40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Episode 157 (Deuteronomy 2:1-3:14)

Episode Date: March 21, 2019

Moses recounts wandering around the wilderness for 38 years. God puts prohibitions on who Israel is allowed to engage in conflict with. Why is God good to the children of Esau? What does God's gifting nature to other nations tell us about Him? What does it mean for God to hate someone? What is going on with nations of giant people? Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network CHF City Events Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is part of that 1517 podcast network. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that we got there for you to listen to. There's a bunch of them. You might not like them all, but you'll probably like at least a couple of them. So you should go check them out. Figure out what's there for you.

One thing you will definitely find there for you is Christ crucified for you. Because that's kind of what they're all about. Also, we got city events coming up. Me and Chad are going to be in Des Moines on April 13th. That's what we're going to be doing. And we're going to be going over the hard sayings of Jesus. You want to hear Chad talk about what it means to tear out your eyeball? That's what's going to happen there.

You want to hear Scott Keith talk about how Jesus said, I didn't come to bring peace, I came to bring a sword. And that seems to contradict everything that me and Chad have ever suggested. You can hear about that. You want to hear about the unforgivable sin? I know you're worried about it. We're all worried about it. That's going to get talked about.

all the hard and difficult things that Jesus said, we're going to explore them. So come on out. That's at Grandview University. It's actually a Luther Memorial Church on the campus. Come on, it's free. You can go to christmalfast.org, go to the city events page and sign up. If you're not in that area, you can, and you're just a little bit further north than that, we're going to be in Minneapolis on May the 4th, and we're going to be talking about the resurrection. The whole thing is themed around the resurrection christ resurrection our resurrection as in our salvation and the life we live after that it's really close to easter you know may the 4th and that's what we're going to be talking about i'll be there jared c wilson elise fitzpatrick a whole bunch

of other people will be there come on and hang out again free and you can go over to christville fest go to the city events page sign up for all those things chad how's it going man it's going good just uh got back into the country of texas yesterday i was up in uh the beautiful land of wisconsin man and midwest saturday sunday came home with some wisconsin cheese that they gave me as a gift yeah we had some of that last night it was a little colder than my body's accustomed to but hey i made it yeah it was a it was a good weekend let a men's retreat up there had a lot of good a lot of good times delving into some old testament stuff with those guys and here i am back at it again you know i just realized as i was talking about all this

stuff that we have a conference that's entirely based you know this one day event is entirely based in the new testament because jesus didn't say any hard things in the old testament since he wasn't you know i mean well he was around as we've learned but you know but all the things we're looking at are like things he said you know when he was walking around amongst us for three years and uh just realized that we brought you brought you in to talk about some of that stuff so you know what were you guys thinking i don't know i might have to talk about the new testament you are gonna yeah that's always weird well if uh if the past is any evidence of what it's going to be like i'll probably take us back on a little uh little journey to the old testament

to see what we can figure out about plucking out our eyes from that perspective well it seems like usually crazy statements have their roots in the old testament yeah this is true this is true yeah It's going to be fun. It's going to be a fun conference. Those hard sayings sometimes are the best to tackle because they send you all over the scriptures trying to figure out exactly what's going on. Yeah, it's not exactly a conference I've seen before.

This is not one I've seen. No, I haven't either. No, it was a great idea. I think it'll be a good challenge for the presenters and hopefully enlightening for everybody else who's there. Absolutely. Well, what are we doing in Deuteronomy right now? Well, we kind of got off to a relatively slow start.

