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're going to talk about the textual unity of the Bible. So just to lay a bit of groundwork for what we're going to be talking about in this episode today, We're primarily going to be focusing on the shape of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible.
And I'm going to talk about why you have these two different terms, Old Testament and Hebrew Bible. And we're also going to talk a bit about biblical theology and what that is. Now, I am primarily talking about the way that Protestants order the Old Testament because in Roman Catholic tradition and in Eastern Orthodox [00:01:00] tradition, You have actually different kinds of ordering of the canon from the Hebrew Bible.
And I think it's very much worth talking about all of those differences. But we can't do everything all at once. And the Protestant canon has the benefit of being the books that pretty much everyone agrees on. And it has a fantastic overlap with the Hebrew Bible. So that's why we're gonna be focusing specifically on the Hebrew Bible versus the Old Testament canon, as you find in a Protestant Old Testament.
I will also say that I am going to be generalizing here, and I'm gonna be pulling my information from specific sources to kind of help zero in on what I'm talking about, because even within Jewish tradition, the ordering of the Hebrew Bible is done in different ways for different purposes and in different traditions.
This becomes [00:02:00] obvious once you look at the various lists of the canon and you see that there's actually different numbers of books, sometimes even, and sometimes that's because they combine some of the books together. Sometimes they separate them. So we'll get into some of that kind of detail. But even when you look at the different lists and the way that they order things, there's usually a lot of overlap as to similarities.
Sometimes the different orders don't matter. Sometimes a couple of the books are just kind of switched around, or combined in a different way. And it doesn't really matter as to the overarching sweep of the narrative. Sometimes, however, the different ordering of the books really impacts the way that you're going to read the whole Bible.
And I think we're going to see that once we compare the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish ordering of Scripture in the Old Testament, to the Protestant ordering of the Old [00:03:00] Testament. And there's actually some really, really interesting things to notice once we do that. So, this is our trajectory for today.
I'm going to start with a brief discussion about biblical theology, because actually on this podcast I haven't really laid out fully what biblical theology is. And I'm only going to be doing so briefly today in this episode. If you are interested in the topic of biblical theology, Or, rather, biblical theologies, because there are different ways of looking at biblical theology as to what it is and how you do it.
If you're interested in learning a little bit more about that, I have a discussion on the YouTube channel Faith Unaltered. In that discussion, I go through some of the ideas from the book Understanding Biblical Theology, a comparison of theory and practice by Edward Klink and Darian Lockett. So, in this episode's [00:04:00] show notes, I will leave a link to that YouTube discussion.
It goes into things way more than we can in this episode. But, in short, the reason we need to look at biblical theology is not just that it's theology that's biblical. But because it looks at the Bible in a very holistic way, but it can also look at the Bible in a way that's very individualized and contextual.
At least, that's how I see it. And I know that many other people have different ideas of what biblical theology is, and how you do it, and what it's for. And even, really, the extent to which it is useful, because a lot of people still want to look at the Bible more topically, from the stance of asking the Bible various types of questions and trying to see what the Bible as a whole says about it.
And I'm not even saying that biblical theology doesn't do that, [00:05:00] because It does. We kind of have to do that, but biblical theology approaches things in a very different way than systematic theology does. There are things that we need to be aware of, though, because when we're doing biblical theology, we're still inputting our biases and the things that we're seeing into the text. And sometimes that's unavoidable. Like, some people will say that biblical theology actually avoids the kind of subjectivity that other types of theology has. That's proven wrong, though, when you look at the number of biblical theology books out there.
And when you do that, it almost feels like there's nothing you can do. Like, how do we get out of our own perceptions and really just read the Bible in its own context? And for what the Bible is actually just saying to us, rather than reading our questions into it, rather than reading our science into it, [00:06:00] rather than reading our philosophy into the Bible, how do we just really understand what the Bible is saying?
Now before I go too much further into what I'm talking about here, I want to introduce the main book that I'm going to be discussing today. This book is called Dominion and Dynasty, a biblical theology of the Hebrew Bible. It is by Stephen G. Dempster, and this is part of the New Studies in Biblical Theology series.
I've mentioned this series before, I know I'm going to mention it again, because it is a great series for monographs about biblical theology. And for those who aren't familiar with what a monograph is, that's just a whole book that is on a single topic. A book that does a really deep dive into a particular topic.
And so the series of New Studies in Biblical Theology is, that's what it's doing. It is presenting monographs for [00:07:00] individual topics within biblical theology. In that discussion on what biblical theology is, I do mention this series because it is a particular type or a particular way or method of doing biblical theology.
And it's kind of my favorite way personally. To describe it briefly, what this method does is it looks at the Bible as a whole. And it tracks themes through the Bible. So if you say, Well, that's a systematic way of doing things, so this is a type of systematic theology. Well, fair enough. But it's not the type of systematic theology that goes to the Bible and asks it questions like, What does the Bible say about God? What does the Bible say about Satan? What does the Bible say about sin or atonement? That's a systematic theology approach. It's looking at the Bible with topics in mind.
But when you approach the Bible and ask, What is [00:08:00] this theme? Then you see how the theme changes throughout the Bible and how different authors in the Bible touch on the theme and also how that theme develops into a fulfillment or conclusion in the New Testament. Because, ultimately, all of our theology needs to be leading to Christ, and it should have that Christological lens. We should be viewing the Bible through the lens of Jesus. But sometimes when we do that, we miss the opportunity to really understand what the Old Testament authors were saying, and how the Old Testament writers were thinking, and then also how the Jews of Jesus day were thinking.
