BibleProject - Applying the Paradigm: Movements and Links

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

How do we apply the biblical paradigm to our own Bible reading? It starts with reading the Bible in movements—the thematic patterns in which the biblical authors organized their ideas long before chapters and verse numbers were printed. In this episode, Tim, Jon, and Carissa introduce us to biblical movements and walk through how to identify and trace biblical themes on our own.View full show notes from this episode →Timestamps Part one (0:00-14:00)Part two (14:00-19:45)Part three (19:45-29:30)Part four (29:30-37:45)Part five (37:45-48:00)Part six (48:00-57:21)Referenced ResourcesInterested in more? Check out Tim’s library here.Show Music “Defender (Instrumental)” by TENTS“Into the Past” by CYGN“Me.So” by Mind Your Time“Invisible” by Philanthrope & mommy“Alive” by OuskaShow produced by Cooper Peltz. Edited by Dan Gummel and Zach McKinley. Show notes by Lindsey Ponder. Powered and distributed by Simplecast.

Hey, this is Cooper at Bible Project. I produce the podcast in Classroom. We've been exploring a theme called the City, and it's a pretty big theme. So we decided to do two separate Q and R episodes about it. We're currently taking questions for the second Q and R and we'd love to hear from you. Just record your question by July 21st

and send it to us at infoatbiboproject.com. Let us know your name and where you're from, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds and please transcribe your question when you email it in, try to keep your question to about 20 seconds, and please transcribe your question when you email it. That's a huge help to our team. We're excited to hear from you. Here's the episode.

The biblical authors were incredibly intentional about the shape of every scroll in the Bible. Which stories go where? What details are given in a story and when are those details given? Everything meticulously organized. And this wasn't just a fun literary game to play. The organization of a biblical book goes hand in hand with the meaning and the message

the biblical authors want to get across. To read the Bible well, we need to understand biblical structure. Now, you're probably aware of one specific way to organize the Bible. Chapters and verses. It's very useful. It's also important to recognize that that is not a division system original to these scrolls. There were no chapters and verse annotations in any of the original biblical scrolls. Which begs the question, how were biblical scrolls organized?

Each of those scrolls has been organized by their authors to have a series of larger scale movements that organized the flow of the story into just the handful of main pieces. That's right movements. And the Hebrew Bible, every scroll is broken into three, sometimes four, large movements. A movement of scripture is a collection of stories that all work together. For example, the first movement in the Bible is roughly Genesis 1 through 11. And there you've got some great stories. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Lane Meck, Noah and the Flood,

the Tower of Babel. Let's throw in some genealogies. And you can look at all of these stories individually and see their shape and design and message. But, back up. And you can also look at them as a whole. And you'll begin to see new things. Look at metaphor here is maybe like a large tile mosaic.

You can back out and get the whole picture, but what you could do is zoom in to any one section and then really pay attention to the meaningful organization of that, you know, maybe a two by two square. It's on every level from biggest down to small. I'm John Collins and this is Bible Project Podcast. Today on the show I talk with Dr. Tim McEy and Dr. Karissa Quinn. And we look at three important skills

for reading biblical literature. The first skill, understanding biblical structure. And this is gonna get us ready for reading through the Bible, movement by movement. We're also gonna look at the skill of seeing biblical patterns. What are the themes that the biblical authors want us to pay attention to? This is all to prepare us for a new reading journey that we're doing in 2022, reading through the Bible,

movement by movement, and tracing biblical themes. Thanks for joining us. Here we go. Today we get to start a mega series, a massive marathon of a Bible project podcast series. Don't let that be daunting because it's not something you have to... You just called it mega massive awesome. A year-long marathon, but it's not scary. And you're asking me not to be intimidated. I know, so I'm back and off of that. Okay, okay, all right. Because it's modular. You could jump in wherever you want.

And so we wanted to introduce that because it starts in the new year. So let's introduce this whole thing, but really this is an extension of the paradigm series we did. Yeah, this is almost a transition episode from our paradigm series into this new massive modular marathon.

The massive modular marathon, the triple M. Discovering all new ways to talk about it. Right now, great. So if you follow along with the paradigm series, you are aware that we talked about seven pillars that explain what type of literature the Bible is and how we should approach it. And what we're going to be doing is discussing, well then how do you read the Bible with this paradigm? What kind of skills do you need? And how do you develop those skills?

So first, let's just review the paradigm. Yeah, we ended with the long series on the podcast about the seven pillars. We are articulating its our recovery project. We're trying to recover a way of imagining how we think about what the scriptures are and then try and develop a method or skill set that matches what they actually are as opposed to what we might assume they are. Yeah, so when we say our paradigm, we're not saying this is something we invented.

It's something we're trying to discover within the biblical text that's native to how the authors wrote in our communicating. Yeah, how did Ezekiel read the Torah and how did Daniel read the Torah and the prophets? Because in the book of Daniel, there's a scene with him reading the prophets, the Jeremiah scroll.

How did Jesus and the Apostles read and understand the scriptural collection? How did the earliest Christians read and understand all of it together? What were their basic instincts that they didn't say out loud because it was all just taken for granted, but that we have to say it out loud because we're in a different time and place

that's taught us to have different assumptions about the Bible that maybe aren't helpful always, or maybe they're just misaligned with what all those earlier people who were much more connected to it. So we're trying to discover it, and then also to name what those things are so that we can practice them too.