We were kind of in first gear during the first chapter. We spent a couple episodes on that. But I think we're going to pick up the speed. We're going to shift to at least a second, if not third year in chapter two, because we have some repetition in this chapter about the Israelites' progression northward toward the border of the Holy Land. So that's where we're at. we're gonna pick up here with chapter two verse one uh the the end of the last chapter is where

the israelites decided that uh well they got to the border of the holy land and then they they balked they're like no no no the people are too big the city walls are too high we can't do this and so they they turned back and then when god decided that uh when when god said okay you're gonna you're gonna die in the wilderness they changed their mind and so they then tried to attack the amorites and they got their butts handed to them so that's kind of where we're left off they uh they were defeated and it says they stayed in kadesh many days so that's the way the chapter ends we're gonna we're gonna pick up we're gonna it's kind of funny like in one verse we're going to skip 38 years ahead so that's the way chapter two is going to start off yeah yeah

that's that is kind of how this works because there is about 38 years where just a lot of wandering going on yeah yeah you know you know you want to describe these 38 years well we walked in circles a lot yeah that sounds like a like a bummer life right there but you can sum up in in two verses yeah yeah so that but that's really what happens i mean just chapter two starts out says that we we turned and set out for the wilderness by way of the red sea as the lord spoke to me and circled mount seer for many days it's an understatement of the entire bible yeah it's like the understatement of the entire bible so you mean by many days like 38 years yeah pretty much pretty much that's what it was so that is uh that's the way the chapter starts out

and uh verse two says that the lord spoke to me this is moses uh of course talking the lord spoke to me saying all right you've circled this mountain long enough so it time's up it's uh it's we're ready now for uh the second chance for israel so that's what they did uh they they turn north, and God, continuing to speak through Moses, says, you will pass through the territory of your brothers, the sons of Esau, who live in Seir, and they're going to be afraid of you, so be very careful. Then he goes on in verse 5, he says, don't provoke them, because I won't give you any of their land, even as little as a footstep, because I've given Mount Seir to Esau as a possession then he goes on to say that you know if you if you get any food there you gotta

you gotta uh you gotta buy it and if you use any water then you gotta pay for that and then he says in verse 7 that the lord your god has blessed you and all you've done he's known your wonderings to this great wilderness these 40 years the lord your god has been with you and you have not lacked a thing so this uh this sets the tone really for at least the next couple of sections in chapter two because right now they're dealing with the edomites that is the descendants of esau next they're going to deal with the moabites and then after that beginning of verse 16 they're going to deal with the the ammonites and in every single one of these sections, it's kind of the same basic message that God gives to Israel. So they're way down

south and they're moving north. So Mount Seir or the land of Edom, that is, if you can just kind of picture the Holy Land in your mind, that is south of the Dead Sea. That was the land that God had given to the descendants of Esau. And they're going to go around that, then they're work their way northward then go through the land of moab which was the the territory that was it was east of the dead sea basically and then north of that is the territory of the the ammonites and every single one of these with regard to every single one of these territories god says basically the same thing that you're going to either pass through it or you're going to pass around it that if you want to eat anything or if you want to drink anything, then you're going to have to

pay for it. And I'm not going to give you even a single acre of their land because I apportioned that territory to them. Now, this is very significant because typically when we think about God giving land to a certain nation, of course, we automatically think of Israel. It goes all the way back to Abraham, right? He says to Abraham, get yourself out of your country, away from your household, away from your father's house, and go to the land that I'm going to show you. And then at one point, he tells Abraham basically to walk all through this land, and he says, this land is going to be yours. And then, of course, that promise is repeated to Isaac, and it's repeated to Jacob, and it's repeated to Moses, what he calls Moses in Exodus chapter 3.

So we've heard plenty about God's promise of the land to the nation of Israel. What we don't hear as much about, and therefore what we don't think as much about, is that God wasn't concerned just with giving a certain land to the nation of Israel. He also gave land to the descendants of Esau, who, of course, was the brother of Jacob. And he also gave land to the Moabites, as well as to the Ammonites. Now, you may remember that scandalous story

that tells about the heritage of Moab and Ammon. You got to go all the way back to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to remember that story. so lot and mrs lot and their two daughters leave sodom right after god is just right before god destroys it of course mrs lot looks back turns into pillar of salt so it's the dad and his two daughters that are the only three that escape the city of sodom they go and they they they stay in a cave in the mountains and while they're there one night uh the daughters get lot drunk and

