Episode 285: Pete Enns & the Old Testament Nerds – Ask a Scholar Anything (About the Hebrew Bible)

Pete: You’re listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns. 

Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.

Pete: Hey everybody. It’s time to tell you about the last class in our fall 2024 semester on the New Testament. It’s called Get a Grip on the Epistles: Understanding the New Testament Letters, and it’s taught by our very own nerd in residence, Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw. Now, the epistles are among the most challenging genres in the New Testament for modern readers to understand.

These letters are often fragments of larger discussions we don’t fully see, written within specific purposes and cultural contexts that can seem foreign or confusing or just bewildering to us today. Because of that, we often find ourselves trying to interpret the epistles without a clear understanding of the broader context they were addressing.

So in this class, Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw provides invaluable tools and insights to help us navigate these complexities and better grasp the meaning of the epistles in their original setting and their relevance for contemporary readers. This class is pay what you can until November 15th, then it’ll cost 25 bucks, but no matter when you purchase, you’ll get access to watch the class right away, and it even comes with a study guide to help you follow along.

There’s also a live Q&A on December 20th at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, during which Jennifer will answer questions about all three of our fall classes. As always, folks, members of our online community, the Society of Normal People, get access to this class and all of our other classes, past and future, for just $12 a month.

For more information and to sign up for this class, head to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/fall24. 

Pete: Hey folks, it’s me, Pete, and today on The Bible for Normal People, we’re doing something really different, and dare I say, pleasantly crowded. On the podcast today, I’ve got three of our nerds in residence, and we’re answering your burning questions about the Hebrew Bible, and I think I’ll leave it to them to introduce themselves.

Anna: I’m Anna Sieges, and I’m currently working at Gardner Webb University. My specialty is, I like to say the book of the 12, but other people know them as the minor prophets. And so that’s what I do. 

Cynthia: Hey fellow nerds, I’m Cynthia Shafer Elliott. I’m an associate professor at Baylor University and I also work in Hebrew Bible and I’m one of those weird people that does Hebrew Bible and archaeology. So I’m an archaeologist and I like to dig in the dirt and I’m really interested in the intersection between text and material culture, how that all works. And basically like daily life of ancient Israel during the Iron Age. That’s what I’m really into right now. 

Aaron: Hi, everybody. My name is Aaron Higashi. Uh, for the past few years, I’ve been adjunct faculty at Grand Canyon University teaching biblical studies and theology. My specialization, I don’t really have a specialization, I guess it would be Ezra and Nehemiah, 1st and 2nd Chronicles, Persian era historical texts. I also dabble a bit in ideological criticism, looking at the relationship between ideas in the biblical text and the social circumstances that give rise to those. And I just wrote 1 & 2 Samuel for normal people, that came out earlier this year, grab yourself a copy, that’s a very exciting thing. 

Anna: Yay!

Cynthia: Yay!

Pete: Cool.  All right. Well, now that you know who everybody is and you knew anyway, folks, cause you’ve heard these people before, but let’s dive into the episode and answer some questions that have been sent to us by people who just need to have answers.

So we’re going to give them the final answers, right? No ambiguity. 

Anna: Absolutely. 

Pete: Everything’s black and white here. So. 

Aaron: The only God ordained answers. [Cynthia laughs]

Pete: I know, well, like God, we’re going to keep things ambiguous and mysterious and not really answer questions. How’s that? 

Cynthia: That sounds great.

Anna: I think we can handle that.

Pete: Yeah, we can do that.

Pete: Does the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible even matter for Christians? 

Aaron: There’s a certain sense of egotism that goes along with it. My religion is so much better than your religion. 

Anna: This rich history that we’ve inherited existed long before us. 

Cynthia: If you do really want to understand Jesus, then don’t you want to be familiar with the text that he considered his Bible?

Aaron: So will the Hebrew Bible ever become obsolete? Will the New Testament ever become obsolete? I think is as valid a question.

Pete: So Anna, how about you? What’s, what’s the question that has grabbed you from the mailbag? 

Anna: Okay, so this one I really love. Somebody asked, why does it seem like the Hebrew Bible can be a little disjointed at places? For example, why is it that in Genesis 1 through 3, we get a creation account and then another one.

Why is it that we go from like Isaiah 39, we’re talking all about Hezekiah and how he’s been saved from the Assyrians. And then you go to chapter 40 and it’s something completely different. So kind of these questions about the flow of the Hebrew Bible. 

And I love this question because it allows me to talk a little bit about how the Hebrew Bible came together. And that’s very, very complicated. But when I think about the folks, and we call them scribes, who brought these texts together, I like to think of them as mixologists. So they’re like DJs that are like, bringing together these traditions from like, 400 years beforehand, and then more recent traditions and like all about the same stuff.

