The Narrative Arc of the Hebrew Bible - Episode 062

Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and in this episode, I'm going to do a bit of a continuation from last week. Last week I talked about the unity of the scriptures. And I particularly focused on the Old Testament and how that does flow into the New Testament.

And we talked a little bit about the difference between the Jewish ordering of the Old Testament And the typical Christian, or at least the Protestant, ordering of the Old Testament. So, because I like my episodes to be standalone episodes, we're going to do just a very short review. I don't think you should have to listen to last week's episode in order to [00:01:00] understand this.

Even if I didn't do a review of last week's content, I think you probably still would follow along just fine. But there's a few points I want to put in as a reminder. Part of what I talked about last week was Biblical theology. At least, Biblical theology in the sense that we are studying themes that go across the Scriptures.

There are different ways of doing Biblical theology. And in that last episode, I linked to a YouTube conversation I had describing some of those different ways of doing biblical theology. But at any rate, when we're talking about biblical theology and we're talking about the themes that are in Scripture, then we're talking about something that goes across the canon.

And if we're doing that, then the order of Scripture really can and does matter to that theme. It matters to the development of the theme. It [00:02:00] matters to how we see different biblical authors or books speak on a theme in comparison to the way it was spoken about previously in the canon. And this isn't even necessarily about the chronological dating of scripture.

Like, if some scripture was written before another scripture, that does affect things. But what really matters when we're looking at the whole canon is how that canon was ordered. So that means whether or not something was written earlier or later and may have had a previous source or not, The order of the canon means that we can read the later books in light of the earlier books, or at least that they have some sort of connection between the books.

We talked a little bit about how the Tanakh has that kind of connection, and in particular, you can see this very easily in the Torah. In the first five books of Moses, each one of those [00:03:00] flows into the other ones. And there is a purpose to the beginning of the Torah, and the end of the Torah, and also a very big purpose to the middle of the Torah.

But that's another subject entirely. But all of this kind of organization is stuff that we ought to be aware of when we're reading. I am still going to be pulling some information from the book that I talked about last week. And that book is Dominion and Dynasty, a Biblical Theology of the Hebrew Bible by Stephen G. Dempster, which is in the series, New Studies in Biblical Theology. Here's a quote, speaking to some types of scholars who like to chop up the text and try and figure out, this is from this source, and this is from another source, and we're going to pull all of that out and try to make something that is cohesive in and of itself from the different sources.

Well, Dempster [00:04:00] quotes Robert Alter in his book. And Robert Alter says, Biblical critics frequently assume, out of some dim preconception about the transmission of texts in primitive cultures, that the redactors were in the grip of a kind of manic tribal compulsion, driven again and again to include units of traditional material that made no connective sense. For reasons they themselves could not have explained. End quote.

I like that quote because that is what they do. There's this overall assumption that there is no cohesiveness to the actual text. It's just overall a ridiculous position to have. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't look into the sources and you can't try and figure out, well, we think this came from here and this was probably a little bit older and this is a little bit younger.

It's not like you can't do [00:05:00] those kinds of studies and that those aren't helpful, because they can be quite helpful in understanding the text in context. But here's a really important and interesting point. To some degree, canonization removes the individual texts from their original contexts.

Quoting from Dominion and Dynasty, they are redeployed as parts of a New literary whole. In this way, their historically secondary context, which is the canonization, becomes their hermeneutically primary context. Thus, the canon operates to refocus the meaning of individual documents as each is read with a view to others and in the light of the collective as a whole. End quote.

So, do you see what that's saying?

Canonization [00:06:00] allows new lenses of interpretation for a text. This may also have been the case with the original authors of individual texts, when they were putting together sources. The author of Genesis could take various documents and put them together and create a new inspired text with all of the meaning of that new inspired text.

The meaning lies in the purpose and intent of the compilation. And, again, that doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't study the text in its original context as much as possible, because it's still going to be very helpful. And, we also need to realize that within the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament together, just saying that shows us that there are individual sections within the Bible as a whole, right? We recognize that the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament is a unique [00:07:00] whole in and of itself. We recognize that the Torah is definitely a unique whole in and of itself. We recognize that the Twelve Prophets, they're probably ordered in a particular way because they are also a unique section that has a particular meaning within it. The Gospels in the New Testament, they have a particular flow and meaning as to their order.

So, if we're trying to read, for instance, the book of Job, in its context, if we jump to a New Testament understanding of that book, We're not doing it justice, we're not understanding the Book of Job in its context. And it's also important to acknowledge that the Book of Job may have been a little bit older or a little bit younger or whatever, but the meaning that we get out of it is because of its canonical placement in the Old Testament.

Now, that doesn't [00:08:00] mean that we don't then also study the Book of Job within a context exterior to the Old Testament. Because that is necessary, and we can see unique things when we do that. For instance, we can see how the Book of Job compares with the Babylonian Job, which I've talked about before. We can also see how the Book of Job parallels with other types of, ancient literature that is like, they're performance pieces.

They're made to be performed in front of other people. And when you look at the Book of Job and you see it in that light, you go, oh! Well, that's why we have all of these long dialogues. It makes perfect sense. So it helps us understand the text. It helps us understand how it was originally used. But then we also need to go into its placement in the canon and say, what does it mean that it is here in the Bible?

