Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1109: Understanding the Hebraic Thought World of the Bible and How the Old Testament Challenges Classism: Dr. Dru Johnson

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

Dr. Dru Johnson (Ph.D. St. Andrews University) is visiting associate professor at Hope College in Holland, MI (was a professor at The King’s College in New York City), director of the Center for Hebraic Thought, editor at The Biblical Mind, host of The Biblical Mind podcast, and co-host of the OnScript Podcast. Before that, he was a high-school dropout, skinhead, punk rock drummer, combat veteran, IT supervisor, and pastor—all things that he hopes none of his children ever become. In this podcast conversation, we talk about many different things, including philosophy of mathematics, Hebraic vs. Hellenistic thinking, classism in the OT, Patriarchy vs. Heterarchy in the OT, and Old Testament theology of women, and much, much more.  If you would like to support Theology in the Raw, please visit patreon.com/theologyintheraw for more information!

Exiles in Babylon 2024. That's right, folks. We're doing it again. Our third annual Exiles in Babylon conference will be held on April 18th through the 20th, 2024 here in Boise, Idaho. And this one is going to be an absolute barn burner, as we say here in Idaho. The topics we're going to discuss are deconstruction and the church. And we're going to actually hear from people who have deconstructed and others who maybe should have deconstructed but didn't. We're also going to discuss women, power, and abuse in the church, which is obviously a huge issue that we absolutely need to discuss. We're going to talk about faith and sexuality, specifically how can churches

become places where LGBTQ or same-sex attracted Christians can flourish within a traditional sexual ethic. Lastly, we're going to discuss, I can't believe we're doing this one. We're going to discuss politics. That's right. Politics and the church where we're going to have various speakers present. We're going to have a right-leaning Christian, a left-leaning Christian, and a, I don't know, what do you call them? A non-partisan or Anabaptist Christian share their perspectives, share their perspective. And we're going to put them all in conversation with each other. And of course, we're going to have Evan Wickham and Tanika Wyatt

leading us in worship throughout the weekend. I really, really, really want to mix it up this year. We're going to hear from leading thinkers in each of these areas. We're going to be having different viewpoints in conversation with each other. It's going to be honest, it's going to be raw, and you're not going to want to miss out. I really think this one's going to fill up quickly. So if you want to attend in person, Boise, Idaho, April 18th through the 20th, register very, very soon. Just go to theologyintheraw.com. That's theologyintheraw.com. I really hope to see you there. Hello, friends.

Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest today is Dr. Drew Johnson, who is a visiting associate professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He is the director of the Center for Hebraic Thought and the host of the Biblical Mind podcast and co-host of the OnScript podcast. He got his PhD from St. Andrews University in Scotland. Before all of this, he was a high school dropout, skinhead, punk rock drummer, and combat veteran, IT supervisor and pastor. So anyway, interesting character. I will say, let me just warn you up front, our conversation goes all over the map. In fact, I'm recording this intro after our conversation, but before I title this episode, so I don't even know how I'm going to title this episode because

we open up many doors of thought and chase shiny objects within those doors. You'll kind of see what I mean once you listen to the episode. We begin, I would say the first like 20 minutes does get pretty heavy on a philosophical level. So those of you who are philosophically wired, you're going to love it. If you're not that way, you might feel lost. But we do lower the plane a little bit and camp out on some really lower the plane a little bit and, and, and camp out on some really, um, interesting, uh, aspects of biblical law, like, like old Testament law of, uh, patriarchy versus heterarchy. We teased out what that means. And we, um, there's a lot more kind of more concrete stuff that if you're not philosophical minded, you'll definitely, uh, love to engage with, um, some, some things that might throw you for a loop, some controversial ideas. And if you have any questions or problems with this podcast,