I've lost track of the number of times I've heard people talk about this idea that Well, why didn't the Jews understand Jesus? Why weren't they predicting His coming in the way that He came? Why didn't they see Him [00:09:00] as the Messiah? Why was this such a difficult thing for them? We have a hard time understanding that because we have the Christological lens in which to view Scripture.
And we forget that at the time of Jesus birth and His life, nobody really had that. They really didn't. And hopefully, part of what you'll see today in this episode is why. Why that might have been. And of course, when I say that they didn't have that Christological or Messianic lens, it doesn't mean they were all missing it.
But they really were reading their Old Testament, their Hebrew Bible, in a way that we don't really read it today. And that makes all the difference in the world when you're looking at interpretation and forward thinking. We have this idea of the Old Testament being a book of prophecy, right? It's all prophecy pointing to Christ.
I'm not [00:10:00] going to say that's wrong, necessarily. But I want to show you how the way that we order our Old Testament really lends to that thinking. Whereas if you tweak the arrangement, it shows you a different picture, not really a different picture of Jesus or the coming Messiah or anything, but just a slight shift in the way that the coming of Jesus can be viewed.
And when you do that, that's going to impact like everything that we're looking at here. It's going to help us see Christ's work. In its fulfillment, we're going to see why he came. Because in order to know why he came, we need to understand all of this backstory. We need to understand the framework of the narrative of the Hebrew Bible.
And I'm going to use that very explicitly for a particular reason. I'm going to refer to the Old Testament as the Hebrew Bible when I'm talking about it in terms of the way it's described in the [00:11:00] Tanakh, the way that it's ordered in those books, as opposed to our Protestant Old Testament canon.
So, by the way, if you've heard scholars or people talk about the Hebrew Bible, and you wonder why do they use the term Hebrew Bible as opposed to Old Testament, is there a particular reason that they do that? Or is it just because it kind of sounds cool and we're going to be in with the hip crowd? When academia starts using a term like Hebrew Bible instead of Old Testament, let's just use that term instead of Old Testament. Well, that might be the reason for some people. I don't know. I, I have no idea. But I think that a lot of the reason this term was developed was to point out this difference in the canon.
I've heard some evangelical scholars not like the term Hebrew Bible because they think, oh, you're just pandering. to the Jews. You're just pandering to the people that we don't [00:12:00] want to pander to, or something like that. I don't know. I've heard that kind of idea expressed. Like, I'm not gonna use the term Hebrew Bible, just like I'm not gonna use the term BCE.
And you know what? Fair enough. If you don't want to use it, that's fine. I don't really care. But I do find it useful to distinguish these two thoughts. Just because once you see the difference here in the way that you're gonna read the Old Testament, then it might start making sense to distinguish these two things from one another. Because they are different. And it's fascinating, like you can use the same content, the same books, we're not talking necessarily about different translations, although that can factor into some things, but we're just talking about a different order of books. The same exact books. And I don't want to belabor the point here, that by doing this we're going to change things.
I really want to show you how that's going to happen. And it matters in a big, big way for biblical [00:13:00] theology. Because once we understand the unity of the canon, and how it all fits together, and how it has to all fit together, and you can't just pull it apart, and take all of the pieces and make them say something in and of themselves without the whole canon, because the whole canon itself is painting a particular picture. Then, once we do that, we're capable of discovering the fundamental theme or themes of Scripture. If we don't put it together in the right way, we're not going to be capable of understanding what those themes are. And if we're not looking at it in terms of this overarching arc of narrative and the way that it's organized and described, we're going to miss all of that.
Just for a moment, I want to look at a very specific example of what I'm talking about. And I'm going to be referencing the idea of the four sources of the Documentary Hypothesis. No, I [00:14:00] didn't say Four Horses of the Apocalypse, though sometimes it might feel like the same thing that we're talking about there.
But I have mentioned this Documentary Hypothesis, or J E D P, in both Episode 19 as well as Episode 56. And this is the idea that the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, come from four different sources, and that you can kind of break up the Torah and read it from the perspective of these individual sources, or individual authors, you might say.
Now, my personal view is that we can't say that there weren't multiple sources, and that the multiple source idea is just bunk entirely, or that it's completely wrong. I don't think it does any damage to the authority of the text whatsoever, to say that there's multiple sources. However, the way that scholars look [00:15:00] at this, and try and break it all apart, and try to find all of the sources, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.
Now, there are books out there where they have printed out entire portions of the various sources. According to different scholars. And that's another thing, really, is that different scholars will come up with different portions of the text. Well, I think that this text belongs to this one, and we're just gonna randomly throw out this portion over here because I don't think it fits.
And a big part of the problem in doing that is that it does damage to the entire Bible as a whole. And a lot of times, even good scholars tend to forget That it's really important to look at the Bible as a whole. That we really do need to interpret it from the lens of the shape of the canon, appreciating that it really is a whole. Now, the reason [00:16:00] some people don't do that is because until well after Christ, we didn't have those books of the Bible bound into one volume like we do today. That technology hadn't been invented yet. Each book was an individual scroll. And so, because they're individual scrolls, and they're going to be individual authors from those individual scrolls, then a lot of scholars don't want to put the scrolls together and say that they are one unified whole.