And they’re mixing them into this kind of ongoing narrative. So I was at this wedding, my cousin got married and they were playing like all of the young kid music, but the DJ mixed in a little bit of ABBA. And that was when I could really hit my groove. And so what I think is going on is we’ve got these scribes that are working throughout time, right?

And they’re looking at the different materials that they have, and they’re like, let’s mix this together. Let’s like, bring these two creation accounts together, or this material that is about like, Hezekiah in the 8th century, let’s mix it in with some stuff from like, the 5th century, and just kind of like, shove them together, so that even like, the old people who are at the wedding can have a fun time dancing.

Does that make sense? Is that helpful? [Cynthia laughs]

Aaron: I think so. 

Pete: I just learned that you’re an ABBA fan. I had no idea. 

Anna: I love ABBA. Oh my gosh. 

Cynthia: Who doesn’t? 

Anna: You gotta love them. 

Pete: That’s even a biblical thing too, abba, right? 

Anna: Yes. 

Pete: See, it all comes together folks. Our lives just come together. So anyway, so when, I mean, I think the complicated question too, it was like, when was the mixology happening? And is it, is it like persistent over time or is it more like a later thing? What do you guys think about that? That’s part of the question, I think. 

Anna: Yeah, I think so. 

Pete: Whether they knew it or not, that’s actually part of the question. 

Anna: I think you’ve got different parts of the Hebrew Bible coming together at different times. I don’t know, Aaron, if you want to say something about like, probably some of our earliest stuff is in the Deuteronomistic history. And that is just kind of an interesting ball of wax about how they’re forming the Deuteronomistic history being Joshua through 2 Kings and those different streams that are coming together.

Aaron: I think that’s certainly possible. I mean, I’m a big fan of Joel Baden, and he makes an argument that some of the stuff in 1st and 2nd Samuel are some of the earliest stuff in the Bible. So that’s definitely possible. There’s some very early stuff in the Pentateuch, too. I mean, the Song of the Sea is, I think, pretty routinely regarded as the oldest thing in the entire Bible.

But that’s, I mean, that’s been mixed in there, right? That existed on its own in some form. It was probably sung or performed in some capacity for a long time before anybody bothered to write it down. Maybe in a cultic circumstance or something like that. And then somebody just jammed it into the book of Exodus later because they said, you know, we’re already narrating the story of the exodus, let’s put this beautiful piece of cultural inheritance, let’s put it in here as well. And that’s, that’s exactly, that’s, that’s your ABBA in the middle of this, otherwise young people music, and there would be probably centuries, I mean, between the surrounding narrative and the actual song in the sea itself.

So yeah, there’s there’s old stuff mixed in. Same thing with like the song of Moses is probably older than the material around it, or something like the blessing of Jacob might be older than the narratives around it. The song of Deborah is older than the narratives around it. So that’s actually a pretty common feature to have these older material put in when it when it sort of makes sense to future editors. 

Pete: And they know it’s older linguistically. Right? That’s a Hebrew thing. 

Aaron: Yeah, right. I’m bad with Hebrew, but—

Cynthia: You’re not bad with Hebrew! 

Aaron: I have I have read texts by linguists who say yeah, for sure. Much older. 

Pete: Right? 

Cynthia: Well, I want to remember the concept of transmission and preservation, not just transmission, but preservation.

Because if we think about, I guess the way I try to imagine it, I love your analogy though, of the DJ and a mixologist. I’d love that. I might have to borrow that, Anna, but I love the idea of just talking about how you have different parts of Ancient Israel, different time periods, and everyone has their traditions.

Everyone has their versions of certain stories and how at some point our scribes were thinking, you know, we want to preserve everything. And it’s not going to make a whole lot of sense, but we’re going to try to put it in as best of a sequence as we possibly can. It’s kind of like when you’re writing a research paper and you’re like, you decide, this part doesn’t fit here.

I’m going to copy it and paste it someplace else. And you have to go back through and make sure it flows. And sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. But then we also have to think about, okay, well, why, why would they want to be preserving these things?

Pete: I mean, I love the humanity of it all. You know, it just, it’s, it’s, it’s, I mean, I mean, not, not to poke a bear or anything, but it’s, you study the internal evidence that we have for sort of why the Bible looks the way, why is it so disjointed?

