be reading the narratives of the Pentateuch from the framework of law.
That's what Dr. Lefebvre is saying. And I think that's a beautiful way to look at it, and I think it's very true to what we see in scripture and how the Pentateuch or the Torah has been read throughout history, traditionally. So the book doesn't just talk about Genesis 1. Lefebvre gets into the actual festivals of Israel and how they're described in the Torah.
And there's so much cool stuff from there, and we tend to really miss out on a lot of it because, as Christians, most of us are not celebrating [00:09:00] these festivals. So, we're not really even exactly sure what time of year they're supposed to be in. We don't know what the meaning of each individual festival is.
But when Scripture is really set within this context of this liturgical calendar, that means that we're missing a lot of things as Christians reading the Old Testament. Another thing that this book gets into is the idea that the chronology of the events of the Torah are not presented with an eye to exact chronology, but rather, they are presented within the framework of the liturgy.
And that's important to note, because it's a very big departure from the way that we use dates today. We like very precise things. We want to know What day George Washington chopped down that cherry tree? If we get that date wrong, then we're not being historically reliable, right? Well, that's not how the ancient person thought of dates [00:10:00] and time.
Okay, so a lot of that is stuff we'll be getting into in this episode. But first I want to define what liturgy is, because many of us might not understand what liturgy is. Liturgy, in our minds, might be this fuzzy concept that we don't really understand. Or, it might be something that certain types of Christians do, and we might be thinking of something as specific as the divine liturgy when we come across this term. And that is a particular type of liturgy. But really, liturgy is just a term that is referencing the forms of religious practice. So it's pretty hard for a group of religious believers to get into a situation where they have zero liturgy. You can have spontaneous things that go on, but usually there's some sort of overarching structure, and the way that you do things, and hierarchies, and procedures, and just things that you [00:11:00] expect to see within the religious practice of a group.
That's what liturgy is. And of course in the Old Testament, it was very precise with the sacrificial system that was supposed to be done in just certain ways, and things like that. So what we're talking about specifically here is that Old Testament liturgy that we see talked about in the Pentateuch itself in the first five books of Moses, the structure of those books and the way they tell their stories is wrapped up in the way they do the liturgy. And the important point there is that the liturgy of the temple and the tabernacle, once they get into the land, it is based on the land's rhythms. It's based on the seasons that they were actually experiencing in the nation of Israel at the time.
And not everyone in the ancient Near East had the same calendar. Israel actually had a different calendar from their neighbors. And there were [00:12:00] theological reasons for that. Of course, it's not that the ancient people didn't maintain set times and years, and couldn't all get on the same page with that. They were actually very careful with these things. But different nations would change their calendar according to who was ruling, and things like that. But also, calendars began at different times. But we'll get into that in a minute.
To us, time is an abstract structure. It's connected, still, to natural processes. We have mathematics and measurements and things like that. We also have the concept of season as far as the effect of that season. You know, we have some places that have two seasons, and some places that have four seasons, and other places are described as having a hundred seasons, because a season is associated with certain types of weather, how things feel, whether you're able to plant or harvest or things like that, [00:13:00] right?
And that doesn't always go along with that mathematically precise system of our calendar. The first day of winter is supposed to begin on December 21st, right? But where I live, winter can start any time between October to into December. And our spring doesn't start till who knows when. We can't plant anything reliably until at least the last week of May, where I live.
So if you think about ancient cultures, and there are probably still cultures like this today, that are very reliant on that agricultural calendar. It doesn't matter what day of the year a certain season starts at. What matters is what's actually happening in that location. Can we plant? Can we harvest? Is it the rainy season, the snowy season, the dry season? What do we have to do during those different periods of time of the year? Lives are intertwined with those [00:14:00] seasons, so it makes all the sense in the world. that a religious calendar would also be entwined with the cycles of the season in a particular area.
Today, of course, our calendar begins in the middle of winter. And apparently that's not all that strange for solar calendars to be beginning in winter, because they are based on the movement of the sun. However, it wasn't until 153 BC that the Roman year began to be celebrated in January. And, of course, they did that because of political reasons.
Previously, the beginning of the year for them had been in March, which, that's interesting because that coincides with the ancient Israelite practice of beginning the year in the spring. Fundamentally, to us, it really doesn't matter what time of the year the year starts. There's no religious meaning attached to it for us.
Calendars and numbers at large have pretty much lost [00:15:00] that kind of deeply rooted religious meaning. Not that we don't have meaning to our numbers, it's just usually a lot more random for us. And we've lost the reason why they have meaning. My kids several times have asked me, Why is 13 unlucky? We just don't have the context that that developed in. I can never actually remember why that's unlucky. I really don't know, at least not off the top of my head. And so then my kids are like, Okay, well, I think that number two is unlucky. I mean, all right, that's just as valid as number 13 as far as our cultural context goes.
