Michael S. Heiser's Blog, page 71

Naked Bible Podcast Episode 024: The Bible’s Literary Context: Historical Annals

In the last podcast episode we continued our series on studying the Bible in a way that amounts to more than reading by taking a look at the legal genre in Old Testament books. This time I focus on another genre – military annals. I think the best way of illustrating how this genre can matter for interpretation is to begin with a problem that it solves, one that biblical scholars have grappled with for centuries. More specifically, I’m speaking of the problem of the unrealistically large numbers in the exodus and wilderness journey of Israel. In this episode of the Naked Bible podcast, I’ll illustrate this problem from the biblical material, mention a commonly proposed solution, and then introduce you to what I think is a better solution—one that derives from the type of literature we’re dealing with in the exodus, wilderness, and conquest narratives.

Technorati Tags: conquest, Exodus, genre, hyperbole, large numbers, literary, Old Testament, wandering, wilderness

V. P. Long and the Theological History of the Bible

Last week in the office while I was gone we had Phil Long in for some filming of our own on the OT historical books and biblical historiography. I only got to spend two days with Phil due to my Nashville trip, but enjoyed the time. I regularly use portions of his excellent book, The Art of Biblical History when I teach the History of Israel at a local university.

The visit with Phil made me think that it would be worthwhile to introduce him and his work to readers who may not know of him. To that end, I found a fairly brief and useful description of his approach on another blog of some years ago. That said, The Art of Biblical History is a book every serious student of the Bible should have and read at least once. Phil is a portrait artist in addition to being a biblical scholar, and I have found his analogy between portraiture and history writing extremely helpful (when you look closely at a portrait, what you see may make little sense and appear sloppy or careless; but when you step back and gain perspective, you can see what the artist was actually doing — and how the whole helps you process the parts).

Technorati Tags: biblical, historiography, history, Israel

Trying to Get Back to Normal

In my case, “normal” means staying a step ahead of task meltdown. But I enjoy everything I do. So … just wanted to say that I was in Nashville this past week and weekend to be filmed for a documentary response to the ancient aliens show/series. Things went well, and we covered all the ground that project required. However, the person filming was in the hospital for two days, so I didn’t actually get to film anything related to my own material (recall that I asked for reader thoughts on inspiration — which would have been the subject matter for such an endeavor). Perhaps something can be done at a future time, somewhere and by someone. We’ll put that on the back burner. It was for reason of this trip that I didn’t do a podcast this week.

So what did I do for two days?  Stayed in my hotel room. Man, was that a treat (seriously). All I did was work on the sequel to my novel, The Facade.  I have no more travel on the dock until ETS/SBL, so I’ll be trying to get back to normal — posting with some regularity here. But to be honest, the sequel is taking over my brain, as I knew it would once it began. Writing fiction (especially something that requires this much research) is consuming (if you have read The Facade you’ll know immediately I’m not kidding) and more difficult than non-fiction (academic or otherwise). It’s hard to care about anything else.

Anyway, my goal is to get back to normal and do something productive here.

Survey on “What Troubles You About Inspiration?” And a Rant

Thanks to all of you (nearly 50) who responded to my survey. It’s still open so that others can chime in. I’ll be using these thoughts as fodder for my trip to Nashville this week, as its goal is to experiment with creating some content / teaching videos for YouTube. (I’m also being interviewed for a documentary response to the Fantasy [aka, History] Channel specials on “Ancient Aliens”). The director for that secured some studio time for that experiment. I thought the whole issue of inspiration would be a good trial run.

What follows are select, anonymous examples of the sorts of responses I received. Most of the responses overall concern how to understand the process of inspiration. Hope you find these interesting. At the end there’s one in particular that I thought I’d comment on.

How do I know the books are inspired? The Bible says so. Why do I trust it’s claim? Because its inspired. Wait. There is no objective starting point here?

I have no doubt God said what He meant and meant what He said. That the writers wrote by their own hand and mind guided and urged by the Holy Spirit; at times verbatim from God. The teaching today troubles me. A flat earth is clearly described early on, no problem man understood it as so. There are observations of Nature throughout Scripture that we know today as not correct: animal behavior and/or actions. To a person of that day this is as correct as they would know it. I hear many today say Scripture is inspired and infallible – every word of it – seemingly with ignorance of the mentioned issues and others. Seems obvious the writers at times were free to create and fill in with their limited knowledge (right or wrong) and still God was and is able to use it for His purpose. How do we have an intelligent and open conversation with the “every word” statement and still maintain fully inspired and inerrant?