A lot of scholars say that that's unjustified because they're just separate. And even the ancient people wouldn't have really put them together as a whole, necessarily. But that's just silly, because we have the ancient idea of a library. And guess what? They could put them in a certain order in the library.
In fact, we see that very directly when you go into some of the [00:17:00] archaeological digs and they find those old caches of ancient tablets. They are ordered in a particular way so that when you go to find the tablet, it's going to have the order of the tablets. They are definitely connected. Each individual tablet can't just stand on its own when it's connected with other tablets.
Like, you don't take the Epic of Gilgamesh and just take one tablet and say, well, they just thought that this part was its own unity, and this other tablet over here really had nothing to do with this tablet. Well, it doesn't make any sense at all. They had a very firm understanding of what a library was and how to put texts together. So, just because each individual biblical scroll was separate doesn't mean that it didn't also fit into the whole structure of the entire canon.
Okay, so I said we were going to look at a brief example here of why you can't just take [00:18:00] random bits of the text out and think that you're not doing damage to a whole narrative. Okay, so I have this translation of Genesis by Stephen Mitchell. So I think he is a very respected translator, and he has a wide variety of translations. Like, he's translated the Book of Job, as well as the Tao Te Ching. So he's clearly not a biblical scholar in general. And there are some things about his translation that are interesting.
And he obviously makes some very deep theological interpretations while he's translating, but I don't think you can get away from doing that when you're translating the Bible. For instance, I'm sure all of us turn to Genesis 6 first in order to judge a translation, right? We all do that, don't we? This translation has the first few verses of Genesis 6 ascribed to the source Jeh, or the Jehovist.
And Stephen [00:19:00] Mitchell translates it as, When humans began to multiply on the earth, and women were born to them, the gods saw that the women were beautiful, and they took as wives any of them they wanted. It was in those days that the giants appeared on the earth, when the gods slept with the women, and children were born to them. These were the heroes who lived long ago. The men of great fame.
Those are the first four verses of Genesis 6 and instead of sons of God It says the gods. We're just gonna leave out the fact that it says sons. So that just gives you a flavor of his translation.
We're gonna be looking specifically at Genesis 3 6 now I'm going to read it first in the ESV to get it into our head It says so when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes And that the tree was to be desired to make one wise. She took [00:20:00] of its fruit and ate. And she also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate.
Okay. So what we're focusing on is the first half of this, the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was desired to make one wise. So there's three things there, right?
So here is how Steven Mitchell translates it. And when the woman saw that the tree was good to eat from, and beautiful to look at, she took one of its fruits and ate, and gave it to her husband, and he ate too.
So you're going to notice here that it's missing the phrase about making one wise. Mitchell actually has a note about this in the back of his book, and he says, The usual translation, the tree was desirable for acquiring wisdom, is too complicated a thought for Jay's beautifully simple style in the Eden story. That the tree [00:21:00] conferred knowledge is what the woman heard from the serpent, not something she could actually see. Textually, it is suspicious that the subject is repeated here and that the clause is not introduced by Kai as the first two parallel clauses are. In this context, it is more accurate to translate, along with the Septuagint, the Peshitta, and Vulgate, That the tree was lovely to contemplate. The clause is parallel to that it was a pleasure for the eyes and no doubt, just a manuscript variant, end quote.
Okay, so his reason for not putting it in is that he just thinks it clashes with the rest of the way that this particular source puts things. But you have to remember that he's picking and choosing which parts of the text are from this source.
Now, it is fair to say that the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, [00:22:00] doesn't have this line. Translated into English, the Greek Septuagint says, The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasing to the eyes to look at, and it was seasonable to look at.
So there's no line about wisdom there in the Septuagint. The Septuagint, however, does have three lines, instead of just leaving one out. And then there's the question of wisdom and knowledge. Are those the same thing? Mitchell says, ah, we can just leave that out, because the serpent already told the woman about the wisdom. But did he? Did he tell her that? What the serpent said was, you will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened. And you will be like God, knowing good and evil. That's what the serpent said. He's just reiterating the name of the [00:23:00] tree, as far as we know it. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Is the knowledge of good and evil the same as wisdom?
That's an important point, because if it's the same as wisdom, then yeah, this might just be some extra information that we don't really need. But if it's not the same as wisdom, Then what Eve is saying is something in addition to what the serpent said. And the idea of wisdom being connected to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is a different idea than just calling the tree the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
In our ESV translation of Genesis 3 6, it makes the connection with wisdom explicit. Take that out, and the connection with wisdom is no longer there. Because the idea of knowing good and evil is presented in Deuteronomy as something that's connected with physical maturity.[00:24:00] Now, hopefully physical maturity also entails the idea that you're gaining wisdom, but that can also be kind of a separate idea, right?
You can become a certain age and still not be wise. The concept of wisdom is knowledge rightly applied. And wisdom comes from God. So, if Eve is saying, Oh, this tree is going to give me something that only God should be giving me, that's a really important point. It's a very important theological point.
And also, if you take this whole line out of the narrative in Genesis 3, you're potentially damaging intertextuality in the Bible itself. In Isaiah 1, 29, it says, For they shall be ashamed of the oaks that you desired, and you shall blush for the gardens that you have chosen. That word desired there is the same word that we have in Genesis 3 for [00:25:00] desiring wisdom.