There you go. So there are seven pillars that we've identified as part of this paradigm, and they are divine in human. This is divine in human literature. It's unified literature, messianic literature, meditation literature, the Bible's ancient literature, it's wisdom, and then finally, it's communal literature. And even reading those off for me, I'm reading them,

and it's still hard to remember the order that they go in. So we've been talking about, or just, I guess, as we've been discussing these, we've been thinking about which ones naturally group together better, and we've come up with a different order to remember these pillars that make sense to us. And it seems artistically designed. Yes.

So to clarify what you're saying, Chris, is that we reordered them from the order we talked about them in the podcast. Right. So what I just listed as the order we talked about them in, but we've come up with an order that will be maybe more helpful to remember. Yeah. So now we've structured the new order. Sounds weird, like it's its own thing.

Now we're remembering the pillars in this new order as three parts. The first part is a cluster of three. There's communal right in the middle. And then the last part is a cluster of three. So it's a symmetrical chiasm. It is. It's pretty to us.

It's so nerdy. Yeah, totally. And the first three are the same, divine and human unified, messianic. And we already kind of talked about how we realized that created a cool little cluster about the divine human partnership. Yeah. Yeah. The scriptures are themselves the product of a divine human partnership. They are unified by both as a editorial collection, editorially unified, but also unified in terms of a story about a divine human partnership. And that story comes out its culmination

in the figure of the Messiah, who is a divine human, who fulfills the story of the divine human partnership. So that's the first triad, the first section is those three, divine and human, unified and messianic. I think John, you were the one that said, you really liked communal being right at the center. Yeah, because at the center of all this

is reading it together in community. You could end with it, but since we had the first three and then the another three that kind of worked together, taking a cue from literary structure, let's throw it in the middle and make it more of a central piece that you read the Bible in community. And that, it develops a community. Like the purpose of it is that we can live as a community,

as a new type of human community. Yeah, this is a rich one, because it, both, it speaks to the origin of the scriptural collection, that its origin was in a community within ancient Israel that read and experienced these texts as groups, but also it was a community that these texts were forming and shaping the identity of as it told always continued into the late period of ancient Israel, into early Christianity. The scriptures were read aloud, experienced aloud, understood by groups of people who could help each other understand them. And so it's communal through and through. Yep, and that's something we can practice today. It's an under-emphasized theme in our particular

cultural context. It's not in every Christian tradition, but it has been in ours. And so we felt like it's worthy to name it, say it out loud. Yep. And then the final three pillars, maybe these focus more on how we should go about reading. Yeah, these get more practical. Yeah, it seems like it. Ancient literature, meditation, literature, and wisdom literature.

So it's ancient literature in the sense that it was written by an ancient community or scribes and yeah, ancient real-worlds over time. Yeah, in a different part of the world, in a different context, then I guess most of us, yeah, different contexts than all of us. Yeah, historically. And we changed the title of this pillar in the course of the conversation. Remember, it used to be contextual literature, but we changed it to ancient, because that can speak to ancient language, ancient culture, ancient time. It just comes from a different, all of those.

So it's helpful. So it's helpful. So it's helpful. Yeah, helpful to remember that as we're reading and come across things that seem really odd. A lot of times it's a product of a culture that's different than our own. And we have to leave space for that.

It's meditation literature, that's different than our own. And we have to leave space for that. It's meditation literature. That's the sixth pillar. It's meant to be read and re-read, meditated on just like Psalm 1 talks about meditating on scripture. And this is an extension of its ancient roots. It's like, cause this pillar is not a modern type of way to read literature. Right. Yeah, or write, or produce it.

Right. Right. So it's tapping into a very ancient and very beautiful literary approach to language. Yeah, it's designed in such a way as to have multiple layers of meaning and if you follow the design cues and know how to read it along the grain of its design,

so to speak, it will keep revealing more layers of meaning the more you become familiar with the whole collection and read every part in light of the whole. Yep, meditation. Yeah, meditation and the final pillars that it's wisdom literature. So it is literature that leads to wisdom. It's not a list of principles that tells you exactly what to do. It's meditation literature that leads to wisdom. It's not a list of principles that tells you exactly what to do. It's meditation, literature that leads to wisdom. Yeah, how does an ancient set of texts have anything to say

to people who live outside in a time and place other than that ancient setting? And typically, this is speaking most to, I think, a contemporary paradigm of how to engage the Bible that we've just called less than helpful, which is the reference book or the rule book approach. Because there are rules, like moral ethical rules in the Bible, don't murder, you know, don't lie, that kind of stuff. But there's actually not as many as you might think, and there aren't enough rules to cover every area of human life in relationships, but wisdom literature is designed to form people who have

a moral compass that's aligned with God's wisdom so that no matter where they go, they can be informed from the scriptures about what like true North is. So it shapes people and communities to be wise, image-bearers ruling the world into the future. And that's the point of reading these texts. And I love that this final triad ends with wisdom for how to rule the world with God as human partners, because that brings you back to the first paradigm. The divine human partnership. That's a divine and human literature that's unified with the partnership story that we need the human and divine one, the Messiah to come and rescue us. Yeah. So yeah, that's it. That's the seven pillars. Yeah, just because we have some distance now from when we had all those conversations. This is a great piece of work. Yeah, that's really helpful.

I feel really proud. I'm going back and looking at this and going like, oh, this is really helpful. I'm glad we got here. I'm going to take this with me for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. The other really cool thing about this is that it begs the question, how do we develop this paradigm, or how do I, how do I read the Bible with this paradigm? What do you do with it?