Because there's a particular [00:09:00] reason it's there. So you see, there's all of these different layers and all of these different ways we can study scripture. And all of them are quite important. We need all of them in order to fully get this really robust picture of what we're reading when we read the Bible.

And you can start seeing how each way of looking at the text and studying the text has a unique purpose. But when we're talking about biblical interpretation, the right lens is absolutely important. And the right lens is going to be the function and the purpose and intent. of the text itself. That's how we read it.

That's how we need to understand it. And this is why it's perfectly okay to go into the Old Testament and start looking at that through the lens of Jesus. Because now that we have the whole biblical text all together with the Old Testament and the New [00:10:00] Testament together, Then it really is a fair thing to go into the Old Testament and say, what does this say about Christ?

How is this relating to what we see in the New Testament? But we need to be really careful in realizing also that the Old Testament is itself a unity and it is not the same as what the New Testament is. And between the Old Testament and the New Testament, there are changes in understanding. And that makes absolute perfect sense, not only because of a passage of time and just general progression of understanding of ideas, but also because Jesus's coming into the world changed things.

And so we need to do this little dance of interpretation where we're looking at the New Testament, we're looking at the Old Testament, we're looking at all of these individual pieces, and we're looking at them as a whole. Each part of that interpretive dance is [00:11:00] important. And it doesn't mean that we just go into the Old Testament and then we start seeing Jesus behind absolutely everything.

If we come to some part of the Old Testament that we just, we don't understand it. That seems odd. How does this relate to Jesus? We don't need to make up artificial connections there. So, it's not about going into every individual little tiny piece of the Old Testament and seeing it. Because we need to realize that the Old Testament is still a cohesive whole.

It still makes perfect sense just by itself. And the things that it meant to the original authors there don't just go away. They still matter. It just means that they can be seen in possibly a double light. So, for instance, if you do have a prophecy of the Messiah, but that prophecy also had something to do with the period of [00:12:00] time of the writing, then our new Christological messianic lens that we're reading the Old Testament through, it doesn't negate that original meaning. We see this frequently in the book of Isaiah, for instance. There's several messianic prophecies in that book, but they also had an actual fulfillment at the time of Isaiah. So just because they have an ultimate fulfillment in Jesus, it doesn't negate the fact that they had an original fulfillment.

All right, so when we're talking about the text as a whole, we need to realize that an ancient text is not like a modern text, right? In a modern story, we have titles, we have introductions, we have ways that we're going to expect the story to behave. And ancient writings, they didn't have the same kind of titles and introductions that we have in our stories and our books. They didn't introduce things in the same way. [00:13:00] But, they still have a beginning, they still have an ending, and those two things connect. And the middle takes us from the beginning to the ending.

In the last episode, we talked about different terms. We talked about the Old Testament. We talked about the Hebrew Bible. We talked about the Tanakh. Those are all ways of talking about what is essentially the same thing, but our Protestant Old Testaments are ordered differently than the Hebrew Bible or the Tanakh.

Of course, we call it the Old Testament because we have the New Testament. So that's our attempt to show how those two things connect. Sometimes it's unfortunate what people take away from this idea of calling it the Old Testament and the New Testament, because to some people, old means outdated. We don't need it anymore. It's no longer important. [00:14:00] We don't need to pay any attention to that old stuff because we have the new stuff over here, and that's not the point. I think the main reason we call it the Old Testament and the New Testament is because we do have different covenants. And so the terminology Old Testament and New Testament is trying to point that out.

But guess what? We can't understand the New Testament unless we understand the Old Testament. We can't understand the New Covenant unless we understand the Old Covenant. Okay, so the Old Testament, as we have it in our Christian Bibles, is a different order than the Hebrew Bible. And I can't speak to the reason why people use the term Hebrew Bible in general, but it might be because they see this difference and they're thinking about it.

And when they're talking about the Hebrew Bible, they would really prefer to talk about the ordering of the Hebrew Bible. [00:15:00] Again, I can't say that that's across the board the reason or maybe even a common reason, but that would be why I would use the term Hebrew Bible, because there is a difference and that difference matters.

As far as that last term, the Tanakh, that's an abbreviation, because the Hebrew Bible is ordered into three different sections. You have the Torah, you have the prophets, the Nevi'im. And you have the Ketuvim, the writings. So you put Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim all together and you get the acronym Tanakh.

So again, you might have correspondence between all of these things, the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, and the Tanakh, but the Hebrew Bible and the Tanakh have a definite overlap. One to one correspondence, that they are just basically the same thing. But when you talk about the Tanakh, you might be emphasizing that [00:16:00] three fold structure that it has. So the next time you see somebody using these different terms, ask yourself, are they using those terms because they're trying to point out some sort of difference?

Okay, so this book, Dominion and Dynasty, Dempster is talking about the Hebrew Bible in specific, and he's talking about the ordering of the Hebrew Bible and why that matters to the storyline of the Bible itself. If you're interested in all of that, I definitely recommend his book. So in the Hebrew Bible, in the Tanakh, we have a beginning, We have a middle, and we have an end. Genesis is at the beginning. It's at the beginning of every Bible that I know about.

Chronicles is the end of the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible. So, if you have always wondered why there is this repetition of material in the middle [00:17:00] of our Old Testament, then you realize, oh, the book of Chronicles is at the end of the Hebrew Bible. Then it might make a little bit more sense as to why Chronicles exists.