Here's a quote from a footnote in the book. It says, quote, Saka Stern suggests that the invention of a calendar governed by mathematical rules rather than by natural observations led to the desacralization of time and made it a secular [00:16:00] entity end quote.
That means that to us, time is no longer sacred in the way that it was in the ancient world. For the ancient person, the calendar was very connected to the cycle of life and death. And so, of course, this was attached to the harvest cycle. If you are living off of the land, there are times when you are emptying your stores of food, and you are filling up your stores of food. And they had stories that spoke about this. And these stories were very related to their calendars. I've mentioned before about the Baal Cycle, for instance. And that's what the Baal Cycle was. That's how it functioned in society for the people of Ugarit. It explained the cycle of the year. What's interesting in contrast with the ancient Israelites, however, was that instead of mythology being the basis for their calendar, And again, mythology doesn't necessarily mean [00:17:00] something that's not true, but rather it's a story that is about the gods.
Israelite calendar and purpose and the entire structure of their society was based on something that was historical. So instead of something that was entirely based on what's happening in the heavens, Their national story was based on what happened to them here on Earth in a real way. So that's very different, and the people of Israel took that very literally and very seriously. But again, the way they treated and told historical narrative is simply not the way that we do today.
Okay, so let's talk about the easiest way to plainly see the liturgy in Genesis 1. On the fourth day of creation, we have the establishment of the lights. These are verses 14 and 15 of Genesis 1. And in those verses, there are [00:18:00] three statements that are the let there be statements.
The first has to do with the establishment of the day. The second statement has to do with signs, festivals, days, and years. And the third has to do with giving light to the earth. So these are three different purposes for the lights in the sky, basically. Our focus here is on the second let there be statement.
The one that talks about signs and festivals and days and years. Depending upon what translation you're reading. Your translation might say seasons. But that word is talking specifically about the festivals that the Israelites celebrated. So part of the reason for the lights in the sky was so that they could establish those festivals properly.
So not counting the regular New Moon festivals as well as the weekly Sabbath, there are seven festivals in the Israelite calendar. These are the Passover, [00:19:00] the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Firstfruits, the Feast of Weeks, the Feast of Trumpets. The Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Booths. These are all described in Leviticus 23.
A lot of times you do get the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread lumped together, because they happen one right after another. But they are separate celebrations. And again, in the Christian imagination, we don't have these festivals that are embedded into our minds. We have other kinds of things, like Christmas, and Easter, and our Sunday worship. And in some ways, those are very like how the ancient Israelite would have thought about their festivals.
Okay, so we're talking about the festivals, and we're talking about Genesis 1, and we probably note that emphasis on the number 7 in the calendar. Sometimes we think, okay, the number 7 is special because of the Days of Creation. And [00:20:00] that's why everything else is going to have sevens, right? Because we read our Bibles from left to right, we might say. We begin in Genesis and we continue forward. And so, the number seven seems to us to be embedded into creation. And I'm not saying that can't be a possibility, okay? But, the setting up of these festivals isn't a natural process.
The number seven means completion in the ancient Near East, and this is not just an Israelite thing. It's pretty ubiquitous that it has this meaning. Why it has that meaning, we don't really know. Might it be that the number seven is embedded into creation in some sense? Again, I'm not going to deny that that's a possibility. For instance, a quarter moon is approximately seven days. And there was the idea that they had to let the land lie fallow every seventh year in order to continue having good crops because they didn't have the types of fertilizers that we [00:21:00] have today. But guess what? It's not actually enough to let the land lie fallow every seven years.
So, can't really use that one. But at any rate, a question for our modern time is Do we need to insist on a literal seven day creation because of the prevalence of the number seven? Actually, I will note that usually the emphasis is on a six day creation. They leave off that seventh day because God is supposed to not be doing anything then. He's not creating on the seventh day. Well, while the number six can and does have biblical meaning, we really do need to give more attention to the pattern of sevens. My suggestion to you, and I've made this case before, is that as much as we are starting in Genesis in this podcast, we need to say that the context of Genesis is not in the time before Abraham. It's just not. The context is much later. [00:22:00] At minimum, the context is the Exodus, complete with the tabernacle and sacrificial system. And where in the Ancient Near East in general, the number seven mattered. It was important. So, the number seven is associated with all of that stuff. I'm saying that they were starting out with the cultic, ritualistic, liturgical meaning, and they're not actually starting out with the meaning that is embedded in creation itself.
That's not what's primary in their minds. Again, bringing up John Walton, and it's not just him, but the idea of creation as temple is really important to see here. While I don't want to disparage the idea that earthly creation reflects a heavenly pattern or reality, it's still clearly the case that the writers and readers had the temple or tabernacle in mind.