Yeah. Yeah. No, there's just talk about it. How does it inform the way I actually read the Bible? Yeah. And what we've discovered is that there's actually very practical skills that once you've onboarded this paradigm or while you're attempting

to onboard this paradigm, these skills will get you there. And what we realized was that our whole library of videos have been getting at developing these skills. Kind of a Tim, I don't know how consciously you were doing that, but like as we were making theme videos and how to read the Bible series and word studies, it all became like skills for the paradigm. Yeah, we just have developed more precise language

for this stuff we set out to do when we started the Bible project. Yeah, it's great. So we're gonna talk about the skills, but first we have a really important announcement. Announcement, if I could do a drum roll on this wooden table I would, but might cause audio problems. 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc

1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc

1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc Okay, John Collins, you have something you want to share? That's some good stuff. Well, actually, I want you to share it because you were kind of at the genesis of the idea. You came back from some meetings and shared with me this idea. So I remember learning it for the first time. So what is it, John? Well, yeah, so we are developing our own Bible Project app. And I actually have been historically through this project, been against building an app for Bible project. Actually, so we had some friends designed like a reading plan app and that's called a read scripture

and it's really cool. We didn't actually make it. A lot of people think we did make it. It's a really wonderful app that we didn't make and I was great. Just like yeah, you guys go make an app because I just had no vision for an app. I thought if we just have a really cool mobile experience

for our website, why do you need an app? I was visiting a like a VC guy down in the valley, you know, like just, he's in this world. He started explaining to me why you need an app and what you can do with an app. And it just started opening my imagination to what we could do with an app. So then we went out and started developing one.

And it is releasing in January. And what we really wanted to figure out was how do you learn to read the Bible while you read the Bible. So we wanted a way for you to get access to all of our material, but then to not just watch a video and be like, oh, great. Awesome. I watched a video or I listened to a podcast, but that this can translate into learning to read this literature and actually doing it with your community. So what you're saying is the app will be like this really interconnected web of resources

where everything we've ever made is all interconnected in a learning experience. And you can read scripture directly on the app and access resources. And a, yeah. And learn skills. Yeah, we have somebody who's new on our team, really neat person, and he was telling us about how

he would show theme videos in his church, like at a class setting. And for somebody who's really new to reading and understanding the Bible, he said the video theme videos come across like a magic trick, it was his metaphor, of like, wait, so somebody would watch it and be like, when I read the Bible, I just find genealogies

and stories of violence and like cool stuff about Jesus. How did you get the water of life? Yeah, like it's incredible to see and really fascinating, but that must be something that only those people can do. Totally. And I'm just gonna watch them do it. Exactly, it's something you watch the video, a theme video, and you're like, I can never do that.

That's not what I get out of the Bible. And so, you know, this goal, you know how there's, sometimes you watch instructional videos or I was building a Lego set. Oh yeah, with my kids. And there's these, you can shoot pellets like little cannons, you know? Oh, with Legos.

Yeah, and it'll show like, you know, a boy and a girl in the picture on the back of them firing the little cannon. But then underneath it, it's like little cannons, you know? Oh, with Legos? Yeah, and it'll show like, you know, a boy and a girl in the picture on the back of them firing the little cannon. But then underneath it, it's this little picture of like a human face with one of the little projectiles going into the eyeball. And then it says like, it has like a don't do this. Slap or don't do this at home, can I think?

Yeah, don't shoot this in your eyeball. Don't shoot this in your eyeball, yeah. So, well, we're trying to say that's actually wrong Totally the wrong parable I just thought of the cuz it was yesterday Because I'm we're not trying to tell you to shoot your eyeball right but that logo is on is on the back of a lot of things Don't try this at home. Don't try this at home or it's implied in a lot of Yeah, we want people can do this. That's right.

We want to encourage people to do, learn the skills so that you can try this at home. We want you to learn how to read the Bible and get cool, get the good stuff that we've been trying to show everybody. What I love about the magic trick thing is that magic tricks are designed to kind of confuse you and misdirect so that you think something like magicals happening,

but really it was just a slight hand or something. And we're not attempting to do that. But I think there is a sense of like, there's some slight of hand going on because there's this whole layer of skills that we're using that we haven't been really, really transparent about, not on purpose, but we just haven't been like, oh, these are the skills, and let's develop the skills together. Yeah. I mean, we've talked about the skills a lot, just not to find them so clearly as in the paradigm series. Yeah. So in the app, there's like, in the very center of the app is going to be a tab called Skills.

And you're going to find our whole content library organized into three skills. And then you're going to be able to see all the related content we have, podcast episodes, and quizzes, and notes, and all sorts of things so that you can kind of develop those skills. And that's a way to access our content and the app. Also, while you're reading the Bible, if there's related skills nearby, you can get to it that way. And those three skills, we want to walk through. What are they, John? What are the skills? Yeah, there's three skills. They are style, structure, and pattern. Let's go over these one at a time and let's start with styles. What do we mean by the School of Styles?

Yeah, what we mean is the Bible is a collection of scrolls, ancient scrolls, and they are written in a variety of ancient literary styles, different types of narrative, various types of poetry, various types of prose discourse. And we covered this in our How to Read the Bible series. In fact, our whole How to Read the Bible podcast and videos are organized along the three main literary styles of biblical literature, but each one has subsets. That's basically it. And you engage, you come to different types of literature with different expectations.