The things that cause me to have trouble with inerrancy (not inspiration – no problem there) are… 1.) The force with which theories of evolution (the ones that suggest humans came from lower animals) are pushed, and my personal conviction that it seems to fit with the way God does stuff – the unfolding, patterning, fractal-type stuff. 2.) The ANE parallels to biblical literature. 3.) The way people often speak of inerrancy. I’ve heard people say things like ‘the bible is truthful concerning that which it affirms, now let’s figure out what those affirmations are’ or ‘the bible is an inerrant theological revelation from God, not a science or history book – so let’s parse out all the theology’, but the pleas for nuance are often lost in the crowd of people that would rather just affirm that tithing can be performed whilst inside of someone’s loins – I can’t die on this hill. The term inerrancy has been irreparably hijacked and beaten silly by the louder of voices in the discussions, and as a result, I’d rather just drop it altogether.

The only thing I struggle with is how we got from the inspired autographs to the text(s) we actually have and use. Even then, it seems I wonder more than actually struggle. We have a great God who continues to reach for us in spite of our massive and prolonged mistakes in preserving his written message.

My main question concerns exactly what the inspiration looks like and do we see similar things today? Was Paul for instance, ‘in the zone’, so to speak, and was able to form exactly what God would have him write? Did John, go into a trance when writing Revelation as he saw these things unfold before him? Did Paul hear the Lord? Did the Lord fill Paul’s mind with what He desired Paul to write? I guess, I would like some sort of idea or ‘play-by-play’ of how practically Scripture was thought out, formed, and transcribed by each individual author.

The issue that bothers me is the concept of the text being edited in its history. I wish we could understand if this was part of the inspiration, or if the editing has removed some inspired text.

One thing I think of at times is do we know that the protestant cannon is the only group of inspired scriptures available. What I mean is that from my understanding the canon kind of organically developed among the early church and was cemented, not originated at the council of Nicaea. While I don’t doubt the inspiration of the protestant cannon, I do sometimes ponder some of the books that certain factions hold to and others don’t, and am uncertain as to whether or not there was a universal “litmus” test for determining letters canonicity.

I’m still not totally sure what I would affirm regarding inerrancy, because I’m hesitant to give it up. The thing that creates anxiety most in me about inspiration is how it is bound up in the doctrine of inerrancy, and what people mean by it. Secondarily, the issue of scientific concordism and the ancients’ view of cosmology.

Overall, I guess what bothers me is that it ultimately leads some people to the conclusion that God isn’t capable of preventing mistakes. And who wants to worship a god like that?

Plenary inspiration supposedly allows errors to be part of the inspiration process, yet most people can’t get their mind around this. If it’s true, the problem is not with inspiration but with our understanding. Of the text. We need a more open way of arriving at truth and verifying it instead of fighting for what we think it says.

The whole “the Bible gets a pass on science thing” causes me trouble. I know you’ve gone over it several times but why couldn’t the Holy Spirit filter little inaccuracies out? Like the hair covering thing with Paul. Why did that need to be preserved through the centuries? Or the whole ANE cosmology thing? And if the answer to all this is divine accommodation where does that end? Why is it a rule that God can ignore scientific errors but not moral ones? The more I study the topic the more I wonder if the Roman Catholics are right in their accusation that we Protestants use scripture like a “paper Pope” when we need a real one.

Many things have become somewhat troubling to me, though maybe not in an insurmountable way. I’m still working through much of this. When I first started to become aware of the implications of the Bible’s ancient context, I didn’t see too much of a problem. Interpreting Genesis 1 in the context of ANE creation myths made a lot of sense, and didn’t seem to upset my background presuppositions regarding inspiration. I already rejected dispensationalism long ago, so was well-versed in the error of “wooden literalism.” However, the more I’ve tried to read the rest of the Bible with this mindfulness to the ancient context, the more anxious I have become. What does “inspiration” even mean, *practically* speaking? It’s easy to see the theological applications in Genesis 1, despite the ancient cosmology reflected there, but what about the rest of the Bible? Which parts are merely a reflection of the culture (from which we might draw some relatively disconnected application), and which parts make perpetual, unchanging ethical demands on me?