And here we have a connection with oaks. And what are oaks? They're trees. And what is the tree of knowledge of good and evil? It's a tree. So if you take out this whole line, then you can't make that connection any longer.
And here's something really interesting. Remember how the Septuagint didn't have the line about wisdom? Well, the Septuagint's translation of Isaiah 129 says, Since they will be ashamed because of their idols, which they have preferred, and are ashamed at the gardens which they desired. So the manuscripts that the ESV is pulling from, and the manuscript of the Septuagint, they have some interesting internal consistency here.
And also, when you're taking this phrase out of Genesis, then you're removing part of the theme that is quite likely there, at least I think it [00:26:00] is. This word wise, it's not always connected to kingship in the Old Testament, but it very frequently is. In Psalm 2, 10, it says, Now therefore, O kings, be wise. It's the same word there. In Proverbs 14, 35, it says, A servant who deals wisely has the king's favor. Proverbs 17, 2 says, A servant who deals wisely will rule over a son who acts shamefully, and will share the inheritance as one of the brothers. In Isaiah 52, 13 it says, Raise up for David a righteous branch, and he shall reign as king, and deal wisely.
When you pick up your English Bible and you read the word wise, There are different Hebrew words behind that word sometimes. It's not always the same word, but these verses I just read, they are all the same [00:27:00] word that hearken back to Genesis 3. Like I said, it's not always connected to kingship. There's plenty of verses where it's just seems to be talking about wisdom in general, but those verses I read are very suggestive that when we're reading this section of Genesis 3, we might want to be thinking kingship.
We can only do that, however, when we're tracking the whole theme throughout Scripture. We have to be certain that kingship, and kingship in particular connected to humans, is something that the Bible is really talking about. And we have to know, is this just a theme, or is it a central theme? We can never know if it's a central theme without looking at the whole Biblical narrative, and in particular, looking at the whole Biblical narrative ordered in a certain way.
So I hope you're seeing how essential this really is. This is also [00:28:00] demonstrative of why single word studies really fall flat. Either word studies or proof texting. Both. Now, there's different ways you can use proof texting. To some degree, there's nothing wrong with proof texting because you need to be able to point to scripture and say, Look, here's where I'm basing these ideas.
Because scripture really does just straight out tell us things. Right? Like, you can look at scripture and say, Look, it says this! If you're using passages as a defense for an idea, That's proof texting, whether you're using it for good purposes and you're using it in a wise way or whether you're using it in a bad way in which you're just pulling out texts that seem to support your theory when they may or may not.
The question is, how do you know if they do or not? And this is where understanding it in context is essential, so [00:29:00] you have to know a bit about culture and history and worldview. The kinds of questions that people would be asking at the time, as opposed to the kinds of questions we ask today. All of that is helpful and necessary, but I think another way of studying this is through looking at patterns and themes.
This is why I like this type of biblical theology so very much, because that's what it's trying to do. In order to do that, first you have to understand what something meant. In one context, at the beginning, or an earlier part in Scripture, and then you have to see how that theme shows up in patterns, and you have to see what other biblical authors do with that theme.
After you've done that, you do come out in the end with a more complete and full picture. So, it's a type of systematic thinking, and it absolutely draws upon the entire narrative of [00:30:00] Scripture. Instead of just leaving interpretation for this book and then an interpretation for this book, they all do fit together in a big pattern.
But you can see, in a way, how much more difficult this kind of study is. Because it's not so straightforward. It's not just one thing that you have to do. You don't just go to scripture and say, What do you say about Satan? The answer you get to that question is going to end up being the answer that you get at the end of the New Testament, after all of the thinking and development has been done.
And there's something to be said for just landing on that and saying, Here we are. Here's our idea of Satan. The problem with that, though, is that not only is the entire Bible, Old Testament to New Testament, a complete narrative and a complete whole that we need to look at, but the Old Testament itself, the Hebrew [00:31:00] Bible, that in and of itself is also a complete chunk that we need to look at for a story arc.
And this is what a lot of Christian scholars seem to be missing. This is one of the points that Dempster is bringing out in his book Dominion and Dynasty, because you'll notice that his is a biblical theology of the Hebrew Bible. He's really not going into the New Testament in depth, although he does mention it and show how it's connected.
But he's noticed that if we just leave the idea that the Hebrew Bible itself is a complete whole, A complete section that we should be looking at in and of itself. I think that his point is a very important one, to be honest. And we might ask ourselves, why?
Why is it important? Why does it matter? Because we're Christians, and we need to be reading things from the Christological lens. And so, if the Christian church has ordered the books in this way, You know, what's the [00:32:00] problem with that? Well, part of the problem with that is that Jesus himself would have been using a particular order of scripture.
And if we want to understand the Jews of Jesus day, we need to understand how they viewed their scripture, how they read it, what kind of meaning did they see from it. The very idea that the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament, should have led people to understand who Jesus was. It tells us just in and of itself that the Hebrew Bible has a particular unity to it.
It has a particular story arc that we ought to be able to see, and that story arc ought to tell us who the Messiah is and why he came. I'll say that again because I think it's really important. The story arc of the scriptures that the Jews were reading at the time of Jesus should tell us about the [00:33:00] Messiah, who he is and why he came.
I like this quote that Dempster shares from Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer says, I don't think it is Christian to want to get to the New Testament too soon and too directly. That's a good quote. So the main task of biblical theology, according to Dempster, is the description of the conceptual unity of the biblical text.