Actually, here's a metaphor that we used, you're many years ago to intro this. It's very similar to the kinds of expectations that we all bring when we enter into a grocery store. If you go, have your normal grocery store, you have this internal map of how it's organized and what to expect from it and what to do with it that you already, no one like gave you a lecture, you just like figured it out, you know.

But you really have exposed before you your assumptions about grocery stores. When you go to a new one, do you guys know this? Yeah, I hate going into new grocery stores and I will drive across town to get to a familiar one. You know what the best thing is is when you're on a road trip or like visiting somebody in another city and you go into the Trader Joe's and you're like, it's exactly the same! No, it's so disorienting to go and do a different grocery store. Because of familiarity. It's like there's something about familiarity that is comforting,

that makes you feel like, I know how to do this and I can do it fast and I've efficiently, I know what I'm doing. Yeah, and if you're in a new grocery store, that's happening so many times, where I go to where I think the thing I'm looking for ought to be. Like, oh, normally, if I see the chip aisle, then the salsa is not gonna be far away. But not all grocery stores do that.

Some have the separate zone, because it's by the beans, or whatever. Okay, but hold on, help me understand how grocery stores are related to literary styles, like literary genres. It's about expectations. So expectations. So you go into a grocery store, expecting certain parts to have certain things,

and you feel, So like if I'm in a certain aisle, like the bread aisle, I know there's gonna be muffins here, I know there's gonna be hot dog buns. Yeah, but if I need the salami, that's somewhere else That's right. Yeah, and you wouldn't expect to find there like coffee like the cinnamon whole other zone Yeah, and no one again like when you go under a grocery store They don't have people. They're handing out maps in fact that's frustrating. I sometimes I wish they were

Yeah, oh my gosh So we have a store called Fred Meyer and I think that's just a Northwest store. I think so. Yeah. But it's a Kroger brand. They're huge. Yeah. Because it's like a grocery store, but then they've got like appliances, like, peril and games and everything you'd want. But then the grocery store itself, because we're in the Northwest and you got to have the organic section, they like started having like the regular groceries and then the organic section of groceries. But then they have like an area that's just for special cheeses and another area that's

just for special whatever. So sometimes you like want to find something and there's like three potential spots it might be. Yes Yeah, that's right. It's it's so frustrating. I once looked for kimchi and Fred Meyer for an hour. Oh Hopefully it was really good Okay, so the equivalent is all a parable the equivalent to this is know, sitting down with the Psalms, but maybe let's say you're in like a theology class at your church or in school, and you're trying to understand the Bible's portrait of like human nature. And so, you know, maybe you'll have some narratives about the

E. Gardenevene's story. You'll go to Paul's letters. Yeah. Because he's didactic. It seems and works through an idea systematically. But then you might go to the Psalms, because he's didactic, it seems, and works through an idea systematically. But then you might go to the Psalms, and you're pulling out some sentences from the Psalms, and the whole question is like, man, did any biblical poet sit down and think, I'm going to teach about human nature in this poem.

Usually poems have other agendas than didactic information transfer. Yeah. So that's it. What should I go to biblical poetry looking for? What should I expect? then didactic information transfer. Yeah. So that's it. What should I go to biblical poetry looking for? What should I expect? What are the expectations and what are the organizing principles

of different kinds of styles, different kinds of texts? Yep. Okay, so to be really clear, how this metaphors working is when I'm in a section of a grocery store, I have a certain expectations of what to find there and how it's designed and how I exist in that part of the Crochet Store. Yeah, that's right. And in the same way in the Bible, there's different literary styles or literary genres, poetry, narrative discourse, and when I'm reading discourse, Paul's letter versus reading some poem and say the Psalms,

when I'm in a different section of the literary When I'm in a different section of the literary aisle of the Bible, I have expectations of how to navigate through it. Yeah, it works differently. Yeah, and those expectations will help me notice certain things, but I also might make me blind to other things that are right there, but that I don't, I've never taught or don't expect them to be significant, therefore I don't really see them or pay attention to them. So that's basically it. And then each of those subtypes, narrative, poetry, prose discourse, there's subtypes to them. Did I say subtypes? Each of those types, there are subtypes, yeah. So each of those types, three types, narrative, poetry discourse, has subtypes that all are doing different things. They're like different aisles of the store. And we need to develop the skills for learning

what to expect when I walk into Jesus' parables versus the story of Jesus. Yeah, the story about Jesus, something like that. So that's it, basically. Awesome, so that's style. The second one is structure, biblical structure. Yeah, this was something that for me, early in my education in biblical studies,

so I'm in my early 20s, and I was just introduced by the same professor you were, since we went to school at the same place by our Bible study methods professor, that the organization of a biblical book goes hand in hand with the meaning and the message the biblical authors want to get across. Right. Form and function are related. Yep, that's right. Design and message. So if I hadn't been told that, I would have known to look for that,

but that was one of the first things I've ever taught. And so that's just been a topic that's just inherently interesting and valuable to me, because from the beginning of my encounter with the Bible, it's just had so much payoff, learning how to study what we now call literary design or structure of biblical books. So that's the reason it's important how the biblical authors organize what they're saying is just as important as what they're saying. And by structure you mean where literary units begin and end and then how different units are organized within. So what kind of patterns they create?

And when you say unit, Chris, what do you mean? Yeah, unit, I think we're using the word unit to describe any chunk of text, whether big or small. We have other specific words for the larger level. Units all the way to the micro level. So you can have a macro structure and a micro structure. Yeah, yeah, depending on the unit size you're talking about. Yeah, so let's paint that picture.