It has a different purpose in the Tanakh. And you can also see why this might be one of the very few places that mentions Adam. Because it's mirroring back into Genesis. Like Genesis, Chronicles has a lot of genealogical lists. Thankfully they kind of front load them, but that's a lot to go through when we're reading our scriptures.

But the genealogical lists serve very important functions in connecting these things. You have other connections that I mentioned last time between Genesis and Chronicles. Abram was called out of Babylon in Genesis 12, and the people have been called out of Babylon in 2 Chronicles 36. And both [00:18:00] books are about land and dominion. There's probably a whole episode we could do just on the connections between Genesis and Chronicles. But one thing I want to point out here are the endings of the books.

So if we remember how the different books of the Bible are on different scrolls, then it makes sense that different scrolls are going to connect with one another in particular ways. And one of the ways that we're going to have that happen is in the connection between the end of one scroll and the beginning of another, or the end of one scroll and the end of another, or the beginning of a scroll and the beginning of another. All of those things are valid ways to connect two scrolls together.

When somebody down the line is trying to collect the library and put it in some sort of order, these things are going to help do that. So, let's say you have a librarian going through the scrolls, and he's wondering, where do I put this scroll in relation to another scroll? [00:19:00] Well, the fact that Adam is mentioned in Chronicles means that, if they wanted to, they could put that at the front of the library.

We think, oh, why would they do that? Because we need to start with the creation of the world. That makes more sense. Well, obviously they thought that too, but they could have started with a genealogical listing instead. And it would be perfectly valid for them to preface the entire Tanakh with a book that really just kind of reviews the whole history before getting into all of the nitty gritty details.

They didn't do that because it wouldn't have made much sense in light of all of the other books of the Bible and the story that they were telling. I'm just saying that there are different ways they could have done it, and they didn't do those different ways. At any rate, let's look at the end of Genesis and the end of Chronicles.

Genesis 50, verse 24 says, I am about to die, but God will [00:20:00] surely visit you, and bring you up out of this land, to the land that he swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Skip to the end, and we have 2 Chronicles 36 23, which says, Thus says King Cyrus of Persia, Yahweh has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may Yahweh his God be with him. Let him go up.

Okay, so I tried to emphasize a couple of words there. In Genesis 50, the word visit is actually the same Hebrew word as the word charged in Second Chronicles, but not only that, we have the same word of bringing you up out in Genesis and going up in Second Chronicles.

So when you have one word that connects, that [00:21:00] may or may not be an actual connection. When you have two words that connect, however, that probably is a connection. Okay, so obviously we have some really interesting details that connect, Genesis and Chronicles. So, hey, there might be something to this idea of the ordering of the Tanakh, especially since that's probably the ordering of the Bible that Jesus had.

So, what I want to do now is kind of look at the Tanakh from a bird's eye view. As I said, that book Dominion and Dynasty can give you a lot of help when you're reading your Old Testament, or your Hebrew Bible, and trying to see how that works out in all of the individual and specific places. It's quite interesting the different things you're going to end up seeing when you do that.

And we have to also keep in mind that there is no single one way to [00:22:00] view the Bible. Like, we can pull out some central themes that I think are absolutely core to what's going on, but that doesn't negate any other types of reading and ideas that we're going to have. The fact is, the Bible is such a layered book that you can just keep looking and looking forever and never really end on this kind of a quest. For instance, some Jewish scholars have looked at the Tanakh and seen this storyline that goes from Eve to Esther. The story of the Hebrew Bible begins with Eve and ends with Esther. So, just taking those two stories and seeing how those relate can help you see things in the Bible that you wouldn't see in any other kind of reading.

And that really puts, kind of, that idea of the patriarchal narrative on its head, right? Like, these are two women that we're talking about. Here's another way of looking at it. [00:23:00] From the lens of the Word of God. Ooh, that's interesting, right? Some of us are very, very used to calling the Bible the Word of God, and we think that that's some sort of title just for the Bible. And then other people might point out that in the Bible, the Word of God is Jesus. The Word of God is incarnate. And the Word of God is incarnate in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. So is it fair to call the Bible the Word of God? That's a question I see pretty frequently. And sometimes we land on No, let's not call the Bible the Word of God, because the Bible itself doesn't call itself that.

And fair enough, because the ultimate revelation is not the Bible. It's not the words on the page. It is Jesus himself, or the [00:24:00] visible Yahweh in the Old Testament. But I think it might be a bit too pedantic to toss the label out entirely when referring to the Bible. When you're looking at the Tanakh, There's three parts to the Tanakh, right? And each part of that begins with an emphasis on the Word of God.

Genesis 1, 3 through 5 says, And God said, Let there be light. And there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening and there was morning the first day.

So, of course, we have all of these instances of God speaking into the world and creating. Then, at the beginning of the Nevi'im, in Joshua 1, verses 8 through 9, it says, This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, [00:25:00] so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.

So, here we have the Book of the Law, and how it should not depart from our mouth, and how God has commanded them. So, all of these little connections there. Interesting, also, that there seems to be a very strong connection there with God speaking, and us speaking. We should be speaking the same thing. And that thing that we should be speaking is God's Law, the Book of the Law.

And then in the Ketuvim, we have Psalm 1, verses 2 and 3. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree, [00:26:00] planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.