please email Drew Johnson. So yeah, this, this is a fun one, folks. Get ready for, get ready for a ride. So please welcome to this show, the one and only Dr. Drew Johnson. Drew, thanks so much for tuning into the show, a fellow podcaster. My pleasure. I love doing podcasts. It might be a, do you like being on this end of things or do you like being on the other, on this side of things? I love being on the other side. Okay. I kind of, maybe cause I'm so used to that side. I actually enjoy being on the other side. I kind of, maybe cause I'm so used to that side. I actually enjoy being on the other side. So if you want, yeah, we can. Yeah, no, absolutely. I'll have you on. I'm always looking

for a fresh meat too. So, so, uh, tell us who you are. Uh, you've had a very interesting journey. I would encourage people to go on your website and read, um, your autobiography. It is definitely not very vanilla. So, um um can we start with your uh skinhead punk rock musician days is that a good place to start i should always qualify i was not a neo-nazi skinhead um my my stepfather was african-american from the south raised under jim crow my sister is black like uh i was a non not involved in racist activities which most skinheads in the 80s and 90s were not racist you just had a shaved head that was that was it well real what they say real skinheads were not the races the neo-nazis adopted I mean early skinhead movements were actually out of

Jamaican and West Indies uh mods and in England so most of them were black um so if you ever wonder why skinheads are associated with ska music and reggae, it's because of the early skinhead movement in England. So when that movement came over to the United States, this, this got way out of bounds by the way. So my truncated understanding of the movement is when it came over to the United States, 69, early seventies, um, the clan and white Aaron resistance, like the look they like the kind of

hooliganism that went with it because you know it is kind of like a brotherhood hooligan movement uh and so they appropriated it for some of their youth their their youth gang look or whatever and you know i was i was a skinhead in oklahoma in the 80s you know and so there were certainly you know nazi skinheads around and there were certainly clansmen yeah i mean we would have clan people walk up to us in the mall and you find out because they would i found out later they have certain identifiers that you know tell you they're in the clan or whatever but um yeah so you you realize like these people are just out there circulating um but the skinheads were kind of the uh they drew all the heat. They were out there, you know, loud and proud and noisy and, you know, making a ruckus. The Klan members are actually the scary ones because those are just the normal looking white dudes that you would never be able to pick out of a lineup.

Okay. Interesting. So how did you go from that world to pursuing theological education? Were you always like a Christian, a thoughtful person, a student, or is that something you kind of fell into? Well, I've never been a thoughtful person. I'm looking forward to entering that phase of life, maybe when I turn 50. No, I wasn't. When I was young, I was raised and my mom and dad were married,

very Pentecostal, like old Pentecostal Christians. And then they got divorced and I stayed with my mom. And my mom kind of went off in a new age. She kind of quit parenting when I was about nine years old. And my dad moved to another state. So I still had a relationship with him, but he wasn't there in my daily life. I had some good interactions with a few Christian people, like some solid men who saw me struggling. They were Christians and they stepped in and were a good presence.

But I didn't buy any of it. I didn't trust anybody. I was scarred, or as my students would say, butthurt by everything. If you don't know, Oklahoma has a very particular brand, Tulsa, of Christianity, Oral Roberts University, Ring of the Bible. There's some cutting-edge Christianityian i don't know what you would call it there how would you describe the unique brand of christianity there well now i yeah that's a good question because oral roberts is kind of its own thing isn't it i mean it is

its own world it's part of the pentecostal movement and certainly he's part of that revivalist pentecostal movement but they were early adopters of the kind of the radio and television world and i mean if if you should google image search for robert university campus if you've never been there like it's worth looking at the architecture it is wild it's like 2001 stanley kubrick meets art deco they have a prayer, which is also the radio station. They have a 62-story skyscraper that was a hospital. Yeah, it's a crazy place. So there is just this almost like a self-starter, non-denominational brand of Christianity. I'm sure it's changed. I mean, this was 30 years ago. And then you then you had like the main lines what uh the