And it's also to grasp the big theological picture through analysis of the theological views of all the various biblical texts. So really, it's a matter of looking at individual texts while also looking at it as a whole unity. Alright, so if you are interested in studying the Hebrew Bible in the kind of context that Dempster is talking about here, This book, Dominion and Dynasty, it does go through the [00:34:00] whole Hebrew Bible and explains why it's shaped this way, and how each of these sections play into the general theme. We are obviously not going to have time to go into very much of that today, but I do want to look at that overarching narrative that he's pointing out.
, so this is an audio podcast, so it's a little bit hard to just follow along here and compare lists. So, we will do our best, but in my discussion group and on my blog, I will post lists, so you can compare them side by side. And like I said, there are different lists for all of the things. For instance, in my discussion group chat on Facebook this week, I posted a list that I got from a book by Lois Tverberg.
But Dempster's list varies a little bit. There's only a couple of books that are switched around. And the reason for that is that there are just different Jewish lists. Each [00:35:00] list has a different reason for putting the books in the order that they did. So Dempster's list looks like this. And again, you can find this list on my blog, or you can even go into my transcript and find the list there.
But every list starts with the Torah, the five books of Moses. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. There's never any change to the order of those books, and they are always at the beginning. Now, I haven't mentioned another word besides the Hebrew Bible that we can refer to this ordering of the canon.
We can also call it the Tanakh. The Tanakh is an abbreviation. It puts together the three different sections of the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible. First you have the Torah. Then you have the Nevi'im, or the Prophets. And then you have the Ketuvim, or the writings. [00:36:00] So you put together the Torah, the Nevi'im, the Ketuvim, and you abbreviate that and you come out with the word Tanakh.
So I might be switching back and forth between referring to this as the Tanakh and referring to it as the Hebrew Bible. And I might also throw in the term Old Testament. In a sense, those all mean the same thing, but sometimes these more technical terms are more precise as to what we want to be referring to.
But, it is really hard not to switch in between different terms, especially when you're used to them. It's also kind of fun to keep people guessing. Like, when you switch terms between the Lord's Table and Communion and the Eucharist, then that really confuses some people. Some people get so up in arms about the terminology that you use, like, Ooh, you're using the term Hebrew Bible, or you're using the term Eucharist.[00:37:00]
That must mean some secret code. Well, I guess for some people it is a secret code. At any rate, back to our ordering of the Tanakh. You have the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Then you have the Prophets, or Nevi'im. In this section, we have Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the Twelve Prophets.
Couple of things to note here is that we are probably a bit surprised to see historical books lumped in with what we would consider to be the Prophets. But remember, we're trying to change our framework into a different kind of thinking. Also, note that Samuel and Kings are considered to be one book. They're just quite long, so they ended up on two scrolls, which is why we would have 1st and 2nd [00:38:00] Samuel and 1st and 2nd Kings. But they are supposed to be a unity.
Alright, so the last section we have are the Ketevim, or the writings. And here the list is Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra and Nehemiah are put into one section, and the last thing we have is Chronicles.
And again, we're putting 1st and 2nd Chronicles into one book. And that makes sense, right? Makes sense to put 1st and 2nd Chronicles together, and 1st and 2nd Samuel together, and 1st and 2nd Kings together.
So we might find it a bit surprising that Chronicles is at the end. Of course, we're often confused at the book of Chronicles, aren't we? It's like, why do we have the same content over again, [00:39:00] but in a more boring way? Like, look at all those genealogical lists at the beginning of Chronicles. I know, the Jews put that book at the end because it's the most boring! Yeah, no, obviously that's not the reason. See, any good story is going to have an introduction, and it's going to have a conclusion, right?
Now, of course, we're usually thinking the conclusion should be exciting and not boring. Like, ending with a list of chronology? Really? Why would you do that? Okay, so that's a really important question. But before we do that, let's talk about a few of these details first. , just for completion's sake, or if you want to lift these from my transcript, I'm going to give you the list of books in the Old Testament from my Bible that I have open right next to me.
Here we have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, [00:40:00] Numbers, Deuteronomy, and then we have narrative literature. Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Samuel, Kings and Kings, and Chronicles and Chronicles. Then we have Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. Then I have Wisdom and Hymnic Literature. Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon. Then we have the Oracles of the Prophets. And we have Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
So our order here is primarily about types of literature. [00:41:00] We've categorized them in certain ways, and we've sectioned them off and put them into these little categories. And, you know, categories help us out in a lot of things. These days, especially, we think in terms of categories. Part of the drive here, I think, is a really good one, where we're trying to look at things according to genre. I mean, you're going to read different genres of books differently, right? So that's potentially helpful.
What this doesn't seem to acknowledge, though, is that there is a genuine unity to the entire book. If you're just pulling books out according to genre, then you're ruining the actual arc of the narrative. I mean, think about it. What if we treated the entire Bible this way? What if we put all apocalyptic literature together?
I mean, that's essentially what they're trying to do in this organization. So, why [00:42:00] should we separate the Old Testament and the New Testament at all? Let's put all of the historical books together. We'll put all of prophetic literature together. We'll put all apocalyptic literature together. And heck, we can even take the poetry out of the epistles and put it with the poetic literature.