Well there are answers to these, are, there are good answers. And are they the final answers? Who knows? But they’re really good answers that people have thought about for a few centuries. And then to come up with you know, a category like the Bible is infallible or inerrant in its historical and scientific details and all that it’s like, eh, that has no interest to me because I’m looking at this beautiful collection of texts that’s very intentional. And yeah, they made decisions about what to include and what to put where, and they knew as well as anybody who can read that there are tensions and contradictions between these stories. And they said, yeah, but this is our tradition and it all belongs and we’ll just stick these 2 creation stories next to each other or just, you know, some people add to Isaiah. We’ll just stick it all together. It’s fine. You know?

Cynthia: We’ll let them figure it out, what they’re thinking. 

Pete: Or fight about it. That’s the thing too, or fire people from their jobs for thinking the wrong things. 

Anna: But it is, it’s such a different way of thinking, right, that we’re not going to try to smooth all this out for you. We’re going to preserve all of it. I mean, that’s not the way that modern inerrantists would do it. They’d want to smooth it all out, make it one nice plane, and that’s just not what we have in the Hebrew Bible. 

Cynthia: And we don’t have usually, you know, eyewitness accounts of things. These are things that are written much, much later than the events that they report on. So we don’t have a court reporter sitting right there saying, wait a minute, David, can you say that again? Okay. Now, Goliath, it’s your turn. You go right ahead and say this. Okay. Now, David, do you have something else you want to say to that? We don’t have that.

And I think that’s one of the really like, sad things, is that we bring our way of looking at history or historiography, if you will, to ancient texts who just don’t look at it or document things the same way we do. 

Pete: Well, I think the topic of the origin and the composition of the development of the Bible is what got me into all this stuff to begin with, because you could just see stuff and you wanted to understand.

So, but, um, maybe, I mean, Cynthia, do you, is there a question from the long list? We got to, I don’t know how many questions we had. It’s a lot far too. There are, there are 20 episodes here of questions we could do easily. So, but just some of us just were struck by some more than others. So how about you Cynthia?

Cynthia: Well, of course, some of the ones that I’m drawn to are more of the archeology related ones. You know, people always ask about the exodus, you know, did, did there, does archeology, you know, really support an idea of an exodus and then also a related question about the exile. And, you know, these are questions I think that we probably all get a lot from our students or from the person we meet on the plane who asks what we do, things like that. 

And, you know, the exodus one is, is pretty easy to talk about because there is no archaeological evidence. I mean, as an archaeologist, I really wish there was. But there isn’t. And I mean, we, we get a couple clues within the text itself about the cities of Pithom and Ramses and those were built probably during the period of Ramses the second.

And the text itself doesn’t tell us who the Pharaoh was. Now, if I could go back in time and say, “Hey, if this happened, could you please write who the Pharaoh is? Because this would save us a lot of trouble later on.” But they don’t. So we have to deal with what we have. And then, you know, we also have the issue of the translation of Yom Suf from the Hebrew, uh, into the Septuagint where they take it from Yom Suf, which means sea of reeds to, in the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, they mistranslate it and call it the Red Sea.

So all of the, you know, discovery type shows are looking at the Red Sea and they don’t find anything or they think they find something, but it’s not there because it’s not the right body of water, even if it happened. But the only thing we do have regarding the exodus is, is the Merneptah Stele. And the Merneptah Stele, that really comes from around 1208 BCE and this is Pharaoh Merneptah, who is the son of Ramses II, who had a military campaign into Canaan.

And this is when Egypt was the superpower of the time. And it’s not uncommon for us to have texts that reflect, you know, some sort of Egypt vying for control over Canaan. So that’s not unusual. And it’s not unusual that, you know, we see people going to Egypt during famine, as we see in end of Genesis before, when Joseph, you know, goes to Egypt and really does the whole famine restoration type thing. But, so that’s not unusual either. 

So you get some kind of clues in there, but the biggest archaeological thing, like I said, is Merneptah Stele and his campaign into Canaan, where one of the lists, on that list of people that he conquers, he lists a few cities. He lists Ashdod and Ashkelon, but he also lists a people group and a people group called Israel. He says Israel’s seed is no more. And the only thing that really points to is that there is a people group called Israel living in the land of Canaan from sometime around 1200, 1208 BCE. That’s all we know. And that’s our earliest historical anchor of ancient Israel. We have nothing before that. 

Pete: Does, does that, I mean, this is, I hear, I just was on a heated discussion with some people online about this. Um, and I want to ask you, Cynthia, so doesn’t the Merneptah Stele, uh, prove the exodus? 

Cynthia: No.

Pete: Why? It says Israel. No, explain that. I agree with you, but explain. 