The instances in the Nevi'im and the Ketuvim might not be quite as direct as what we have in Genesis 1, with God actively speaking. But the law that we are to meditate on, it's made up of words, isn't it? Hmm, yeah, I guess it is. And those words are coming from God. So, if you like to call the Bible the Word of God, I say go right ahead.

So, we have these three parts to the Tanakh. And as Christians, we often don't see all three parts of this. We tend to kind of ignore or even downplay the writings. Equating them to be more like Rabbinic Judaism than Scripture. Like, they're just not as important as the historical books [00:27:00] somehow. And we like the prophets because of our New Testament focus. We want everything in the Old Testament to be prophesying about Jesus in the New Testament.

And I'm not saying it doesn't, but I would suggest looking at it in a different way. And we'll get to that. But some scholars have even said that the writings were all originally secular writings and they were just put in and kind of edited to put God into them. So in a sense, in that kind of idea, they really hold no place in Old Testament theology.

And I'm fairly certain that most of us would say that's ridiculous. Of course, we need to look at all of the parts of the Tanakh for formulating our theology. But the fact that it begins with Genesis means that history is definitely important. But the fact that it begins with Genesis, [00:28:00] and not Exodus, means that Israel's history is subordinate to the history of the creation as a whole.

Remember that we could have started the entire Bible with Chronicles. That definitely would have given the impression of everything is starting with Israel. But it doesn't start that way. It starts with the creation of the cosmos as a whole.

You know, they could have also started the Bible with the Book of Psalms. It could have been a liturgical beginning to our library of books here. But it didn't start there, and so the idea that we have history, it is absolutely essential to what the core of the Bible is. But we have to remember that Our version and thinking of history is really not the same as the way that an ancient person would have thought of history.

I would say that the closest we get to this idea that they would have is our [00:29:00] idea of salvation history. This is kind of a scholarly idea that the workings of God in history is the story of the Bible. And so these are theological points that we need to be focused on. So, mining the Bible for science, or modern philosophy, or some sort of Bible code, that's the wrong way to look at it.

The story arc is salvation history. But that also sounds a bit simplistic, because what does salvation even mean? Salvation has meant different things to different people across time. Many Christians read the Bible like the entire thing is all about deliverance from our personal sin. Or, it's about this mean, vengeful God who wants everyone to do exactly what he says, or else. Or else he'll destroy them all. [00:30:00] So, Salvation History is about release or deliverance from that wrath.

And, well, when you can find passages that really do touch on all of these things. then how do you determine which arc of the story is correct? Because I can show you verses that seem to suggest all of those ideas. I can show you a wrathful deity, I can show you a deity who wants to control people, I can show you a deity who has determined everything in history, and who is thus the source of all evil. I could also show you a deity who is just all about love and acceptance, and it doesn't matter what you do. The thing is, for each of our ideas or frameworks, We can find an opposite idea or framework, and they seem contradictory.

So what are we to do here? How do we actually [00:31:00] figure it out? The thing is, I don't really think it's that hard. And maybe this is just my personal bias and preferences showing? That's entirely possible, and I won't deny that that's, might be the case. I may be picking and choosing things just as much as anybody else.

To some extent, that's just the way we think. It's just how we approach life. We have to have a overarching narrative and way of thinking. If we don't, we are pretty much literally crazy, because we can't associate things and make connections between thoughts and have entire ideas. So this is why we put ourselves into certain traditions or denominations or what have you, because we crave and we need some sort of solidity in worldview.

Of course a lot of times what we do is we look [00:32:00] out from our framework and we see into somebody else's framework. And then we judge their framework by the standards of our own framework. And then we tell them that they're so wrong, and why don't they see things the way that I see things? That's because they have a different framework than we have.

And it's kind of unfair to judge somebody else's framework. From the lens of your framework, when there's actually significant overlap there, it's just not entire overlap. This is why two people can frame things differently, and they can sound opposite, but they might not both be wrong. It's almost like we're cats playing in the background of a podcast recording.

Yes, for those of you who follow me on Facebook and who are listening very carefully, That was, indeed, Sherlock playing with my middle stripy cat, Neo. Sometimes [00:33:00] Sherlock will try to play with our older cat, Feff, but that usually doesn't turn out so well.

Anyway, back to Genesis and the Tanakh. Obviously, the Book of Genesis is very important to the narrative of the Bible. This is where we have the three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And God's promises to those patriarchs are very foundational. So the promise to Abraham, there's three parts to it. There's the promise of land. There's the promise of descendants, and there's the promise of relationship. And it's been noted that the organization of the Torah can be seen in light of these three promises.

In Genesis, there's the focus of descendants. In Exodus and Leviticus, there's the focus of relationship. In Numbers and Deuteronomy, there's the focus of the [00:34:00] land. Each of these things, of course, plays their part in everything that we're seeing in the Tanakh. In a sense, the idea of the relationship is a little bit different than the idea of the descendants and the land.

All of them can be considered a kind of gift from God, but relationship is definitely reciprocal, right? Whereas the idea of the descendants and the land It's like, enjoying those, or getting those, it's still reciprocal. The people still have to do things in order to have that happen. But those are kind of more physical manifestations, right?