But if we were to say that the creation account was written to reflect the temple and its liturgy, rather [00:23:00] than being a chronological, journalistic type account, does that then falsify the Bible, or at least Genesis 1? The answer is no, it doesn't. It really doesn't. And if you want to understand that more fully, I highly recommend reading the Liturgy of Creation. If you want to understand the difference between the way we view time and its role in historical narrative versus the way the ancient person viewed time and historical narrative, I really suggest this. And this also gets into things like why are the gospel accounts different? Why does it look like Jesus was crucified on a different day in the Book of John versus the Synoptic Gospels? Dr. Lefebvre gives a very good explanation for that in his book.
The literal six day creationist is very adamant about Genesis being a historical narrative as opposed to something like poetry. [00:24:00] And the point here is actually, yes, it is. You're absolutely right. It is a historical narrative, but it's not a modern historical narrative.
So, because it's an ancient historical narrative, we should expect it to display characteristics of an ancient historical narrative rather than a modern one. And that means, actually, an entirely different purpose and intent and meaning to their calendar. Which, in turn, means different intent and meaning and purpose to their chronology.
And there's a couple parts to this. First, just appreciating how tied to the land and seasons and sky their calendar was, and also acknowledging that there is going to be religious meaning to it. Their calendar is going to have stories attached to it. And those stories, even the historical narratives, aren't going to be based on bare mathematical dates, but [00:25:00] rather symbolism that is embedded in their cultural consciousness.
So genealogies need to have a certain number of people in them, for instance. An accounting of days will likewise not be a literal tally, but will be some number with inherent meaning. Because we have desacralized our use of calendar and number, We simply don't understand this former way of doing all this. It feels nonsensical and random to us because we use numbers in such a precise way. If I was going to celebrate the anniversary of the premier of my podcast in the way that an ancient person did, I would do so on a more meaningful episode then number 52. I could choose 50, for instance, or I could wait until January 1st, or I could celebrate it on Christmas Eve, or some other significant date that happens to fall roughly around this time.
Actually, if I was doing it like the ancient person, I'd probably use the closest [00:26:00] new moon. But you see, in a solar calendar, our weeks do not line up with the moon that nicely. You see my point here. There would be something other than the counting of weeks. Because other than it happening to be the exact number of weeks in a solar year, there is nothing that is otherwise interesting or meaningful to the number 52.
This isn't to say that ancient people didn't use numbers precisely at all. We have many economic and astrological documents from the past that suggest otherwise. They made meticulous efforts to be on time for their planting so that they could gather the most productive crop. And they were just as interested in not being cheated out of goods as we are today.
But writing a narrative like the Torah, it was critical to imbue it with the right meaning. They weren't just making a history book. And, by the way, for that matter, have you ever picked up a history book? Even our modern history writers need to organize things in a narrative [00:27:00] way. We pick and choose things to include, and we do so with themes in mind. They aren't just random collections of facts. Of course, when writing history today, we are not comfortable with changing data to fit our narrative. But, again, ancient people weren't accused of things like bias. They intentionally wrote for a level of bias as part of the way they got their point across.
So, let's talk about the calendar now. Here is an interesting thing that I learned while reading this book. If you have been into biblical studies, you've probably heard that the Jewish or Israelite day began at sunset, and then it went until the next sunset. So the Sabbath, which is Saturday to us, begins on Friday night.
But apparently this is a thing that started in the Second Temple period, which means it's not an Old Testament practice. Lefebvre explains that to the ancient [00:28:00] Israelite, A day would be the daylight hours, so sunrise until sunset. And night was a kind of marginal space. It was not the same as the day. If pressed, and somebody insisted, no, how long is a day, it's gotta be 24 hours, it would be from sunrise to sunrise.
He shows this by actual verses in Scripture. For instance, in Genesis 19 with the incident with Lot and his daughters, it says in verse 33, So they made their father drink wine that night, and the firstborn went in and lay with her father. He did not know when she lay down or when she arose. The next day, The firstborn said to the younger, and so on and so forth.
If the day started in the evening, it would be the same day. It wouldn't be the next day. And that is what that Hebrew word means. It means the next day. So that's interesting. But what about the [00:29:00] idea that the phrase, evening and morning, in Genesis 1, is evidence that the day began with sunset? I think I've discussed this phrase before and suggested that it might be a merism.
A merism is a type of figurative language where you're using two opposites to indicate a complete whole. So that's one idea for why this phrase shows up in Genesis 1. Evening and morning indicates it's the entire day. But Dr. Lefebvre suggests that maybe a better translation is evening unto morning instead of evening and morning.
And that this is the boundary that marks the end of the day before to the beginning of the next day. So it is highlighting the fact that God worked during the daylight hours, and then there was that marginal time at night. If we're taking the Creation Week to mimic the way that people live, this makes quite a bit of [00:30:00] sense.
Okay, so let's talk about the month in the ancient Israelite calendar. There is no word in Hebrew that just means month. They used the word moon, and the month began with the first sliver of the moon. In the ancient Near East, this was usually observed by the priest who would tell the king about it. And they would blow trumpets so that everyone knew, Oh, okay, it's the new moon. The new month has now begun.