Cynthia: Yeah. What it does prove is that there is a people group called Israel at this time around 1208, and they are living in the land of Canaan at this time around 1208. That’s all it proves, but it is our earliest historical anchor. So if people want to say, okay, well, when, you know, a lot of times people will say, it’s not even If the exodus happened, it’s when and so they’ll use that as their anchor to look at Okay, well, when did this could this have possibly happened? So no, it doesn’t prove the exodus at all, but it does prove that there’s a people group named Israel living in the land of Israel around 1200 1208 1213, whichever year you choose, because there’s, I’ve seen a variety of years for this campaign.

Pete: I mean, it’s, it’s hard to map a piece of archaeological evidence, like onto the Bible. 

Cynthia: Right. 

Pete: And mentioning Israel isn’t really enough for historians. It might be for apologists, but it’s not enough for historians. And I guess, I, I don’t know, what do you think about how, okay, Egyptian presence in Canaan, the Bible doesn’t say an awful lot about that, meaning.

Cynthia: But archeology does. 

Pete: Right, exactly. See, this is the problem because the Bible, you would expect maybe the book of Joshua or something to just at least refer to, yeah, and we have not just the Philistines, but we have problems with the Egyptians as well. Yeah. Utterly silent. 

Cynthia: They had a governor’s residence at Beit Shan, which is just this huge site just south of the Sea of Galilee, right in the middle of the Jordan Valley. And this was just one of the places that there was an Egyptian presence there. So as far as being. You know, as archaeology and biblical studies, they’re, they’re not the same and we can’t treat them the same. We can’t use one or the other to prove or disprove each other. We can use them in tandem together, but if you’re looking for archaeology to prove the Bible, you’re going to be disappointed. You can use that as a soundbite. [Laughing]

Pete: We will alert the masses of that, but it’s true. 

Cynthia: But the other thing that their question brings up too is about the exile. And we have a lot more historical archaeological anchors for the exile than we do for early, early Israel. So it’s not until you start getting into Maybe the 9th century, but really the 8th and 7th centuries, 6th and 5th, where you start to get a lot more archeological anchors, if you will.

So the exile, we have a lot of archeological proof for, I mean, more so for those who were in Babylon than those who were left behind. So that’s unfortunate, but. You know, the ones who were taken away were the ones who knew how to read and write. Yeah. So, so you have the provision lists that mentioned King Jehoiachin and the provisions he got from the King’s table back in Israel.

You have the Lakish letters that talk about the army’s coming and they’re, they don’t know what to do. It’s, it’s almost reminds me of that scene from Lord of the Rings where they light the fires to warn everybody. So we have a lot more for the exile than we do for the exodus. And of course, that’s a very long time period in between those. And a lot happens between when the exodus is supposed to have happened and when the exile happened. 

Pete: It tells us something maybe about when these stories were written, the things that have more, you know, historical anchoring, as you say, it might suggest that people were writing maybe not 500 years later and talking about whatever, but yeah.

Anna: I’m interested because part of that part of the exodus question was, “If it didn’t happen historically, why does it matter?” And I wonder if we can, can take a stab at that, because I think that’s a really good question. If it, if it didn’t happen, which we, we kind of think maybe it didn’t, right? Like maybe not, or even maybe probably not, at least not the way that the Bible records it, then why does it matter?

Cynthia: I think you’re right. And I think because we talked both about the exodus and the exile, those two things actually go hand in hand because the exile really made this exodus story super important to the Israelites. I mean, the exodus is the most talked about event in the entire Hebrew Bible. So there’s something about that memory.

Or a collection of memories. Maybe it’s, you know, different things happened at different times and they kind of put them all together. I don’t know. I wish we could go back in time and find out, but when you’re a people group who have been taken away by force, you’re prisoners of war and you’re strangers in a strange land and you’re maybe not slave laborers like we see in the exodus, but you’re enslaved.

You’re prisoners of war. Stories of God liberating you before, your people from before, and bringing them back into the land that God promised your ancestors that would have a lot of significance to them. 

Pete: The question is still though, I mean, yeah, it has significance for them, but. Does it have significance for us? And that’s different levels. I mean, I don’t know how to answer that question, but other than I like watching ancient Israelite theology and how they, other people have used the term how they, um, yeah, I think there’s a historical kernel to the exodus. Don’t ask me what it is, but it’s been mythicized. And it’s been elaborated on and that’s telling me something about what the Israelites believed about their God versus maybe other nations and it’s them telling their story and I think struggling through it. And for me, it’s that the value of it is I’m watching them do what I do, not at the same level, but I do that all the time.

I try to make sense of things and I try to understand the nature of reality and what it means to talk about God in the midst of all that. And for me, that’s, that’s the value of it. But that really runs afoul of certain ways of thinking about the nature of the Bible, where it’s saying things that are more mythological and theological. And I think we’re fine with that, but I know many people aren’t. And I understand why they’re not fine with it. I do. I’m not sure what else we can say, though. 

