Theology in the Raw - 775: Old Testament in the Raw: Week 1

Episode Date: January 16, 2020

Preston started teaching an Old Testament course at an adult Sunday school class at his church and is going to be releasing these talks on this podcast. In this introductory lecture, Preston discusses how to read the Old Testament, the nature of divine inspiration, and gives an overview of OT history. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends, and welcome to a special edition of Theology in the Raw. What you're going to listen to in this episode is a recording of a Sunday school course, an adult Sunday school course that I just started teaching at the church that my family and I attend, Dry Creek Church. And this course is sort of an Old Testament survey course. We call it OT Dive, OT Dive. And we just started this week. And I'm going to be releasing these episodes on the podcast. Now, let me just give several caveats here. Number one, I recorded the class lecture discussion on a little lapel mic okay so the audio is not the best and I had my audio guy clean it up the best he could it's understandable but you'll hear noises in the background sometimes you'll hear ruffling of my shirt and even the the band starts

to practice halfway through it doesn't overpower the audio, but the audio is not going to be super, super clean. And the room is, it's an elementary school that we meet at. So it's not like acoustically made for a Sunday school class. So yeah, that's number one. Number two, I do a lot of kind of writing on the whiteboard, writing on my PowerPoint slides. I use like an iPad pro where I can write on the PowerPoint slides. I put a lot of pictures on there. So there's things going on in in the in the lecture that you're not going to be able to see because you're listening to just the audio of it. So, but you know, I wanted to release this on the podcast for a couple of reasons. Number one, I think there's might be people out there that would love to understand the Old Testament

better. Also, there's people in my Sunday school class that might have missed a Sunday here and there and would like to make it up. So I'm going to just record the lectures and release them on the podcast to make them available to the public for any of you out there that might want to listen to it, but also for those in the class that might have missed the lecture. So in this class, we discussed a bunch of introductory issues about the Old Testament, how to study the Old Testament, what is the Old Testament, what isn't the Old Testament. We looked at how to read biblical literature. The biblical literature is both a divine and human. And then towards the end, I, on my PowerPoint slide, I drew a timeline of the Old Testament and try to fill in some

of the major, you know, pieces of Old Testament history. So, again, towards the end of this episode slash lecture, you're going to kind of hear me interacting with the timeline that, you know, you're not going to have visual access to. So you're going to miss out a bit on that. I'm going to try that. This is something I didn't do in this, uh, lecture, but I'm going to try to do in the future is when somebody in the audience asks a question, I'm going to try to repeat it for the, the, my podcast listeners. Um, I didn't do that in this one, but as I went back and listened to the, um, the recording, you can actually hear the question that comes up.

It's a little faint. It's a little distant, but you can't actually hear it. So I don't think there'll be too much loss there. So anyway, without further ado, welcome to Sunday School in the Raw with Preston Sprinkle at Dry Creek Elementary, or Dry Creek Church that meets at Dry Creek Elementary. Okay, so welcome to OT Dive, class number one. I mean, this is kind of a class, but for those of you who don't like school, don't get too nervous. I'm not going to give you mandatory homework. I will suggest some things for you to get the most out of this. So, yeah, I'll explain a little more as we go along

like what we're gonna do in this class, the kind of pace, the level, the nature of it. Before we go any further, though, we do have some notes. Cody, do you wanna, Cody and Aubrey, you wanna pass those out? I think we made like 20 copies, which might cover everybody here. So do you guys prefer like something to write on? Is that okay?

I always do. Like I like to kind of know like where the teacher or professor is going. So anyway, my name is Preston Sprinkle and I'm going to be leading this class. Welcome, come on in. Let me just tell you a little bit about myself and and I I don't like I don't like talking about myself that's not the purpose of this but like if I'm listening to somebody I like to know a little bit about the person so um here is uh here's a picture a picture of me from fall of 1999 I I'm 44 now. How old does that make me then? I don't even want to do it.

I guess it's 20 years. So I think I was like 23 there. Does anybody want to guess where I am? Mining, close. It's actually, okay, it's in Jerusalem. But does anybody want to guess the specific archaeological site? Of course you're not going to get it, I don't think. This is inside a part of what's called Hezekiah's Tunnel.

Does that bring us any closer? Hezekiah's Tunnel, does that mean anything to anybody? No one's been to Israel, right? Is that where the water came in? Water source for Jerusalem? Yes. So, yes. So Hezekiah was one of the kings of Israel. And he was the king of Israel during one of the most, I mean, horrific and bloody sieges of Israel,

where King Sennacherib, one of the most vicious, bloodthirsty rulers of the ancient world, came upon Israel and sacked all the major cities surrounding Jerusalem. And then he marched on Jerusalem. Now, in the Old Testament period, Jerusalem was, it was set up kind of on a hill, the only, which is a great, like, defense. The only problem is its water source was outside the city walls. And so when somebody's going to lay siege to the city, what you do is you go inside the city walls and try to hold out and maybe, you know, you can wait it out or whatever. So when Sennacherib is marching on Jerusalem, he's about to lay siege to, well, about to, I mean, they know he's coming. Now the water

source is outside the city. They're not going to live very long without water. They'll live, what, three days and then they die. So they end up digging a near mile-long underground trench to funnel the water inside, underneath the bedrock, into the city, behind the city walls. What's so cool about this, and this is one of the many reasons why I actually believe the Bible, is that you can go to Jerusalem.