Depends on how rigidly you perceive the doctrines. For me the question is: Does the OT-NT sufficiently preserve the will of God to lead humans to him, and to hold them accountable if they reject this testimony? To that, in spite of places that are hard to understand, I must affirm that yes, the OT-NT is a reliable guide to know God and his will. The goal is knowing God. The goal is not strictly a pristine, spotless text. But with 5000 surviving of NT Greek texts and fragments there is no real issue with the messages contained in NT documents. Textual variations are evidence of frailty in the human-divine interface, but the consistent messages of NT pericopes is surprising proof IMHO of divine oversight. Yet textual variations do lead to a desire to know which variant might have been original. That generates interest more than anxiety, but there are places where you wish things might have been clearer. Do those places of question lead to rejection of the messages of the pericopes as unreliable, a la Bart Ehrman? Not to my mind. If one holds to absolute textual perfection, then I would imagine you’d suffer much anxiety. If one finds consistent reporting of the pericopes proof of divine oversight, then anxiety levels are greatly reduced. The question of conflicts between parallel pericopes. The fact they are parallel suggests some common acceptance of such pericopes in the early communities, which tends to strengthen confidence in the overall message. Variation of parallel pericopes leaves me personally with a slight lack of confidence that we humans can always unravel texts that have been preserved, IMHO, by divine oversight.

What bothers me most is that I now see scripture as expressing both cosmological and historical inaccuracies. I believe in the Bible’s inspiration but don’t always know to harmonize it all. I can only conclude that God deemed it acceptable to work within flawed views that ancients held in some matters while still being able to reveal Himself in the process. Does inspiration mean that some of Scripture really isn’t true?

The patchwork process. who were the ‘inspirees’  vs. the gatherer, vs. the scribe, the secretary, the guard, the addenda-er. in short – even the short books were “written by” a composite “author” who may have spoken, not written.

And finally, for this post:

Being brought up in the protestant church, I was taught that the Torah (complete) was given to Moses intact. Later in life I learned of ancient pictorial Hebrew and how letter depiction changed over time, hearing then that “That” is what Moses received at Mt. Sinai. And later yet, learning of the Bible Codes with it’s slant towards election of only Jews, I am at a point of total discouragement of ever finding God’s true message to us.

This last one was especially interesting and disturbing to me. Although many readers might be surprised at the elements and wonder where this person is coming from, it is actually illustrative of the sorts of things I run into on my websites and at conferences. It’s disturbing in the sense that this person was so poorly (and errantly) taught. The first item is familiar — that every word of the Torah came from the hand of Moses. Many churches (and seminaries) teach this idea uncritically (i.e., no professor ever examines it in a class and helps people think better about what’s actually in the text, never mind any theory that tries to explain it). And then that misconception, now confirmed as dogma, gets passed on to the laity. But then we read two more confused things this person was taught:

(1) “I learned of ancient pictorial Hebrew and how letter depiction changed over time, hearing then that ‘That’ is what Moses received at Mt. Sinai.”

What on earth is “ancient pictorial Hebrew”? My guess is that it’s a reference to the proto-Sinaitic alphabet — which was *not* invented by Moses or the Israelites traveling in Sinai, and has nothing to do with what Moses or any other biblical writer wrote prior to the exile (when the now-familiar block script was adopted). The proto-Sinaitic alphabet is considered the first Semitic alphabet. But the terms “Semitic” and “Israelite” are not synonyms. The latter is a sub-class of the former. As far as actual *Hebrew* or *Israelite* literature goes (the oldest examples of which are the 11th-10th centuries BC), there was a *non-pictorial* paleo-alphabet used (called “Old Hebrew” or, anachronistically, “Phoenician”). The idea that Moses got handed a pictorial alphabet is nonsense, and the notion that he or any other biblical writer used a pictorial script for biblical material has no basis in archaeological or literary evidence. Either some well-meaning teacher messed the information when giving it, or the right material itself was misunderstood. But it has little or no relevance to the issue. The mainstream Jewish community never considered ONLY the Torah inspired (the only group that took that view was the Samaritan community). But I have met modern Jews who, knowing next to nothing about their Bible, believed that only the first five books were sacred (and some thought there were no other books — I kid you not).

(2) “And later yet, learning of the Bible Codes with it’s slant towards election of only Jews…”

Bible codes are nonsense. More crudely, the idea is sanctified crap. For those who think such a thing is harmless and silly, for this person the bogus notion perverted not only the idea of inspiration, but OT theology itself. Yes, the Jews were elect among the nations … but the foundation of Judaism, the Abrahamic covenant (Gen 12:1-3) includes the blessing of the nations … and Gentiles could become believers … and then there’s this thing called the Church, the Body of Christ, that is “circumcision neutral,” rendering the whole distinction irrelevant.  And then there is the whole error of making “election” and “salvation” the same thing (they weren’t if you’re paying attention in the OT to what happened to the “elect” — most were not saved, but were apostates — the issue was never ethnicity, but belief in and exclusive loyalty to Yahweh, no matter what you’re starting point).

