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October 23, 2020 - February 26, 2021
Israel is Yahweh’s elect portion of humanity, and the land of Canaan is the geography that Yahweh, as owner, specifically allotted to his people.
Genesis 10 clearly casts the human inhabitants of those nations as owing their existence to Yahweh, as they descended from Noah’s sons and, therefore, Noah—all the way back to Adam, Yahweh’s first human son. The Nephilim bloodlines had a different pedigree. They were produced by other divine beings. They did not belong to Yahweh, and he therefore had no interest in claiming them. Coexistence was not possible with the spawn of other gods. Viewed against this backdrop, Joshua’s kherem is a holy war begun under Moses in the Transjordan, specifically against the Amorite giant kings Sihon (Deut
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biblical writers at times use sweeping generalizations that are not intended to be precise. For instance, Genesis 15:16 and Joshua 7:7 referred to the occupants of the land as “Amorites” when it is abundantly clear that there were other ethnic groups in the land.7 The term “Canaanite” is also used in the same imprecise way (Gen 12:6; 28:1, 6).
the conquest narratives utilize other verbs besides kharam that are not necessarily words for taking life.14 This indicates that kherem was not the goal of every engagement. The picture that emerges when all the descriptions are woven together was that, when Israelite soldiers encountered a member of the giant clans or others known to be descended from those clans, they were under kherem. Others might be killed in warfare, but their lives were not required by the supernatural-theological orientation that is telegraphed in Num 13:26–33, Deut 2–3, and Josh 11:21–23.
The picture that emerges from the biblical text and archaeology is that vestiges of the Nephilim bloodline were scattered throughout Canaan among a number of other people groups. The aim of the conquest was to drive out all the inhabitants and eliminate these bloodlines in the process. The thinking is foreign to us, but it was part of the supernatural worldview of the biblical writers.
The terrible end would produce theological lessons: Eden cannot come and survive without Yahweh’s constant presence—as had been the case in the original Eden. The kingdom of God cannot be built with human hands. As Israel reached the final stages of failure, God announced through the prophets that plans had changed. Restoring Eden would require God’s enduring presence in the hearts of his children, and an ideal king who would remain loyal to Yahweh. God himself would supply the second Adam, the son of David, the perfect ruling servant.
In Israel’s theology, Eden, the tabernacle, Sinai, and the temple were equally the abode of Yahweh and his council. The Israelites who had the tabernacle and the temple were constantly reminded of the fact that they had the God of the cosmic mountain and the cosmic garden living in their midst, and if they obeyed him, Zion would become the kingdom domain of Yahweh, which would serve as the place to which he would regather the disinherited nations cast aside at Babel to himself. Micah 4 puts it well:
there was a close religious association between Molech and the Rephaim. This makes sense in light of the geographical relationship between the Valley of the Rephaim and the Valley of Hinnom in the Old Testament.
The conflict between the powers of darkness and the presence of Yahweh was an ever-present part of life for the ancient Israelite.
Prophets were simply people who spoke for God—men and women who, at God’s direction, looked their fellow Israelites in the eye and told them they were being disloyal to the God to whom they owed their existence and who had chosen a relationship with them over everyone else on earth. Prophets told people the unvarnished truth and often paid dearly for it.
When God chose someone to speak for him—to represent him to the rest of humanity or to his own people, they had to meet first. This is the idea behind the biblical “call” to service.
true prophets have stood and listened in Yahweh’s divine council; false prophets have not.
By God’s design, the Scripture presents the messiah in terms of a mosaic profile that can only be discerned after the pieces are assembled. Paul tells us why in 1 Corinthians 2:6–8. If the plan of God for the messiah’s mission had been clear, the powers of darkness would never have killed Jesus—they would have known that his death and resurrection were the key to reclaiming the nations forever.
there is no Old Testament verse that has a dying and rising mashiach. If you’re thinking Isaiah 53 is the exception, it isn’t. The word mashiach does not appear in that passage. That doesn’t mean Isaiah 53 isn’t part of the messianic profile—it means that the content of Isaiah 53 is just one piece of a much larger whole.5 The pieces were kept separate to obscure the big picture.
the concept of a dying and rising messiah must be pieced together from a scattering of disparate fragments in the Old Testament that, each taken alone, don’t seem to have anything like a messiah in mind. None of the fragments reveal the final assemblage.
Only someone who knew the outcome of the puzzle, who knew how all the elements of the messianic mosaic would come together, could make sense of the pieces.
God’s plan to redeem humanity, reclaim the nations, and revive Eden depended on the incarnation of the second Yahweh figure and his subsequent death and resurrection. The story of the cross is the biblical-theological catalyst to God’s plan for regaining all that was lost in Eden. It couldn’t be emblazoned across the Old Testament in transparent statements. It had to be expressed in sophisticated and cryptic ways to ensure that the powers of darkness would be misled.