And in the Israelite calendar, there was a monthly new moon feast. This was kind of an extra sabbath every month. It was a feast day, so they had particular sacrifices they would give. It strikes me also that I need to disambiguate something for you. When we think of the new moon, we think of the time where you're not seeing the moon. Right? There's no part of the moon that is lit up. That's the new moon to us. But to the ancient Israelites, the new moon was [00:31:00] literally the new moon that is now showing. It's now appearing in the sky. That's the new moon. Okay, so a month is either 29 or 30 days, because the actual cycle of the moon going around is somewhere in between 29. 26 and 29. 8 days. It does depend on the month. And so sometimes it was basically 29 days, and other months it would have to be 30 days. It would vary according to what was happening in the sky. They didn't have any months with 28 days. They didn't have any months with 31 days. And today, our lunar calendar, or our month cycle, is fixed, aside from the occasional February.
Later in the book, when Dr. Lefebvre is defending the fact that you cannot use the calendar in the Pentateuch and say that this was a literal chronology because there's discrepancies in the datings, it becomes important to realize that not every month [00:32:00] had 30 days. This becomes a factor in the flood narrative, which has five months of 30 days, and that's just not possible in the calendar.
So that means that the numbers are being used symbolically, figuratively, for particular purposes rather than just, it happened to be this exact number of days, and this happened on this date, and this happened on another date, and well, those just happen to fall on the festival dates, right? Of course, it is possible that God just aligned the calendar in a way that it all lined up perfectly with the Israelite festivals.
No one's saying that's not possible, but what's not possible is that you'd have five months of 30 day months. That's not possible in the calendar. And it's not a contradiction when you just realize this is how they dealt with calendar and time and memorial dates.
And it doesn't indicate that the [00:33:00] narrative is false. That's the other important thing to note. This doesn't falsify anything. This is just how they did it.
Okay, so the Israelites had a calendar that was based on the moon, but that doesn't mean that the solar year plays no part. The spring and fall equinoxes are very important to them. The spring equinox marked the end of winter or the rainy season and the beginning of spring.
It is in this month that they have the Passover. They have the Feast of Firstfruits and the Festival of Unleavened Bread, which lasts a week. At the Fall Equinox, that was called the Turning of the Year. And it seems as though this is why, later on, the calendar was changed so that the First of the Year is in the Fall, because of a misunderstanding of what the Turning of the Year meant.
But during the month of the Fall Equinox, this is when they celebrate the Feast of the Trumpets. The Day of Atonement and [00:34:00] the Feast of Booths, which is, again, another seven day feast. So, in between the spring and fall, that is their dry season. And in between the fall and the spring, that is their wet season.
The wet season was when they were planting the next year's crops, and there is a sequence of types of rain that happened during that time. You have the first rains that soften the ground so that they can plant at all. Then they have heavier rains. And usually there's a final burst that gave them a really good crop at the end, which, again, is in the spring.
Now, of course, we know that the months do not line up with the solar year, and so they would have to adjust that occasionally. We have no records as to how the Israelites did that. They didn't have a system in place for it, as far as something official that said, you will do this when this happens. But everyone in the ancient world had these kinds of adjustments to their calendars.
Whether they used a solar year or a lunar year, you [00:35:00] have to adjust the calendar on occasion. Because the cycle of the Earth going around the Sun, and the cycle of the Moon going around the Earth, Those are not exact day lengths. They're a little bit off. So we have to adjust it on occasion in order to stay on track. And people in the ancient world, they were amazing observers of the sky. And they understood how these things worked and how to adjust for them.
Okay, so to me, it makes a little more sense when you see that the festivals are all clumped into two months. Well, they're not all clumped there. There is an exception.
But in the spring, you have three festivals, one of them week long. And in the fall, you have another three festivals, again, with one that is a week long. In the spring, we might say that the Passover is the most important feast. Not that any of the feasts were probably unimportant, but certainly the Passover is where they're celebrating the exodus and the freedom from slavery. The Day of [00:36:00] Atonement, of course, in the fall, is where they have the two goats, and one of them is for Yahweh, and the other one is sent out into the wilderness. And there's all of that symbolism there. The feasts from the spring to the fall, they're also about the entire journey of the Israelites from Egypt into the Promised Land. It begins with Passover, which is that initial thing escaping from Egypt, and then you end with the Feast of Booths, and that is the celebration of ending up in the land.
There are not very many dates in Genesis, but there are dates surrounding the Flood, and those dates correspond with these festivals and also the story of Israel being saved out of Egypt.
We could call that coincidence. We could call that God's foreknowledge and planning. But again, when the Flood is using those perfect kind of months of 30 days each instead of, some of them are going to be 29 days, that's an extremely strong indicator that we're not [00:37:00] dealing with historical, chronological, modern time. Again, not saying it's not historical, but that it's a different kind of use for the dates to indicate that history.