Oh, so it talks about this in the Bible. In 2 Chronicles, it says that Hezekiah stopped up the pool of Siloam, which was the pool with the water source for Jerusalem, and they dug that, and it says he dug a trench to funnel the water in. It's like, okay, well, is that true or not? Is that just myth? Is that just made up? Or, you know, well, no, you can go there today and you can walk through Hezekiah's tunnel, the near mile-long trench that he dug, and there's still water that goes from the spring that gave water to Jerusalem, and you can do that today. So 20 years ago, I can't believe it's been 20 years, 20 years ago I was in Israel studying the Bible, and one thing everybody does is walk.

If you go to Jerusalem, you walk through Hezekiah's tunnel. It's like the bucket list thing to do. But I was part of a class, and there was a local archaeologist who needed some manpower to unload dirt out of Hezekiah's tunnel. So it wasn't glamorous at all, it was just slave labor basically. So a bunch of students are excited to go do archaeological, an archaeological dig in Hezekiah's Tunnel, but we were just basically slave labor hauling dirt out. So anyway, that's me inside a little kind of nook in Hezekiah's Tunnel.

So I am originally from California, specifically the armpit of California, Fresno, California, big kind of farming community. Fresno's kind of like Boise, actually. So yeah, there's, you know, it's about the same size. Well, Fresno's about twice the size of Boise, but I mean, it has a similar kind of farming vibe. I lived for three years in Scotland, not just Scotland, but northeastern Scotland in Aberdeen, which is where two of my kids were born. So just to give you a point, so I mean Scotland's pretty north, right, pretty cold, and Aberdeen's like north Scotland, so we didn't see warm for like three years literally like one day it was 71 degrees and all the Scots were like staying inside because

they're gonna get like sunburned they're just sweating inside and it's crazy so um so here's Loch Ness over here what oh why was I there I was studying. I was finishing my schooling over there. Yeah, for three. The University of Aberdeen founded in 1490, two years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, which is pretty cool. I used to, my office as a student there, you get a PhD student, you get an office there, and it was in this little building, like 300-year-old building, called the Old Brewery. Now, like most British universities, they used to be training grounds for old monks. And back then, if you're studying to be a monk, you would get your ration of bread and beer every day for lunch. Sounds like a lot of people in Boise.

And I was in the building that used to be the old brewery where the monks would brew their beers. It was kind of interesting. So here's Loch Ness, and if you're a whiskey drinker, here's Speyside where all the good scotch is made, which I couldn't stand that stuff when I was there. I lived for two years in Ohio. And yeah, that excitement is about, reflects the two years.

I was outside of Dayton, Ohio, teaching at a Christian university called Cedarville University. I did have my son in Ohio. Five years back in Southern California, teaching at a small Bible college called Eternity Bible College, population 100 students. And then even though we only had a handful of students, I decided to move to Boise Idaho in May for on May 1st 2014 to start an extension campus here that's why I came to Boise is to say we need to have a Bible college here and that lasted about two years and can't have a college without students makes it a little bit problematic so we ended up closing down the campus so anyway that's a little bit about me. I have four kids.

Busy Mark four kids, eight years ago. I thought this was how old they were when we moved to Boise, but this is not, right? No, no. Because Cody here, I think Cody, you were what, two here or something? Maybe? I don't know. But you were five when we moved up, so yeah, there's no... I just wanted to embarrass my kids by showing that picture, so...

Okay, overview of the course. The way I read the Bible and study the Bible, what I love about the Bible is I love to go where the text leads. This has been my DNA from the time I became a Christian at the age of 19. I'm 44 now, but a Christian at 19. And just from the time I was 19, I just fell in love with the Bible. I always wanted the Bible to take priority over my presuppositions of what the Bible must say and what God must be like.

And, you know, a lot of us maybe come from a different theological tradition. You know, maybe it's Methodist, Baptist, maybe it's Reformed or Wesleyan, if these categories mean anything to you. And, you know, and that's fine. We all have kind of presuppositions or certain denominational backgrounds that we come from. But at the end of the day, I'm just a huge fan of going where the text leads, of looking at the text and not imposing kind of like theological presuppositions of, well, this doesn't make sense because God's not like that, or God can't do this, or this text must mean this because I already know this about God. No, we need to go where the text leads and let the text of Scripture form our conception of what God is like.

So in this course, I really just want to pay close attention to what the Bible's actually saying, and not race so quickly to say, you know, to try to put God in some kind of box with the text. So this is going to be a very kind of text-focused class. The level of the course, so all I'm doing is taking my notes, my slides, from a college, a freshman year college level course that I taught for probably eight years. I taught it on a semester level, the whole Old Testament in 14, 15 weeks for a few years. the whole Old Testament in 14, 15 weeks for a few years. And then I taught it for the last seven years as a two-semester course. So what is that?

It took 28 weeks to get through the Old Testament. So I'm going to keep it at that level. Freshman year, college-level course. I'm not going to assume that you know a lot about the Old Testament, but there are going to be times when we are going to go deep. I'm not going to assume that you know a lot about the Old Testament, but there are going to be times when we are going to go deep. I'm not afraid of going deep. Now, if I do go deep and say, well, this Hebrew word means this, or this, you know, archaeological find, whatever, I will try to explain that. So if you really don't have any context for that, I'll try to make it clear

to you. And again, I said this is open to any age group i see several teenager-ish people here um so so i want to make sure that we are all on the same page so there will be times when i might explain things so basically that some of you might be like oh my gosh don't we already know this you know but some of us might not okay and other times i'm gonna i will go really deep and some of you might be like, whoa, like this is way beyond where I'm even at. But again, I'll try to explain it clearly so that we don't lose anybody. We will discuss a lot of just information. I am, I mean, I'm an information junkie.

