40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Judges 17:1-18:10 (Episode 216)

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

A man named Micah steals silver from his mother and then returns it and starts a cult at his home. He upgrades from his "priest" son to a traveling Levite for hire who assures some spies from Dan as they seek out land to invade. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network 1517 YouTube Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. you can go to 1517.org slash podcast check out all the other podcasts that are living over there and while you're over there check out all the articles and the other sections of the website like craft of preaching i mean if you're a pastor and you're using the lectionary you got to be using craft of preaching you get some you get some exegesis by some some people like john pless and robert kolb i mean you're really not doing yourself any favors if you're not taking advantage of that chad and i are we're in the quarantine technically but we're also in the in the states that are like

hey let's give it a shot and see uh see what happens and so i don't have any data for you uh other than we're right at the beginning of giving this thing a shot and uh so far it's okay so far i haven't seen anything horrible happen yet chad no so far we're uh we're safe and sound here in texas we'll we'll see what happens my wife actually went back to work today oh she's been off for uh oh my goodness what do we figure seven weeks i guess so she's going back part-time so we'll see how it goes she's a dental hygienist so they're like dressing as if they're going into open heart surgery yeah it's gonna be a it would definitely be a change for her she's got a she's got like a hazmat suit on she's like looks like one of those doctors from the the movie break

outbreak yeah exactly exactly so we'll see how it goes so last week chad we finished the story of samson uh the best the best known of all the the characters and and stories in the book of judges and uh but we're not through judges yet so it doesn't end with the sort of paramount story uh we got some lesser known things to to finish up before we're we're out of this book yeah we're kind of in the the final section here uh there's still a few chapters to go we're at chapter 17 and yeah it's kind of a it's a different different flavor to to the rest of uh for the rest of the book because yeah we're kind of done with judges at this point i mean the the actual judges even though when we get to samuel he is the the final final judge you might say but we're we're entering

a new into new territory here because what seems to take place in 17 and following is there's much more of a focus upon individual families and kind of using what happened with them as examples of what was happening in the broader society so samson yeah he's he's the the judge that we hear the most about and kind of the depending on your perspective either the climax or the uh the anticlimax of of the judges maybe both the top or the bottom both things both things can be true at ones. Yeah, right. So we're going to shift now in chapter 17, especially to focus on an individual family and a couple of members of that family and this strange Levite fellow that shows up on the doorstep. So 17 and 18 are really just a fascinating journey into the lives of some families, as well

as one of the tribes, the tribe of Dan, and how there's kind of this strange mixture of talk about Yahweh, but then idol worship, and this Levite who basically is an opportunist who hires himself out to whoever can pay him the most to do his sacrificing and consulting of the gods. So it's really, I love the chapters because, not because it's full of all kinds of good stuff. I mean, it's full of all kinds of idolatry and heterodoxy. But I think even on a psychological level, it just shows how mixed up people were.

They were trying to combine talk of Yahweh with the construction of idols. And so it's this kind of theological, rampant theological confusion that characterized this, not just this period, of course, but a lot of periods of Israel's history. So anyway, we'll get right into it. Starts out 17, verse 1, that there was a man of the hill country of Ephraim whose name was Micah. Stop there for just a second. So two things ought to jump out of this. One, we can see, and the one is kind of hidden in the Hebrew. So we've heard a couple of different times about the Ephraimites.