methodist uh the eighth baptist church which is a beautiful art deco church in downtown tulsa presbyterians have a small footprint there so it's it's kind of you know tulsa used to be the land of billionaires it's before saudi arabian oil was discovered in 1917, 1916. Again, this has gone in a weird direction. That's where a lot of billionaires in the United States lived. And so they, Frank Lloyd Wright's only skyscraper is in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, a 13 story skyscraper, tall building. So there's a lot of mishmash in that part of the, in that part of the Oklahoma. It's a very, very bizarre place. So my experience of Christianity was, was kids at my high school who were kind of floating in and out of all of those youth groups

and, uh, youth movements with all kinds of, you know, so it's kind of Southern, it's kind of not, but none of it made me want to be a Christian. Like I just say that very clearly. I was like, I wanted to get girls. I was in a punk band. Like I wanted to go out and get in fights, get drunk, uh, hang out with girls. Like that was, I was pretty singularly motivated. Uh, and then I, I worked at a pub through high school, me and two of my skinhead buddies worked in a pub in the kitchen. And, um, and I worked until like, you know, until the, until the bar closed every night that I worked. And so I did not do well showing up at school the next morning after working until 1 in the morning at the bar. So yeah, I eventually failed out of high school after three freshman years, three solid freshman attempts.

And it didn't take school seriously. It didn't take much of anything seriously. And then eventually, after dropping out of school, I moved up with my dad in St. Louis, Missouri. And he's like, hey, you can live in my little house. This little 700-square-foot house he was living in with his wife and his new family. He's like, but you got to go to church. You got to get a job. You got to pay rent.

You got to step up here. So I did. And I went to that crazy charismatic church where they played REO speed wagon worship songs and Jehovah Jireh and all that stuff. Um, he's like, you don't have to agree with anything, but you have to go and sit, you know, just go sit there. And so I got to know again, another guy there at that church and he took me seriously, befriended me, like took all my silly, silly questions very seriously.

Actually I have in my new book on Darwinism, I have a short story about this guy, how he really took me seriously, even though I was being completely ridiculous. And he's the one who actually eventually kind of helped me understand that God had changed me from the inside out and I'd become a Christian. I'd say he led me to Christ or whatever, which he did coach me into it. But. But I think he would also say, no, like God changed me. He helped me understand what happened to me. And then that led you, when did you start pursuing theological education? Like pretty shortly after? No, no.

I was in the military for seven years, deploying regularly down to South America to do counter-narcotics work and going to college at the same time. regularly down to South America to do counter-narcotics work and going to college at the same time. Um, so, uh, I finished college, uh, got married within a few weeks of finishing college. And then, um, I was planning on doing research psychology. That was my, my love, my interest, you know, psychology, I understood it. I had, you know, me and my wife both came from broken families. So like psychology did a lot of work for me just on the ground. And then that same guy who coached me in my Christianity, we sat down and he's like, I think you should go to seminary. And I was like, what's a seminary? What do they teach there? And so he told me and I was like, oh, that actually sounds really interesting.

And I visited Covenant Seminary because it was in St. Louis. It was, you know, and I withdrew all my PhD applications and went to Covenant the next semester and never looked back. And then I loved, you know, I did four years at Covenant and it like, I was sad when the four years were over. And so he, so then I thought about doing a PhD

and my mentor at Covenant Seminary said, Drew, you're asking all the wrong questions. Go work in the church for five years and they'll, they'll reshape your questions. And so I ended up being a pastor for about eight years actually, before I went and did a PhD at St. Andrews. So how old were you when he did your PhD then? My mid thirties,30s 34 35 had four small children unlike everybody else i brought all my children with me rather than having them for free in the uk i had a couple free kids in the uk yeah no all nine were in elementary school there oh wow yeah so uh so yeah i also when i was a pastor i it's like within three weeks of graduating from seminary, I had more questions.