Whereas a relationship is more ephemeral. It's kind of harder to pin down and really see in a visible way. The land and offspring, however, those are very visible. I think that we would all say that the relationship is much more foundational to the [00:35:00] promise than the land and the offspring are. But it's almost like the land and the offspring function as a bit of a barometer to the relationship.

Like, if you're not getting land and offspring, then the reason for that is because of a break in the relationship. And I say that the relationship is less visible, but it's really not true, because in the sense of relationship and how the Bible talks about it, and how the ancient Israelite would have thought about it, it was really very much wrapped up in those Rituals surrounding the tabernacle and the temple.

But it's also a little bit hard to talk about there because of what we see in the prophets. In some places, the prophets seem to be against the idea of sacrifice at the temple. And as I've said before, I don't think that's because they literally didn't think that the Israelites were given the temple rituals of sacrifice. [00:36:00] But because suddenly the Israelites were treating it like some magic thing that they could just do and then go on with their lives and do whatever they wanted. It was actually the case that the ritual was not just a ritual to get what you wanted, but it was for genuine fellowship with God. And if you're not having genuine fellowship with God, and you're just treating him like some magic genie to get what you want, then yeah, those rituals aren't going to do you any good.

Because they are supposed to be reflective of the relationship. So the fact that Jesus is our better high priest is a really big deal. That's what this means. It means that in Jesus, we have that ultimate relationship with God. And yeah, you know, sometimes we treat like the book of Hebrews in the same way that the Israelites treated their rituals.

Like oh, let's analyze this and Why does the heavenly temple need cleansing? And [00:37:00] let's figure all of this out. Now, don't get me wrong. I love all of those details, and I'm not saying they're not important, but it's not some magical thing. It is absolutely about establishing relationship. So when you have places like in Hebrews where it talks about the sacrificial rituals, and it's talking about blood, and it's referencing all of these things, It's not just like, there's this magical formula that God needs in order to forgive you guys. He's not going to forgive you without this killing , and blood and all of these other things. No, that is the description of a pagan deity, a pagan deity who requires blood in order to do anything. That's not what we have in the Bible. That's not what we have in our relationship with God. He's not some bloodthirsty deity who needs blood in order to satisfy his wrath.[00:38:00]

When Hebrews is talking about blood, it's talking about that reference to those sacrificial rituals. And what are the points to those? What is the core message of those? Is it satisfying wrath and justice and these kinds of ideas? Or is it relationship? Is it community building? Is it fellowship? Is it becoming right with God in that sense that we are now in good stead and good relationship? Where we can have this back and forth communication and we can have this back and forth situation where God does things for us We're gonna respond and do good things Because we have been blessed by God not in order to earn his favor because we're really Worried that he's angry at us But because this is a natural response from us, the [00:39:00] meanings that we have ascribed to things like blood are death and brutality and violence.

But when we go back into Leviticus, and we look at all of this language of blood and the application of it, it's about purification. It's about reconciliation. It's about getting rid of something that is not good, that needs to be gotten rid of in order to have the best relationship we can with God. It's about God dwelling with us in reality.

Like that is relationship at its core, right? So, this idea of relationship, I'm not trying to put it aside, or not talk about it here, but for the moment, I want to focus on the other two promises to Abraham, that of land and descendants. I think we need a special focus on this, because as [00:40:00] Christians, we tend to kind of downplay that or not really be understanding what that is even about.

We're like, we're not Jews. So, we're not attached to the land of promise, and we're not really sure what this whole idea of having children is, because we don't seem to struggle with that too badly. But, guess what? All of this started way before Abraham. The first chapters of Genesis, what do we have? We have the creation of the cosmic temple, first of all.

We have the establishment of Eden, and also the garden inside of Eden. So, you have the holy place, and the most holy place, and you have the establishment of the idol within the temple, or the image of God, which is Adam and Eve, and also all of humanity. So, there we go, starting with relationship, adding in the potential idea of [00:41:00] land, because Eden is a specific place. And from our very creation, humanity is meant to multiply.

And what else is that all connected to? It is connected to the idea of dominion. And what is dominion except kingship? Now, of course, as we are the image of God, God is the king. And we are his vice regents, right? But a vice regent, just like we see in the book of Genesis at the end with Joseph, a vice regent has the power to do things.

A vice regent has the power of the king. Now, of course, you're supposed to be using that power in the way that the king wants you to use it. And the problem is, Adam and Eve didn't do that. They didn't use their power in the way that God wanted them to do it. Instead of subduing the serpent, Eve submitted to him.[00:42:00]

But even after that happened, the promise of offspring and descendants remained, and became even more important as well. So, from the beginning, we have the idea of divine rule and relationship between God and humanity. We have the need to multiply, and that suggests that that's very much connected to the land, and from the beginning, that means all of creation, not just a section of the earth, but everywhere.

The ideal would have been to stay in the garden and use that as a base of operations, right, to spread from there. But Adam and Eve got kicked out. That didn't stop the plan, but exile made it harder for them. It's harder because of that break in relationship with God, and obviously that break in relationship with God did come [00:43:00] about because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve.

The question hanging over all of that is Would things have been fixed if Adam and Eve hadn't hidden away? If instead they had turned to God and repented and said, We did this thing, God. We're sorry. If they had done that, instead of hiding away from God, might it have been the case that they wouldn't have gotten exiled?