I'm a history junkie. I love learning just facts. history junkie. I love learning just facts. However, my ultimate goal is that this biblical information will lead to spiritual formation. Okay, now we may go a long time like talking about just facts, facts, and we're really understanding what the text is saying, but the ultimate goal is that we will say, OK, what does this mean for our view of God and our relationship with God in response to that? We will, as far as the pace goes, we are going to start off slow. I think I think there are some really fundamental things about the Old Testament, about Genesis in particular. Genesis in particular, I mean, like Genesis 1 and 2 is so foundational for having just a biblical worldview, understanding the flow of Scripture.

I mean, even in the New Testament, we constantly see like Jesus and Paul referring back to Genesis 1 and 2 to make their point. And so we really need to get a good grasp of the early chapters of Genesis. And then as it starts to progress, we'll go a bit faster. Some Sundays we might even cover like a whole book or half a book in one Sunday. Questions, questions, questions. I'm a huge fan of being able to ask anything, anything. And I know some, you know, I've talked to some of you and you're like, man, in my church growing up, we couldn't ask any. Like you start asking a question like, I don't know, like I'm not I'm struggling with this text or I don't know, does God really like that?

Or there was like no room to question anything. I want this to be the opposite. I want you to be able to ask any question you want as hard as it is or even like, hey, I'm really doubting God right now. And this text seems to paint God in negative light. Like, what do we do with that? Like, I'm totally fine. In fact, I encourage those kind of honest, honest questions. And if you do have a question along, I'm fine with you raising your hand. But I will also try to like break for questions throughout as well. So if

maybe I'm right in the middle of a point, you have a question and you want to write it down, or if you want to stop me, that's okay too. I can't, I'm not going to promise that I have all the answers, by the way. The Old Testament is a big book. I mean, it's many books, actually, written in a language that we don't speak, two different languages that we don't speak anymore, and a culture that we're very unfamiliar with.

There's a lot there, and even though I've been studying it for a long time, I don't know more than I actually know. How did Bilbo say it? I don't know. than I actually know. Is that? How did Bilbo say it? I don't know. He said something like that in Lord of the Rings. Homework. Okay. No. I'm not going to give you mandatory homework. And even if I did, I have no way to reinforce it.

So it doesn't matter even if I did give mandatory homework. But it would be very helpful for you to read along in the Old Testament ahead of time the portion we're going to discuss. Now today we're just going to keep talking about big picture introductory stuff, so we're okay now, but if you did want to get the most out of this, and if you think you might be able to come most Sundays, I would begin reading through the book of Genesis and familiarize yourself with that if you haven't done so recently. Because sometimes I might be talking about a passage and we're not going to have time to like read through Genesis 37 to 50 when we're talking about Joseph.

You know, I might refer to different events and you would get more out of the discussion if you were somewhat familiar with with what i'm talking about so that that would be um what i would recommend um you're like well man i can't read through the whole testament um you could um but there are certain portions that would be more helpful than others. So just for now, if you really want to spend the next few weeks reading through a certain section, I would say Genesis 1 through Exodus 19. So all of Genesis and the first half of Exodus. I know that's a lot, but it'll probably take us about at least a month to cover

that section. So in a month, you can, it's not that much, what, two or three chapters a day, maybe? It's not that much. Now I say Exodus 19, because that's the, that's all history. Genesis 1 through Exodus 19 is all stories and history. You get the kind of historical backbone to everything we're talking about. The beginning in Exodus 20, that's the Ten Commandments, and then the rest of Exodus. I'm not saying don't read it, but you get chapters of how to build a tabernacle with precise dimensions. You get a bunch of laws that are a little hard to understand, which again, I'm not saying that's not, it's all inspired, it's all good, but even if you wanted to be a bit selective, I can't read the whole Old Testament,

if you could read as much of the historical portions as you could, that would be really, really helpful for this class. So for now, for the next few weeks, Genesis 1 through Exodus 20 would be really helpful. Okay. Any questions so far about anything I've said so far? And by the way, I'm deaf in my left ear. And I don't know if you can hear it, but I hear a massive just hum in my good ear.

Is that okay? It's not just me. So if you speak up and I don't hear you, it's not because I'm ignoring you necessarily. It's probably because I didn't hear you. So no questions so far? Okay. Alright, let's keep

going. Introduction to the Old Testament. How many books are there in the Old Testament? Just getting us warmed up with some facts. 39! 39! Is that right?

It is, and you know it's funny. It's 39. Not 49. It's 39. I just wrote that real quick this morning. was like yeah it's 39 because it's 27 in the new testament 66 total and 39 in the old testament all right so um now um what is i mean the old testament um does anybody know what the word testament means?

Testament comes from a Latin word, testamentum or whatever, which means covenant. So you could say, you know, this is an Old Testament class, and we've read the New Testament. All that means is the Old Covenant, New Covenant. Testament class, and we read the New Testament. All that means is the Old Covenant and New Covenant. The titles of these two sections of Scripture are named after two covenants that occur in Scripture, the Old Covenant and New Covenant. Even the term Old Covenant comes from 2 Corinthians 3,

where Paul says, when the Jewish people read the, and he says the Old Covenant, and in the Latin people read the, and he says the Old Covenant, and in the Latin translation of the New, he's, you know, the Old, I don't know the term Old in Latin, but the Old Testamentum. So that's where we get the term covenant. Now, the Jewish, some people refer to the Old Testament as the Jewish Bible or the Hebrew Bible because it is the Bible of Judaism. Jews don't call it the Old Testament. In fact, that's kind of almost offensive.