Okay, so I mentioned that there is one outlier festival. You have the three in the spring and the three in the fall. And in the middle of those, you have the Feast of Weeks. The Feast of Weeks marks the beginning of the wheat harvest. And it takes place seven weeks after the first fruits of barley.
I want to read a quote from the book. He says, quote, The festivals, especially through the lens of the Exodus narrative mapped over them, taught the people to view themselves as stewards of a land that God had given to them. They were being taught to maximize the fruitfulness of the land with gratefulness and with God's love for the poor on their hearts. These calendars provided not only agricultural guidance to maximize harvests, But [00:38:00] also the backbone for a national welfare system. The pilgrimage required at this midpoint between the two grain harvests was an opportunity to identify those who were suffering lack, so that those with abundance could share with those in need.
End quote. Another thing I will point out here is that the Israelite calendar began in the spring. The calendar of their neighbors, on the other hand, began in the fall, and this is theologically important. I'm going to read another quote. Lefebvre quotes the scholar Richard Hess, who suggests the following reason for this break with other Canaanite practices.
Quote, Israel's focus on the period of harvesting as the beginning of the year suggests that Israel recognized the harvest as given by God and emphasized divine ownership of it. End quote from Hess. In other words, to start the year with bounty rather than with labor. [00:39:00] was a demonstration of the grace of Israel's God, giving them a land already flowing with milk and honey. For Israel, seed did not bring harvest. Harvest provided seed. The appointment of the year to begin with the spring equinox may have been a deliberate Theologically significant break from the practice of the Canaanites. End quote.
It is fascinating to me how very steeped in the idea of God's provision we see the Israelite culture in the Old Testament. Now, of course, they didn't always live up to acknowledging that, and that was the problem, right? They had all of these reminders, yearly reminders, feast reminders, sacrificial reminders. Of who they ought to be grateful for, of how they became a people, and who's providing what they enjoyed in their entire lifestyle and nation.
And yet, of course, they still fell away. They went into idolatry. [00:40:00] They allowed the people around them to influence their worship and to influence their worldview. And yet God kept coming back and kept being faithful to them. Of course, a lot of skeptical or non-con confessional scholars will use this kind of information and say, see, the Israelites didn't always believe that Yahweh was the only God and that he was the sovereign creator and all of these things, and they will try and make the case that Israelite belief went from polytheism to monotheism.
But the entire story of the Bible suggests that we ought to see that polytheistic worship in in the land. And we do. The Bible has an explanation for that, scholars. Hello! Right? At any rate, we see this pattern of sevens here in the year, in the festival times, and it's kind of hard to portion out an entire year of twelve months into groups of seven.
But there is that seven month long [00:41:00] time of harvest from the spring into the fall. And so we might see that the year is kind of like the day. You have the useful part of the day where you're active and you're doing things, and then you have the marginal time of the night or the rainy season. And it's fascinating to me that their climate fits into that pattern.
So, it's like you have the complete year within those seven months and the festival cycle. And then it's like you have a time of rest in the year as well. I personally appreciate that because I like wintertime. It is my hibernation time, I like to say. Because I'm doing less and I'm feeling rejuvenated by the fact that there is a little more rest time in the winter.
I know for a lot of people it's depressing, there's less light, but for me it's that rejuvenation rest time. So now when people say I'm really weird for liking the winter, I can say, look, it's pretty biblical, right? Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I [00:42:00] do feel bad for the people who get depressed and are really affected by that lack of sun. So I'm not trying to make light of that. It's a very real problem for a lot of people. I admit that I would probably be less happy if I lived in a rainy place rather than a snowy place. To me, snow is about light and refreshment, so yeah, I don't know. I have some strange meanings that other people don't have. I get that. I'm a bit weird.
But again, this idea of spring being the start of the year, where you have things blossoming, and you have a first harvest. We don't have any kind of a harvest where I live in the spring, but that's what you get when you get a lot of snow. The spring, however, it's definitely got that new life kind of feeling going on, right?
And that's very connected to the cycle of the temple. You have the menorah in the temple, which is stylized like an almond tree, and almond trees would be blooming in the spring. [00:43:00] And this is also quite interesting because we've brought forward the idea that the tabernacle was imbued with the themes of creation, right?
And we're thinking in terms of Eden, and the garden, and all of that fruitfulness that's going on. So, the temple is definitely steeped in that, but it strikes me that when they are going through their year, and they just have gotten through their rainy season, and they're looking forward to harvesting plants and seeing the flowers and new life really come forward.
That is also what is being embedded in that symbolism of the garden and the trees and the fruitfulness in the tabernacle or the temple. When we pick up our Bibles and we're reading that left to right reading, we're starting in Genesis and we continue on, then everything we're reading later is colored by that reading of Genesis.
