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 today we have another Q& A episode. I have this little stack of questions, and we're going to see how many I can get through in this episode. And we're going to start out with a few questions about the figure of Satan.
The first question is... So, you're saying that Satan in Job isn't the serpent? So this is a really good question, and honestly, the answer is not definitive. I knew I should have addressed this a little bit more in my episodes where I am talking about the figure of Satan. The fact is, it's addressed really well in other places.
But I don't [00:01:00] want to leave it out of my description of what I'm talking about here. So let's get into it. And I will also say that people who have listened to the things that I would suggest that you listen to in regards to this topic, they can still come away with questions and some doubts as to, wait, what does that mean? How am I supposed to be thinking about this? Is it not, is it the same? Is it not the same? What's really going on here? Why do we have Satan in the New Testament if this word is over here? It is really confusing if you don't understand biblical theology and the approach of biblical theology and how to view scripture in light of the different authors and, and all of these little details.
And if you're still in that space of trying to figure out how biblical theologians talk about things and why it sounds so weird, that's okay. This isn't your typical way of explaining the text. Now, I think it is getting [00:02:00] more and more common, which is amazing and great, but it's fairly new for most people. And so that means it's going to take a little bit of work to wrap our brains around this kind of new way of thinking. Because it is a new way of thinking. I mean, even the early church fathers, they weren't thinking in terms of biblical theology.
All right, so let's take a second and back up a little bit to our question. We have the book of Job, right? And, in many of our English Bibles, when we open up to the book of Job, and we start reading, we see that God is talking to Satan, right? We might wonder, why is Satan talking to God? Why is Satan still in heaven? I thought he was kicked out. But we don't usually question that this is Satan, right?
Because it says... satan, right there, in our Bibles. Well, most of our translators were trying to be very helpful to their [00:03:00] English Christian readers by translating it with the proper name, Satan. Because throughout the history of interpretation we've kind of settled on the idea that this is Satan himself, right here.
So most of us just kind of go along with that and say, Right, this makes sense. This being in the Book of Job is acting like Satan. He's being accusatory. He's challenging the goodness of people. He can be seen to be trying to tempt them. Right? That's the whole profile of Satan right there as far as we're concerned.
So, therefore, let's just slap the label of Satan on this and be done with it. Why are we even talking about it, right? If we look at an interlinear, we'll even see the word right there. Satan. S A T A N. Satan. In fact, that is the Hebrew word there. But, you might be missing a point, and that point is that it doesn't say Satan like it's a personal name.
It says THE [00:04:00] Satan, and THE Satan, that's not a name. Just like in English, we don't use the word THE in front of somebody's name. That's bad grammar. Same thing with Hebrew. That's bad grammar. So, Satan here is not a name. It's not. It is not a name. Full stop. So that's the first thing that we need to understand.
And then you might come across material, like from Dr. Heiser and others, who say that the Satan in Job is not Satan himself. Now, I understand that that sounds like a very definitive statement, right? Like, this thing is not that thing over there, and I don't think that we should take this information that way.
I don't think that's what Dr. Heiser is literally saying is that it cannot be Satan himself. Like, there's no way for this to [00:05:00] be Satan himself. What Dr. Heiser is saying is that the writer of Job did not see this Satan figure as being the same as the serpent in the garden. That's what Dr. Heiser is saying.
And I think that's fairly definitive, simply because it took people time to connect these dots between authors, right? That just took people time to figure out. Another reason why I can say, I think, fairly confidently that Dr. Heiser isn't saying that there cannot be a one to one correspondence with these two things is because if you read his material, in his demons book, he goes out and he lays out the entire fabric of interpretive history surrounding the figure of Satan and how he came to be viewed by the time of the New Testament.
And Dr. Heiser admits that there are interpretations later that do connect the [00:06:00] serpent in the garden with the figure in Job. So he's not saying this isn't an idea that can be had. Dr. Heiser's concern is just that we look at the book of Job in and of itself from the perspective of the actual writer and original readers.
What were they thinking about the Satan in this book? If they were reading this book, were they thinking, Aha! That's the serpent in the garden! No, they weren't. They, they just weren't. And again, I think we can say that pretty definitively. That's not to say, again, that you cannot make this connection.
Because there are these conceptual links. But, if you want to understand what the original author intended, we can't just assume that the Satan here is the same as the serpent in the garden. They very likely were not making that connection. [00:07:00] And why do I say that? Well, for a couple of reasons. Number one, there was a common Jewish interpretation that the Satan is actually a spiritual being who is an archangel. Number two, in the book of Jubilees, which I have talked about before, the serpent in the garden is just a snake. They've lost the Babylonian throne guardian context there, and now he's just a snake. And you know that because after the fall, all of the animals went, went dumb. Like, they could all talk before, and now they can't.