Let's start at the largest level which is a collection called the Bible. The Scriptures. The Scriptures. Remember, the word Bible never appears in the Bible to describe the whole collection. We're not going to call it the Bible anymore. Oh, no, that's fine. I don't know. I'm just talking about structure, it's helpful.

Yeah. Because it's a collection of Bible. It's a collection of Bible, because the word Bible is a Greek spelling in English, a Greek word, top of the book. This means book. It's a Greek translation of a Hebrew word, safer, which means scroll. Yeah. Okay.

There you go. The Sepharine.. Scroll what we call books. Our collection of scrolls is the scriptures. You got it. The biggest level is a collection of writings called the scriptures or the Bible. Then when you go down into the Christian Bible, there's two sub-collections,

the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament, and then the writings of the Apostles, or what Christians call the New Testament. So those are the two overarching macro collections. And then each of those have sub-sections, is what we call them. So the Hebrew Bible is organized into three sections, the Torah, the prophets, the writings, and then the New Testament has kind of macro divisions in terms of there's a huge foundation narrative the Gospels and Acts five scrolls and then after that comes the letters or the writings of the Apostles that go from Paul into the last book the Revelation then so each of those sections consists of a number of scrolls, and we call these books

in the Bible. 1.5% So what's interesting is there's differences between modern Christian Bibles, the division and number of scrolls, and how those same scrolls are divided up within the Hebrew Bible. So for example, if you go to a bookstore and get a Bible today, you'll see in the Old Testament a book called First Kings, and then another book called Second Kings. But those are considered one work. They're one literary work because they are. They originally were and they tell one story. Correct. That's right. In the Christian Bible, there's two books called Ezra Niyamaya. Those are one scroll in the Hebrew Bible. They were written and designed as one unified literary work.

And when we open, first or second kings, or Ezra or Niyamaya, we see chapters that start at the beginning of each of those books. So we might think that they're originally two separate works. That's exactly separate chapters, yet organizing them, but really they're one scroll, and so that actually gets us to the next layer down, which is... This how is a scroll organized? Yeah, so if you open modern Bibles, let's just go to the first book of the Hebrew Bible, Genesis. You open it up and it has a big one in front of the first words, meaning chapter one. And then there's little numbers, subscript numbers, dividing sentences that are called verses, chapters and verses.

Every book in our modern Bibles is divided up this way into chapters and verses. And they're very, it's a very helpful system, actually. It's useful. Yeah. So useful. We can all read the same thing it's a very helpful system, actually. It's useful. So useful. We can all read the same thing at the same time. Yeah, totally. So it's very useful. It's also important to recognize that that is not a division system original to these scrolls.

There were no chapters and verse annotations in any of the original biblical scrolls. Right, those were added from the 1200s to the 15th century. Yeah. The chapters, and then the verses later. Mm-hmm. And there were different paragraphing traditions in many different manuscript histories,

but the actual chapter and verses have a medieval origin. So that's interesting. In the Jewish tradition, for the Hebrew Bible, if you're educated in traditional Jewish educational settings like your neighborhood Yashiva or something like that, you are not taught. There isn't a chapter in verse division in the scrolls in those systems. In that tradition, each paragraph of every biblical scroll has a one word title, usually based off of the key word in that paragraph. And so if your rabbi says, everybody open up to Parashat Akeida,

then you know, like, oh, I'm going to what Christians call Genesis chapter 22. So you don't learn numbers in the Jewish tradition, you learn key words. Yeah, that's interesting. And that's the reference system. Isn't that cool? Yeah.

So it just goes to show that how we organize it is based on traditions. And in our paradigm, recovery effort, we want to ask, like, what's the original design organization of these scrolls that the authors want highlight for us? And it turns out that it's different than our modern chapter in verse structure. Yeah. So Genesis, for example, the author has designed the scroll through large scale

patterning, broken the book into four sections that we're calling movements. We've adopted a term from actually symphonies. How symphonies are organized with the term movements. I'm really happy with this development. I think it's a very helpful way to think about it. Right, so scrolls are broken down into movements, usually three to four, maybe five. Yep, kind of regardless of the size of the scroll, right? Yeah, so something small as Ruth has four, and something as large as Genesis has four. Yeah, like the scroll of Ruth is four chapters in my Bible.

Oh, yeah, so sometimes the movements will correspond to chapters, sometimes a lot. Yeah, like Ruth, it does actually. That's interesting, but Genesis is what? How many chapters?. A lot. Yeah, like Ruth, it does actually. That's interesting. But Genesis is what? How many chapters? 50. Yeah. 50.

And so these movements are like, we'll span many chapters. Right. We have four movements in the book of Genesis, and they don't actually correspond to chapters at all. They end in the middle or near the end of a chapter. OK, so actually here's a smaller, well let's finish the kind of the breakdown.

So let's say if Genesis has four movements, each of those movements has lower levels. It's like scales down into lower level groupings of smaller units within those units. Think of like the traditional Russian nesting dolls where there's a large doll and a medium, small, small, smaller, so biblical literature is organized like that. And a great example of this is actually the first main literary unit of the Genesis scroll has such a clear structure.