the oldest daughter sleeps with her father gets impregnated the next night they get their dad drunk again the youngest daughter goes in sleeps with the dad she gets impregnated so lot is both father and grandfather to his to these these two these two sons that are born to his two daughters and those two sons are the the the fathers of two nations the father of moabites and the father ammonites so because lot was the nephew of abraham the moabites and the ammonites are related to the to the nation of israel so all three of these nations the the edomites that is the descendants of esau and the moabites and the ammonites all three of those have a family connection with the people of israel esau is is specifically called the brother of of israel we see that in

uh wherever that was at oh verse four yeah your says your brothers the sons of esau and to each of these these peoples who were descended from these these guys god gave their land as as a heritage and not only did he give it to them but they drove out the inhabitants who were already there. So what we see is basically way before this, way before this particular time in Israel's history, God had driven out the people who originally lived in the land of Edom, and then he gave it to the descendants of Esau. He drove out the people who were the original inhabitants of the land of Moab, and then he gave it to the descendants of Moab. And then he did the same with the people who originally lived where the Ammonites lived.

So in each of these cases, what God did is basically a precursor, a foreshadowing of what he's about to do for the people of Israel. In fact, not only that, but we're told that some of the original inhabitants of these lands before the Edomites and the Moabites and the Ammonites took them over, these weren't like, you know, just weaklings. They weren't some kind of small tribes that these relatives of Israel were able to go in and easily conquer. Some of these were giants that they had to conquer. They're called the Zazumim and the Anakim and the Imim.

There's all kinds of names that they gave to these giants. So the message that God is giving to Israel is it's sort of implicit in in in these in these opening sections of chapter two. But the message is this. Look, way before right now, I was able to drive out these gigantic inhabitants of the land and give the land as a heritage to your relatives. so don't be afraid of what's what is what's coming up to you because i'm going to be able to do the exact same thing in in your situation you got a lot of people live in these lands i'm going to be able to to fight for you just like i fought for your relatives in the past and i'm going to give you the land of israel just like i gave you the land of the edomites and the moabites and the Ammonites. So this is something that I don't think that we often consider when we're thinking

about the Old Testament, that God wasn't just concerned with Israel. In fact, we sometimes get that impression that God basically ignored every single nation of the world except for Israel. That was the only people on the whole globe that he was concerned about. But this particular chapter flies in the face of that, because this not only says that he was concerned about them, but he was actually active in their midst to do the exact same thing for them that he's about to do for Israel. So to state the obvious, you know, there's a lot that we don't know about God's activity because it's not recorded in the Bible. Suppose the Edomites had written their history about what God did for them. Well, no telling what that might have read like. Or if the Moabites or the

Ammonites had written a history about what God did for them, maybe a lot of it would actually parallel what we're reading in the Scriptures about what God did for Israel, because we know just from chapter 2 of Deuteronomy that God was doing for them the very same thing that He's about to do for Israel. You know, the more time I spend in the Old Testament, the more I am convinced that god is not good at hating esau that's a good way to put it it's not it's just not very good at it yeah that that that actually came up this weekend when uh when i was leading this mentor treat because we were talking about jacob and somebody quoted that verse about you know jacob i love and esau in esau i hate and we often hear of course that that's that's in the scriptures

and that is often quoted, but I think too much is made of it, right? Yeah, well, I'll tell you this. So this is quoted, it's famous because Paul quotes it in Romans chapter 9, which is a fairly tricky text. Now, it just so happens that in 30 minutes in the New Testament, we are currently going through Romans. We're not at chapter 9 yet. We are, at the time of recording this, we are midway through chapter 7,

but we're coming up on 9. And so 9 has been percolating in my mind because I have to give thoughts on it. What I do find is that, yes, God is not good at this hating Esau business. I guess you'll have to go over there and tune in if you really want to know what I really, really think about that statement. It's probably different than what you've commonly heard. But I think at the end of the day, as I spend more time in the Old Testament as well, I really think that Esau is a definitive Christ figure in the Old Testament, more than just in the swapping of blessings when Jacob goes in and dresses up like him. You sort of have this obvious parallel there where, hey, how do you get the blessing from the Father?