It assumes that there is such a thing called the New Testament. It assumes the veracity, the truthfulness of Christianity. So, yeah, when I'm in more broader kind of academic settings, we refer to it as the Hebrew Bible. Because if you say Old Testament, it's kind of biasing the conversation. So the Jews call it the Tanakh. Or Tanakh. Based on the acronyms, maybe I'll do this. I can do this here.

So the Tanakh comes from three sections of script. You know what? Let me do this. It's probably going to be better if I do it black. T, N, and K. Has anybody heard Tanakh? Is this completely new? Or would it be like, yeah, I've heard Jews talk about the Tanakh?

No? Okay. So the Jews divide it in three sections. T, the Torah, which means law or instruction. The Nevi... Let's see, I think you'd spell it something like this. The Nevi'im, or the prophets, that's the Hebrew, Nevi'im is the term for the prophets, and then the Ketuvim, which means the writings. So the whole Old Testament, they would, see, they wouldn't say, oh, they would say the

whole, they would say the Tanakh is divided in three sections. The law, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The Nevi'im, the prophets, which is like Joshua through, let's just say, second kings. Joshua judges Samuel kings. And then the writings is where they put a lot of the poetic books, Psalms, Ecclesiastes. They would actually put Ruth in the writings. And so the Jewish Bible, if you were to open up like a Hebrew Bible, they would have the same number of books, same content, but it would actually be in a slightly different order.

Because they do, the first five books are the same. Most of the prophets would be the same, but they include like, you know, Joshua, Judges, they call those prophets. And then they call like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, which that's when we think the prophets, we think those books, they would include all of that under the prophets

as part two. And then the writings, the Psalms and Proverbs and all those would be at the end part three. I don't want to go any deeper than that right now because it's not that important. Just know that, oh yeah, yes sir. Why didn't you rearrange them? Okay, that leads into the next, this is why we rearranged them. The LXX, does anybody know what the acronym L, I mean, it's going to sound like I'm not responding to your question, but I actually am. Anybody know what LXX stands for? It's a number, 70. Okay, wait, what's that called? The Roman numerals, right? L stands for 50, X is 10, X is 10, so LXX means 70. This is the acronym that people use to describe the Septuagint.

Does anybody know what the Septuagint is? Have you heard that? What's that? Not quite. Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. In about 150 BC, a bunch of Jewish scribes, 70 according to tradition, hence LXX70,

70 Jewish scribes went and translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek because most of the Jewish people in 150 BC were speaking Greek, especially if you were living outside of Israel at that time, so they couldn't even really read their own Bible. And so they had 70 bilingual Jewish scribes go in, and according to tradition, it's probably fabricated to some extent, each individual scribe went into a room by themselves, translated the whole Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek. And when they came out, all 70 translations were exactly perfect, perfectly aligned.

They were all matched. It was a miracle here. So they kind of validated the Greek translation of the Old Testament. So the question, why did we rearrange the order? For whatever reason, when the Septuagint caught on, it had the order that we follow today, or I should reverse that. Our English translations follow the order of the Septuagint because the Septuagint became the version of early Christians. the version of early Christians. Most Christians running around in the first century were reading out of the Septuagint,

not the Hebrew Bible, simply because most of them didn't speak Hebrew anymore. And then, and again, this is, I don't want to get too, but Septuagint became the basis for the Latin translation. Latin became the basis of the whole early, the whole church for a thousand years. English translations were kind of based on the order of the Latin.

So our order follows the arrangement that the early Christians have been reading since the first century. Since the first century. And you know what's interesting too, side note, most New Testament quotations of the Old Testament were actually from the Septuagint.

Again, because most New Testament writers spoke Greek, and then almost every New Testament Christian spoke Greek, and so the Greek translation was the translation they used. What's cool about that is that the biblical writers or even Jesus who is often quoting from the Septuagint, that kind of validates

the whole idea of reading out of a translation. Because sometimes critics will say like, or maybe even you're like, you know, you're looking at your English Bible and you're like, well, I don't know, does this actually represent the original manuscripts? The Bible wasn't written in English. Is this authoritative or just the 2000-year-old manuscripts authoritative? The fact that Jesus and the New Testament writers quoted from the Septuagint, that shows that they saw a translation of the original as authoritative. Now certainly there might be some translational difficulties, and we can work through that, but just because you're reading out of a translation doesn't mean you're not reading out of an authoritative, the authoritative word of God.

The Bible, the whole Bible, but the Old Testament was written by god and humans um i don't want to get too deep here but um this really is important to understand that that the bible because we christians rightly emphasize the bible as the word of God, the word of God, this is God's word to us, we could fall into the danger of not appreciating the fact that it is also written by real earthy humans. It's kind of like, is Jesus God or man? Well, he's both, 100%, 100%, right? He's both 100% divine, 100% human. 100% 100% right he's both 100% divine 100% human scripture is also 100% divine but also 100% human um second timothy we won't go there just for the sake of time but second timothy 316 says that um all scripture is inspired by god literally the greek word is theopneustos, breathed out by God.

What that means is not that some human fell into a trance. He's foaming at the mouth, and he's just writing scripture with no clue what he's doing. He's just as surprised at what's there that you are. But that's not what it means to be inspired. Inspired means that God worked through human writers in their humanity, which is why, if you study the Bible closely, you will see different writing styles. You will see, like, you read Paul's letters, and he was writing these letters in real time, with a real context, a real urgency in view, a real historical situation. And same thing with the Old Testament. When we're reading the Old Testament, we're not reading, it's not like the Old Testament

just kind of fell out of the sky and we're like, all right, God, what did you have to say to that? It is divine, absolutely, but it's also written by humans in their own context. And there's tensions there, I understand, but we need to somehow not overemphasize one over the other. We need to ask the question, what did the human writer mean when he said this or said that? The Old Testament is a narrative or a story. It's not just a bunch of events that occurred side by side.