Anna: Well, and I, I try to tell my students that there are stories that never happened, but are still powerful and sometimes the fact that they didn’t happen historically can make them more powerful I mean if you just think about David and Goliath that kind of narrative of like the little guy overcoming the huge giant like that probably didn’t happen historically But and what a story, you know, what a way to think about how one relies on the power of God.

Aaron: Slay, David.

Anna: Slay, David, indeed. [Laughing]

Pete: Well, Aaron, how about you? I mean, is there a question you want to bring up? 

Aaron: Sure. I mean, well, on the topic of myths, let’s do this Genesis one right here. If, if Adam and Eve aren’t historical people, what is Genesis one through three trying to tell us? And some other parts of this question are, you know, if not them, then whence the source of sin? Where’s sin coming into the world from? What’s the point of Jesus, if not to save us from the sin that Adam and Eve, you know, begun? 

And the question is going to, uh, sort of start biblical and end up theological, but I will, I will try my best to sling together some sort of answer here. As far as what Genesis 1 through 3 is trying to do, as myths, one of the primary functions of these passages is not to be appreciated for their literal and historical value, but to be appreciated for how they function as etiologies. They are explanations of how the world came to be what it is, and how different groups of people came to relate to one another as they do, and then also how God, how we relate to God. So it’s an explanation of these existential facts. What is the human condition like? Uh, Genesis 1 through 3 is answering questions like this.

So Genesis 1 tells us that we occupy a well structured world in which God is sovereign. In which human beings are made in the image of God, which is very unique praise in ancient Southwest Asia. Elevating us to a position that only kings occupy in other texts. And it’s telling us that we participate in some way in that sovereignty over the world.

That God has deputized us in some fashion to participate in that sovereignty. And also in a very straightforward and kind of simple way explains the origin of Shabbat. Which is a quintessential Jewish holiday and the day of rest. the Sabbath. Similar sorts of things for Genesis 2 through 3 are also telling us, and I think you see this most straightforwardly in the consequences for Adam and Eve in their disobedience.

What happens to them? Well, women are going to suffer in childbearing. We’re going to institute this essentially patriarchy. Eve is going to desire her husband and he is going to rule over her, which apparently wasn’t the case prior to this. Disobedience, and what is Adam going to do? He’s going to work every day of his life on fields.

It’s going to be terrible, and eventually he’s going to die. So why is the world like this? Well, it’s because of stories. These stories help explain the situation in which human beings find themselves. And it’s only relatively recently in history that we’ve managed to put any distance between ourselves and these consequences.

I mean, most of human history has been women dying in childbirth and men working themselves to death on fields. So it has characterized human existence up until five minutes ago, essentially. So the value of the story is in explaining that, in explaining these common features of human experience. And that holds true whether Adam and Eve are real or not.

I mean, they’re not real, but that holds true regardless, right? That’s something that you can take away. Regardless, this is why the world is the way that it is. As far as sin, I think this is actually kind of an easy theological question. Sin exists regardless. I mean, it doesn’t take too much to look around at the world and see that human beings are not as good as we could be.

Human beings make evil choices when they could make good choices. And this is like universally recognized by almost every religion in the world, has some term or some set of terms used to describe this deficiency in human beings, that we are not as good as we could be. I think it’s a pretty general observation of the human condition.

So what is Jesus saving us from if not Adam and Eve’s sin? Well from this, from this situation that we found ourselves in, from the fact that I’m not as kind or as compassionate or as giving or as charitable as I could be, the fact that it is so difficult to find contentedness in things that I should be content with.

There’s this nagging sense of purposelessness that I constantly have to fight off. So I think these enduring existential elements of human life are more what these texts are getting at, and I think they’re easier to appreciate than did Adam and Eve exist X number of years ago? 

Anna: And did they have belly buttons?

Aaron: That’s a great question. And what color was their hair? You know, and there’s a lot of these interesting where, where did all the rest of their children come from that Cain married and, you know, and all these kinds of things. 

Pete: Well, like with the belly button thing, I’ve heard people say, argue that Adam was made from the ground, but the ground carried no biological material. Because if it did, then that opens the door to evolution. 

Cynthia: Oh, yeah, you wrote a book on this. 

Pete: Yeah, I didn’t mention that, though. But that’s just okay. I guess. I mean, I’m just going to go have a cup of coffee now. I don’t know what to do with that. Yeah, the thing is, you know, it’s the, if Paul didn’t mention Adam, we wouldn’t be talking about this. Not not with the same ferocity. And it’s really that.

Cynthia: That darn Paul again. 