We heard about them in connection with Gideon, and we heard about them in connection with Jephthah, I believe it was, chapter 8 and chapter 12. remember those were the guys that like were itching to fight yeah you know they were upset with gideon first and then they were and he kind of pacified them but when they were upset with jephthah jephthah was just like i'll show you right and we had this big massacre uh at the crossing of the jordan with the ephraimites yeah you need this text just to just to let you know that he didn't completely exterminate them right yeah they weren't all wiped out there were some left but as soon as we hear that there was a man in the hill country of Ephraim we're like oh this if if we're going to judge what's about to happen based upon what's already happened this

is probably not going to be that uh uplifting the story so that's the first thing to note and the second is this guy's name I checked uh I don't know 10 or 12 translations and in every single one of them translated as as or transliterated rather as Micah which is a which is, I mean, close, but not exact. So here's what happens in chapter 17 and 18. The first two occurrences of this guy's name in Hebrew is Micah Yehu. And then after that, it's a shortened form of Micah. Now, why is this important? Well, I think what's going on here, well, let me explain first of all what the name means, and then I'll explain what's going on. So the first two occurrences in verse one and then verse uh four is mikhayahu and that's really composed of three

different hebrew words that are put together me ka and then yahoo so me and ka mean something like who is like and then the ending element of his name yahoo is a short form of yahweh so mikhayahu who is basically, who is like Yahweh. So you hear his name in the Hebrew and you're like, oh, this guy must be, you know, a faithful worshiper of Yahweh. He's got a, what's called a theophoric element to his name, meaning there's like a God element to his name. But then when after that, after you're introduced to him,

then the rest of the time his name is written as Micah. So the God element, the Yahweh element drops off, which actually is quite fitting when you read the story itself, because you realize this guy is super messed up theologically, and he's trying to do this syncretistic mixing of Yahweh's name with all sorts of idol worship. So anyway, I point that out because right in the opening verses, there's a couple of elements to the story that are hinted at, the Ephraimites and then this guy's name. So what's going on with him? Well, he says to his mother, the 1,100 pieces of silver which were taken from you, about which you uttered a curse

in my hearing, behold, the silver is with me. I took it. And his mother said, blessed be my son by the Lord. And then he returns the 1,100 pieces of silver to his mother, which by the way, was a bunch of money. And his mother said, I wholly dedicate the silver from my hand to the Lord. Now that is Yahweh to Yahweh. So I wholly dedicate the silver to Yahweh for my son to make a graven image and a molten image. Now, therefore, I return them to you. Now this is, this gets even better because listen to verse four. So when he returned the silver to his mother, his mother took 200 pieces of silver and gave them to the silversmith who made them into a graven image and a molten image and they were in the house of micah let me go ahead and finish the next two

verses and the man micah had a shrine literally he had a house of god bait elohim he had a shrine or some little temple or something like that and he made an ephod and household idols and consecrated one of his sons that he might become his priest and then it wraps up in those days there was no king in israel every man did what was right in his own eyes this is a bizarre story because this is extremely strange story so you know we don't know anything about this 1100 pieces of silver at least not that i know of uh this is a weird way to do that where it's like hey you know that money that was stolen from your mom it was me and now i'm gonna give it back to you and she's like oh well just praise the lord for you praise be to god what kind of situation there's like so

many levels of bizarreness to this story i don't even know where to start yeah i mean it'd be one thing if you're like hey you know that that 1100 pieces of silver that were stolen i found that guy i got it back well maybe that's what happened i mean i guess i guess it's possible but it seems like he says that he's the one that took it yeah yeah he took it and i i suspect maybe he brought it back because she uttered some kind of curse and he heard it and he's like oh you know so he wasn't the most god-fearing man in the alley sort of sense but maybe he was scared about this curse he's like oh man made mom mad she said curse would be the one who stole my silver i better i better take it back yeah but she doesn't even seem upset she's like happy

no she rewards him yeah well yeah but that's that's one of the another odd thing about this so yeah she rewards him and she says oh great you know so i'm going to dedicate all the silver completely dedicate this silver to the lord to yahweh and how is she going to dedicate it to yahweh she's going to have her son make an idol yeah yeah it's it's sort of a mount sinai situation all over again you know because they make this golden calf and then aaron says ah tomorrow we're having a festival to yahweh this is the this is just the almost predictable pattern of the israelites where the element of the of the commandments about not making an image for yahweh is just ignored repeatedly uh a flagrant ignoring of it so you know what's you kind of