So, the serpent was just a snake. But in Jubilees, you do have the head honcho guy. And he is associated with the name Satan. And the other thing to really delve deeply into when we're talking about this topic is just the term Satan itself in the Old Testament. The word means the accuser, and it is used with the definite article, with the word the [00:08:00] here in Job, and also in Zechariah, which is another courtroom scene.
This leads us to believe that It's actually referring to a role that was within the court. Okay, so, I don't want to belabor the point that I'm trying to make here, but I kind of want to make sure it's clear. And this is just a good place to talk about the two authors of Scripture, right? We have God, who is the ultimate author, and we have the human authors.
The human authors, they didn't know everything. And so, you think, well, great, but so what? God knew everything and he revealed these things, even if the human author didn't know them. And maybe so, that is the case for some things, right? We have prophecy and such. But here's the thing about being a good faith reader of a text.
You want to understand the text [00:09:00] the way the people would have understood it upon its writing. Yes, the trick with the Bible is that we can have meaning beyond that. And we're not disputing that fact here. But the fact that it has a wider meaning in interpretive history doesn't negate its original understanding.
We can't read the Bible like a normal book, but we also can't ignore the principles of sound reading. So, yes, in interpretive history, many have come to see that this figure in Job is the devil. By the New Testament, there was a complete picture, with the serpent, Satan, the devil, the dragon, the head of the bad guys... all of those things were in place by the time of the New Testament. But the readers of Genesis, and the readers of Job, weren't all thinking of the serpent as the devil or the head honcho. So, these ideas developed in people's minds as interpretation and understanding got [00:10:00] deeper, and things changed according to the reader's context as well.
Like, for instance, how the writer of Jubilees, which was earlier than the New Testament, but later than the writings of the Old Testament, he wasn't thinking about throne guardian and sacred space imagery in Eden as far as the snake was concerned. Maybe that wasn't a key aspect of his time. Or, because he just wasn't a priest writing it, I don't know.
It's okay that not all authors had the same ideas in their heads, because A, they had different concerns for their writing, and B, as time went, more was revealed to people. They had more access to writings, so they literally understood more. The authors of the New Testament had all of the Old Testament.
The various authors of the Old Testament didn't have access to all of their writings, even that existed then, [00:11:00] probably. So maybe the author of Job didn't have the devil or the serpent in mind. He at least didn't have him in mind the way we do. It's also the case that word meanings can kind of shift. The Satan was not a name, but the word became a name.
In the Dead Sea Scrolls, that word is at least a category. And at places, it's probably a name. But in the time of the writing of Job, we can't be sure that the Satan was understood to be any kind of arch nemesis of God. It's possible he was. He was being challenging. But another option is that this is just a category. It's like a job category. He could still be rebellious. And that in and of itself also is not a problem because we see more than one rebellious spiritual being in the Old Testament. So just because he's rebellious, that also [00:12:00] doesn't mean that he is the arch nemesis. One reason I think we should hesitate on being dogmatic about the status of this being, whether he's evil or whether he's just doing his job, is that he just drops out of the narrative entirely.
He's never judged. The other places we see open rebellion against God by spiritual beings, those are judged. And one last thing, what are the consequences upon reading the text if it's not Satan? How does it affect the potential meaning of the book itself? As far as how we see what's going on with Job, and also the character and purposes of God?
Maybe the point of the book wasn't that evil was tempting Job at all. Maybe the point is more about how God really does allow the testing of his people. Does it make a difference between God using the designs of the evil one himself, whereas God's giving him permission to go out and do things, [00:13:00] versus God having his own system of testing?
I think that those two things are different. And it's possible that the book of Job can really help us understand the way that God uses testing for his purposes. Maybe that's part of the whole message of the book. I don't know. I'm just putting that out there for an option. And you know, that's what I like about getting into these different types of interpretations.
We're not challenging the authority of the scriptures or really its meaning, but I think that really wrestling with these different interpretations and thinking about it, that's us taking it seriously to develop a biblical imagination. And that's a good thing in my book.
All right, I am going to move on to the next question, which is related.
This question asks, so we really [00:14:00] don't see Satan in the Old Testament? The answer is, it depends on what you mean by that. If you mean, do we see somebody writing in the Old Testament who had this full fledged idea of who Satan was? I don't think we do. I could be wrong. There are some ways that we could look at this, but probably not.
And again, I'm not saying he's not there. I'm saying that we don't see a complete profile. And even by the time of the New Testament, we should still be careful in thinking that we understand it all. What we definitely should not do is go to the idea that Satan is behind all evil and temptation, that there is no intelligent evil except Satan and maybe some of his minions.
If we can tell anything about the idea of supernatural evil at all, it's that it's complex [00:15:00] and real. I don't think you can take Jesus seriously if you don't take seriously the idea of evil and embodied evil. And while evil does not have the same power as God, That does not mean it doesn't do anything at all. Like, we shouldn't be afraid of it as followers of God, but neither should we be complacent.