Pete: Well, you know, it’s actually the darn people who read Paul and impose categories on an ancient Jewish writer who, first of all, I’m not convinced Paul necessarily thought that Adam was a human being. I mean, he might. He might just be using it as an illustration.

I don’t know. But this is like the only time really he makes the argument. Well, it’s like, first Adam and second Adam. See what I’m saying? Is this parallel here? And he’s got rhetorical reasons for saying that. But it’s like in chapter five. It’s tucked into something in the midst of a much larger argument, and he’s building off of things in Second Temple Judaism too, but the fact is that if we understand Paul, again, as a Jewish writer of the first century, and If we try to appreciate the arguments that he makes it as books, I think the question again of the historicity of Adam, it’s, it starts to recede to the background.

It’s not terribly important. And the analogy he has between the first Adam and second Adam that can still hold regardless of whether the first Adam is a historical figure, at least that’s my opinion. But. 

Anna: Yeah, I mean, it seems like the point is Jesus is kind of a big deal, like the biggest deal. And you don’t necessarily need a historical Adam for that to be the case.

Pete: And like, you know, Aaron just said, it’s like, it doesn’t matter where sin came from, we’re, we’re not as good as we could be, right? And we make bad choices when we could make good choices. So Jesus can still fix that. I don’t know. I just, I think our knowledge of physical reality, our knowledge of the past and all that. It just brings these questions back up again. They can’t be avoided, you know? So that’s, I love that question. 

Aaron: It’s actually funny how little Adam is mentioned. He plays such a large role in our like theological imagination. And you get told about Adam in Sunday school and like everybody knows Adam. And if you read the Bible at all, you get at least as far as Genesis two, right?

So everybody is. And then he is like literally never mentioned again. He’s at the head of like two genealogies and nobody talks about him in the Hebrew Bible. 

Cynthia: And that’s it. 

Aaron: And then, yeah, and that is it. So if you want to know what sin is like without Adam and Eve, just read the Gospels. I mean, because Jesus, the gospel authors don’t talk about that. That’s not how they understand the drama of sin. And then he just pops up in Romans five and all of a sudden it’s like, Oh, original sin is the only way to do it. [Cynthia laughs]

Pete: Exactly. Right. Yeah.

Pete: Speaking of solving things, here’s, I mean, a question that struck me, this is a big one. Um, so this may take a while, but. Does the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible even matter for Christians? And the question, you know, why, I guess one question we can ask is, what’s behind a question like that? Thoughts, prayer requests, comments? What about it? 

Anna: Just like, pray for my heart breaking that we’ve done Christianity in such a way that this question is even one that can be asked. I think one of the things that just keeps coming to mind for me is this idea that this faith that we’ve inherited, it didn’t start with us. It’s not ours. And so, I think that the way that Christians have talked about the Old Testament is just as kind of like a jumping off point for the New Testament, right?

It’s always pointing to the New Testament. And, and for people who don’t look at Jesus and say, oh, duh, the Old Testament pointed to this guy the whole time. For them, oh, they’re just dumb. And it really irks me when we think that way, because this rich history that we’ve inherited as Christians existed long before us and existed among a people that God had chosen, at least according to their scriptures, God had chosen to work specifically with them.

And then for some unknown reason, in the New Testament, it’s like, IE Gentiles, come on, like, we don’t deserve this. We inherited this from somebody else. This isn’t our faith. And so that was kind of where my mind went initially. Of course, I can say more, but I think that approaching the Old Testament with that kind of humility, that idea that like, no, it wasn’t written to point to Jesus.

It was written as an expression of a faith of a people who had nothing to do with Jesus for years and years and years. So, yeah.

Cynthia: Even if like the faith issue isn’t a concern for some people. Even with that, we have to remember though, that this collection of books, these texts that we know as the Hebrew Bible and what’s a lot of people refer to as the Old Testament, for the most part, not in its entirety, it was Jesus’s Bible.

You know, so if you do really want to understand Jesus and Jesus’s teachings, especially from a faith perspective, then don’t you want to understand? Or at least be familiar with the text that he considered his Bible? To me, when Jesus is, you know, the teachers of the law are trying to trick him and they say, which one commandment is the most important?

You know, if that was me, I would say like, I know you’re trying to trick me. I’m not going to answer that. But he does answer, he gives them two answers. He gives them part of the Shema from Deuteronomy. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your strength, with all your soul, with all your might. You know, he adds one element in there. And then you also have, and the other is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. Taken from the most ignored book in the entire old Testament, Leviticus. So, I mean, he says that, All of the Torah hinges on those two things. And then he goes out and he does his ministry and his teachings and his miracles.

And so if you really want to understand Jesus and his life and his teachings, you have to read the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. 