This is largely an argument from silence. We have no idea if that could have happened. But, if the exile from the garden is anything at all like the exile to Babylon, then I think you can make a fairly convincing case that if Adam and Eve had just repented and turned towards God, they wouldn't have been exiled.

I mean, you see this kind of language over and over and over in the prophets. Turn back to God. Repent. [00:44:00] And really, the understanding of the Jews was that once they had repented, the exile would be over. It's like part of that is there is this sense of there needs to be enough punishment for what happened.

And so just as a bit of an aside, because recently I was talking about Jesus and the cosmic forces and how sin is a literal power that has hold on us. You see, there's no misunderstanding that transgressions don't have anything to do with anything. Like, they don't matter somehow. Because, obviously, they do.

Transgressions are related to the break in covenant. Transgressions are a unique problem that needs to be solved. And some of that is connected to the idea of impurity. and removal of these things. They need to be removed from us. They need to be removed from the [00:45:00] community. They need to be removed from the sacred space.

But not only that, but they need to be fixed in general. There needs to be repentance. There needs to be restoration. The situation that happened that was bad. needs to be fixed. And I hate to tell you this, but part of the way that happens is through our repentance, and through our restoration of relationships between ourselves and other people, when we do something that's bad, we need to do something in order to fix it.

Just like the Israelites, when they broke their covenant with God, and they rebelled, and they chose to follow other gods instead of Yahweh, Or, other gods in addition to Yahweh, then the way that gets fixed is not via just punishing the Israelite. I mean, that might be part of it. [00:46:00] That's the story of the exile. It was a punishment, and they are to be punished in order to see the light of their ways and to turn back to God. It wasn't a matter of extracting some vengeance when the relationship is broken and the other promises aren't being fulfilled because the relationship is broken, well, the way the relationship comes back together is not via punishment.

It's not that God needs some sort of tit for tat. Like, we see forgiveness all over the Old Testament. Unfortunately, in our intellectual Protestant type thinking, we end up going, Oh, you know what, those instances of forgiveness, those aren't about salvation. We're going to put salvation into a different category.

And the question I have for you if you do that is, Why? How do [00:47:00] you justify that? Oh, I know that you can. I know that you can pull plenty of proof texts right out of the Bible and justify that. But that's the same thing as saying that the Old Testament is all about pointing to Christ and we're just gonna look at the prophecies.

It's these proof text prophecies that matter. But here's the thing. Prophecy is not just in the prophets. It's not just something spoken about by a prophet. A prophet is actually much more than just Somebody who tells the future. Now, does a prophet do that? They can. A lot of times that's what they're doing. But that's not all a prophet does. A prophet speaks for God. A prophet is a covenant enforcer. Trying to get the people back on to the right path. And sometimes they're telling the future. Sometimes they give signs [00:48:00] from God so that people can know and see that God is acting. But even though a prophet can tell the future and let us know what's going to happen, prophets are actually not the only thing that can do that.

Aside from a prophet, what else can tell us the future? Well, we have typology. We have patterns. We have themes. And all of those things, by the way, are related to the shape of the canon. And we have promises and covenants. These things may not give you specific details about how it's going to be fulfilled in the future, but they allow you to look for and see the workings of God.

These are the ways we see the purposes and intent of God. These are how we see what's important. So, basically, what I'm telling you is that the arc of the story, the shape of [00:49:00] the Tanakh, is gonna tell us what and who and how the Messiah does things. We don't get to just pull out proof texts and say, aha, this is what I find important. This is the core of the messianic work. If you can't embed that into the arc of the story, then you've got it wrong. I'm sorry, you just have it wrong if you're not doing that primarily. And, okay, I'm speaking fairly strongly here. But I also want to say that there really are wrong ideas out there. Now, how we determine that and the nuance that we are then gonna move forward with it's gotta be a long, long in depth conversation.

So, anyway, back to my point here. My point is that the themes and the patterns and the [00:50:00] typology and the promise, all of those, they're actually a more full picture, a more complete idea of what we're gonna see in the Messiah, and in the work of the Messiah. So if you want a biblically solid way to describe what Christ did, why he came to the earth, it's those larger themes and patterns that really should be formulating exactly what we see, and exactly how we talk about it.

We don't get to just pull out one thing that we see as central to the Tanakh and say, This is what Jesus did. The story is, it's just more grand, and it's just more all encompassing, and it's just this thing that we see over and over and over instead of just pulling from one spot. I hope that makes sense.

I hope I'm getting my point across here, that the themes and the whole [00:51:00] shape of the story, those are the ways that we need to be formulating our biblical imagination and the way that we think about things. So, you see, this is why I get so excited about biblical theology, because that's the goal of what I'm trying to do with it.

And I don't want to downplay other types of theologies. I really don't. A lot of times, those theologies have great ways of thinking, great ways of explaining things to a more modern audience. And I don't really find anything explicitly wrong with those kinds of approaches. It's like, sometimes I see people complain about Jordan Peterson talking about the Bible. It's like, oh, you're not supposed to talk about the Bible psychologically! And I'm sitting here thinking, why not? If it is, as we said, the Word of God, then the Word of God speaks to [00:52:00] every aspect of our humanity. And as we continue this little path of history and life, the progression of humanity, like, we change, we start thinking in different categories, we start thinking in different ways, and if we can't bring the Word of God into those ways of thinking, then I don't even know what to tell you, because we are humans, we are made in God's image, and the way that we think, is gonna align with the way that God is.