Anyway, as far as seeing Satan in the Old Testament, here are some places that I do see Satan. I see him in the Serpent in Genesis, maybe in Job, but I wouldn't hitch my horses to that one. And two other places I would suggest are Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14. I'm not going to go into detail and replicate what can be found elsewhere in explaining these passages, but These texts, which both are excoriating human kings, are possibly also referencing the serpent in Genesis, who is [00:16:00] being judged and cast down to Sheol.
Now, there's a possibility that these texts are in fact referencing Adam and his rebellion. It depends slightly on if you're referencing the Hebrew or the Greek text, but it is suggestive of later ideas surrounding Satan. So I'm not going to get into detail, but I will say that both of these texts are talking about two things at the same time. They're talking about a literal human leader. Different ones in each text, but they're also using metaphors that stretch back to the Garden of Eden to describe these kings and how they are going to be judged.
Now, notice I didn't mention Lucifer. Well, Lucifer has some issues with translation. The term really comes from the Latin version of the Bible, and we've kind of conflated some ideas with that. So, I'm going to back away a little bit from suggesting that [00:17:00] it's really that clear that we have Lucifer in the Old Testament by that name described in those texts as the Morning Star. It's possible that there's that connection back to the serpent. But, again, in the Old Testament, we don't really have it laid out how Satan became the explicit god of this world that we see him described as in the New Testament.
We don't see any explanation for how he became the god above the other lower gods, you know, as far as their main leader. So in the end, I'm not saying that you can't see him there, because he's there, right? Not arguing against that, but we've just made it this narrative that seems so solid to us today and it just isn't quite like that.
Alright, we're going to move on to question number three, which says, Do we really need the Apkallu narrative [00:18:00] to understand the Sons of God episode in Genesis 6? Now, I think that this question stems from a certain concern. And that concern is that, well, why do we need modern scholarship and new ideas in order to understand what's going on in the Bible?
And people are thinking this because it is the case that a lot of modern scholarship has shed light on these stories in Genesis. particularly the Genesis 6 episode. However, that does not mean that this interpretation has not always existed. And I think that we can see that very clearly just reading the Book of Jubilees.
Now, of course, I just mentioned the Book of Jubilees, and I said that it was missing the Mesopotamian context of the Garden of Eden. So that's, that's kind of an interesting thing, that you can [00:19:00] have a document that sheds light in one area. And seems awfully obtuse in another area. But, again, Jubilees is not inspired. Perhaps it was based on similar documents that Genesis was built upon. It's anybody's guess, really. And there's a reason it's not an inspired work, that we don't take everything that it says as inspiration. But you can see how useful it is to see that this kind of line of thinking is not brand new. And I think it's pretty darn safe to say that Jubilees was also drawing upon the book of First Enoch for its stories as well.
So, to be clear, the Apkallu stories, First Enoch, Jubilees, none of those are inspired work. I think that to some degree we're not really sure how to categorize things like this. Because we're like, well, it's not inspired, but it's [00:20:00] also informing inspiration in some way. It seems to be Preserving a narrative that otherwise might be lost, perhaps, or it's helping the, the New Testament authors to think about things in a certain way.
And we might ask, how is that not inspiration just like everything else in the Bible? Like, is this not knowledge that was preserved somehow? That's inspiration, right? Okay, so I'm going to suggest a way of looking at this. I'm going to suggest that inspiration is a process that God uses providentially. So that means that some things are going to be preserved in various ways in order to make the task of inspiration happen within the actual text.
So that means that there's going to be pieces, texts, and people that God is using to promote the knowledge in the text. But there's [00:21:00] a reason that those things don't end up in the text themselves. It's like they're a little stepping stone or something like that. It's like you have who knows how many scribes and editors and compilers and people who have preserved the text providentially in many, many different ways so that in the end, we have the text that we do. And this is the text that is meant for the church at large. This is for our edification and our instruction. It just might be the case that other biblical writers had other texts themselves that seems like maybe they should fit in here, but they don't.
I mean, Paul was writing in dialogue with people. He was receiving letters, and he was responding to those letters at times. But we only have Paul's letters. We don't have those other letters. So, I kind of see these other texts [00:22:00] in a similar way, it's just we happen to have them because it's really helpful to us to understand things in context. We could wish that we had those other letters that Paul was responding to because that would sure be very helpful in our interpretation of his writings, but we don't.
We don't have that stuff. And apparently we don't need it because it wasn't preserved. Anyway, ultimately, I'm really glad that we have these various traditions that help support the idea that we have. Of course, the more knowledge, the better. It is fair to ask, why did this context get lost at times anyway and in certain circumstances?
But just like everything, you can look at those times and those circumstances in their own context. But here's something I think we should all appreciate. Just because something has been believed for a really [00:23:00] long time, that doesn't make that particular belief more true than something else. That idea can actually apply to a lot of areas. So, just gonna leave that there for now.