And again, for the sake of time, I'm not going to actually, I'm not going to look at this example. It would probably take too long. But here's the point. going to look at this example. It would probably take too long. But here's the point. When we're reading the Old Testament, we need to not just look at what is being said, but how it is being said. This example here that I give is, I'll just briefly maybe explain it. Genesis 18 is the whole story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

And there's some real kind of shady things that happen in Sodom. Okay, attempted gang rape. Town tries to rape two angels, actually. I mean, they thought they were men. They were actually angels. I mean, one of those kind of like PG-13, if not R-rated stories in the Bible. There's many of them, by the way. Well, Judges, the story of Judges, it's interesting. It's a very similar story. And the author of Judges retells a different story, but uses the exact same phrases and language of Genesis.

a different story, but uses the exact same phrases and language of Genesis. And so there, we need to recognize, oh, two events happen that are similar to each other, that's the starting point, but we also need to pay attention not just to what happened, but how the author is describing it. Why is he describing this other event with almost identical language as the former event? with almost identical language as the former event. And it just so happens that one of the themes in Judges is what some people call the Canaanization of Israel. Israel failed to drive out the Canaanites, and now they are becoming one of them.

Israel is becoming like Canaan. And the author describes this other event in such a way to show that you Israelites are acting just like the Sodomites acted before. Those evil, wicked Sodomites that you guys hate, you think they're the scum of the earth, you're doing exactly the same things they're doing. But we get that really powerful, practical, scathing point by looking

at the way the author is writing. The authors are, the biblical authors are brilliant artists. Some of you may have, you know, attend secular university and, you know, sometimes some colleges have like a Bible as literature class. And some Christians get annoyed at that. It's not just literature. It's God's word. And that's true. But it's not an either or. Like there's a reason why even non-Christians look at the Bible and want to study it for its literary power because it's beautiful, super creative literature. There's not one sentence, one word that's there just haphazardly. The biblical authors were historians, they were prophets, and they were also amazing artists.

So we'll keep looking at that. That'll keep coming up throughout this class. We're going to pay attention to how the authors are describing the events. The Old Testament is fundamental for Christians. This is one of my biggest pet peeves, is Christians race to the New Testament. They spend all their time in the New Testament. But thinking the Old Testament's just old. And for the Jews, or, you know, the Old Testament's all about, like, works,

and the New Testament's about grace, which is just not true. You see both works and grace in both Testaments. But when 2 Timothy 3.16 said that all Scripture is inspired by God, the New Testament hadn't been written yet. When he says all Scripture was inspired by God,

he's basically saying the whole Old Testament is inspired by God. Not that the New Testament isn't, but I mean, when the New Testament talks about the Scriptures, it's primarily talking about the Old Testament. Testament talks about the scriptures, it's primarily talking about the Old Testament. The Bible, according to, well, the Bible for the first century Christians was simply the Old Testament. This is why we see so many quotes from the Old Testament when the New Testament is actually being written.

They are constantly going back to the Old Testament. So I think that one of the reasons why I love the Old Testament is not because I don't love Jesus, but because it's so necessary to understand the Old Testament, to understand so much about the Christian faith, not just background to the Christian faith. Okay, how to read Old Testament literature. I'm going to give three different kind of approaches that some people take. And I don't think people necessarily call these approaches,

you know, the historical approach or whatever, but some people approach the Old Testament only as a historical document. Which it is. I believe in the historicity of the Old Testament. But some people, when they read the Old Testament, they only focus on historical questions like, well, how many animals were in the ark?

Could they actually fit there? And where is the ark? And how could they actually fit there? And where is the ark? And what about the Ark of the Covenant? Can we go find it? Or, you know, they only look at it as a source of historical facts. And then sometimes there can be problems. There will be problems we'll have to face between, like, archaeology and the Old Testament.

And, whoa, these things don't match up. And what do we do with that so some people devote their entire lives to defending the historicity of the Old Testament and I think that's a valid very valid thing to do um yes the Bible is historical but it's not just historical it's not historical like, I don't know, like the evening news. This kind of breaks down because the news is so biased these days on both ends that it's hard to get it unbiased. But, you know, back in the day, you know, 40 years ago, maybe, you know, you have a news outlet that would simply report what happened today. Just, you know, okay, it's snowing in Boise, and there was a bank robbery downtown,

and, you know, the Dodgers are going to win the World Series this year, or whatever, you know. It was just kind of disconnected facts. That is not what the Old Testament is like. It's not just like a random, like, okay, the flood occurred, and then next on the scene, Abraham, and then later on joseph and then oh and then they went down to egypt and then they got delivered from egypt and it's not just a bunch of disconnected events laid down side by side it is a as i said before a coherent story and narrative being being built so other people look at the Old Testament as just kind of like an example of

how to live. So they kind of only go to the Old Testament to find moral examples of how to be a better person. Let's look at David and how great David was, and let's live like David. Or look at Moses, and let's lead like Moses. Or, you know, Abraham, we need to have faith like Abraham. And again, none of this is, well, there are some moral examples of how to live in the Old Testament. But what would be one big problem with this moral approach? What's that? Oh, that's good. Okay. It's based on law and a lot of screw ups. I mean, if you really look at these characters, I think we, we, we have read some of these moral figures with really fogged up lenses. I mean, David, a man after God's own heart, and when we