Oh, well, you dress up as your brother. Okay, well, that's pretty clear. But I think there's a lot more to it than that. But it does, I think, help with texts like that, because at the end of the day, even when you have something explicit like, this person I love, this person I hate, and then you look at how God treats that person, you're like, well, that's not how I hate people, I'll tell you that. Yeah. We're better at hating than God is. We really are. At least the way we usually think about hate.

You know, there's other verses where we have that language of hate, too. i don't want to get too far afield here but since we're talking about it you know jesus we could have included this in the in the hard sayings of jesus you know he who does not hate his father and mother cannot be my disciple so does that mean that uh god wants all children to go home and tell their mom and dad hey i hate you or or something else going on here this is this is sometimes referred to i've found this helpful anyway as an explanation of it there's a there's a literary device known as dialectical negation which is a fancy way of saying that sometimes in order to stress one thing we deny something else so uh in order to stress the fact that we

are to love one thing we say that we hate the other thing so i think those examples are great are great illustrations of of this dialectical negation where jesus when jesus says he who doesn't hate his father and mother uh i cannot be my disciple what he's basically saying is that you need to love god first and foremost and above all things he's not saying that you're supposed to literally hate your parents but in comparison to our love for god then our love for everything else should be so small compared to that love that he calls it hate and i wonder if that's maybe what's going on here in the case of jacob and esau there's a reason that that he that he says that he chooses jacob because jacob is the to be the one who is of course the uh the nation

of israel the one upon whom god bestows these special blessings and the covenant and everything else but that doesn't mean that god sits around all day just fuming about uh esau and just loathing him it's very different the way i understand just to throw my new testament two cents in there uh the way i understand you know hating hating your father and mother it's sort of like this love the lord your god is the first and great commandment on your father and mother is not it's even that commandment is subservient to that one right so even in the old testament i mean certainly we are told to honor our father and mother but that commandment is underneath the great commandment of love god um and so if push comes to shove and you're you know your

parents are like the whole family's joining the you know the philistines well what you do at that moment by saying no like you can all go but i'm gonna stay is going to perceive that it's going to be perceived as a dishonoring of course of your of your you might literally end up fighting them the only way to describe this then was to be that you love god so much that you would reject uh or hate which is you know rejecting it's not the opposite of love but hate is so you're using this literary device so um that's kind of how i understand that i just rank order it in the commandments and say look uh god loving god comes before loving your loving and honoring your father and mother god himself says so and has always said so yeah that's a that's a great

way to explain that. And I think it's reflected well in Deuteronomy chapter 2, because obviously God did not hate Esau in the sense that he was out to destroy him. I mean, he gave him. We know even already back from Genesis that God was giving a blessing to Esau. It wasn't as if just because Jacob was blessed that there wasn't any good thing for Esau. There was. And he inherited a land and god drove out the inhabitants and he gave that land to esau that doesn't sound a whole lot like what we think of as hate no it sounds like it's uh god's actually concerned about esau just like he's concerned about the two uh sons of of lot and and his daughters so god is god isn't just solely focused upon israel is the uh is the point that that i'm

trying to make here and uh i did i did want to to pull in one more old testament text because i i it it it fits also with this particular theme and it's one of these it's one of these passages from the from the prophets that uh i think most of us are not familiar with this is a reading from amos the last chapter amos chapter 9 and uh god says this this is amos 9 verse 7 and following he says Are you not as the sons of Ethiopia to me, O sons of Israel, declares the Lord. And listen to this. Have I not brought up Israel from the land of Egypt and the Philistines from Kaptur and the Arameans from Kir? So you see what Amos just did there.

He says, in the name of God, he says, not only did the Lord bring up the Israelites out of Egypt, but he also had an exodus for the Philistines. He brought up the Philistines from Kaphtor. And not only did he have an exodus for the Israelites and for the Philistines, but he also had one of the Arameans because he brought the Arameans from this place called Kir. So Amos 9, verse 7 fits well with what we see in Deuteronomy chapter 2, that God isn't simply concerned about Israel, nor does he just give gifts to Israel. He promised way back in Genesis chapter 12, verse 3, that in Abraham, all the families of the earth would be blessed.