want to get in there in their heads like what are they thinking i mean are are they understanding these idols to be representatives of Yahweh or are they just kind of putting Yahweh together with other gods in this mixed up pantheon that's going on here in Canaan what what are they thinking and then another element of this is kind of strange okay she dedicates the silver right to Yahweh but then she takes only 200 of the pieces of silver to give them to the silversmith well what happened to the other 900 pieces of silver we're never told so did she decide she's going to keep that or or what happened anyway all a lot of unanswered and unanswerable questions i suppose going on here but there's plenty that we that we do know we know that this guy's whose

name is micka micka yahoo who who is like yahweh well he's a thief he's dishonored his mom stealing from her and now he's about to take this silver at least a portion of it dedicated to yahweh and make a graven image out of it and he's not going to stop there he's got his own little uh shrine little temple that he has set up and now that he has this idol i guess he decides well you know what i need a priest i've got a son i'll just do this little home ordination and he can be my priest and he can serve this idol and everything will be just great because I'll have kind of a good luck charm in my home. I mean, is there anything that we have read thus far in the Old Testament

that sounds more like you are cooking up a cult than this? No, I don't think that we have. Yeah, that's a great way to view this. I mean, he's going down the path of self-determination here, right? He is going to decide exactly what he wants his religion to look like. he's gonna choose his own priest do his own home ordination have his own little household shrine yeah this story uh you can tell this is not going to end well maybe one thing if it's like i'm gonna start worshiping the bales or whatever uh that's just like straight up idolatry uh this

is like mix in a little yahweh do a little shrine make a little thing get a priest for it yeah that's how you do cults like you got like a little little bit a little bit of jesus in there mixed with some other weird stuff yeah yeah it's uh it'd be kind of like you know i'm gonna turn my garage into uh into a church i'm gonna get a little uh statue of buddha yeah get some get some uh some symbols from from islam put them in there maybe mix a little judaism in and uh then i'll uh i'll find my neighbor and if he's not busy he can he can serve as my my priest will just be perfect right here or my son right yeah my own my own son yeah and this is interesting that ends like this uh where it gives you this sort of hint at where where we're headed at some

point uh which is uh in those days there was no king in israel and everyone did what was right in his own eyes yeah uh there you you see this tension in judges i mean because i mean when when we finally get to israel having a king obviously it's something that god's not really excited about um and now if you know how kings in israel turned out like you know why he's not that excited about it because this is just as many swings and misses as it is base hits when it comes to to kings uh but not having a king doesn't work out either uh that's not there this is not going well uh and so there there's this there's this uh can't win for trying uh thing going on here where no king you'll have you know you have no king but yahweh that's not working out well uh

we've been we've been in that position for a while now and this is constant idolatry and all kinds of craziness uh no so that the the the nation as it were it has no direction they don't have any there's no there's no there's no way to rein things in right um so you know they have no king oh eventually they'll get kings and some of that would be good and a whole lot of that'll be bad a lot of it yeah and and what you see is that you can have uh you can have everybody doing what's right in their own eyes uh or you can have one guy leading you in the direction that he thinks is right in his eyes and these things are neither of these things are good uh because because it's pretty rare for the i mean every like i said every once in a while you get a good one but

for the most part whether you have everyone doing what they want or you have one guy doing what making everyone do what he wants most of the time they're going to lead you into some idolatry and they're going to lead you into false worship and all and all of this sort of stuff yeah that's precisely right yeah i think you can take that phrase a couple of different ways most people most commentators will take it like that uh this is like positive toward the king right in those days there was no king and look what happened everything was just falling apart i dialed the trail over the place or you could take it in the complete opposite way to mean that But yeah, back then, there was no king in Israel, and they were doing the exact same things as happened under our kings.