Man, I feel like I'm gonna be getting through a lot of questions this time around for this Q& A, which is great. Here's another question that's kind of related to what I was just talking about. And it says, It's obvious to me that we should read the stuff Jews were reading, but how do you make sure people aren't misled into error? I have read and studied a lot of this, and the number of errors that I see is horrible. It seems to me we should only be preaching Jesus.
Okay, so first of all, yes, absolutely, the number one thing we should be talking about is Jesus. Not gonna [00:24:00] deny any of that. That doesn't mean that everything we're talking about has to be about Jesus, though, right?
Not everything in the Bible we need to, like, skew to point towards Jesus. There's plenty there. We don't need to fake evidence, okay? But that's not really what this question is saying. I just wanted to point that out. You know what I like about questions is that usually there is an underlying concern that goes along with these questions.
And sometimes I hit upon those concerns, and sometimes I'm probably just reading into the question, and maybe this concern has nothing to do with anything at all. But, I do think that the underlying concern here is that we want correct doctrine. We want correct teaching. And that's a very good thing. And we ought to be concerned about false teachers, and false teaching, and all of that kind of [00:25:00] thing.
Absolutely. This is something we should all be on the lookout in everything that we're doing as we study the Bible. But the first thing I will say to this is that we shouldn't just be heresy hunters, right? We shouldn't just assume that because we don't agree with something, then it's a false teaching and it's leading people astray.
Here's a secret. A lot of times, it's our understanding that's off. And sometimes we need a little bit of grace and humility to understand that we don't get it all either. Honestly, it's really hard to learn something without some form of intellectual humility. Like, sometimes we're beat over the head by it, and we learn something in spite of ourselves, but it's much better to just approach it and try to learn.
Here's a philosophy that I want to present to you for consideration. [00:26:00] We have different ways of thinking about learning things, right? And in our current society, and I'm primarily talking about Western society, I'm in the American context, so that's my context. That's what I see and experience all the time.
And with the idea of public schools being what they are, there's this idea that our children are these empty vessels, and we have to pour everything into them. We have to pour all of their learning into them, and if we're not pouring their learning into them, then they're not grasping anything. They're not going to learn anything if we're not actively pouring all of that information into their heads.
So, basically, what they come away with at the end is what we have poured, or at least that's what we think is the ideal. That's what we think our role is as teachers. [00:27:00] And successful teachers end up with children who know everything that we tried to pour into them. So with this idea in mind, it's really important that we are pouring the right information into our children.
Right? We have to get everything as correct as we can so that in the end, they come out alright. If we're pouring bad information in, then they're going to have bad information inside them. And that's bad. We want to protect them from anything that's wrong or that we perceive shouldn't be in their heads.
And I'm talking about children, but we take the same approach for adult learning as well. For all of our Adult Sunday School classes, we need to be teaching absolutely accurate information, or else who knows what will happen. People will get wrong ideas in their heads, and we don't want that.
And of course, [00:28:00] obviously that's a good goal. It's obviously something that we really do want. We want people to have correct information. We want to teach people the correct things. We don't want them to have misinformation. And that, that's a real problem in today's world. Even without the idea that there are people out there who are purposefully spreading misinformation, even without that, we're surrounded by more information today than humanity has ever had access to in the history of anything.
And that is really hard to sort through, but it's also impossible to get away from. And because it's impossible to get away from, and also because this is just generally true of humanity forever, one of the most important things we can ever teach a person is how to think. And that's, it's not obvious. It's [00:29:00] not easy. It's not something you're just born doing. And because our schools have given us this idea that they know best, and that they are just going to pour all of the essential knowledge into our children, the school system is not there to teach us how to think. It's just not. It's not what it's designed for.
It's not what it's capable of doing. Rather than protecting people from information and ideas, and trying to keep everything error free, which it's not possible, by the way. What I'd rather do is we teach people how to think. Then they can figure out and see error and avoid it themselves.
But also a lot of the times, guess what, it might not be the case that it's an error. It might just be another idea that either you don't agree with or you haven't been exposed to, or you haven't [00:30:00] thought through all of the implications yourself. It's kind of weird, but ideas can be scary, ideas can be threatening, and sometimes we don't know what to do with them.
I think that there is a very good reason that historically in Christianity, understanding the Bible has been done in community. It's actually a fairly recent thing, relatively speaking, that we have this idea that I'm just going to take my Bible, and I'm going to read it every night, and I'm going to understand it, and I don't need anything else or anyone else. But if I use somebody else to shed light on this, then I have to make sure they're accurate and correct.
Well, how are you going to do that? How are you going to do that by yourself? You kind of can't. Like even in scholarship and in the academy, there's a reason there's a wide variety of voices. There's a reason why we need all kinds of people to chime [00:31:00] in on things, because we can't think of everything ourselves.
I can't think of everything. You're not going to think of everything either. We need other people to give us ideas, to share our ideas with, so that we can see how they sound out loud. Because sometimes it sounds a whole lot better in my head than when I'm actually speaking it to somebody. And honestly, just in general, I think we need to ditch this idea that we can only have correct things in our heads. That's not good for thinking. It's not good for study. It's not good for understanding the world.