Pete: Yeah, the thing that strikes me though, too, I mean, I agree with that, but I think part of why this question even comes up is because, you know, to say the least, we’ve lost the Jewish apocalyptic fervor that is part and parcel of the New Testament.

Cynthia: Absolutely. 

Pete: And that happened for historical reasons, you know, by the time you get to the second century, you’ve got. Gentiles, like Justin Martyr, for example, telling Jews, you don’t know your own Bible if you don’t see Jesus in it. And we’ve inherited, maybe, supercessionism, we’ve inherited historically, and also we’ve inherited just this Gentileification, if that’s a word, of what is essentially a Jewish text, and I’m even including Paul there, even though, you know, he went around to the Gentiles, it was still, I think Paul was struggling with, with the Jewishness of it all and how it translates over to a Gentile audience, and, and we’re just heirs of that. If anything, the Old Testament’s important to remind us there’s a struggle here and we shouldn’t just overlay our own assumptions and our own worldviews on onto this text. 

Cynthia: So, Pete, could you just remind us about supersessionism, an explanation for it? 

Pete: Yeah, I mean, sometimes it’s referred to as replacement theology, but with Jesus, the Old Testament, we’re done with all that stuff. And now we have the new and the function of the old is simply to support the new, especially Jesus and, and it doesn’t have the Old Testament and, you know, Judaism as well. It’s sort of like, you haven’t quite caught up yet with what is really important. So it’s, it’s a superiority of Christianity as a religion over Judaism because it’s Christian. It’s not Jewish. It’s Jesus oriented. And a lot of bad things have happened to Jews throughout history as a result of that kind of thinking. 

And no, we all know what some of those examples are, but this goes to the medieval period and the early church as well. And. It’s something that I know I’m glad I had Jewish professors in graduate school and I could see some models like I don’t know if I was ever really supersessionist, but I think I probably was because, you know, Calvinist background and the Old Testament is essentially a failure that Jesus fixes. You know, that’s part of a supersessionist mentality as well. 

And I think what you lose there, apart from the actual context of the New Testament itself, which is a Jewish apocalyptic context, we lose the fact that, you know, the Old Testament covers a lot of ground and a lot of time. And in terms of the writing of it, I mean, what would we say, like, maybe as much as a millennium, in terms of maybe 1200 BCE to the time of Daniel, around 200, whatever.

That’s the literature that gives us Lament Psalms. That’s the literature that has internal debates about the nature of God. Because time has elapsed, and different contexts have happened. And, I tell my students at Eastern, I say, in a way we have more in common today with that journey that things have been around now for 2000 years and all these questions have arisen and the triumphalism of the new can’t bear the burden of that.

And the Old Testament is, is wonderfully relevant, I think, in that respect, just on its own terms, not Jesusifying it. These are not words I’m using here, but whatever. 

Aaron: That’s a technical Hebrew term. 

Pete: It’s a technical term. Thank you. But that’s why, you know, I don’t get tired of the Old Testament because you have the Psalms and you have Ecclesiastes saying what? This is stupid. This is utterly stupid. Yeah. You have, I think, I’m convinced Job is, you know, arguing with Deuteronomistic theology, and, and…

Cynthia: Yes, absolutely. 

Pete: I’m like, I love the fact that we have that. Now, we have it in the New as well, we have Paul and James don’t quite get along, but different perspectives, but it’s not as sharp, I think, for the most part, as this century over century over century over century development in the Old Testament that makes me think, yeah, you know, I think differently today than people might’ve thought in the year 500.

And I have to do my own theology, just like the Old Testament writers had to do their theology and their context. That’s why Chronicles differs from Samuel Kings. It’s a different time period. You need a different way of thinking about what God is up to. And yeah. That I just carry that with me that that to me is a real impetus and a model for just what it means to be frankly, just a person of faith.

Cynthia: Yeah. And I wonder how many Christians have, even if they’ve grown up in the faith tradition or not, or maybe it was more recent for them. I wonder how many of our churches just kind of have that super sessionism aspect to them baked in without even people really knowing about it. 

Pete: Right. And they might, because the point is to get saved.

Yeah. And you have to emphasize the problem that is then solved by Jesus and you don’t need a lot of the Old Testament other than see what happens if you don’t have Jesus, none of this stuff works out. I get news for you. Jesus hasn’t made things work out for the church either because we’ve been pretty screwed up for 2000 years.

So someone could say that’s a failure. It’s a failure. It hasn’t worked. Look at how people act. That was Paul’s issue. But how you act will demonstrate to people whether this stuff is real or not. And, and we’ve been doing a good job of demonstrating that it’s not. So somebody is going to be supersessionistic about, well, they probably already are. Atheists are super, atheists are supersessionistic over Christianity. 