Yeah. So we didn't need a leader to take us into all sorts of realms of idolatry. The people were doing just fine on their own, because you're right. I mean, I think, if memory serves me correctly, there's only three kings, and they were all southern kingdom kings who were commended basically with very minimal critique. David, even though, of course, he has the whole David, has the whole Bathsheba and Uriah issue. But the other two are Josiah and Hezekiah. So when you get to kings, you know, each one of them is kind of critiqued toward the end of their reign. and without well apart from those three every single one of them is either completely condemned

or they're commended but then it'll it'll go on to say except you know they didn't remove the high places or they allowed this or that form of idolatry yeah even even someone like Solomon who there's plenty of good things to say about um there are certainly a whole lot of bad to say about as well yeah i mean he's he really started he started uh israel down the path to idolatry because he married all the foreign wives and built temples for them and especially toward the end of his life it sounds to me like jerusalem was just full of full of idolatry but not to mention the fact that you know people were upset with him because he had taxed him so much and turned him into indentured servants more or less to do his bidding whatever he wanted whatever he wanted

built so all of that to say that there's a little bit of ambiguity built into this phrase there was no king in israel every man did what was right in his in his own eyes but what's going to happen with our friend here with uh with micah well let's see starting here at verse seven he has a visitor that shows up says there was a young man from bethlehem in judah of the family of judah who was a Levite, and he was staying there or literally sojourning there. Then the man departed from the city, from Bethlehem and Judah, to stay wherever he might find a place. And as he made his journey, he came to the hill country of Ephraim, to the house of Micah. And Micah said to him, where do you come from? And he said, I'm a Levite from Bethlehem and Judah, and I'm going to stay wherever

i may find a place so micah says to him will dwell with me and be a father and a priest to me and i'll give you 10 pieces of silver a year a change of clothing a suit of clothing and your living expenses basically your maintenance or your your living so the levite stayed there and the levite agreed to live with a man and the young man became to him like one of his sons so micah consecrated the levite or ordained the levite and the young man became his priest and lived in the house of micah and then here's here's micah's assessment of the situation the closing verse of the chapter now i know that yahweh will prosper me seeing i have a levite as priest it's all you need this is super strange because he had his son as the priest but then he gets an opportunity where a

levite comes wandering in he's like okay well this guy is actually part of it's a real deal that's part of the tribe of the priest so i mean i could pay him have him stay what exactly is this guy building here yeah like you said this is the beginning of a this has all the makings of a pretty good cult going on yeah yeah there's there's some uh there were plenty of oddities in the first half of the chapter there's a a few more uh here i mean to begin with we kind of have this strange dual tribal affiliation of this guy right because it starts out he says he was a young man from bethlehem this is the bethlehem we all know there were two bethlehems there was one kind of in the galilee area i think it belonged to the tribe of zebulun but of course this is the

one that uh we're familiar with because it's connection with david and of course the birthplace of jesus so it's in judah so he says he's a levite but he's of the family of judah now how is that possible i mean you're either of judah or you're of levite all right most of the the commentators that i've read say could be like a marriage so maybe there was a judahite mother and levitical father or vice versa not exactly sure maybe he was actually called that because he was living in bethlehem which was of the tribe of judah that city belonged to uh to that tribe whatever it was it's kind of it's kind of a strange description so well you leave it or is he a judahite you assume that i mean the the tribes of israel intermarried all the time and that like that

would happen um but um you you ended up in one house or the other right based on this right so this is benjamite gets together with you know someone from dan you're not but you don't take on both you don't have dual citizenship if you're one or the other yeah yeah yeah so i i mean we know it's kind of uh jumping ahead here we know from the end of chapter 18 that he's of the literally of the tribe of levi he's actually descended from moses but uh yeah it's just this odd description of him so he he's evidently a guy who's just kind of looking to to find a job more or less so he was in Bethlehem for a while for some reason that didn't work out and so he just takes off he's gonna wonder where wherever uh he ends up leaving wherever he ends