So anyway, those who might be curious to hear a little more extended version of what I think is a better philosophy for learning, especially when we're approaching our children. It's that we should see ourselves less as people who pour everything in to the other person and more as guides and also people who learn alongside them.[00:32:00]
And yeah, that includes learning with our children and understanding that opposing ideas and people who think differently, that's not a detriment to what we're trying to do here. That's actually a very good thing because when we encounter those challenges when we encounter those more difficult thoughts and we encounter those perspectives that are very different from ours, then that challenges us to reconsider what we've always thought because otherwise we're not very good at doing that. And we all need that. It is difficult because to some extent we just want to be right. And there are certain sides to arguments and certain people that we don't want to give any credence to at all. And we want to say that they have no reason for thinking what they think. But that's not very fair to them. And it's not very fair to us to give ourselves the [00:33:00] opportunity to think a little bit differently.
Alright, let's go ahead and tackle a more technical question now. This question is, What is the etymology of the name El, that's the name El, which is spelled just E L, and etymology is the origin of a word.
So as some of you know, in Canaanite mythology, El was the high god of the pantheon. And of course, some scholars believe that there was a progression of understanding and an evolution in religious ideas that went from polytheism to monotheism. So the Israelites took the idea of El and his pantheon and turned El into a monotheistic deity called Yahweh.
And this explains why Yahweh is also known by the designation of El [00:34:00] in the Bible. That's kind of the general idea of some of the more liberal scholarship out there. I disagree with this idea. I think that it stems from that context that we had almost a couple of centuries ago where evolution was all the rage, and so everything was evolutionary.
There is scholarship out there that actually suggests that monotheism was the original idea, and polytheism grew out of that. Anyway, there's a whole lot of assumption that goes on with this idea of evolution in the way that some of these scholars want to see it. But it is the case that the Bible uses the same term for God that the Canaanites used for their high god.
And so really the question here that we're tackling is, where did this word come from? What does it mean? How did it come to be used for God from the perspective of the etymological [00:35:00] origin? And I'm sorry to tell you that it's not very conclusive, but again, we have to go really early into written history to try and investigate these things, and there's just not an abundance of records.
Sometimes, what we have to do is we take later words and try to backtrack their meaning. And we also need to use related languages in order to do this as well. So this is where you're going to come up with this idea that Allah and El come from the same idea. Linguistically, they're related. And so the way that scholars then approach that idea, that they are related, is going to color some of the things that you're going to hear about it.
Like, some people will still say that Allah and the God of the Bible are the same, not only because of the claims of Islam, and how they claim to be descended from people in the Old Testament, but also [00:36:00] because of these linguistic connections. But if you're hearing those kinds of arguments from the perspective of defending Islam, well, they're biased, okay. So, take whatever they're saying with a grain of salt. Just because words are going to have a common meaning in the far, far distant past, that doesn't mean that that being is the same being. We don't have to say that Yahweh and El are the same being because they both use the word El. We don't need to say that Yahweh and Allah are the same because of these connections either.
Just because things are linguistically connected doesn't mean they're conceptually connected. You can't take the revelation of Yahweh himself in the Bible to be the same as the revelation of Allah because their characters are vastly different. And the same can be said for Yahweh and El as well. Now, of course, people are just gonna say that the [00:37:00] Israelites changed the character of El. So, of course, the characters are not the same. But anyone who tries to tell you that they don't have a bias and a reason to suggest these kinds of ideas I'm sorry, but I don't buy it.
At any rate, I am going to read you a little snippet from something that explains the etymology, as we understand it currently, of the name El.
I have several resources, and I'm trying to pick the one that's most readable for you so that you can understand what it's saying. Sometimes scholarly writing is a bit convoluted. So I'm going to read from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, which says, quote, El. This basic word for deity is found in various forms throughout the ancient Semitic languages.
Although various opinions are held regarding its etymology, it probably derives from a [00:38:00] root meaning power or preeminence. Occasional adjectival use of the word to denote might or majesty. For example, cedars of El. are the mighty cedars. Mountains of El are the majestic mountains, and the El of one's hand is within one's power, supports this derivation.
The word El was also used as a proper noun to refer to the supreme god of the Canaanite pantheon as it is known from Ugaritic texts that extol him as father of men and god of gods. The name is commonly compounded with other descriptive titles in the Old Testament patriarchal narratives. Of course, the Old Testament tradition treated all these as names of the one God, the God of Israel.
But probably separate names of possibly separate deities, or names associated with separate centers of worship of one deity, became identified with [00:39:00] Yahweh, the personal name of the God of Israel. A great deal of uncertainty must surround any attempt to delineate the historical stages of this assimilation, however, and such a task is unproductive.