So I enrolled in a philosophy master's program at University of Missouri and did that. And then actually I taught there as well, philosophy of religion for a few years. And then kind of that helped me realize philosophy is a good tool, but it wasn't what it really wanted. I wanted to continue working yeah um and i told us a story in this biblical philosophy book about reasons why um christian philosophy didn't seem completely receptive to the kind of things i want to do with scripture as well so you yeah you have i mean if you look i you know i was just looking through your cv your your i guess people here call it like resumes resume so weird like when you when you study in the uk you pick up certain lingo and you don't I guess people here call it like resumes. Resumes, yeah. Resumes.

So weird. Like when you study in the UK, you pick up certain lingo and you don't realize, you know. Yeah, I told someone here, I was like, oh, I was an external examiner for Aviva, you know, last week. And they're just like, uh-huh. Do you have rubber gloves on? So you wrote a book, Biblical Philosophy. The subtitle is a hebraic approach to the old new testaments well actually first of all let me back up you you are one of the few people i know that are well not i guess there's more of you out there but like that are really multi-disciplinary like you know like i study new testament like that's that's my thing but like you know you you have this combination of how would you describe it i mean like history biblical theology

philosophy like what was your main areas of expertise expertise i mean this is i tell people like when with students i'm like listen i know people say that you know i don't really know what i'm talking about i i really hide in the cracks like a cockroach so that nobody can catch on to me. I just need to know slightly more. No, I am very interested in philosophical questions. I think when I read, one of the main advantages of not being really raised in Christian culture was I didn't speak Christianese. I didn't speak Christian cliche.

I didn't understand a lot of that language. When I went to seminary, I kind of had to learn that language. But I also remember reading the Bible for the very first time when I was 20. And I remember my emotional reactions to it. I remember being very confused by the Gospels. I remember being very confused by Genesis, Exodus. So I think it gives me just different questions that I bring to the text. And, and also as I, you know, I went to seminary and then I just studied philosophy afterwards,

not really having a plan, but what I realized coming into philosophy with good exegetical tools, I was like, wait, you're not asking any questions that are radically different than anything I was learning over in seminary, right? And the Greeks don't really have any interesting answers. In fact, we don't believe any of the Greek answers are correct. We think they're basically wrong about everything. Math, science, morality, everything. We basically think that they're wrong. We sometimes will go like, well, you know, the Stoics have some aspects and Aristotle's ethics, you know, there's some helpful things. I'm like, yeah, but nobody is actually preaching Aristotle qua Aristotle. Noah's preaching, nobody's preaching stoic, stoicism is qua stoicism. Right. Um, and certainly we don't believe in their like

mathematical ideas. We don't believe in their science, their view of science. It's all like, it's all been shown to be incorrect. Right. Wait, math. I thought, I mean, I know nothing about anything you're talking about really, but it, I thought, wait, I thought, I mean, I know nothing about anything you're talking about really, but it, Oh, I don't either. I thought, wait, I thought, I thought like, like mathematics,

like weren't they kind of the fathers of mathematics? And then we would, well, what don't we believe about there? Well, you know, if you want to take it and I, maybe I'm thinking metamathematics and philosophy of mathematics more than mathematical like devices themselves,

but, but even mathematical devices, like the idea that the circle is the theologically, everything is theologically derivative from circularity, right? That's a strong principle in Aristotle that Galileo held onto, which is why he didn't believe in elliptical orbits, right? Because he was an Aristotelian to the death. Kepler believed in elliptical orbits and he showed Galileo like, oh, hey, I have calculations that make more sense of the sky because I'm going to put these in ellipses. But he believed those because he was a Neoplatonist and believed in ratios were the

perfect divine form of whatever divinity is that flows through the logos. So, and things like zero, right? Zero in mathematics. If you want to do engineering today, you need to use zero as a placeholder to do lots of fancy mathematics. Well, zero was an impossibility in the West because it was a Greek theological problem. You can't have an infinite,