up heading to and see if he can find a place so anyway he uh he makes his way up to the hill country to the house of Micah and Micah jumps at the opportunity right soon as he hears that he's a Levite and that he's looking for a place, he says, well, hey, I've got an idea. Stay here with me, and you can be a father and a priest to me. Now, most of the time in the Old Testament, when a spiritual leader, I guess we could say, is called a father, it's a prophet. We have several occurrences in the prophetic literature where a prophet is referred to as a father, so it's an honorific title to my knowledge this is the only case where a levite or priest is is is called father but anyway that's that's what he calls him here not just priest but also a father and he's

going to give him 10 pieces of silver a year and this suit of clothing could refer to like his priestly vestments that he's supposed to wear we're not exactly sure and then he's going to provide a living for him so anyway that's where that's where he decides to stay becomes like one of his sons and he's he's certain now that he has this uh molten image and the shrine and now he's got a leave not now not his son anymore but a levi as his priest that god is going to be happy with him he's got everything lined up just the way he wants it to be yeah one of the things that's interesting is i hadn't thought about this until just now but if you have sort of if you have sort of rampant idolatry and just everyone doing whatever maybe the people that this is has the

worst effect on is the levites because their literal job as the way that god puts puts forward everything right is that the rest of the tribes are going to make sure that the levites are able to survive based on them being priests right so the rest of the tribe is going to support them this is sort of dependent on though that you have a correct worship of god going on and that you have the need for the priests to do their priestly work right and and i yeah just i didn't thought about it until i read this like why why is this levi guy wandering around looking for work well probably because there's there's not a they're not the way that the tribes were structured um is not that's not really playing out no no i mean in the the ideal situation which

was envisioned by the torah is yeah everyone worships at one place wherever the tabernacle happened to be of course it's not in jerusalem yet so they worship that one place one place only they don't each have their own altar in their town or their house they just go to worship there and they collect tithes and these are supposed to be distributed to the levites remember the levites have no land they live in certain cities and bethlehem by the way wasn't one of those cities so for whatever reason the levite ended up in bethlehem but yeah i i expect that this would be monetarily not beneficial to the levites for i doubt that it'd be taking place because the way i mean the way god set it up it would have been fine the levites would have been taken care of

they had their own cities and they were given a little bit of land around their cities so they could farm a little bit and have their crops and their herds but chances are i mean this particular the situation is given to us as a model for what was happening in other parts of the country so i guarantee you there were a lot of micahs and there were a lot of levites a lot of household shrines that were going on if you could afford it i mean not everyone of course could afford to hire a priest but micah could and uh anyone with enough wealth i suppose could have done exactly what he's doing here so chances are there were levites like this who were just looking for an opportunity to They served basically as what we might call a kind of a personal chaplain, right?

They were just living there and taking care of whatever sacrifices need to be made and maybe consulting the gods on behalf of their boss, whatever they needed. Anyway, that's chapter 17. as we're going to find out from chapter 18 things did not go so well for uh for micah uh following a visit from some uh people from the tribe of dan so we'll see how far we get into into this chapter so starts out with a reminder that in those days there was no king in israel so kind of repetition we heard already and there was the tribe of dan looking for an inheritance for themselves to live in says until that day an inheritance had not been allotted to them as possession among the tribes of israel so it's a little confusing here because

back in joshua the tribe of dan was given a portion of land my lot this was the way you remember that that the land was divided up each tribe was given a little portion and they were supposed to go and possess it but we find out from the book of judges the opening opening chapter verses 34 through 36 that what happened was the land that was allotted to the tribe of Dan they were not able to conquer it the Amorites wouldn't let them and so they were kind of driven up into the whole country they must have had a couple of cities at least because they're mentioned in the second verse of this chapter Zorah and Eshtoel so they had these two cities but they didn't have enough land so they're basically on the hunt for some place to settle some place to