Although the Old Testament does witness to the strains of early Israel's polytheistic environment, and the polytheism in its own ancestry, from the perspective of the history of Revelation, it mainly witnesses to the various revelations of the one living God to the patriarchs against the cultural background of their time. Through these revelations, he created that relationship of promise upon which the nation and its faith were founded. End quote.
Okay, so listening to that, maybe you caught a couple things that made you say, wait, what? When it was talking about the assimilation of other deities.... That doesn't necessarily mean that there's this progression from polytheism to [00:40:00] monotheism. But this is the idea that people could encounter Yahweh, or the people of Yahweh, and then assimilate these ideas of the true God into their previous conceptions, right?
So it's not necessarily people going, Oh, yeah, He's the same. But it's trying to understand God in the way that they already understood Him on some level. And when it mentions the polytheistic context of the people, again, that's not necessarily saying there has to be an evolutionary idea of thought, but they were literally in polytheistic contexts.
In short, what we have when we have the word El. is that this is the designation of the mightiest one, the most powerful one, the one with the most preeminence.
Alright, so I hope that was a helpful response. Let's go on to [00:41:00] our next question. And this question is, What do you think about Robert Alter's Hebrew translation.
This is the translation of the Old Testament done by the scholar Robert Alter. This is a great question because I have been meaning to mention his translation. Alright, so a couple of points about Robert Alter and who he is. He is Jewish. He is a non confessional scholar. So he is not a follower of Jesus.
And so, some people are going to discount his translation simply from that fact. But like I was talking about earlier, about how we need to have different perspectives and we shouldn't just shun people's ideas because of where they're coming from, this isn't a fact that bothers me. I believe he is currently a professor of Hebrew and [00:42:00] Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. He has a few books that are really worth looking into. One of them is The Art of Biblical Narrative. Another is The Art of Biblical Poetry, and his approach in those kinds of books is valuable for us to understand his perspective on translating the Hebrew Bible.
He's using a very literary technique where he wants to translate the words so that the English reader can really pick up on the repetition of Hebrew words. And really see the poetry that is in the original, which is often lost in our English translations. I want to read a bit from his book, The Art of Biblical Narrative, because this kind of shows us his thought process here.
In chapter one, it says, quote, What role does literary art play in the shaping of biblical narrative? [00:43:00] A crucial one, I shall argue, finely modulated from moment to moment. Determining, in most cases, the minute choice of words and reported details, the pace of narration, the small movements of dialogue, and a whole network of ramified interconnections in the text.
In chapter one, he goes on to explain a section of Genesis that really highlights these ideas. Have you ever been reading that section in Genesis with the Joseph story, and you get to Genesis 38? To that point of Tamar and Judah, and you're like, what the heck? Why is this here? It seems to really interrupt the text in a disruptive way, like someone just stuck something entirely foreign to the story right in the middle of this.
And Alter goes on to explain several things about the text and about its [00:44:00] narrative flow and goes on to explain how this story of Judah and Tamar actually fits really well with the Joseph narrative, especially viewed in light of how inheritance was dealt with at the time, and how the end of the book of Genesis really puts that on its head.
Alter says, quote, There is thematic justification for the connection, since the tale of Judah and his offspring, like the whole Joseph story, and indeed like the entire book of Genesis, is about the reversal of the iron law of primogeniture, about the election through some devious twist of destiny of a younger son to carry on the line.
There is, one might add, genealogical irony in the insertion of this material at this point of the story. For while Joseph, next to the youngest of the sons, will eventually rule over his brothers in his own lifetime, as splendidly as he had dreamed, it is [00:45:00] Judah The fourth born, who will be the progenitor of the kings of Israel, as the end of Genesis 38 will remind us.
In any case, the preceding block of narrative had ended with the father bemoaning what he believed to be the death of his son. Genesis 38 begins with Judah fathering three sons, one after another, recorded in breathless pace. Here, as at other points in the episode, nothing is allowed to detract our focused attention from the primary problematic subject of the proper channel for the seed.
Alright, I'll stop right there for reading right now, but you can see how helpful it is to look at this story as a complete narrative. Like, purposefully designed. It's not just a series of stories one after the other after the other that was kind of stitched together haphazardly. If that's your view of the text, well, you're missing the thematic patterns and the [00:46:00] entire point of what the writing is even for to begin with.
He also does address the idea that people have that if, if the Bible is history, then is it really fair to even look at it from a literary fashion using literary principles? He addresses this in chapter two of his book, The Art of Biblical Narrative, where he says, quote, The Hebrew Bible is generally perceived, with considerable justice, as sacred history, and both terms of that status have often been invoked to argue against the applicability to the Bible of the methods of literary analysis.
If the text is sacred, if it was grasped by the audiences for whom it was made as a revelation of God's will, Perhaps of his literal words, how can one hope to explain it through categories developed for the understanding of such fundamentally secular, individual, and [00:47:00] aesthetic enterprise as that of later Western literature.