The identity and purpose of the messiah are unknowable from a Bible verse—and even many Bible verses. The profile proceeds along conceptual trajectories that eventually merge into a portrait. And so Jesus’ question (Luke 24:26) to the two men on the road to Emmaus makes eminent sense: “Was it not necessary that the Christ suffer these things and enter into his glory?” Yes, of course it was. It’s just hard to see that unless you know what you’re looking for. The messianic portrait can only be discerned by assembling a hundred terms, phrases, metaphors, and symbols, which themselves take on
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By the time of Jesus’ birth—as God incarnate—Jews were intellectually acclimated to the idea of Yahweh being (at least) in human form, including being embodied.
“Son of man” is a fairly frequent phrase in the Old Testament. Ezekiel, for example, is called “son of man” dozens of times in the book of Ezekiel (e.g., Ezek 2:1–8). The phrase simply means “human one,” and so Daniel 7:13 describes someone who appeared human coming on or with the clouds to the Ancient of Days.
In the Ugaritic texts, the god Baal is called “the one who rides the clouds.”5 The description became an official title of Baal, whom the entire ancient Near Eastern world considered a deity of rank. To ancient people all over the Mediterranean, Israelite or not, the “one who rides the clouds” was a deity—his status as a god was unquestioned. Consequently, any figure to whom the title was attributed was a god.
Baal was the main source of consternation about Israel’s propensity toward idolatry. In an effort to make the point that Yahweh, the God of Israel, deserved worship instead of Baal, the biblical writers occasionally pilfered this stock description of Baal as “cloud rider” and assigned it to Yahweh
the one who rides the clouds in Daniel 7:13 receives everlasting kingship from the Ancient of Days. As we saw in the previous chapter, everlasting kingship belonged only to the son of David. We’ve just filled in more of the messianic mosaic: The ultimate son of David, the messianic king, will be both human (“son of man”) and deity (“the rider of the clouds”).
The kingdom of God is reborn at the first coming of Jesus. His arrival marks the beginning of the end of the rule of darkness and the initiation of Yahweh’s reclamation of the nations ruled by the other gods. Jesus is the son of man, and the kingdom is his. Ruling with him will be the holy ones of Yahweh’s (and his) council.
the fraternal conflict between Saul (chosen by rebellious Israelites for his height) and David (chosen by Yahweh for his heart) was emblematic of the unseen spiritual war for the land and the people.
An Edenic realization without human participation would mean that the nachash would then have won a victory—the abolition of humankind as God’s image.
When Jesus tells God the Father that he has revealed God’s name to the disciples (John 17:6), he isn’t talking about telling the disciples what God’s name was. They could read their Old Testament and see that in thousands of places (e.g., Exod 3:1–14). Revealing God’s name to them meant showing them who God was and what he was like. He did that by living among them as a man. Jesus was God among them. He was the incarnation of God’s essence (Heb 1:3).
The notion of making God known by revealing his name also takes us back to Yahweh’s Angel in the Old Testament. Recall that Yahweh’s Angel was Yahweh in human form—Yahweh’s “name” or presence resided in that Angel (Exod 23:20–23). John draws on that language in his presentation of Jesus as God.6 When Jesus says he has “kept them in your name,” he means he has kept those followers the Father gave to him by means of God’s own power and presence—the Name, now incarnated in Jesus.
The Name and Yahweh were interchanged in Israelite theology, so that trusting in “the Name of Yahweh” meant trusting in Yahweh.
The context of Isaiah 40 is a new beginning for Israel. Judah, the remaining two tribes, had spent seventy years in captivity in Babylon. God brought them out of exile and back to the land. However—and this is frequently overlooked—the other ten tribes never emerged from exile. They were lost, scattered among the disinherited nations. But the coming of the messiah will result in redemption for all the tribes. Yahweh will draw his children from every tribe and nation, whether Abraham’s literal descendants or not.
With the arrival of the messiah, the apostle John casts John the Baptist in Isaiah’s role. Like the prophet of old, John the Baptist has “stood in the council” (Jer 23:16–22) and answered the call. To a Jew familiar with the Old Testament, the pattern would not be lost. As had been the case at the time of Isaiah, Yahweh’s council had met in regard to the fate of an apostate Israel. Isaiah had been sent to a spiritually blind and deaf nation. The calling of John the Baptist tells the reader that Yahweh’s divine council is in session again, only this time the aim is to launch the kingdom of God
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When God refers to Jesus as his “beloved” he is affirming the kingship of Jesus—his legitimate status as the heir to David’s throne. The key term is “beloved.” Scholars have noticed that the term was used of Solomon, the original heir to David’s throne.