When we see something about new life, we're thinking Eden. We're [00:44:00] thinking creation. And I'm not saying that's wrong, because that's the first creation, right? And these are new ideas of creation, renewed creation. The idea of creation again happening yearly, happening on a regular cycle. It seems as though that's really key to Israelite thinking, which is awesome because that's also key to Christian thinking, right?
The theme of new life and rejuvenation, and who is creating that new life and that rejuvenation? All glory to God who does this. I'd also bring out a point about typology and themes in Scripture. I bring up both typology as well as themes, because I think they're very similar in a lot of ways, like you're using them in order to trace something through Scripture.
For those who aren't sure what typology is, a type is where you have something in the Old Testament, And then you have that same [00:45:00] thing, but slightly different and definitely better in the New Testament. So, you have Adam in the Old Testament. You have Jesus as the second Adam in the New Testament. You have Moses as an archetypical prophet in the Old Testament. And Jesus is the better prophet. And so you have something that's in the Old Testament that is also in the New Testament. And we can kind of see themes in this kind of a light as well. You have Eden, you have the tabernacle, you have the temple, you have the new idea of what sacred space is like in the New Testament, which is the body of believers.
And to us, a lot of times we think the archetype, or the prime example of something, might be the first one. So, Eden is the archetype of sacred space. But it's not really, because Eden isn't the best example of sacred space. We might say that the best example of sacred space would be God's kingdom and goodness that reaches out through [00:46:00] all of creation, right? The renewed heavens and earth that we see described in Revelation. Of course, in this episode, I'm basically sticking with the Old Testament, but I wanted to bring out this idea of typology and themes and how we see that through Scripture. Because as Christian readers, that's how we do need to read our text.
And part of how we do that is by fully understanding how the Old Testament context was seen. If you can't first understand that context, then there's no way you can bring it into the New Testament and then into Christian history as well. So even though we Christians don't usually celebrate the festivals that we see in the Old Testament, it's really, really important for us to understand them and to see how they molded and shaped, or were at least supposed to mold and shape, the nation and people of Israel.
Okay, so I would really like to get into more specifics [00:47:00] about the festivals, but we will leave that to the side and get into the meat of how this relates to Genesis. , so some of what I could say about this book and the framework here is stuff I've already talked about in my episodes about the views of creation.
So I'm not going to take the time to rehash all of that. or even very much of it. Specifically in episode 15, I discussed the analogical day's view, which is really very similar to what Dr. Lefebvre is saying in this book, The Liturgy of Creation. I think that Dr. Lefebvre is giving a little more sturdy of a foundation for this view because of his deep dive into the festival calendar of Israel as a whole and showing how that really impacts what we see in the Torah And in Genesis, and in Genesis 1 in particular.
But briefly, what I need to say about this is that When we read Genesis 1, we [00:48:00] should be thinking about not only what God is doing in creation, but our cooperation and partnership with Him. Because as the stewards of creation, where we are supposed to have dominion and rule over it, that gives us real tasks here on earth that mirror what God did.
So this is very much about seeing ourselves as the image of God and seeing a real impact we have in the world. And you guys all know how much I love that kind of topic. An interesting point that Dr. Lefebvre brings up is that in our apologetics movements, we tend to be focused on the crisis that we're addressing.
And he's not bringing this up as a criticism to those apologetics organizations and the things that they're doing. It makes total sense that what they're doing is responding to something and that that response is going to be framed by the thing that they're responding to, right? So if a Christian [00:49:00] apologetics organization is trying to explain how we can still be scientists and be faithful readers of the text, Or how we can possibly put those, two things together, it's not a knock against them to say that they are framing it in a certain way that is the same way that the opposition is framing it, perhaps. For instance, if somebody is saying, well, we can't be Christian and believe evolution, then an apologetics organization that is showing that, well, actually you can be Christian, and believe in evolution.
Let me show you why. They're taking a presupposition as the basis for their very existence and their arguments, right? So in that case, it makes a lot of sense that a lot of literalists or people who are defending science, I'm thinking in the realm of Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe and BioLogos and all of those kinds of things. It makes sense that they are focused [00:50:00] primarily on the six days of creation, right? Because those are the days where things are happening in the realm of creation and things are being created. The problem with that is that we lose focus on the purpose of the narrative if the purpose of the narrative is the whole seven days.
We kind of forget that, oh, yeah, there's that Sabbath day and it's actually super important. And again, this doesn't have to be a hit against anyone or their defense of scripture. But it's a really good point to bring out because it is true that we tend to just leave that seventh day off like it doesn't matter.
It's like, well, if the Israelites were reading this in relation to their week, then there were two focuses to the text, both the week of labor that people were engaging in and also that day of rest. That's Sabbath. So from the perspective of the [00:51:00] Israelite daily or weekly life. It's the six days of stewardship over creation, then the seventh day where they are supposed to be communing in God's presence and recognizing that as hard as they might be working, it is God's provenance and provision that That is ultimately the way that they can rest, and that even all of their stewardship is based on that.