think, man, this guy was such a righteous dude. David also coveted, lusted, committed adultery, tried to get him drunk so he would sleep with his wife, and when he refused, and he had the guy killed. Uriah the Hittite actually was one of his closest guardians, like the Navy SEALs of the king. He was one of his... And then he lied about... Yeah, he had one of his best friends killed. I personally don't know... I've never met a human as sinful as David, me personally,

who murdered his own best friend because he had an affair with the guy's wife and he tried to cover it up. I don't know about you. Abraham actually prostituted his wife on one occasion. And he lied twice, and he doubted God on several occasions. And I don't want to take away from the good things that some of these people did,

but if you actually look at these characters, without, again, reading into them, maybe some presuppositions of what we think. Most of the people in the Old Testament are really bad people. And I'm actually going to highlight that in the class, because I think the good things they've done is maybe overly highlighted. And I am going to kind of give the other side of the dark coin here. And I am going to kind of give the other side of the dark coin here. If we do look at moral figures in the Old Testament,

we should not just say, ooh, here's an example of how to live. We almost want to say, here's an example of how not to live in many occasions. And that's okay because the point, these characters aren't there to show us how to live. These characters are there to show us a great God that we serve. The main point of the Old Testament is not, here's a good moral example of how to live, but here's a great God who uses inadequate people to fulfill his purpose. So the main thing we need to focus when we're reading the Old Testament is what I call a theological approach. We need to ask the question, what does this story, this event, this character, what does it teach us about God?

And so throughout this course, as long as it may go, I don't even know when this course is going to end, but we're constantly going to be asking, what does the flood teach us about God? What does Abraham teach us about God? Jacob and Esau, what does this story teach us about God? That's the primary question that we are going to be asking throughout this course.

Any questions so far on that? And again, nothing is off the limits. We have about, we've got a good 10 more minutes or so. Yes? So up here you skipped over some of these, but the one that says Ruth after Judges? Yes, that's a good, okay, so that was under the Old Testament as a narrative, that things are arranged in a certain order with a certain purpose. It is fascinating that the book of Judges is about a bunch of big, powerful Israel men screwing things up. Like the book of Judges,

and we'll get here, but it's going to be so long that you won't remember this when we get there. The book of Judges is like, it's a downward spiral. It's showing human failure just getting darker and more twisted and worse and worse

and worse and worse and worse. And it's a bunch of Israelite men that are screwing things up. After Judges ends, I mean, Israel is just, I mean, it is just a sick and twisted society. The next book, Ruth, is about what? A foreign woman. You see, some people think that the Old Testament is very misogynistic, anti-woman.

And there are some statements, I'll grant it. You read the Old Testament, like, whoa, that wouldn't fly today. Whoa, like that wouldn't fly today. But there are, you see this throughout the Old Testament, critiquing people who are in positions of power, who abuse that power, and elevating the marginalized who have been pushed out by the elite. So here you have Israelite male military leaders

just becoming worse and worse and worse. Right after that, you have ruth the first verse in ruth in the time when the judge is judged it gives the other side of this coin in the middle of this dark time of israel's history we see a foreign woman a foreigner who is actually demonstrating more faithfulness to the israelite god than all these big, powerful Israelite men. So the whole example there is just, we can't just read Judges, close the book, okay, next book, Ruth. It's like, there's actually significance to these books being placed side by side.

They should actually be read together. Maybe not in one city. That would take a while. But they're designed to kind of offset each other. And what's interesting is what happens at the end of Ruth. What's the beautiful main point at the end of Ruth? Is that the relationship between Ruth and Boaz ends up beginning the lineage that leads to King David, which leads to Jesus.

Like, there's so much Jesus in the book of Ruth. So all these things are all, it's all, it's how it all fits together. Okay. Let me do, I want to do an overview of Old Testament history. And in your notes, I have, I wrote out kind of like a bunch of stuff here that kind of summarizes the flow of the whole Old Testament. But I also have this timeline that i wrote out for you let's do

let's do yellow it looks something like that i'm going to draw my i'm going to draw mine in one line you you have yours in in two there and i'm going to explain why I do the timeline the way I do. So this is Jesus. This would be zero. That's a zero, not an O. It'll get clearer in a second. This is all B.C. B.C. stands for?

Before Christ, okay? And this right here would be AD. And AD stands for? No. We all make this mistake. It can't be after death, because if BC is like from Jesus' birth before,

80 is after his birth, but where's the 30, we just, what about the 30 years that he actually lived? 80 is from zero, it's the Latin, anno domini, in the year of our Lord. So you have, which is, okay, so this is English, before Christ, anno

domini, in the year of our Lord. So that's 80 is, you know, everything from zero on. Even the BC thing is messed up because technically Jesus was actually born in about four or five BC, which doesn't make sense. How is he born before he was born? It's because the calendar, they messed up on the calendar. They missed it by about four or five years.

Anyway, that's for a new testament class. Okay, so that's zero. So then over here, oh shoot. Yes. The Jewish people, they still use AD even though they don't believe in it. No.

That's a great question. Jewish people often use this,, they have their own calendar. I think it's the year like 500, 5000 or something. But because the Christian calendar is global, you know, they would go by that. If they if they use our calendar, they would say BCE before the common era, and then CE the common era. And that's the secular way of doing BCAD. So, yeah. I did my

last degree at a secular university, so I had to, all my, even though it was on the Bible, I had to say BCE and CE because I just have to do that. But yeah, so BCE and CE. Okay, so over here you have zero, Christ, this is creation. Do I dare put a date on creation? Divide the room here. What's the earliest? The earliest creation, the youngest, I guess, creation could have been? Does anybody know that number? There's actually a specific number.