unchanging form of zero-ness in the heavens. You can't have an unchanging form of nothing, right? So that's not a mathematical problem. That's a theological problem inherited from the Greeks of zero-ness in the heavens. You can't have an unchanging form of nothing, right? So that's not a mathematical problem. That's a theological problem inherited from the Greeks that eventually mathematicians had to shake off. They also had to shake off, like scientists had to shake off conceptual beliefs

like none of this is real. All of this is deceptive. Your sensories, everything that you know and see is deceptive, which you can get that in the Brahmanist tradition. You can get that the the greco-roman tradition as well african traditions as well and from the matrix huh and from the matrix right and from the matrix yeah that whole so science can't proceed from a view of reality that starts out with everything is deceptive or false ultimately um and the way to understand this world is to

understand that none of this is real or that me and this computer and you are all one thing and the same thing. And until you understand that, you understand nothing, right? So you see the proceeding of science through history is a lot of overcoming of those kind of largely Hellenistic ideas, not entirely Greek ideas, but many of them were Hellenistic ideas and mathematics as well, um, from Cantorian infinities to, to zero to like the idea that there's not one mathematic system that actually maps onto reality, right? That's why we call it mathematics or in the UK, they call it maths, uh, and not math, uh, because there isn't one mathematic system that actually explains reality and

different mathematic systems conflict with how they explain the same phenomenon so that idea of a unified set of mathematical ideas that comes from certain divine realities like circularity or the supremacy of the logos or whatever whatever wherever you locate the anchor that everything else hangs off of, we've systematically moved away from that. And I think this kind of gets into what I do in the book is say, well, where did we end up, right? What's the system?

Did we end up looking more like a Chinese system of thought or an African system of thought? And it's like, no, we actually ended up looking very much like what the Hebrew Bible thinks about reality and how the Hebrew Bible thinks about testing reality and knowing reality. And so I'd say everything from our morality, our concept of the human person, our concept of politics, that all humans are created equal. Josh Berman has a great book on this. Um, at that really at the end of the day, our concepts of science, um, and some of the concepts of math, those ultimately all work together from a uniquely Hebraic worldview,

uh, and an intellectual world that they developed. Even if you don't even think that the God they're worshiping is real, um, they are singularly responsible for this intellectual world that they developed that we essentially live into today. And that's, that's not my opinion only That's University of Chicago, the Orientalist of the last century, were saying the exact same thing back in the 1940s. So you're, and I hope I'm asking the right questions, because I want you to tease out more. What is a Hebraic approach to the Old and New Testament. I'm hearing you say that a Hebraic way of thinking

has had a lot more influence on how Westerners think. It's not nearly as Greek and Hellenistic as people assume. Is that? Yeah. Everything from ethics to math to science to politics. And again, that's what was surprising to me in doing the research for this book, which I did back at St. Andrews and the second time I was there.

That was actually, I'll be honest, I shy away from those kind of claims when they're like America is a biblical nation. And especially the renewal of Hebrew Bible love that's happened in some wing sectors of politics today. I wouldn't necessarily go along with a lot of those moves. I was kind of compelled by the non-Christians who are saying like, you're not going to find the roots of Western thought, uh, in the Mediterranean. You're going to find it in Southwest Asia in the Hebrew Bible. Um, and again, these are a seriologist and Egyptologist and classicist, um, who are, who are saying this seems obvious to them. So a lot of what I was doing is trying to figure out if what I saw was the same kinds of things.

And it wasn't necessarily always, but there were certain moves. And my favorite phrases that pop out of that tradition from the University of Chicago is the Hebrew Bible has a certain type of critical intellectualism and skeptical mood that you just don't find in Mesopotamia or Egypt. And you only find it really later in Greece and Rome, but it has its other encumbrances in that system as well. So there is like a free rationalist thinking project going on in the Hebrew Bible that just simply doesn't exist in the omenology of Mesopotamia or the mystery religions of Egypt. Can you give us some concrete examples of either that or maybe your larger argument that you're... And by the way, everything I'm saying is not my argument. This is all, again, these are all these people from mid-20th century, but I work in a work group of ancient Near Eastern scholars,