And so through Abraham, through the promises given to Abraham, and there's to be this ripple effect that goes out from him to all nations because God is indeed concerned about all nations. And to put the example out there that is the most blatant example of this, we'll just read the book of Jonah. Because if God was concerned about Assyria, if God was concerned about the capital of Assyria, Nineveh, which was like the bottom of the moral barrel, you couldn't get much more ISIS in the Old Testament than Nineveh. If he was concerned about them, then certainly he was concerned about all the other nations as well. So there is a universality to God's love in the Old Testament. He is especially focused upon Israel because it's to Israel that he gives the covenant and the promises, and then it's through Israel that these promises are to fan out to the rest of the nations. But it's not like he harbors some kind of murderous resentment against the rest of the peoples of the world.

Quite the opposite. Yeah, I mean, the fact that Israel is supposed to be a blessing for the entire world tells you that he doesn't hate the entire world. this is what this is what he says about israel that they are to be this blessing and obviously ultimately this is speaking of christ who's going to come through israel but israel is for the world the way that way that christ is for the world is supposed to bless all the earth uh and so god is ultimately then concerned of blessing all of creation through this particular people so he's not he's not even not only does he not hate the entire earth he's not even

he's not even apathetic towards the earth he's not he's not he doesn't even have this like well like i don't hate them but i don't really care about them they just let them do what they want it's not even like that he is he is actually about the business of blessing all the earth through the specific people and so even though we're breaking a commandment by saying that we were going to move along faster and we're moving along slower uh i think it's i think it's a good point to sit on because i do think that some people can have this perception when you're reading the old testament like god's really really narrowly focused well he's narrowly focused in in one sense but he's focused in that narrow way on channeling those people out towards uh

towards the entire earth and blessing all the all the world uh with you know specifically in christ yeah god's choice of israel is it's just one more example of what sometimes called the scandal of particularity the the particularity being the one nation of israel and and the scandal being that he focuses so much on one but the cross is also the scandal of particularity in this one place and only this one place is atonement and yet uh just like the cross is for everyone so israel was for for everyone also so long story short uh these uh these sections about moab and about Ammon, and about the Edomites, all of these are flying the face of any perception that we might, any false perception that we might have of God being only concerned about Israel in the

Old Testament. So, yeah, so to kind of pick up here, the first section about the Edomites ends with verse 8, Moab starts with verse 9, and what we have there is more or less a repetition of the same themes that we saw in that first section. God's telling them to, when they pass through Moab, to, you know, not take any of the land and to pass through it because that's not their destination. And then there's one significant section at the end of that that I want to just say one thing about, verses 14 and 15. It's at this point when they're crossing Moab, when finally everybody from that former generation dies. Verse 14 says, now the time that took us to come from Kadesh Barnea until we crossed over the brook Zered, this is in Moab, was 38 years

until all the generation of the men of the war perished from within the camp as the Lord has sworn to them. Moreover, the hand of the Lord was against them to destroy them from within the camp until they all perished. So there's this repetition and we'll see perished occurs actually again in the very next verse. There's a threefold repetition of that to accent the fact that God's threat, he followed through with this threat. When the first generation came to the borders of the Holy Land and wouldn't cross over to obtain the blessing, then God said, you're all going to die. And in fact, they all did. And as we'll see, even Moses himself is going to die outside the promised land. So picking up with verse 16 is where we enter into the

territory of Ammon. Same thing there. He says, I've given it to the sons of Lot for a possession. And once more, we hear about the former inhabitants that they weren't just average people, that they were what they called the Zazumim. That was their name for the giants who lived there. The Ammonites called them the Zazumim, just like we have other names for them as well. So they drove out those inhabitants and they took control of that land. So those are the first three sections of chapter two, first with the Edomites and second with the Moabites and third with the Ammonites, all related to Israel, all given lands by God and all helped by God to drive out the original inhabitants. Now we're going to switch gears because beginning with verse