All right, so anyway , in the book, it does give some defense as to how the early Church Fathers were struggling with the text of Genesis 1. And is it literal? How do we really see what this is like? The early Church Fathers saw such problems as Why is there light before the Sun? And a big emphasis on trying to figure out how there was water above the firmament. That really didn't make any sense to them at the time, in particular because they had the idea of the four elements, and the different elements [00:52:00] of air, fire, water, and earth, they're all a different weight. And water is supposed to be heavier than air and fire.
And so it doesn't make any sense that there's water up there when it would be falling down to be next to the earth, which is the heaviest element. So that's kind of interesting to see how the early church fathers were, in their own way, trying to marry the text of Genesis with the science of their day, and asking, how do we do this? We don't know.
Augustine even said, yeah, you know, God could just, you know, decide that this water is a different weight. And that's fine, but it doesn't seem to be the way that God works. When it comes to the narrative of creation, this should be the way that things are working naturally, not as, here's an exception.
So even those early church fathers who took things more literally, They often said, well, we don't know how this works, so it's kind of a mystery, we'll just leave it for now. Most of the [00:53:00] time they came to this conclusion that, well, look, it doesn't make any sense, so that means that we have to take it allegorically.
When you're looking at scripture, it's okay to say, Can we take this literally and just leave it at that? If that doesn't work, then let's go to a figurative or symbolic option. That's the way a lot of people read scripture. And, you know, fair enough. Even though I would suggest that a lot of times we really take a metaphorical view and we don't realize it, but it's so deeply embedded into us that we're not realizing we're doing it. We all think we're literalists, but how does that actually look and play out? in our reading of scripture. That's the question.
And, you know, I really wonder, if you confronted an ancient person and said, look, do you realize you're changing the dates according to your bias, would they even understand what you're asking and saying?
I don't know. I really wonder. Because the thing is, it's wrapped up in an [00:54:00] entire way of thinking. And if you're not inside that thinking, things don't make sense. So, likewise, if you're not inside the thinking that we have that everything needs to be precise, our perspective is probably not going to make a whole lot of sense to them.
They probably don't even realize We're changing things, because to them, it wasn't about changing anything. It was about, here is the meaning that is there. So, yeah, I really wonder at how much this happens to us, just in daily life, even talking to one another. It's really hard to realize how a different perspective changes everything.
And sometimes those different perspectives are not wrong, but they're different. They're just different. And this is why we need so much to get into the head of the ancient Israelite, because that's going to help us a whole lot to see the Bible in a way that they did. And obviously this is what we want to [00:55:00] do, isn't it?
It kind of baffles me sometimes when I hear people who acknowledge that and yet they are still like, yeah, I get your point, but here's my point. And they dig deeper into where they already are. It's like, oh yeah, we should totally read the Bible like an ancient person. But you know what? I still think that God put evolution in there, or that God didn't put evolution in there, or that God was fighting against evolution.
It's like, we can't let go of our pet problems, of the questions that we are currently wrestling with. And I think that's the difference in a lot of theology as well. Like, your theological point is probably based on the questions you're asking, the things that matter to you, the problems you are personally having with what the Bible is saying.
If you're not sure how to reconcile two things, then that's where your attention is being focused. That's not necessarily anything that the [00:56:00] Bible is actually addressing or concerned with at all. But we really want it to be addressing those things because they're important to us. And we want to know what God says about the things that are important to us.
That's completely understandable. It's just a misguided way to use scripture. I don't think that means that Christians can't address things or talk about them. Because we certainly can, and this is part of why it's amazing that we have the body of Christ, that we can work together, talk together, be inspired together, and come up with things that are really in line with Scripture, even if Scripture doesn't necessarily address it in this way, doesn't say anything specific about it, but look, here's how we can pull wisdom from the Bible in order to understand our world, right?
Because it is a book of wisdom. It doesn't mean that it has the answers. It doesn't [00:57:00] mean that we're going to find the data in the Bible. But it does mean that we can use the Bible in order to grow in wisdom. And if we're growing in wisdom and understanding of one another and God's world and how God works, then that's going to color everything that we're doing.
Because we are the stewards of creation, we are supposed to be ruling and having dominion, and we're supposed to be doing that together. I personally think that the Bible is very much encouraging us to live our lives in a very proactive way. So, we're supposed to be exploring, we're supposed to be learning, we're supposed to be struggling, and when I say struggling, I don't really mean, like, this is some sort of a problem we need to get past, but it's like this wrestling of the text.
Working with it in all kinds of ways so that we can find the best and most faithful things that we can bring out of it. And how those things can address our lives. And I think that means that there's [00:58:00] not a single hermeneutic for everyone at all times, everywhere. There are hermeneutical principles. It's kind of our map of how we read scripture, right? So we have the set of rules that constrain the way we should read scripture.