people from mid-20th century, but I work in a work group of ancient Near Eastern scholars, and we've been in Denmark and Germany, but this is not controversial. Again, these are not confessional people. These are just people who work on text and places. But if you think of something like the scientism that Francesca Rockford from Berkeley, that she traces in Mesopotamian omenology. She's like, look, you may think this omenology where it's like if a black cat crosses your path and the back door of your house is over two meters tall or whatever they would measure it in, two cubits tall, three cubits tall, and it's a sunny day on the solstice, then death is coming your way, right? I mean, those are a very logical statement. Those are rigorously logical.

It's modus ponens and modus tollens at work there. And this is what she notes is this omenology that we might think is like crazy magic, whatever religious superstition in our day, it actually operated according to very rigorous systems of logic. And by the way, this would be the wisdom literature that Daniel learns, you know, in Daniel 1 and 2,

him and his companions. And the problem actually becomes, and so she tries to say, like, look, this is evidence of people rationalizing the universe, looking at the physical universe and trying to rationalize what's going on and how things are connected to each other, how this causes that, causal networks, right? The problem with omenology is, A, how this causes that. Causal networks, right?

The problem with omenology is, A, kind of like with your local meteorologist, nobody follows up. When the omens don't actually work, nobody seems to take note of it, which is true today, right? Who knows if I ask you how accurate is your local meteorologist? Well, nobody knows because nobody goes back and checks and sees whether what she said about last thursday actually was exactly how last thursday turned out right and so and there's this question like how could they be and when the greeks came into mesopotamia they were so impressed with their massive learning and their understanding you know the understanding of the um the celestial bodies and the movement of celestial bodies um and they but they couldn't figure out um how they understood so bodies. But they couldn't figure out how they understood so much,

and yet they couldn't figure out that their omens don't come true or their omens don't work, right? And you see that exact critique in both, you could even say in Genesis, you see it with Abraham kind of usurping that entire intellectual system of omenology by saying like, yeah, we're not doing omens. God actually revealed to you what's going to happen. All I'm going to do is help you understand what he's already revealed to you. The same logic gets applied with Daniel.

He brings them into history, place, time, situates outside of the omenology system and says, and this is how it's going to happen. And thus it happened. And notice how careful the and says, and this is how it's going to happen. And thus it happened. And notice how careful the text in Genesis and Daniel is to show it happens exactly according to what he says, right? So, um, we, you know, there's one way you can see that as God establishing this person in that time as a unique person acting on his behalf, on behalf of the Israelites and later the Jewish people.

That's all true, but you have to also understand that is completely going into an entire intellectual system that is thick and rigorous and completely disrupting the whole system and showing that it actually doesn't follow certain rules of history and logic that we would now take for granted. So it makes sense to us when the Hebrew Bible says somebody says something on behalf of God and it comes true and everybody believes because they saw that come true, like the signs that Moses brings to the people. We take that for granted that, of course, Moses shows them the signs. The signs did what he said they were going to do and they came true.

Of course, that's a good reason for believing Moses. Well, that wouldn't necessarily be how a Mesopotamian, depending on which kingdom you're in at the time, would think about those signs, right? So the reason we think it's true is because we've already appropriated that basically Hebrew view of history, space, time, intellectualism, logic, et cetera. We've mapped them together the same way that they did. Oh, there's, I'm trying to, my mind is, I don't, I've got friends that think on a more philosophical level naturally. And man, when we're talking, I feel like sometimes it's like two ships passing the night. Um, so I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm struggling.