24 through the rest of the chapter, we're going to talk about the conquest of Sihon, king of the Amorites. And then chapter three starts out with Og, king of Bashan. And we've talked about these two guys in numbers already. So this is going to be just a bit of a review. So we're not going to spend a whole lot of time there. But in both of these cases, actually, we see parallels between Israel's, the way that Israel approaches them, and then the way that these kings react, and then the end result of it. So when they get to the territory of Sihon, they approach him and basically say, let us pass through. And they say the same thing. If we eat anything, we'll pay for it. If we drink anything, we'll pay for it. And Sihon says, not only says no, but he came out to attack

them. And there's an interesting parallel here because verse 30 says that Sihon king of Heshbon was not willing for us to pass through his land because, we've heard this language before, because the Lord your God hardened his spirit and made his heart obstinate in order to deliver him into your hand as he is today. Of course, we've heard that language in reference to Pharaoh when we were covering the book of Exodus. So this is sort of another Pharaoh type of encounter. We have this powerful leader who won't let Israel do what God wants Israel to do. And in the midst of his rebellion, in the midst of the hardening of his own heart against them, God follows suit by hardening that heart and making that spirit even more obstinate. And the result for Sihon is the

is the same result that we saw in the case of Pharaoh. God delivers him into the hand of the Israelites. So verse 32, Sihon, with all his people, came out to meet us in battle. And verse 33 says, the Lord our God delivered him over to us, and we defeated him with his sons and all his people i think verse 33 is is it's worth pausing on just for a second because we see in in one verse kind of the the two levels of reality that are that are happening here so verse 33 says and the lord our god delivered him but then it also says we defeated him so which was it well of course It's both. There's the victory that the Lord gives, but that victory that the Lord gives doesn't in some way negate the reality of the battle that's taking place on the ground.

So there's human involvement. There's typical human warfare that takes place with two armies clashing and bloodshed and a victor and a defeated, just like you would see in any kind of battle any kind of war, but at the same time, you have a reality that's above that, that's actually the causative factor in the victory of the Israelites, and that is that God is delivering them into their hands. So that's a great verse to point to the fact that there's kind of a divine and a human element that's taking place with these particular battles. So verse 34 picks it up from there. It says, we captured all his cities at that time, utterly destroyed the men, women, and children of every city left no survivors they take the animals as they're the spoils of war and verse 36

excuse me says that there was no city that was too high for us to take because the lord our god delivered them all over to us now the reason that verse is significant verse 36 is because that's the exact same fear that the earlier generation had remember they talked about oh we can't take this land because the walls of the cities are built up to heaven and the people are giants. Well, the second generation, their sons and daughters, when they come into the exact same situation, there was no city that was too high for them to conquer. And here they're facing a giant Sihon in this case, and yet they conquer him and his armies. So the second generation, things are looking up for it. They're doing what the first generation did not do. And they're doing it

because they actually believed that God was the one who was going to give them the victory instead of living in fear like the generation of their fathers had. So that's a conquest of Sihon and his territory. We're actually at the end of chapter 2 now. When we switch over to chapter 3, the first section is more or less same song, second verse. the the first verse was about the conquering of Sihon and the second is going to be about the conquering of Og so Og is the king of Bashan and this exact same scenario plays out with him they capture his capture his cities they utterly destroy the inhabitants they take the spoils of

war and so as a result of that the two kings of the Amorites Og and Bashan are both are both conquered then we have i think we looked at this last time but i'll throw it out here again just uh uh just for uh for a reminder verse 11 if you're ever wondering just how big these guys were i mean you know we we're talking about uh kind of a you know an nfl lineman here or what kind of size people are we talking about here so this is a this is actually in parentheses in my bible verse 11 of chapter 3 for only og king of bashan was left of the remnant of the refaim so the refaim were the these this ancient race of giants behold his bedstead was an iron bedstead and i guess it still existed because it says it's in roba of the sons of ammon its length was

13 and a half feet and its width was was six feet so or as as it might say in your bible's nine cubits and its width was was four cubits so 13 and a half feet by six feet now i don't know how long a typical bed these days is but it's not near 13 and a half feet long these guys are big guys yeah they're they're not 13 feet long i can tell you uh i am six five and they're not that long yeah your feet aren't like hanging off the end of the bed dude it's uh there's i've not found I mean, I'm sure it exists, but I've never stayed in a hotel that has a bed that's even, you know, apparently six and a half feet long. Not a thing. I think they are like right at six.