I think you can see how that would changed the way that we read Scripture. And it would certainly change the way we see things in context. Let's just go ahead and pull the book of Revelation out from where it is and put it back in the Old Testament with the book of Daniel. Come on, admit it! You read those books together anyway, don't you?
Then, for that matter, we could put the book of Hebrews with the book of Leviticus. And let's just put Romans at the front of the Bible. We don't need Genesis there anymore, right? Romans is the best theological text we have, right? It should frame the entire Bible, so let's just put it at the [00:43:00] beginning.
Okay, yes, I'm being facetious here. But I really could see people thinking like that once we start picking things apart and trying to put things together according to genre or things that we find as most important. And We can be honest with ourselves and say that's what the Jewish redactors did. That's why and how they compiled the Hebrew Bible the way that they did because they had particular ideas of things that were important and how the narrative flowed from one thing to the other.
Sometimes, of course, the text's connection from one to the other is already completely locked into place. I mean, we can see that really clearly in the Torah. The end of Genesis, we have the death of Joseph. He dies in Egypt. Then we have the beginning of Exodus, which says, [00:44:00] These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household. Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. All the descendants of Jacob were seventy persons. Joseph was already in Egypt. Then Joseph died, and all his brothers, and all that generation. But the people of Israel were fruitful, and increased greatly. They multiplied, and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.
That is quite clearly supposed to come after the book of Genesis. And really interesting to note there, all of these callbacks to the book of Genesis. To the beginning of the book of Genesis, in fact. Not just to the end of the book of Genesis. We have the idea of multiplication and filling the land. Hey look, the Israelites are doing what God wanted them to do.
They're [00:45:00] just not doing it in the land that God has for them. And so, spoiler alert, that's what the rest of the Torah is about, them getting into the land. Alright, so I won't do this myself, you can go do this yourself, you can look at the end of Genesis, the beginning of Exodus, the end of Exodus, the beginning of Leviticus, the end of Leviticus, the beginning of Numbers, the end of Numbers, The beginning of Deuteronomy, and you can see that you really can't put those scrolls in any order.
They really flow from one to the other. And, of course, you can say the same continuing into the Book of Joshua. But not everything is quite this straightforward. The list that I just read has Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and then Isaiah, and then the Twelve Prophets. There are other lists that go from Kings to Isaiah and then Jeremiah and Ezekiel, before going on to the Twelve Prophets.
[00:46:00] There is a section of the Talmud that is apparently addressing this disagreement in the lists. This list follows the one that I first gave, and says, Then why should not Isaiah be put first? Because the Book of Kings ends with a record of destruction, and Jeremiah speaks throughout of destruction. And Ezekiel commences with destruction. And ends with consolation and Isaiah is full of consolation. Therefore, we put destruction next to destruction and consolation next to consolation. End quote.
Now when you're looking at this list, it also makes a whole lot of sense to put Jeremiah and Kings next to one another because they end with the same conclusion. The exact same conclusion about the mercy that is shown to the last Davidic king in exile. Okay, so you can see that there was a lot of [00:47:00] contemplation as to the order, and people justified their orders in different ways. However, most of that, as far as the Tanakh or the Hebrew Bible goes, was this kind of internal disagreement where you're changing the order of just a couple of things.
When you look at ancient canonical lists, And most of the way you can do this is through letters of people to one another, because people weren't just writing down the list in some sort of table of contents, unfortunately. But when you do that, it's pretty clear that there was a general order to these books, and that it was generally like this.
My point being that the Christian ordering of the books is not the Jewish ordering, and that the Christian ordering of the books is not just Another Jewish ordering. It's an entirely different ordering of the books that is based on the ideas of Christianity. So [00:48:00] basically, early Christians took the books and they reordered them to their own purposes.
And so this is why we aren't reading the Old Testament like a Jewish person in the first century would have been reading the Old Testament. And we might think, so what? Those Jews, they didn't see who Jesus was and they rejected him. Well, first of all, not all Jews rejected Jesus, so we shouldn't go there.
And second of all, if the Messiah can be seen in the order of the Tanakh the way they had it, then there's no reason for us to change it. Okay, actually, we did have a reason, and it's not that it's not a legitimate reason, but it really does change the way that we read the Old Testament. And so let's look at how that does that.
so remember that the Tanakh Ends with the Book of Chronicles. And our Protestant Bibles [00:49:00] end with the Book of Malachi. So we end our Old Testament with the big list of prophets, right? We end with the last of the prophets! Of course, we have all of these prophets who wrote! And then, the 400 years of silence, where there was no writing going on.
Maybe you can hear the sarcasm in my voice there. There was a ton of writing during this period of time, and we might think that there were no prophets, but guess what? When the New Testament opens, there are people who are performing prophecy. And maybe that was unusual, but we really don't have a whole lot of people running around going, Hey, you guys, there's prophets again, everybody, everybody, prophets, hello.
It's almost like prophets were kind of normal. They weren't the writing prophets, they weren't recording scripture, but that doesn't mean you can't have [00:50:00] prophets. Okay, so that's another topic that we can talk about later is this idea of the 400 years of silence. Was it really 400 years of silence? Or, can we think about that a little bit better?
But when we're reading our Old Testaments from our Protestant Bibles, we get that kind of impression. Like, we have these writings, and then, boom, they stop. And that's not even all that we're picking up from how our Old Testament ends. Remember that as Christians, we read our entire Bible from the lens of the New Testament.