In any case, when we see Genesis 1 as being this relation to the way that Israelites had their week, that means that God is really being anthropomorphized in Scripture. That means that He is being given human attributes in order to understand what He's doing.
And it's really important that we be very careful with that, and that we don't take it too far. And it seems easier to not take it too far when we're talking about other scriptures, right? Like God isn't literally a rock, like his voice isn't literally doing something that the Israelites are witnessing necessarily in some of the Psalms, for instance.
But Lefebvre makes the point that somehow [00:59:00] we tend to make Genesis 1 the test for God's reliability based on the accuracy of this account, when it's anthropomorphizing him. And just that should make us step back and say, hmm, how literally do we take this?
I want to make one more point before we end, because I found this quite interesting to think about in the framework here. And that is the concept of eating within Genesis 1, within the framework of the Israelite festivals, within God's provision. Because, you know what, if you think about it, eating is a pretty big deal in all of those things. It's emphasized several times in Genesis 1, and we read it in our plain English Bibles, and it seems to us to suggest that there are prescriptions about what humans can eat and what animals are supposed to eat.
And we see things in the New Testament about how [01:00:00] death was brought by Adam, and then we extrapolate that into animal death as well as human death. Then in the end, we come out with this idea that humans were vegetarians to begin with. Right? I certainly had that perspective for years, reading the text.
Like, it seems pretty clear that humans were supposed to be not eating animals. But is it clear? Let's look at how animals are classified in Genesis 1. There are three categories of animals in Genesis 1. The first category is actually domestic animals, livestock. The second category, the creeping things, those are things that cross between domestic and wilderness settings. And then the last category is beasts of the wilderness, basically.
So if Genesis 1 is already starting out with domestic animals Well, what is the point of those domestic animals? They're going to be used in eating. They're going to be [01:01:00] used in sacrifice. And as we've explained quite extensively, sacrifice means nothing if it doesn't have the theme of eating.
Even a burnt offering, though God is not literally eating the animal. That's the idea, that they are fellowshipping with God and sharing a meal together. So even literalists tend to be very big on the idea that it was okay to be sacrificing animals in Genesis 4. It just fits within this whole framework of the Israelite tradition and the way that they are doing their festivals.
If you ignore that, and you think that somehow they had this ideal of, well, we weren't supposed to be eating animals, Then, that kind of dismantles the whole sacrificial system. Like, if God isn't pleased by the aroma of the barbecue on the altar, what is even the point of the barbecue on the altar, if God is so against the eating of meat?
So, the classification of animals in this [01:02:00] way on day six presupposes the people are already meat eaters. They're already farmers who are producing livestock in order to eat, in order to sacrifice.
However, we do have to have a reason as to why the text explains our food sources the way that it does. And the answer is kind of simple. To humans are given the agricultural produce of the land. Plants that yield seed indicates that those are the plants that you are planting. You are doing agriculture with those, and also with trees with seeds. So agriculture is for humanity, and to the other animals, it is the green plants that are given for food.
That means that God is providing for their food. So the point isn't vegetarianism, it's that humans are supposed to be cultivating the ground, and this is how they are primarily going to be eating. If they weren't supposed to be eating [01:03:00] meat, if they weren't supposed to be eating the animals, We could expect a negative command here, and there is none.
If they weren't supposed to be eating the animals, God could have said, okay, Adam and Eve, now don't you go eating a steak, all right? But he didn't. So in the framework of festivals, in the framework of the Sabbath, in the framework of how they are describing God's provision, they're thinking agriculture. They're thinking the produce of the land, and that is for humans. Agriculture is the way that humans are supposed to sustain ourselves long term. It's not that we can't eat animals, it's that our primary diet is going to come from the land and from agriculture. And again, that's not some sort of legalistic, you can't be on a paleo diet kind of a thing.
But for most of human history and for most people around the world, for sure, our diets are based on agriculture. And from the festival [01:04:00] point of view, where the festivals begin in the spring and they end in the fall, the agriculture of the land is absolutely central to those festivals. You're not going to have the festivals without the agriculture and harvest from the land.
And in addition, every one of those festivals also includes eating meat.
All right, so I am going to end my discussion of this book here. There's lots more you can get into, lots more cool stuff in the book, so I highly recommend you go get it and read it. And again, I want to take a moment to thank you all for your support and for your listening.
I couldn't do this podcast if I didn't have anyone to listen to it and give me feedback and encouragement and support. Thank you to my Patreon and PayPal supporters. You guys help me keep the podcast going. And thank you to those of you who share the podcast, because that's super helpful for others to find the content.
And also thank you to all [01:05:00] of you who rate the podcast. The more ratings I get in all of the various platforms. The more this is distributed for people to see and check out,
I also want to wish you all a happy Advent season. Thanks again, and I hope you have a blessed week, and we will see you later.