that actually is going to be able to they're going to be able to conquer and make their own so what they do is this whole thing is set up sort of as a it's almost like a parody of the opening chapters of joshua because remember the opening chapters of joshua they get to the land they send out spies the spies go to a certain house it happens to be the the the prostitution house of jericho where rahab is at and then they come back and they report, they make their report, and then the invasion happens, right? We have the same thing going on here, except all of this is leading the tribe of Dan in a direction that God would not want them to go. So they don't really, they don't really, they're not out to do the Lord's will,

they're out to do their own will. So here's what they do. They select five guys from the tribe of Dan, valiant men, and they send them to spy out the land and to search it out. So on their way to find this land, they come to the hill country of Ephraim, to the house of Micah, and they stay there. And it says in verse 3 that when they were at or near the house of Micah, they recognized the voice of the young man, the Levite. I don't know if they actually knew him somehow, or maybe it's just a case where he had a southern accent and they themselves were from the south and so they recognized it but they were up north and they're like yeah you know kind of like if a Texan's in New York City and he hears another Texas accent he's like no somebody from my area

of the world I don't know what it is but they recognized his voice or his accent and so they turn in and they're like who brought you here and what are you doing in this place and what do you have here so Micah tells him well this is this and this and that is what Micah has done for me and he hired me and I've become his priest so they want to find out what God wants him to do on this mission to search out more land so they ask him to inquire of God that we may know whether our way on which we're going will be prosperous and it's almost it's almost as if he doesn't even really take the time to do whatever they did back then cast lots or inquire of god because he just responds immediately he's like oh go in peace your way which you're going has the lord's approval

now this is important because it's going to come up a little bit later in the chapter this this particular encounter that these guys have with this uh with this priest is going to come back later on to uh result in things kind of just crumbling around micah this whole little cult that he that he had set up but at this point they're on their way they encountered this priest they stop and they want to know whether this mission this spy mission that they're on is going to be successful and he says more or less yeah yeah you can uh you can critique the translation here chat if you if you like the what i've got going on is is interesting anyway yeah so yeah it does seem that you know this this priest says just immediately they're like go inquire and he's like

don't need to go in peace all right that's i already know just i just got a word just received a word go in peace and then it says this the journey on which you go is under the eye of the lord oh yeah that's the esv i saw that yeah i saw that this morning which when i was just reading it uh you know this morning i thought well that could be a good thing or a bad thing like you know depending on you know that's it's like oh go in peace god's got his eye on you and you're like well that seems that just depends like that that certainly could be a positive or a negative depending on what exactly it is that you're about to do and that's an excellent reading of that yeah literally it uh i i remember when i when i when i saw the esv i was like i wonder why they chose

that translation because it's kind of an odd translation does it refer to the eyes of yahweh in the hebrew it's basically the way in which you are going is before yahweh like in front of yahweh i guess that's where they get these you know under the eyes of or under the eye of the lord but it's a little ambiguous yeah because yeah it's more or less saying the way you're going god's watching yeah well that could be good or it could be really really bad and as we're going to see my mom used to do that and it was like never that was like a threat like coming out of my mom i got my eye on you or she'd just be like i'll be like mom all right we're gonna go me and you know my five friends are gonna go camping uh for the weekend you know we'll be we'll be back on

sunday afternoon and she's like okay god's watching you that was never a positive that was not like she did not use that as i wasn't like okay good that's not how she meant for me to take it either she meant like behave yourself yeah i don't think god is watching you has ever been used positively it's not it's not very encouraging and i i get the impression that this priest just like he he's up for hire so he's gonna say what everything is is just going to redound to his own benefit he's like oh yeah yeah you're good you know you're under god's eyes you're he's watching you whatever he means they take it positively like oh that's good that's yeah well you're saying this sort of like arbit this is something that the spiritual man says