Anna: Pete, I want to go back to a point that you made, because I think it was really good, but I wonder if I can say it better. Um— [All laughing]

Pete: Anna, I’m sure you can. Go right ahead. 

Anna: Well, okay. So you were talking about how the New Testament is apocalyptic Judaism, right? And so in their mind, their apocalyptic just means a revealing. A big thing had been revealed in Jesus. And everybody was like, he’ll be back soon. And then you said, I wonder if the Old Testament has more to teach Christians today, because that thing, that thing of Jesus coming back soon didn’t happen.

And so now we’ve had to be a people for thousands of years that have wrestled with this faith. Just like the people of faith in the Old Testament for thousands of years had to wrestle with their faith. And so I think that’s just a really good point because I do think that that’s what we see in the Old Testament. This persistent people that are sticking with their God, they’re sticking with their God, and this God that is sticking with them—despite all odds, right? Like the cards are stacked against them. And so I love that heritage. I love that idea of just like, we’re going to stick with it. And I do think that for Christians today, we desperately, desperately need that lesson.

And we need that lesson that you also mentioned of like the plurality of ideology. A whole bunch of different thoughts and having to kind of like renegotiate the way we think about God as we continue this journey because that’s what they’re doing too and I love that. 

Aaron: I think that gets into a question that gets asked a lot in classrooms and that’s the role of the Hebrew Bible for moral and theological reflection for us today because isn’t there such a big difference. People will say, people will say that in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible God is Evil and, and, and Jesus is so much nicer, Jesus is meek and mild, and then God is vengeful in the Old Testament. And I, I think that actually, that’s sort of also a product of that supersessionism that we were talking about before. It’s, there’s a, a certain sense of Christian egotism that goes along with it, my religion is so much better than your religion, your religion is a religion of violence and a religion of war, and my religion is a religion of peace. 

And so this, this is colored by that enduring, sometimes unconscious, sometimes conscious prejudice against Judaism, and it’s, it’s deeply, on the religious level, it’s deeply embedded with antisemitism on a more ethnic and cultural level, I think. But that’s a question that comes up a lot, and I think if you’re going to approach the Bible for the doing of constructive theology, serious theology, or for moral reflection, no matter what part of the Bible you’re going to, you’re going to have some work ahead of you to get usable theology and usable ethics out of it.

There is for sure a God who commands terrible things in the Hebrew Bible, and there’s also a God who nukes most of the world from orbit in the book of Revelation. And so you’re going to have to find some way to square a God of love and compassion with either of those things, and that’s going to be a process. It’s going to be a process of bringing in extrabiblical philosophy and ideas to the text to help you sort through and find what is valuable to you. And I don’t think that’s difficult to do with the Hebrew Bible. I mean, people have been doing it successfully for centuries, finding progressive moral value in a variety of places, in the wisdom literature, about examining the world around you, in the prophets especially.

How many times have the prophets been cited for concerns about social justice? These are some of the most cited figures of the civil rights movement, for example. So that material is there waiting to be harnessed by a person with a moral conviction to do it. But it requires that extra biblical moral conviction to dive into the text and seize from everything else what is going to be useful and powerful for you in the present.

And the same is true for the New Testament. You can easily construct some hideous morality or theology out of the New Testament if you wanted to. And indeed people have, I mean, all the time about the subjugation of women, about the, you know, the oppression of other people, about the, justifying conquistadors and colonization. That comes from the New Testament! Or you could be an abolitionist, right? I mean that comes from the New Testament as well there I mean they are they are digging around in the New Testament for those ideas, too. 

So will the Hebrew Bible ever become obsolete? Will the New Testament ever become obsolete? Will Christianity ever become obsolete? I think is as valid a question and that depends on whether or not people are going to continue to be willing to dive into these texts and find morally progressive and powerful ideas in them. If they do, then they’ll never be obsolete. And if they stop doing that, then the entire thing will become obsolete. 

Cynthia: You can drop the mic. 

Anna: Yeah, no kidding. That was so good, man. [All laughing]

Pete: Well, uh, should we bring it to an end? 

Cynthia: Yeah, I don’t think it can get any better than that. 

Anna: Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to do better.

Pete: Well, that’s a great note to end on Aaron. Thank you for those comments. And, uh, I don’t know, you guys, we should do this again. 

Aaron: Yeah, it was fun. 

Anna: Yeah!

Cynthia: Yeah, that was fun.

Pete: All right, folks. Thanks for listening. 

Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you wanna support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just wanna give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give. 

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Jared: And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com. 

Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People! Don’t forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O’Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.