So the result of this God-awful “Bible teaching” is that this person says, “I am at a point of total discouragement of ever finding God’s true message to us.” No kidding. If I had been taught this sort of garbage, I would be, too.

This sort of thing is why it’s so irritating to encounter, within the Church, the idea that since the Bible is for everyone, anyone can teach the Bible … if they are led by the Lord, have a desire, feel called, yadda yadda yadda. Amen. World without end.

Sorry — but no, they can’t, nor should they. All Bible teaching is not equal, nor is sincerity a qualification. And an opinion popping into your head isn’t the prompting of the Holy Spirit. If it was, Paul wouldn’t have told believers to handle the Scriptures carefully or hold up diligence in searching them as a model (2 Tim 2:15; Acts 17:11). He’d have told them to “feel” their theology (how contemporary is that). We have too much Bible Buddhism in the Church. Churches would be much better off if bad or inept Bible teachers (even of children) were told to find some other ministry and then barred from doing it again until they prove they actually know something. But this really isn’t realistic when so many are so poorly taught in the first place. And to suggest this is to invite the charge of elitism. It’s not elitism; it’s an attempt to rescue people from the sort of struggle that this commenter is enduring.

 

Technorati Tags: bible code, inspiration, Moses, Sinai, Torah

Naked Bible Podcast Episode 023: Legal Genre

In the last episode of our series on studying the Bible, we transitioned to an important area of study: learning to read the Bible in terms of the various types of literature found in its pages. Our first example concerned reading narrative, where I recommended reading biblical stories like fiction — like you would read a novel. In this episode we focus on the legal genre of the Bible using a controversial example from Exodus 21.

Technorati Tags: abortion, ancient near east, exodus 21, Hammurabi, law, law codes, legal

Study Your Bible; Don’t Read it to Forget It: Naked Bible Podcast Series

That’s the theme of the podcast series I started several weeks ago. Most people either simply read the Bible like a cereal box, with no intent to analyze it, or like a textbook, which is sure to kill off curiosity. I began the series talking about how critical it is to take the Bible in its own context, not a context that is familiar to us, like modern evangelicalism or the Reformation. I’m transitioning now to another important area of study: learning to read the Bible in terms of the various types of literature found in its pages.

In this episode, we’ll talk about how to read narrative intelligently. I recommend reading it like fiction — like you would read a novel. Read it like the writer had an agenda or a plan – because he did.

Technorati Tags: Bible, close reading, fiction, Literary Study, narrative

Take the Naked Bible “Anxieties About Inspiration” Survey

I’ll be traveling to Nashville, TN in a few weeks to do some video shooting for a documentary. Part of my filming time is supposed to be devoted to personal projects.  I’m thinking of doing some discussion of inspiration for a video project a friend in Nashville suggested. But I need to get the pulse of readers out there who care about the subject. To that end, I’ve created a one-question online survey that I’m hoping many of you will contribute to.  It’s essay/short comment, and anonymous. The question asks what troubles you about the doctrine of inspiration.  Please have a look!

MEMRA Module 2 Registration Deadline

As MEMRA will now be focused on ancient languages, I have lowered the price on the language courses back to roughly the 50% discount level. The registration deadline for Module 2, which begins Sept 24, is September 9. Language courses run 52 weeks in length. The Greek and Hebrew courses feature over 100 videos (each) taking students through a grammar with exercises. Students ask me questions from within the classroom environment. These are classes focused on reading / translation. Biblical languages are not focused on speaking the lanuage.

Ugaritic is the same format, though not as many videos.

Naked Bible Podcast Episode 021

In the last podcast, I recommended the best books and reference sources for understanding the religion and culture of the ANE for OT study. This episode wraps up my overview of taking the Bible’s own context seriously by immersing oneself into the intellectual worldview of the biblical writers by taking a look at books dealing with the literature of the Second Temple period for NT study. Scholars who are steeped in this material have produced fine material for  explaining how the Second Temple period worldview contributes to NT interpretation. My goal in this episode is to direct you to the some of the best reference works and monographs in that regard to enrich your NT study.

What Do You See in Psalm 66:5-6?

I came across Psalm 66:5-6 the other day while working with Mark Futato at Logos Bible Software last weekend (it was a reference in a presentation he made). Here’s the ESV:

5 Come and see what God has done:

he is awesome in his deeds toward the children of man.

6 He turned the sea into dry land;

they passed through the river on foot.

There did we rejoice in him…

Do you see anything unusual here . . . that pertains to our recent Adam discussion?  You will have to think past the English to the Hebrew a bit, but if you’ve been reading the discussions here, it may pop out to you.  So, tell me what you see and why it’s of note for the  Adam discussion.