What's that? Yes! Now I'm going to, 4004 B.C. I'm going to put a question mark there. So an 18th century scholar by the name of James Bishop Usher, who was a brilliant scholar. I think he might have been a lawyer. I forget. Maybe a priest.

I don't know. But he went through all the genealogies of the Bible, which is a lot. And I don't know who would really want to do that. But he went through all the genealogies, all the numbers, added it all up, and da-da-da-da. And he came up with the date. Creation started in 4004 BC. Now,

there's several, I'll just say, let me just say potential problems there. One, the genealogies aren't necessarily designed to be mapped perfectly on each other, and also there's, we know there's gaps in genealogies. You know, if I say, if my son Cody has a son, and he has a son, and he has a son, my great-great-grandson, I could just say that's my son, my descendant, my offspring, even though there's like several gaps in that genealogy. But we'll get to that later. I don't even know what the oldest, an old earth creation, 4,000, 4.5 billion years or whatever. I don't know. We'll get into that a little bit,

but I don't want to fight the breakout because sometimes the age of the earth can be really contentious. I'll tell you kind of where I lean and why, but we're not, so that's creation there. I'm going to put a date here, 586, which this is going to be one of the most important dates you're going to need to know in this class. Does anybody want to take a stab at what happened in 586 BC, one of the most significant events in the Old Testament? No, no, not the flood. The flood would be

way back here somewhere. We don't really know the date of the flood. Third and final exportation to Babylon. Third and final exportation to Babylon. Or that and the destruction of the temple, the beginning

of the 70 years of exile. There was one deportation in 606 B.C. That's when Daniel got taken away to Babylon. Then again in 597 B.C. There was another kind of deportation. And then the ruler over Israel, who was supposed to be like, you know, kissing Babylon's ring, stop doing that. So Babylon says, all right, we're finished. We're done with this. So they go and they destroy the temple in exile, take a bunch of people back

to Babylon. And that begins this exile period when the Jews are living in Babylon. So what happens here? What are these two lines? One's up here, then one's down here. What happens right here? Yes, split between Israel and Judah. The kingdom is divided. Israel, in the book of Samuel, they finally get a king. King Saul. Then after Saul comes who? David.

Saul is ruling over the whole land. David ruling over the whole land. Who comes after David? Solomon rules over the whole land. At the death of Solomon, there's a big feud, and all of a sudden they can't reconcile, and so the kingdom divides. There's now a northern kingdom in the north, and then a southern kingdom in the south. The kingdom in the north is just called Israel, and the kingdom in the south is called Judah.

So you have two kings ruling over each part of the land, land until in 722, Assyria comes and exiles the northern kingdom. Gone. They destroy the northern kingdom, and they actually bring over a bunch of Assyrians, and they interbreed with the Israelites, and what do you call, this is not like a bar joke or something, but what do you call when you cross an Assyrian with an Israelite? You call it that, a Samaritan. So the Samaritans are kind of a half-breed, half-Assyrian, half-Israelite. So they exist for all this time. So when you get to the New Testament, Samaritans, they have a bad rap because they're the offspring of these evil Assyrians blended with the Israelites.

What works? Can we keep going? Yeah. You don't have to get anywhere. You're just going to church right in the half an hour. So, okay. If anybody needs to leave, like you're going to ditch church, we all know who you are. But you can get up and go.

Okay. So, I'm going to give three dates here. And these are easy because they're well-known figures. And they're spaced about 500 years apart. So this is going to be 2000 BC, 1500 BC, and 1000 BC. The three figures are, I'm going to call them, I'll just call them A, but Abraham, Moses, and David. So they're about 500 years apart. Abraham was born around, I mean, give or take, I think it was really like, I think Abraham was born in 2150 or something like that. But we'll just say 2000 BC, Moses around 1500 BC,

David around 1000 BC, and then the kingdom divides in 930 BC. And then this whole, like, I'll just say this. Prior to Abraham, the chronology the dating is really tough to is really tough just determining biblical chronology these dates actually takes a lot of historical archaeological work to come up with these dates now we have this thing called google and books and stuff where this is well everything i'm saying here is well established.

I'll take my word for it. But the original people who were able to say David lived in 1000 BC and Abraham in 2000 BC, it requires looking at Hittite dating and events in Persia. And it just actually takes a lot of work. So once we go before Abraham, it gets really, really, really difficult to date something. Like somebody said, you know, the flood, man, we

really don't, the flood is really tough, tough to date. We can't put a specific date on the flood. Some people say like 3000 BC, some say way before. It's just, it's really hard to think. Good question. Written? Or it's just really hard to say. Do you know when the Old Testament books are written? Good question.

Written? It's determining who wrote the books is actually really hard. Some of them it's easy. Guess who wrote the book of Jeremiah? Jeremiah. We know he wrote it probably in exile sometime. Ezekiel wrote Ezekiel, probably in exile. But who wrote Judges? We have no clue. So when the books are written a little harder, the first five books I think were written by Moses. Most evangelical

Christians do. You should be aware that that would be mocked by some secular historians. But I think there's really good evidence that Moses did write. So that would be 1500 BC when Genesis through Deuteronomy were written. But the events within the books, that's easy to place. So like judges, So like judges, I'm going to say, I don't want to get this too messy, but judges happened right around about, yeah, 1370 to about 1050. The events of the book of Judges. Okay. Now, again, I'm not saying that's exactly when they were written some biblical books can record things that happened hundreds of years before because they had this beautiful thing called oral tradition that was incredibly accurate when you don't have a cell phone you don't have

you don't know how to read and write uh you're relying upon oral tradition and saying things and memorizing things i mean the things that people could memorize, it wouldn't be abnormal for a rabbi to have memorized, like, the Old Testament. Like, that's just not humanly possible. It's still crazy, but back then, people's minds, that's just how their minds were wired. So, yeah, so let's see, the events. So would you say that the first five are written around 1500, Yeah, so the, let's see, the events. Yeah, yeah.