You can't miss it because it's organized in the seven days of the creation story. And as a shorthand, it's easy to refer to that as, oh, that's the Genesis one seven day creation story. But if you go read it, the seventh day has been chopped off of chapter one and made into the first three verses of chapter two. Why? I have no idea. It's like the least helpful organization you can imagine. Because we're like, why would a chapter begin in the culminating last moment of a story? So that's a good example. You must have a theory as to why. I mean, it seems like the six days definitely

are really unified in the seventh day is different. So maybe that literary structure is highlighting the difference, but it still is the seventh day of creation and it still has those overarching literary structures. Yeah. Or literary markers. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the seventh day culminates with the key words of the opening line of Genesis 1, 1, and 2. In other words, the author gives a very clear signal of the closing of a literary unit.

And that's how biblical authors do this. They give clues through word usage and conventions. Repeated words. Transition pieces, the beginning of a unit, the ending of a unit. And it requires a skill set to learn how to pick up those signals. But when you do, you can see the biblical authors have given an organizational design to how all these pieces of a scroll fit together. And when you follow it, it turns out that chapter divisions only sometimes help you see that. Yeah, so chapter divisions are helpful for reading and for all being on the same page and they are an interpretation of where units end, so a lot of times they're good, but sometimes they aren't paying attention to ancient conventions. So we're re-evaluating some of that.

One of the payoffs for this skill so far in the content library we have is Tim, what you've done with Read Scripture, which is showing the structure of a scroll. And you don't talk in terms of movements. And this concept of movements is also something that you've developed even further with a group of scholars that you collaborate with. So there's gonna be kind of a refresh of these walkthroughs eventually, but what I think people have already seen with those videos is how wonderful it is to see how a scroll is laid out. It's a design because it helps you not get lost

in the details, so it helps you remember where you are and why you are where you are and how it relates then to the overall message of that scroll. That's right. Yeah, I think it also gives a guide for maybe how much to read at a time or how to trace a theme through a section instead of just sitting down and reading as much as you can or a chapter a day or something to know that there are movements or even smaller units and you can read through a defined section of text that the author was shaping as a whole

and look for a theme within that section. I think that's a really big payoff too. 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc

1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc So, as we get deeper into movements, this is where we start talking about smaller literary units. And I don't think we're going to be able to talk. Yeah, not. We're not going to address that level of smaller level organization yet in that. Yeah, we're just going to start out with this basic idea of movements.

The biblical collection consists of subsections and each subsection has scrolls. Each of those scrolls has been organized by their authors to have a series of larger scale movements that organize the flow of the story into these, which is a handful of main pieces. And the main skill we want to help people develop is how to trace a line of thought or a theme through a literary movement as a whole, and that connects to the third and final skill. Yes. Well, and we didn't talk though about how the smallest level of literary units are just reading lines of Hebrew and seeing how each line is designed.

So we have these videos called Visual Commentary Videos where we'll jump in and we'll just look at maybe even just two verses that has four or five lines, or the whole prologue to John, which was probably, I don't know, 20 lines. And you can see actually the literary design of scripture at that level, too. Yeah, so the literary design of scripture at that level too. Yeah, so the literary design goes down to the level, well, it probably goes even beyond the level of the line, but that's what we're looking at.

And a good way to think about that is if you read poetry, if you're reading Hebrew poetry and you see two lines right in a row that seem to say a similar or same thing, you can tell their design to mirror each other and play off each other. That doesn't just happen in poetry, it happens throughout narrative too, but each line relates to the next and is designed intentionally. And so that happens, yeah, on the micro level, all the way up to the macro level, and it's the same kind of skill that you use at both levels. Yep. A good metaphor here is maybe like a large tile mosaic, like on the floor, on a wall.

And so when you back up from it, you see like, whoa, this is so beautiful. It's like a picture of whatever. The mosaic is that, let's say it's a portrait of a, I'm thinking of these mosaics of a synagogue called Dura Europa's right now. We talked about it. It's cool ancient synagogue from like I think the third or fourth century, 80. And there's all these cool, it's some of the oldest tile mosaic depictions of biblical stories in the synagogue. It's really cool. So some of them are big and you can back out and get the whole picture.

But what you could do is zoom in to any one section and then really pay attention to the meaningful organization of that, you know, maybe a two by two square. And then you could go in and just look at the organization of a little six inch by six inch square and be like, oh my gosh, like that section is super intentional too. That creates the effect when you're zoomed out, but you go in and like there's all these cool ways that's been organized that way. And that's basically it's on every level, from biggest down to small, literary design and structure, is a very meaningful way that the biblical authors communicate their messages.

And so we want to help people develop the skills to do that. And we're going to start with this in the app in 2022, with helping people see larger movements of biblical scrolls. Yeah, so we're going to be asking and inviting everyone to read along through the Torah in movements. And it's gonna be larger sections than chapters. And each movement has its own shape and its own kind of focus.

And so like in the Genesis scroll, there's four movements and they kind of follow kind of really four main characters. And within each movement, we're going to be tracing a biblical theme, which brings us to the third skill. Our three skills so far are style, structure, and now our third skill is patterns. Notice in biblical patterns.

Yeah, so let's keep running with the Tal Mosaic metaphor. So if you see there's being given a meaningful structure at every level of organization, what is it that tells you it's meaningfully organized? In a tile mosaic it'll be color patterns. It'll be, oh, here's like an orange stripe that goes down in this section. But when you really zoom in you say, oh, that's an organization of these orange tiles in this pattern to create the effect of a line through that whole section of the mosaic.