The New Testament story, then, begins with a dramatic revisitation of Yahweh’s call to the divine council to send someone to announce the appearance of Yahweh in the man Jesus of Nazareth.
Conceptually, the wilderness was where Israelites believed “desert demons,” including Azazel, lived. The Azazel material is especially telling, since, as I noted in our earlier discussion, Jewish practice of the Day of Atonement ritual in Jesus’ day included driving the goat “for Azazel” into the desert outside Jerusalem and pushing it over a cliff so it could not return.1 The wilderness was a place associated with the demonic, so it’s no surprise that this is where Jesus meets the devil.
Satan offered Jesus the nations that had been disinherited by Yahweh at Babel. Coming from the “ruler of this world” (John 12:31), the offer was not a hollow one. As the original rebel, the nachash of Genesis 3 (cf. Rev 12:9) had, by New Testament times, achieved the status of the lead opposition to Yahweh.3 This was part of the logic of attributing the term saṭan to him as a proper personal name.
The “original rebel,” whose domain became earth/Sheol, nachash/Satan was perceived by Second Temple and New Testament theology as primary authority over all other rebels and their domains. Consequently, his lordship over the gods who ruled the nations in the Deuteronomy 32 worldview of the Old Testament was presumed.
Jesus sent out seventy disciples. The number is not accidental.8 Seventy is the number of nations listed in Genesis 10 that were dispossessed at Babel.
Caesarea Philippi was also called “Panias.” The early church historian Eusebius notes: “Until today the mount in front of Panias and Lebanon is known as Hermon and it is respected by nations as a sanctuary.”11 The site was famous in the ancient world as a center of the worship of Pan and for a temple to the high god Zeus, considered in Jesus’ day to be incarnate in Augustus Caesar.
The basis for Catholicism’s contention that the Church is built on Peter’s leadership is that his name means “stone.”14 For sure there is wordplay going on in Peter’s confession, but I would suggest there is also an important double entendre: the “rock” refers to the mountain location where Jesus makes the statement. When viewed from this perspective, Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, at “this rock” (this mountain—Mount Hermon). Why? This place was considered the “gates of hell,” the gateway to the realm of the dead, in Old Testament times.
Simply put, if you wanted to conjure up images of the demonic and death, you’d refer to Bashan.
Jesus, at the moment of agony and death, was surrounded by the “bulls of Bashan”—demonic elohim who had been the foes of Yahweh and his children for millennia.
Psalm 68:18 and Ephesians 4:8 are in agreement if one sees conquest, not liberation.
Jesus is the conqueror of Psalm 68, and the booty does indeed rightfully belong to him. But booty was also distributed after a conquest. Paul knows that. He quotes Psalm 68:18 to make the point that after Jesus conquered his demonic enemies, he distributed the benefits of the conquest to his people, believers. Specifically, those benefits are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers (Eph 4:11).
Jesus descended to “the lower regions, [in other words] the earth.” This option fits the context better (the gifts are given to people who are of course on earth) and has some other literary advantages. If this option is correct, then the descent of verses 9–10 does not refer to Jesus’ time in the grave, but rather to the Holy Spirit’s coming to earth after Jesus’ conquering ascension on the day of Pentecost.
Jesus is the second Yahweh, the embodied Yahweh of the Old Testament. But Jesus is not the “Father” Yahweh. He therefore is but isn’t Yahweh. It’s the same with the Spirit. The Spirit is Yahweh, and so he is Jesus as well, but not incarnate or embodied. The Spirit is but isn’t Jesus, just as Jesus is but isn’t Yahweh the Father. The same sort of “two Yahwehs” idea from the Old Testament is found in the New Testament with respect to Jesus and the Spirit. That is the source of Trinitarian theology.
“divided tongues like fire.” Both are images in the Old Testament associated with God’s presence—the disciples are being commissioned by God in his council like the prophets of old.
Fire in the Old Testament was an identifier of the presence of God, a visible manifestation of Yahweh’s glory and essence.3 It was also a way of describing divine beings in God’s service (Judg 13:20; Psa 104:4).
The wind and fire in Acts 2 signified to readers informed by divine council scenes that the gathered followers of Jesus were being commissioned by divine encounter. They were being chosen to preach the good news of Jesus’ work. The fire connects them to the throne room. The tongues are emblematic of their speaking ministry.
Luke is drawing on the Septuagint, and specifically the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11 and Deuteronomy 32:8–9, to describe the events on Pentecost.
The list in Acts, then, begins at the farthest points east where there were Jewish populations, then progresses westward.