Yeah. You got to curl up in a partial fetal position just so your feet aren't hanging off the end of the bed. For the last 28 years of my life, I've had to do this. Whenever I passed six foot, it was time to scrunch up. It was all over. Yeah. My son follows a lot of the participants in the World's Strongest Man competition. I was looking at the size of some of those guys the other day.

It is amazing to look at these guys, especially when they're standing next to an average built person. They are scary to look at because these guys are just huge. well one of them if any of you have watched a game of thrones uh remember the guy who always wears the helmet over his head and the i can't think of his name you know his name the mountain yeah yeah well the guy that plays that is is one of the participants in the world's strongest man competition so you know you look at him you're like oh my gosh that guy is a giant well he wouldn't be a giant if he was standing next to og king of bashan or sihan king of the amorites

He would look small compared to these guys. So that gives you some idea as to just how immense these people were. And you can, from a human perspective anyway, understand why that first generation of Israelites were shaking in their boots when they looked at the size of some of these people they had to face down. Yeah, well, and if you're thinking that this all sounds crazy, so that guy in particular is actually from Iceland. and if you uh there's a there's a documentary about this there's only about 300 000 people that live in iceland and in the whole country a very high percentage of them are massive individuals and what you have is this smaller they actually have a way for you to you can log on the internet and make sure that you're not dating someone that's too closely related related

to you this is a real thing and because it's not a very big population but what they have is a bloodline um that i mean it's essentially a viking bloodline and the reason that such a large percentage of these guys are just enormous is because this this viking dna has just propagated like this right um so if you were to watch the world's strongest man competition you would see all these dudes from iceland there and it lets you know that this is this is like real stuff i mean And, like, so, you know, back then, you have this huge, like, how do you have some huge race of people? Well, think about it like this. If you have, like, warrior nations, like, these are warring nations.

These guys are not, these are not good guys. These are not nations that just are hanging out, not, like, conquering anything. You have huge individuals who are at war all the time. The biggest, baddest dudes survive. They're the dudes who then, like, have offspring. and this is how the vikings also were became this warrior huge massive race because the only people that survive are the biggest baddest dudes and then they're the ones with the kids and and this just goes on and on this actually is the case currently i mean they're not warring like that

now but you sort of see a shrinked down haven't been at war for a while version of that still remaining in iceland uh that was the case when the vikings came over that's why when the when vikings were getting off of boats you know the people in england were like what in the world uh because that's how this was there's generations of warring people where the weak got killed off in battle and you just are just left with massive dudes creating more massive dudes and i think this is the case for societies and and cultures like these ones where all this left is just the biggest and the baddest making more big and bad things and and it's not like america we're all sitting around you know eating twinkies and you know making kids and you know some of you know some

of us are like yeah some of us are all jacked and ripped up like chad and some of us are skinny like me and this is just how it goes so uh yeah so i don't think it's this crazy impossible thing to think about this race of people that ends up just being enormous i mean some of these you know 13 foot bed i don't know who knows how tall maybe this guy's 10 foot tall i don't know but but yeah but you see so you see smaller versions of that throughout history that's not so far back uh in fact even some of it is that's current yeah yeah that's an amazing amazing modern parallel and that's and that's all the time we got we're gonna leave it on the go go check out the iceland documentary i guess yeah see some of these mini giants man it's pretty crazy it's pretty nuts man

dude there's some crazy stuff whole whole island of people just lifting heavy things it's nuts it's like putting rock they're putting boulders on their shoulder yeah man just moving around cars and all kinds of things go check that out guys and we will see you next week see you then We'll see you next time.