So when you're reading biblical literature, the analogy or the parallel to color in a mosaic is words. The repetition of words over different expanses of a scroll, connect ideas in the reader's mind that help you see a progression or development of whatever ideas signaled by that word. So again, these are things we've been showing and doing in our video content and podcast for a long time. Now we call them various titles,

but we've organized it all in a way that was helpful. I think you were the first one to organize it this way, John, how we've been doing pattern. Or just the levels, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this example or analogy of a mosaic seems really helpful because there could be like this pattern of orange tiles and then a splash of orange somewhere else that is just coincidental or not related.

But if it occurs in the same pattern, and then if it occurs another time in that same pattern again, then it increases the likelihood that that's a related pattern. It's not random. And I think that happens in the biblical text too. It's like you can go through and see a word that's repeated and you have to ask the question, is this intentional?

Is this a pattern being developed? Is there a cluster of repeated words? Is this random or is this a pattern? And so that's kind of the skill we're wanting to help the audience develop as we go through is to see where words are repeated intentionally and where they're forming patterns. That's right. So this can happen at different levels of scale,

just like the structure. So let's start with the smallest. The smallest level would be just studying an individual word in a, maybe a smaller, literary unit. So the word create in Genesis 1 or beginning. So one skill to develop is, how do you find out what the meaning of a word is? The ancient Greek Hebrew air-mat

represented in a translation, what are we reading? Like, how do you study words in the Bible? Just to figure out what they mean in the first place if you were wondering about that. And so we have, we've made video content about this. You and I, Chris, have both written word study videos and had conversations about them on the podcast. So words are the basic building blocks or the basic tiles of the mosaic of any scroll and mixing metaphors now. So that's the lowest level metaphor, developing skills to learn how to study words in the Bible,

slowest level. The next level up is when a word or related words gets repeated throughout a number of units in sequential order or just gets repeated throughout a larger like a literary movement of a scroll. And you keep seeing this word or this image. And when you see that happening and you compare the different places where it appear and you notice commonalities, what you're watching is a theme. That's our word for it.

Yeah, so this is like a key word, but then also it's related words, like it's synonyms. Yeah, synonyms and images. And also it synonyms. Yeah, synonyms and images. And all sorts of related images. Yeah. And as you trace that, you are seeing that it's rifting off a bigger idea. That's right. Yeah. That we call a theme. Any of our theme videos are examples of this, whether it's the water of life, water

in Genesis 1, the 7-day narrative, water in the Garden of Eden narrative, there's water in the flood story, and so on. And you're like, oh, I guess, and usually what happens at the waters, if you compare where it's, you're like, oh, that's connected in a thread. Yeah. And the same thing happens every time with water or, oh, it's reversed, but intentionally there, things like that, that when you're tracing these themes, you can see the meaning of the text. Yeah. So in that case, you could study the trace, the actual word, water, but related will be related images that also carry that theme forward like stream, or river, spring, spring, or well, or well, or sea, and as you go throughout the biblical story, biblical authors can pull up any of those

water words and be activating and caring for this theme. So learning how to study a theme through. Yeah, and this will be the main thing that the app is teaching is how to trace a theme through each movement. Yeah, that's right. So the main skill is how to how you can do this at home. You can do the magic trick By studying themes throughout larger sections of the biblical scroll. That's what the apps gonna focus on for 2022 I'm really excited about right. Oh well to be clear a section of the app. Yeah, that we're calling journey is going to be Hey, let's read the Bible movement by movement tracing different themes and so you'll be developing two skills A structure skill where you're seeing

how a skill is broken up into movements and then you're developing a pattern skill, which is you're able to then find the theme and watch the theme develop. And we'll do a new theme for every movement. That's gonna be just one section of the app. You can then get to another section of the app where we're just gonna have all the skills.

And you can then like develop those skills at your own pace and kinda see how our content libraries organize that way. Mm-hmm. So, we're not quite done with patterns, that was a little side bit there, but an important one. When you back out from just looking at one story, like water in a Genesis 1 story or water through a section of stories, what you'll notice is another level of patterning, and we call this narrative patterning.

So this is where a whole network of words that you would maybe not think are related. But all of a sudden, there'll be a story that starts using a whole bunch of words related to an earlier story. And what the biblical authors are doing is teaching you to see how these two narratives or units are patterned after each other. So for podcasts listeners, you already know this. This is how the Garden of Eden narrative, for example, the failure

narrative of Adam and Eve at the tree. That whole story is filled with so many words that you wouldn't think are related. Garden, tree, bush, beautiful, eating, good, desire, sea, take, nakedness, these kinds of things. And these are unrelated words, apparently, at least in terms of their meaning. But they're connected in one story. In a story, in a sequence. In a sequence.

And then you'll watch a later story about Abraham and Sarah going down to Egypt. We'll start to use a lot of those same words again. And the narrator is trying to invite you to see those in comparison to each other. So you call them both up in your mind and they become a point of meditation to reflect on those two stories together. So that's narrative patterning.

And then you can scale up even one level up bigger for what we're calling Melody, which is another term we're using from Symphony. So this would be a whole sequence of literary units, like a creation narrative with a seven-day pattern to the number seven, then a failure narrative, then a division story that leads to a crisis where God brings about some kind of de-creation, but rescuing a remnant and delivering them so that they can try and become Adam and Eve 2.0. And that sounds like such a complex story. You wouldn't imagine it would be repeated anywhere, but you're saying that's a melody

that gets played out over and over across these larger spans of text. Yes, exactly. So I just summarized Genesis 1 through 9, what we call in chapters, but that sequence and all the words in sequence in them can get repeated in a whole later section of narratives like a section of the Abraham story is organized in those same repeating patterns or melodies. So that's the level that we'll start to explore in the future. But right now, for what we're going to do in this year, it's going to be studying how scrolls are organized into movements, and then how movements you can follow, key repeated words and images through detrace the theme. That's a lot.