And if the text is history, seriously purporting to render an account of the origins of things and of Israelite national experience as they actually happened, is it not presumptuous to analyze these narratives in the terms we customarily apply to prose fiction, a mode of writing, we understand to be arbitrary invention of the writer, whatever the correspondences such work may exhibit with quotidian or even historical reality.
In a novel by Flaubert or Tolstoy or Henry James, where we are aware of the conscious fashioning of a fictional artifice, Sometimes, with abundant documentation from the writer's notebooks and letters, it is altogether appropriate to discuss techniques of characterization, shifts of dialogue, the ordering of larger compositional elements.
But are we not coercing the Bible into being literature [00:48:00] by attempting to transfer such categories to a set of texts that are theologically motivated, historically oriented and perhaps to some extent collectively composed? At least some of these objections will be undercut by recognizing, as several recent analysts have argued that history is far more intimately related to fiction than we have been accustomed to assume.
It is important to see the common ground shared by the two modes of narrative ontologically and formally. But it also strikes me as misguided to insist that writing history is finally identical with writing fiction. The two kinds of literary activity obviously share a whole range of narrative strategies, and the historian may seem to resemble the writer of fiction in employing, as in some ways he must, a series of imaginative constructs. Yet there remains a qualitative difference. [00:49:00]
All right, I'll stop there. But I find that to be quite useful in constructing our thought processes as to how the Bible can function as both history and literature. And this is probably kind of obvious to a lot of us if we read good history books because a good history book really can read like a novel or something of that nature. So these categories don't have to be quite so differentiated in our minds.
Anyway, yeah, Robert Alter's translation of the Hebrew Bible is pretty cool because he uses poetic language, and he's trying to use the same word for the same Hebrew word wherever he can so that we can really see these hyperlinks that are harder to see when we're just reading our English Bibles.
There are also some really interesting notes at the bottom of his page, so I just want to give you a short sample of that here. [00:50:00] Genesis begins with, When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth, then, was welter and waste, and darkness over the deep, and God's breath hovering over the waters, God said, Let there be light.
Okay, so at the bottom of the page, it says, For the translation welter and waste, he says the Hebrew tohu vabohu occurs only here and in two later biblical texts that are clearly alluding to this one. The second word of the pair looks like a nonce term coined to rhyme with the first and to reinforce it, an effect I have tried to approximate in English by alliteration. Tohu by itself means emptiness or futility, and in some contexts is associated with the trackless vacancy of the desert.
Then under hovering he says [00:51:00] The verb attached to God's breath, wind, spirit, or ruach elsewhere describes an eagle fluttering over its young and so might have a connotation of parturition or nurture as well as rapid back and forth movement.
Okay, so Jeremiah 4 verse 23 is where we see this repetition of tohu va vohu. And Alter translates this as, I saw the earth, and look, welter and waste, the heavens and their light was gone. Continuing on for just a moment, it says, I saw the mountains, and look, they quaked, and all the hills broke apart. I saw, and look, there was no human there, and all the fowl of the heavens had gone away. I saw, and look, the farmland was desert. And all its towns were ruined before the Lord, and before his blazing wrath. [00:52:00]
So in Robert Alter's translation, you can see the repetition of the phrases that are in Hebrew there, where it says, I saw something, and look. If I just go to my ESV translation of these passages, it says, starting in verse 23, I looked on the earth, and behold, it was without form and void, and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked on the mountains, and behold, they were quaking. And all the hills moved to and fro. I looked and behold there was no man and all the birds of the air had fled. I looked and behold the fruitful land was a desert and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.
So you get the same kind of repetition in the E S V. But to me, it kind of misses a little bit of that punch that I think probably the original Hebrew really has if you're reading it. Anyway, I [00:53:00] highly recommend the translation to use alongside a translation that you're used to reading. It's very likely to point out things that you never would have thought of on your own just from reading your, your usual translation.
The poetry in particular is very beautiful. Actually, you know what, while we're here, I'm gonna go ahead and read a psalm. I'll read one that we're pretty familiar with, so it can kind of tickle our ears, some of these differences. Some of it's just pretty much the same as what we're used to reading, and some of it's just a little bit different that just gives it a little bit of something that we can think about in addition to what we usually think about.
So I'm going to read Psalm 23. It says, A David Psalm. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. In grass meadows he makes me lie down. By quiet waters guides me. My life he brings [00:54:00] back. He leads me on pathways of justice for his name's sake, though I walk in the veil of death's shadow, I fear no harm, for you are with me, your rod and your staff, it is they that console me, you set out a table before me in the face of my foes, you moisten my head with oil, my cup overflows, let but goodness and kindness pursue me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for many long days.
And I'm just going to make mention of the note he has for the section where it's at the end. For many long days. He says, This concluding phrase catches up the reference to all the days of my life in the preceding line. It does not mean forever. The viewpoint of the poem is in and of the here and now, and is in no way eschatological. The [00:55:00] speaker hopes for a happy fate in all his born days and prays for the good fortune to abide in the Lord's sanctuary, a place of security and harmony with the divine--all, or perhaps at least most, of those days.