I mean, we're gonna get it wrong. We don't get to take a psychological analysis of Scripture and say that that is the same as the revealed Word of God, but it can be a way to think about it. It's the same when you have, you know, some set of Scriptures that is geared toward children. And, oh, those are just Bible stories. [00:53:00] Well, maybe. And a lot of those collections are written really poorly from a bad angle or a bad lens. But aside from that, you should be communicating scripture to children in the way that they're going to understand it. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. If you try and communicate with children from the level of an adult, they're going to grasp some of it, but they're not going to grasp a lot of it. A lot of it's just going to go right over their heads. And so if you want them to understand the Bible in a way that is going to apply to them right here and right now, you got to talk to them in a way that they are going to understand. You got to appeal to them in a way that they are going to appreciate.

We get in our little lofty towers and say, Oh, my scripture is better. My translation is better. And I don't use children's books in order to teach my children. I just use the Bible. Well, [00:54:00] okay, I'm sure they can learn a lot like that, and I'm sure they can really understand God if you do it the right way and you're teaching them correctly from it.

But it's also a bit pompous, because adults really don't understand what it's like to be a child, and we don't even understand each other. Like, we have a really hard time understanding somebody else's perspective. If somebody else has a different framework, we really have a hard time entering that framework ourselves.

Anyway, turning back into what the Tanakh is talking about, what we have is creation, exile, and return. This is the pattern we see from the beginning, to the middle, to the end of it. But it's also the pattern that we see over and over and over inside of the Tanakh itself. We see this pattern of behavior, of people being blessed. [00:55:00] and them messing up, and them being exiled in some form, and then a restoration of sorts. I highly recommend, as you're reading the Old Testament, to try and look for these patterns. It's easy to see, in Genesis, we have creation, we have the fall, we have the exile. Immediately after that, we see the institution of sacrifice, which is a restoration of relationship with God.

And again, immediately, we see transgression. We see exile. And that keeps happening throughout Genesis. The Flood is like a massive exile from the entire Earth. The language of scattering that we have with the Tower of Babel? That's another exile. Exile is used in really unusual ways, too. Because Abram is called out of his land. People leave the Promised Land to go to Egypt many times. And then they're called [00:56:00] from Egypt back into the Promised Land, and then they get into the land, and we have all sorts of interesting stories that happen there.

And at the end of Chronicles, what do we have? We have the calling back into the land, the end of the major exile, or at minimum, it's the beginning of the end of the exile. And you don't need to be worried that ending the Tanakh with Chronicles as opposed to Prophecy. is doing any damage at all to the story of the Messiah. Remember that Cyrus is called a Messiah himself. So it's not like the ending of the Tanakh doesn't move quite well into foreshadowing Jesus. But it's doing it in a way that isn't the way that we tend to think of prophecy.

And you might say that there's no real distinction here, like it's talking about apples and oranges. And kind of, in a way, you're [00:57:00] right. I'm not trying to say that the ordering of the Old Testament is entirely wrong, or there's something wrong with that. Both ways that you can order these books of the Bible really do point to Jesus.

So I'm not trying to toss out this Protestant canon and say, don't read it that way anymore. But since we are not Jewish, I think it really behooves us to read it in a Jewish light. The Messiah is, after all, a Jewish Messiah. He's a Messiah for the whole world, yes, but he came from Judaism, and the story that we're reading about here is from the Jews, or at least they're the ones who had all of this organized. Even if the entire Old Testament isn't just about the Jews, because it's not, We can't deny that it's the Jewish people who were organizing and collecting this material in its final form.

[00:58:00] Okay, so, my argument is that the shape of the Tanakh is really this story of creation, exile, and return. Now, that doesn't mean that a whole bunch of other things don't fit inside of that, because they absolutely do.

And then we can start asking these kinds of questions, like, How does this pattern fit with the theme of kingship? That's probably going to be our next topic. How does this pattern fit with the theme of covenant? How does this pattern fit with the theme of the Messiah? How does this pattern fit with the theme of atonement?

How does this pattern fit within the theme of personal redemption? Because personal redemption is definitely part of the story of the Bible. The culture of the biblical authors was very much more of a collectivist or tribal kind of thinking rather than our modern [00:59:00] western individualistic thinking. But that doesn't mean we just sever the link there and say nothing is about individual salvation.

In all things interpretation, we need to avoid the two extremes. It's like you're on this path of interpretation. And on one side, you have a certain type of risk or danger that you can fall into when you're interpreting. And on the other side, you have an opposite ditch, an opposite place of danger that you can fall into.

And we need to avoid both of those. I mean, it is always the case that exile is because of rebellion and following someone other than God. And following someone other than God is rebellion. So, yes, the problem is that we are sinners, we are rebellious, and we do that on an individual level, but also a nation could do that on a collective level, and the way to fix both of those things is through [01:00:00] a return.

It's through repentance. And to be honest, the idea of repentance is not really a simple matter either, because are we just talking about Declaring loyalty to God and following Him now? Or are we talking about repenting from every little tiny sin that I've ever done in my life?