That's a lot. Style, structure, patterns. Patterns, yeah. Those are the skills, and the rabbit hole goes deep in all of them, but it's a great way to organize, and I've found it so helpful. I think everyone else will as well. And what it really does is it gives us a roadmap for how to then plug in the holes for the content

we're missing. We don't have a lot of good narrative patterning content yet, or we haven't talked a lot about the melody quite yet. Or literary units and how they work within a movement. We haven't done a lot of work there yet. So it shows us where the work is to be done here at Bound Project. So we've got a lot of work cut out for us, and we're super excited to jump in. But again, next year, reading

in movements, tracing themes, the very first movement you've already said is Genesis 1 through 11. And we're going to trace the theme of Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is one of our theme videos. It's the theme of God's Ruaq, the word Ruaq in Hebrew is breath or wind or spirit, and it shows up a lot in the first movement of Genesis. Yeah, so we chose that word or that theme, I guess, because it's a group of words, to look at in this movement. It doesn't mean it doesn't occur elsewhere. It doesn't necessarily mean it's the most important theme, but it's a skill that we're

wanting to practice, and it is one of many important themes in Genesis one through life. So yeah, we could have chosen almost any of the things that we're wanting to practice. And it is one of many important themes in Genesis 1 through 11. Oh yeah, we could have chosen almost any of them. Yeah, yeah. John, you have been in it more than I have, so you'll describe it better. But there's gonna be like an interactive reading experience. So you can read Genesis 1 through 11 in this cool way

that will kind of guide you to help see the repeated patterns throughout the process. Yeah, what we would like you to do is read through Genesis 1 through 11, and as you get to the pattern, you'll find the pattern, and then you can see what God's Ruhrah is doing there, and then you'll go and you'll collect all of these basically we're called them hits or we're called them links throughout the movement. And it'll be like actual words will be, there'll be something to make the words look special. Yeah little invite you to click on You'll find them you'll collect them. You'll you'll be able to reference them later and We'll do that holy spirit and movement one and then we'll move to Genesis movement two

Which is the Abraham narratives and we'll do a new theme. Yeah, and we'll do that throughout the whole Torah By the time we're done, we're gonna have understood the structure of the Torah. And so we'll have done a number of themes throughout all the movements. And this is all building towards a Bible reading experience where eventually you could be in any movement, tracing any theme, but it's gonna take us a while to get there.

So this is where we're gonna start. And it's gonna be wonderful. And the app is gonna be available wherever you download your mobile phone apps. And so we really encourage you to get the app and start this reading experience with us. On the podcast, we're going to actually next year go through and discuss all of these hits and more depth, all the hits for the themes and the movements. And so you can follow along in the podcast as well to even get deeper into this. So that's it.

Thank you. We have one more episode this year and it's just going to be a short episode where we reflect on the year and then we'll see you in the new year reading the School of Genesis. Good times. Thanks for listening to this episode of Bible Projects Podcast. Next week is the last week of the year. We've invited our CEO Steve Ackinson to join us for an end of the year recap.

We're going to look at everything that we did in 2021 and have a moment to be able to thank you for joining us this year. After that, it's January. And we're beginning a brand new reading journey. We're gonna start in the first movement of the first scroll of the Bible, the scroll of Genesis. And in that movement, we're gonna trace

the theme of God's Spirit. The basic image of Ruaach is breath. There's an invisible energy that I breathe in and breathe out at Ruaach. And then I look out in the world and I see the Ruaach blowing in the trees and the grass, and that's an animating energy. And it's the very thing that I take in. Calling God's invisible, energizing presence, Ruaach is a metaphor. Whatever beautiful mind is behind all of this,

the first uncaused cause, so to speak, that generates and animates all of this and sustains it. This must be a result of that being Ruach. Today's show is produced by Cooper Peltz, Dan Gummel and Zach McKinley are the editors and Lindsey Ponder with the show notes. Bible project is crowdfunded nonprofit. We exist to experience the Bible as a unified story

that leads to Jesus. Everything we make, all of our videos, this podcast, and the new app that you can download to get ready to do this reading journey with us, it's all free because of the generous support of people just like you. So thank you for being a part of this with us. Hi, this is Korkau and I'm from Kuala Longto, Malaysia.

Hi, this is Marissa and I'm from Seattle. I first set about Bible project back in 2014, obviously. I first heard about Bible project a long time ago. My favorite thing about the Bible project is how clear and accessible every video is and how the drawings add layers of meaning that can take you deeper into the text. I also like that while it's accessible for my children, it also introduces new areas of study to me, even though I've studied the Bible for many years.

My favorite thing about Bible project is how easily accessible it is, invite it internet and it is visually stunning and what I really enjoy most. It's how John always knows how to ask questions on our behalf, and how to reference it with the original text, to give us the right way of approaching the Bible. We believe the Bible is a unified story that leads to Jesus. We're a crowd-funded project by people like me. Find free videos, study notes, podcasts, classes, and more at BibleProject.tech.com