And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with doing that. Because the New Testament and Jesus He is the fulfillment of the Old Testament. The whole arc of the Bible absolutely goes through the New Testament. But when we end the Old Testament with the list of prophets, we have this idea then that the entire purpose of [00:51:00] the Old Testament was to prophesy for the Messiah.
And so then we're like, why didn't the Jews see this? Weren't they reading all of these prophets and trying to find the Messiah? Well, some of them apparently were. And I'm not trying to say that the Old Testament isn't full of prophecy for the Messiah, but are prophecies of the Messiah the main theme of the Old Testament?
Now, before you take me wrong here, when I suggest that that's not the case, I don't mean to suggest that Jesus isn't the purpose of the writing of the Bible, because he is. He's the center of it. He is the lens of the whole thing. But there's different ways you can see that, and prophecy is only one of those things.
Because, you see, the Bible starts out with this idea that we don't need a personal Savior from sin, right? When the Bible's [00:52:00] pages open up, we don't need to be saved from our rebellion. We don't need to be saved from the Fall. So if the lens of Scripture starts at the Fall and goes through Christ and to the end of time, Then what about those first few pages?
What are they even there for? Why do we even have them? My suggestion is that the main theme of the Bible actually does start in Genesis 1. I know that's pretty crazy to suggest, and I don't mean that the Bible is here to refute evolution. So there's something beyond the Fall that we need to be drilling down into as far as the main purpose and theme and intent of Scripture.
And also salvation history as a whole. Let's look more closely about the ending of the Old Testament and the ending of the Tanakh. The ending of the Old Testament, [00:53:00] again, it ends with the prophets. We have Malachi as the last book of the Old Testament. And this is how it ends. I'm going to read this whole last chapter.
Chapter 4 of Malachi. For behold, the day is coming. Burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of Hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings.
You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall, and you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet. On the day when I act, says the Lord of Hosts, Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel. Behold, I will send you Elijah, the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes and he will turn the [00:54:00] hearts of the fathers to their children, into the hearts of children, to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction. End quote.
Honestly, I can see why Christians want to end the Old Testament this way because not only do we have this kind of correlation of this book with the book of Revelation, with the great day of the Lord and judgment and destruction of the evildoers, but this also opens the door to John the Baptist.
So when you're reading from the Old Testament into the New Testament, It's kind of this cohesive little narrative that goes right through, and then we go, Why didn't the Jews see this? It should be so obvious. Here, it's right there in front of them. The end of their very own book tells them all about John the Baptist.
But now we see that this actually wasn't [00:55:00] the last thing they were reading in their own scriptures. That doesn't mean that they didn't read it, and that they couldn't and shouldn't have seen this, perhaps. But I hope you can see how the way that this ends makes it really easy for the Christian reader to read on into the New Testament and make these connections.
It doesn't require us any work at all, really. It makes it quite plain and obvious. But to the Jews of the first century, they would have had to connect this thing that was in the middle of their book to what was happening right in front of them. And when you have a dozen of these lines going from the middle of their book over to Jesus, that makes it a lot harder to see.
In fact, I would say that they needed genuine revelation in order to make this happen. This is why Jesus himself would expand on scripture to talk about how their scripture connected with himself. It's [00:56:00] really not that they were such dunces that they couldn't see it. And I don't even think it was that it was just so buried that some genius would have to find it.
No, I think, genuinely, it had to be revealed. And that's why we see what we see in the New Testament. Why the New Testament authors do what they do with Scripture. Because if they didn't do what they did with Scripture, Then it wasn't clear to anyone. It couldn't be seen. It needed to be reinterpreted in light of what they were seeing in the true revelation of God, who was Jesus Himself.
Because remember, revelation isn't just some vision that people are getting, but the incarnation itself was revelation. And once you have that rock your world, then you need to go back to your scripture And reinterpret all of that in light of the [00:57:00] incarnation. So it's not just that the biblical authors of the New Testament were making stuff up and just putting things together haphazardly and randomly and, Oh, well, it's easy to see right after the case what you're going to see in scripture.
Yeah, but that's not a bad thing because they had the incarnate word of God right in front of them in order to help them make all of these connections. And they weren't going to do that without Jesus expounding upon things and showing them how it worked. So even saying that the New Testament authors were doing some sort of Jewish midrash, I mean, kind of.
It is kind of the way that the Jews were treating scripture and interpreting things. But there is a very definite difference with the New Testament authors. Because they weren't just doing interpretation. They were doing new revelation. [00:58:00] Which is not the same as just another type of midrash interpretation.
And the reason they were able to do that was because of Jesus. Was because he's literally the incarnate word of God.
Okay, so, but let's go back to the Tanakh and the ending of the Tanakh. Because now we know how our Old Testament ends. How does the Tanakh end? The Tanakh ends with the Book of Chronicles, and the Book of Chronicles ends with the Proclamation of Cyrus.
And I'm going to read this section here. Starting in verse 22, it says, Now in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, that the word of the Lord, by mouth of Jeremiah, might be fulfilled. The Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia. So that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and also put it in writing. Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia, The Lord, the God of [00:59:00] heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him. Let him go up. End quote.
So what does the Tanakh end with? It ends with the beginning of the end of the exile. It begins with the idea of them going back into Judah to rebuild the temple. That's how the Tanakh ends. That's very different from the ending of Malachi. And so if you're reading this thing called the Tanakh, What do you see here? What do you see from the beginning, the book of Genesis, to the ending, the book of Chronicles?