So, just a little bit of difference and something to think about.
Alright, I think I have just enough time for one more question. And this question says, what's the deal with Jordan Peterson and his psychoanalyzing scripture? A lot of what he says makes a lot of sense to me, but I can't help but feel he's just making it all up. And that's not what we're supposed to be doing with the scriptures, right?
Well, this is an interesting question, and I think there's a pretty good point behind it, right? We're supposed to be taking scripture on its own [00:56:00] terms and understanding it there, and it feels like if you're extrapolating it out to psychology or philosophy, then you're not really doing that, it feels like, right?
So I get that. However, I think that truth is something that I, I think it's recognizable. And I don't think that theology and biblical theology is the only place that you can find that. I mean, like, I like biblical theology, I, I like it a whole lot, but that's not the only way to study or look at the Bible.
Of course, in my opinion, it should be our starting place so that we can be faithful readers and so we should start wherever we can with what the original thing even meant. But that doesn't mean we just leave it there. I mean, if the Bible contains timeless truth, then it contains timeless truth. And psychology [00:57:00] and philosophy should kind of all be centered on what the Bible's saying.
I'll be honest, I find this idea that a psychologist shouldn't speak about the Bible to be really weird. Like, why not? Why shouldn't a psychologist have something to say about the Bible? I kind of feel like they ought to have stuff to say about the Bible and its truth and applicability to humanity at large.
Call me crazy, but that's kind of what I think. I mean, I get that there are people out there who discount him and this, this idea that he can teach on the Bible because they think that he is only coming from that psychological perspective, but he talks to a wide variety of people. He consults with theologians of various stripes. He talks with all manner of people [00:58:00] to establish all of his ideas. And are we not supposed to utilize what God has given his imagers at large? Aren't we supposed to be collectively finding truth? Because, I mean, you have the body of Christ, and we have the ultimate truth of the gospel, but we're all imagers of God.
That means we can all have really good ideas and things that reflect God and His, how He should be experienced in the world. We shouldn't just limit that to some small subsection of humanity because we are all God's imagers. So wherever our work is aligning with God's work and His word, we should take those things as truth.
And I, I think that's why we do see truth in so many areas of the world. Why should we not listen to this person over here or that person over there? Why are there people that we just shut [00:59:00] down, that we think don't have anything useful to say? And regarding the Bible, it is a book for all of humanity. It's not just locked away in our cabinets only for our reading.
And here's my opinion about psychology and philosophy. I'm looking at people helping people, and I'm seeing a lot of truth there. And truth is truth. Are we supposed to leave the Bible in some particular zone? We only allow theologians and pastors and Bible teachers to touch it?
Sorry, but its impact and truth is wider than that. The Bible is the most profound and impactful literature ever, and if we don't think people can use it in their professional areas of interest, then... Well, what the heck?
Now, I might not personally agree with a scientist who is a concordist, for instance, and thinks [01:00:00] that the Bible can shed light on modern science and the way we should frame that. But really, who am I to say that? I say that because, to me, the Bible was written theologically, without God intending it for that purpose. But...maybe I'm wrong. And even if I'm not wrong, maybe it can be a useful metaphor or structure to describe what scientists are seeing. That could actually make a lot of sense to me.
And psychology and philosophy in particular, those deal with the raw human condition. And this is what theology also deals with. And all of those things ought to mesh. We should expect them to mesh. So, why do we accept a concordist, but we reject a philosopher? It's nonsensical. We should be seeking knowledge everywhere, from every zone of human existence.[01:01:00]
And I mean, really, the Bible is all about the human condition. It's about typology. We should be able to understand humanity when we read the Bible. I know, I know, that's a crazy idea, right?
Alright, well, that is it for this week. I managed to get through quite a few questions this time, so cool. If you guys have any questions for me, go right ahead and email me.
You can message me through my website as well. That's also a really good way to give me questions. You can even give me an audio question. Like, you can give me a voice question. Which, that would be really cool if I got one of those. If anyone wants to send me one of those to test my little website thingy out, that would be awesome.
So if you go to my website at genesismarksthespot. com [01:02:00] in the corner somewhere, depending on if you're in your... Desktop or your phone or whatever you'll see a little microphone a circle with a microphone if you push that I think you can record a message and It'll get to me and that would be really cool if you did that So if anyone wants to do that go right ahead and do that for me. I would love to test the option It's really cool.
At any rate. Thank you guys for listening Thanks to those of you who sent me these questions And a really big shout out to my Patreon and PayPal supporters. You guys are awesome and super helpful. Thank you to those who subscribe and who have rated the podcast and who share episodes.
You guys just make my day. Alright, and if you haven't signed up for my newsletter, go ahead and do so on my website as well. Okay, well that is it, [01:03:00] and I wish you all a blessed week, and we will see you later.