You're gonna predict my answer. I know you will. The answer is yes. Both. But we're not talking a factor of legalism here. We're not saying, oh, God's not gonna forgive you if you don't do this list of things. Because here's the thing. God isn't that petty. But do we want to go and fix the things that we can fix? Absolutely! That's going to improve my life. It's going to improve the life of the person that I am trying to apologize [01:01:00] to. It's going to improve the whole world if we did that. I think that most of us will agree that in the end, in the eschaton, whatever we leave unfinished is going to be restored in ways that we can't imagine. And it's going to be restored to a level that we can't imagine.

So, it's not like our little tiny repentances and things that we do here are gonna get us all the way to that point, because they're not. But does that just mean we just throw up our hands and say, ah, we'll just repent later, we'll just wait for later? No, that's totally not what we're supposed to be doing, and I don't think anyone wants to live like that.

All right, I'm going to go ahead and end us here with a few quotes from the book Dominion and Dynasty. And this is in reference to the main storyline. He says, quote, God creates humanity [01:02:00] like himself, for a relationship with them, and their main task is to exercise lordship over the earth. That is, to represent God's rule over the world. The relationship fails at the beginning. And instead of subduing the world, they are subdued by it. He goes on to say, The rest of the story recounts the restoration of the relationship through the twin themes of Geography, Dominion, and Genealogy, Dynasty. End quote.

The key concept at the end of the Tanakh, beginning with Daniel and ending in Chronicles, is Kingdom. The word Kingdom is used 28 times in Chronicles whereas, it's used three times in the earlier books.

And one more quote. Is it any surprise that this text was understood to be a unity [01:03:00] from Genesis to Chronicles? It begins with a creation story of humanity in the Garden of Eden, continues with their exile from this place of God's presence because of disobedience, and ends with a nation in exile as a result of disobedience, yet called back to the province of Judah to engage in the task of temple reconstruction, the supreme symbol of God's presence. This temple is no ordinary temple either, as it has eschatological overtones, resulting in the restoration of Eden. The rivers of Eden will flow again, this time turning even the Dead Sea into a place of teeming life. End quote.

Once you look at it like that, the connections to the Gospels just jump out at you, right? The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent. This also goes right in line [01:04:00] with what we see in the Book of Revelation. I don't know about you guys, but this kind of stuff lights my fire. And yeah, it's not like I didn't see the themes of exile, you know, years ago.

Years ago. It was like, Yes, of course, exile's a big deal in the Bible. But then you get to the New Testament and you start thinking, Oh yeah, it's still talking about exile, but those are just metaphors. Of course the New Testament authors would use metaphors that the Jewish people would understand. But looking at it now, from this framework of meaning and intent and purpose, the more I see the arc and the narrative and the themes, The less interested I am in proof texting individual points.

I've mentioned more than once lately about the thinking that we have today as modern people and the thinking that the ancient [01:05:00] Israelite would have. The thinking of the Semitic person. For us, it is just, it's so about propositional knowledge. It's about facts. And what you can prove, and how you can prove it.

That's just not Semitic thinking. And it's not just Semitic thinking we're talking about, either. Like, if you read stories from anthropologists who go into cultures that are less touched by this kind of thinking and influence, it's really striking how similar their thinking is to that of the Semitic people of the Bible.

Instead of facts and proposition, it's about story. It's about narrative, and it's about, like, practical life. Rituals aren't just things that you do for a rational reason, but they're genuinely embodied truth. And once you see that, then propositional ideas just fall [01:06:00] by the wayside, because you're not busy thinking about the rational logic behind something when you're engaged in something that is really raw and participatory.

I mean, think about a marriage, for instance, when two people are up there getting married, they're in front of their family and their friends, they're declaring their love and dedication to one another, and the focus there, it's not about all of the steps that you took to get to you from where you were before to where you're standing right now, but rather you're immersed in the experience.

Or at least hopefully you are. There's a lot that goes into a wedding and sometimes you're up there standing there thinking about all of these lists of things that, did you do this? Did you do that? But ideally, you're up there and you're really focused and immersed in this relationship. And perhaps not just the relationship you have with your new spouse, but the relationship that you have with all of the people [01:07:00] who are also standing around witnessing what's going on.

So I feel like the, the imagery of weddings and marriage is not an accidental one that the Bible uses that for our relationship with God. And I'm using this here because it is something that we have still held very strongly onto in our culture. And it's not really that difficult for us to take that idea and realize that this is what's going on for the Jewish people.

being exiled from your homeland is being exiled from your home, being exiled from your true place. And it's very related to relationship, and your relationship with God should be that of like a marriage. It says this in the Bible over and over. But what's fascinating to me also is that the imagery of exile, well, it's just a very rich one. Definitely worth exploring more and thinking about. And [01:08:00] as we're reading our scriptures, if we're looking at these ideas and we're thinking about them, they'll start popping up off the page just time and time again.

I am going to go ahead and wrap up here, but I am certain that we will be revisiting this idea. I hope you all had a good time listening to this, and I appreciate you for doing so. Thank you again for sharing the episodes with others. for rating my podcast, for leaving me reviews, for contacting me personally and telling me how much you enjoy this, and a big shout out especially to my Patreon and PayPal supporters. You guys rock.

If you're interested in giving me any questions for future Q& As, which I am building one of those up again, you can contact me via my website at GenesisMarksTheSpot. com, where you can also sign up for my newsletter. At any rate, [01:09:00] I wish you all a blessed week, and we will see you later.