something that sounds spiritual but just as like anyone could say that like it just is true it's like god knows yes go in peace and you're like well i mean like obviously that's true yeah yeah i'm sure if i went to a palm reader that's what i would hear right oh yeah you're yeah looks like things are going to go well for you for a while and then they're gonna not go well like oh okay that's really insightful that pretty much describes every human's life you go to a pastor and you said i just really want to know uh if i'm doing the right thing and their response is god knows everything he sees everything go in peace and you're like that's just i mean that's true but it's very true so this so this priest like he says a true thing

that they're able to take us a good thing that just in i don't know if it's meant to be a good thing or a bad thing or if it's just meant to be a thing like a true statement yeah because he obviously hasn't done a lot of inquiring here no he obviously has and if he did he wouldn't be inquiring of yahweh he'd be inquiring of idols that are set up in this uh kind of cultic shrine yeah i'm not sure that hirelings do a lot of inquiring yeah i mean this this should be uh on the sundays when we have the the reading about you know the good shepherd and the hireling this should be the old testament reading judges 17 and 18 definitely should be the old testament reading for that day all right we got to i think we got a few more minutes here so let's

see what happens next uh the five guys depart and they come to a place called laish and they saw the people who were living there and everything looked great they were living there's a little bit there's some translation here issues here too there's some differences between the the various uh various translations but here here's what i have it says they were living in security after the manner of the sidonians so we hear a lot about tyre and sidon phoenician cities uh so after the manner of the sidonians quiet and secure where there was no ruler humiliating them for anything in the land that hebrew is ambiguous i know the esv has something else there but new american standard has no ruler humiliating them

for anything in the land there's a two-word hebrew phrase there that no one really knows what to do with anyway they were far from the sidonians had no dealings with anyone so the overall message is pretty clear. These five spies come to the city, just like the two spies came to Jericho back in Joshua. So these five guys come to Laish. And more or less, the message we get is everything looked great. They were in peace, security. And we know from just the whole geographical feature of this particular part of the Holy Land, it's at the foot of Mount Hermon, there's plenty of water, there's plenty of grass so i'm sure it did look like it was ideal idyllic kind of place for the tribe of dan to take as their own everything looked just ready it's like low-hanging fruit

right ready for uh ready for them to get it yeah yeah and the esv it says that it's what that this land is quiet and unsuspecting now this sounds like the perfect place to invade right yes it certainly does yeah yeah you kind of get the impression these people were like they thought they had it made yeah you know they weren't expecting to be attacked they were just you know they were living life uh as they wanted to and seemed you know everything was going to be fine with them no threats from outsiders plenty to eat you kind of got to feel bad you kind of got to feel bad because it actually they said you know saying that it's quiet unsuspecting no dealings with anyone you're like these don't sound like horrible people like they sound like the shire

yeah man just like just so then they rolled up on switzerland and just said let's do it and i think that's yeah i think that's the impression that we are meant to get out of this that these poor people never saw the army coming well the the i think we have a couple minutes left the spies get back and they they more or less say hey we have we have got a good report for you the they're asked right away you know what you find out what's your report and they get like they're like let's go right now first night candy from a baby man let's go yeah get up let's go against them we've seen the land and it's it's tov mode it's it's very good so don't sit still don't delay enter possess the land and it's they they add when you enter you

shall come to a secure people in a spacious land for god has given it into your hand interesting they don't say yahweh they kind of use the generic elohim here which can mean can you be used to reference to yahweh it can also mean just like we might say for a divinity a higher power has given it into your hand a place where there is no lack of anything that is on the earth so they set this up as if it's it's going to be easy it's perfect so strap on your armor put on your sandals and let's march and take it that's uh about out of time all right that's it we had 40 minutes all right yeah we got you feeling real bad for switzerland uh who's about to get invaded by guys who uh firmly believe that god whatever that means uh is with them that's it yeah that's it

40 minutes. All right. We will be back next week and see how the cult progresses. We'll see how everything goes down. Chad, we'll see you then. All right. See you then.