So I would say the rest, a lot of books were written, well, most of the prophets, if you go Isaiah through Malachi, okay? And those were all, as far as we know, Jonah's the only one that has a big question mark behind it. But from Isaiah through Malachi, those books are all written during this time period here. Yeah, so most of the writing happened after 1000 BC. And the big thing, too, is we don't have evidence. They're written in Hebrew, right? We have... Hebrew really came into being... Well, again, I'm going to have to say the time of Moses

if I say he wrote it, but we don't have really a lot of archaeological evidence of the Hebrew language until about 1200 BC, 1000 BC. So the writing activity happened a lot after that. Yeah, yes. When did it actually come together as a complete Old Testament? Yes. It was probably finalized in the late first century, the Old Testament.

I mean, you've got to understand, in the late first century, the Old Testament. I mean, you've got to understand, in the ancient world, we're talking about scrolls and a collection of scrolls. It's not like nobody in the ancient world walked around with their Hebrew Bible. This didn't happen for hundreds and hundreds of years later. So yeah, so when Moses wrote the Pentateuch, sorry, the first five books, the Torah,

that was collected in five scrolls, and that was carried around, and then who knows what the next book chronologically was. Maybe it was Joshua. Maybe it was some, well, certainly some psalms were being written. So you have books being written, recognized as authoritative,

and then they're slowly being kind of collected in this collection of authoritative scrolls. But in terms of becoming one body of literature, 39 books, no more, no less, that would have been finalized in the late 1st century AD. There was a couple books that were questionable. Song of Songs. You guys read that recently? Yeah, it's pretty racy, right? Kind of a little bit like, whoa, is that referring to what I think it is?

So some Jewish people were like, we can't have this in our Bible. And then Ecclesiastes had some rough go at it. Very pessimistic book, if you read it. And there's a few others they were like, well, we're not sure if these are in. But most of the Old Testament books were immediately recognized as authoritative throughout. Any other questions about that? Or what about, there's many other characters I can put on here. Give me a name of somebody, and you're like, where does this person fit, or that person fit, or this event, or that event?

What's that? Paul? Oh, Paul, so he's a new test. Paul's going to be after zero. Isaiah. Okay, Isaiah is going, Isaiah wrote right around the time of this, so Isaiah is going to be right there.

Oh, the Assyrian invasion with the whole Hezekiah's tunnel, that happened in 701 BC, and Isaiah was living right around that time. He was the one who told Sennacherib, trust in God, trust in God, trust in God, and finally Hezekiah, did I say Sennacherib? He told Hezekiah,

trust in God, and finally he did. Any others? Yes? Do the Jews recognize any of the books in their Bible that are not? No, no they don't. The Jews only recognize the same 39 books we do. It is various Eastern, either the Catholic Church or Eastern Christian

traditions that will add anywhere from 7 to 10 extra books to their Bible that is sometimes called the Apocrypha. First and Second Maccabees, Ecclesiasticus, those kind of books. And those books, by the way, were written, oh, sorry, so this is, this squiggly line here, this is, I'm going to say 400 AD, or 400 BC, and this squiggly line is,

they call it the period of silence or the intertestamental period. So when the Old Testament ends around 400 BC, the next thing we read about is, you know, the birth of Jesus in 5 BC. And those books were all written, the Apocrypha, Maccabees, Tobit. If you're raised in a Catholic church, some of these might sound familiar. Were all written during the Apocrypha, Maccabees, Tobit, if you were raised in a Catholic church, some of these might sound familiar, were all written during the intertestamental time period. Now here's, this was actually the subject of my study

here in Scotland. This time period fascinates me. It was anything but silent. It was one of the most exciting, vibrant, I mean, cataclysmic time periods in biblical history, but there's just, there's no, there's no book that's been inspired by God that was written during that time period. The only questionable one is, some people say Daniel was written

in that time period, but I think Daniel was written by Daniel. Oh, Daniel, where's Daniel? Daniel's in exile, okay, so Daniel's here. Samson is one of the judges, right, so Samson is going to be over here. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph are all going to be, obviously, you know, right after Abraham. I think we probably should wrap things one more question maybe that's yes They very much read it. They interpret it differently. Isaiah 53, the famous prophecy of Jesus dying on the cross. As a Christian, we read Isaiah 53 and we're like,

how are you not a Christian, you Jewish person? When I was in Israel, I actually sat through a whole lecture by a Jew who was so frustrated at how Christians interpret Isaiah 53. It was fascinating. Really fascinating to hear him read Isaiah 53. You know, without getting into

the details, they do interpret it differently. And I would say they do have some evidence that when we get through Isaiah in 20, 24, we can look at maybe some of the Jewish interpretations of Isaiah 53. Yeah, yeah. All right, can I, I forgot to pray at the beginning.

I'm a total pagan, but let me pray now and then we can go to church. God, thank you for revealing yourself to us through these 39 books. And God, I just pray that you would give us a spirit of wisdom, of curiosity, and most of all, a soft heart that when we encounter you throughout the Old Testament during this class, I pray that you would teach us a lot of things about the Old Testament, a lot of facts, a lot of information. But God, I pray that your spirit would

work in our hearts so that we can respond with obedience to what we are reading. In Christ's name, amen. Thank you.