I'm sorry, but Genesis just connects so much better to Chronicles than it does to Malachi. It just [01:00:00] does. There's actually quite a few things that connect Genesis and Chronicles. For one thing, these are the two books that have the most genealogical lists by far. You have, towards the end of Genesis, in 49 verses 8 through 12, the discussion about the rule of Judah. You have Adam, who's mentioned in Chronicles, and he's hardly mentioned anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. You have Abram, who's called out of Babylon in Genesis 12. And here we have the people called out of Babylon in 2 Chronicles 36. Then we have the connection between land and dominion and exile. Once you start seeing that, you start going, Oh, maybe there is an overarching major theme to the Old Testament. Huh. And then once you look at these two endings to the Old Testament [01:01:00] and to the Tanakh, And you start connecting those to the New Testament, you see some very interesting things there as well. I won't get into this too deeply here because we're at the end of the episode, but let's just look at this one thing.
Okay, so I just read this section in Chronicles, right, at the end, with the proclamation of Cyrus. Now let's look at the beginning of Matthew. Now some of you will be familiar with the debate of what gospel was written first. And the two usual contenders are either Matthew or Mark. I'm not really hot and bothered by either option.
I think both sides have some good data for their defense. Historically, most of the early church fathers say that Matthew was written first. And so in every Bible you pick up, you're gonna see Matthew as the first gospel. Okay, now keeping in mind this ending of the Tanakh with Cyrus, right? [01:02:00] Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus, starting with Abraham, not with Adam, but with Abraham, because Matthew was mostly concerned with the nation of Israel.
His audience was probably primarily Jewish, so that probably tells you straight out what his audience was thinking about the Book of Chronicles. But look how this genealogy in the Book of Matthew is sorted out. It's sorted from Abraham, to David, to the exile. And then it talks about the return from exile.
Another little tidbit to notice in the end of the Book of Chronicles, what does Cyrus say? That the Lord has given him all the kingdoms of the earth. Hmm, I wonder if there's something in the early chapters of Matthew that could connect to the kingdoms of the earth. Hmm, that's interesting. I'm just going to leave it at that and let you ponder.[01:03:00]
To be honest, right now I don't have much more than that teaser for you there. But I think you can see how reading the Old Testament the way that the Jewish people would have been reading the Old Testament can absolutely help us to read our New Testament better. Alright, but that's not it. Here's another thing that I find very interesting in relation to the ending of the Tanakh, the ending of the Old Testament, And whether or not Matthew or Mark were written first.
So we can already see a very definite connection between the ending of the Tanakh and the beginning of Matthew. That is at least suggestive of the fact that Matthew may have been written first. Now the connection might just be there because Matthew was writing to a predominantly Jewish audience. And so he's going to take that into account.
But I do find that very, very suggestive. But now let's compare the [01:04:00] ending of Malachi with the beginning of the book of Mark. Okay, so remember, Malachi ends with the idea of the great day of the Lord and Elijah coming back.
So then, what does the book of Mark start with? The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet. Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight. John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
So he says that quote is from Isaiah, but it's only halfway from Isaiah. The second part is from Isaiah, and the first part is from what? Oh, you guessed it. Malachi and John the Baptist as Elijah returning. [01:05:00] Yeah, here we have a very strong connection from the book of Mark to the end of Malachi.
So we have a couple of options here in front of us. Either there was a different list of the canon for the Tanakh that ended in Malachi, and Mark is using that. Or, another idea is that Christians reordered the Old Testament to make this the last book of the Hebrew Bible, so that it does move into the book of Mark, because of the connections that Mark was making. And if that's the case, as far as the question of whether Matthew or Mark was written first, it would suggest to me that Matthew was written first, and then Mark was written, and then people saw what Mark did and reordered the Hebrew Bible.
I could have that wrong, but it seems quite likely, once you start looking at these different connections between the Hebrew Bible The Old [01:06:00] Testament and the New Testament. And we have to remember that most Christians probably didn't have a full copy of the New Testament as we have it now for quite some time.
Alright, I'm going to go ahead and end the episode here because there's a whole lot more I could say about the actual theme that does run through the Bible. I cannot possibly do it justice at this point in time for this week. And so, I'm going to save that for next week. So, I'll end the episode by thanking you all once again for listening.
If you guys weren't listening, I wouldn't be doing what I am doing, and I really enjoy doing what I'm doing. So, really, thank you guys so very much for listening, and thank you for sharing my episodes with other people, either in person, or on Facebook, or in different groups, or wherever you're able to do that.
I greatly appreciate it when you do, and thank you for all of you who reach out to me and tell me how much you're [01:07:00] enjoying this. You guys make my day when you do that. And thank you, thank you, thank you so very much to my Patreon and PayPal supporters. For those of you just tuning in, if you're interested in contacting me, or in looking at all of the various things that I have on my website, you can do all of that through my website at genesismarksthespot. com. You can sign up for my newsletter. You can look at my artwork that I have up for sale that helps to support my podcast. You can find blogs. You can find information on all of the guests that I have. You can access transcripts. And you can also leave me a rating either on my website, or wherever it is that you listen.
That helps the algorithms out so very much. At any rate, thank you all again, and I wish you all a blessed week, and we will see you later.