I'm struggling here. You can see the same thing with Paul too. Right. So if I'll take it in the New Testament. But in Acts 17, which is funny for the longest time, I thought that was just the most rigorous, large logical argument, you know? And then when I was working on this book,

I'm going through it again for the, how many times I've been through that passage. I'm like, wait, this is not an argument. This doesn't even make any sense, right? He's entering their system. He's showing, hey, look, I understand how your system works. I understand what you're concerned about, what you think is philosophically primary and what you need to understand. But he cinches that argument by saying God has overlooked your ignorance and he's appointed a man who you've never heard of. And he's going to come judge you, which you don't believe in any kind of divine judgment anyway. And he's given evidence of that by something you've never heard of either,

this historical event that you've never heard of, and you wouldn't believe it if you had heard of resurrection, right? That's not a convincing argument to any Athenian. It doesn't matter whether they're Stoic, Epicurean, or otherwise. So he's disrupting that system, but he's disrupting it by using what we consider, in the very broadest form, historical or scientific evidence. There was an experiment that was run, and if he wasn't raised, then we should be the most pity of all people. You just can't take for granted that that general line of reasoning is the way all ancient people thought about reasoning about the nature of the cosmos. We take it for granted because our scientific system today that we all learn in junior high

or high school takes the Hebrew view of the world, right? We've gone down that path. Even the enlightenment in many ways takes for granted the Hebrew intellectual world and takes it in all kinds of wonky ways. When you say Hebrew view of the world, what specifically are you referring to there as opposed to other notions? So that the world is real, that it is law like, I mean, it's, you, you know, you have to tell people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, when you say, you know, I believe in the laws of physics and the laws of gravity, you have to say, like, you realize that's a divine metaphor, right? That's a theologically loaded metaphor. It, it assumes a law giver and a regulator, according to that law giver who is divine and holds things. It's, you know, Colossians one, he holds all things together. Um, and he created all things. So, um, that kind of basic view that

there's a god who created you know the ones we've all heard he created he created creation um by whipping it into shape not by war battle death and victory um but by his whatever you want to call his will his his movement in the world, his spirit, his breath. And that you can therefore know things because things act according to the way he regulates the world. Like even that simple move, you're already outside of most systems of thought in the ancient world. Or at least you're on the border of them in some way. So that's a big one. How do you know the world around you and how do you know it truly? And this gets into like, even what the word true means in the Hebrew, which is

slightly different than the way we often use the term true and false or those binaries. And I think also I would say a kind of historical view that the world begins in a certain place and is headed in a certain direction, which that's not unique to the Hebrews, right? I mean, you have various people who will have this kind of zenith point of history down the line or starting point from which everything comes. But that you have a God along the way who's encountering the world. I love that line from Daniel where he's like, the enchanters say, he's like, they're right.

No man can know these things, but there is a God in heaven, right? Because they say there's only the gods know these things and they don't reveal them to men, right? And he's like, no, there is a God in heaven, but he's revealed it to you. That blood-brain barrier between the heavens and the earth, that you have a God. And he does that because he's come down as the lawgiver and instructed people directly. Again, you go into the Mesopotamian or Egyptian world. The gods control a lot of things in the world. By accident, by sex, by drunkenness, by anger, by care and wisdom.

But humans have no idea why they do the things they do. You don't know why the gods are mad at you. The poetic laments from Egypt and from Mesopotamia. Where you have the man saying, I don't know why God has are mad at you, right? The poetic laments from Egypt and from Mesopotamia where you have the man saying, I don't know, like Jobian, I don't know why God has done any of this to me. And the only result is you can go give sacrifices to all of them just to cover your bases. Contrast that with the Torah where you have a God who comes down and personally instructs you. Yeah. And in words, in terms, in analogies that you can understand that from your lived experience and then and you're presumably in their language their local language and is okay

with them confirming it by saying we will do all of these things like almost seemingly seeks the consent of the people if you will you know um not in any kind of lock-in american consent of the people way yeah like that you know you you've just broken every rule in the ancient near east of god human interaction right um and uh and that if you want to think about like the sons of korah and numbers 16 is a good example because you know okay god opens up the earth and swallows a bunch of people but you have to say well why did he do that right yeah it was an experiment where like these people brought a new view of holiness they're like we don't need these curtains we don't need this

tabernacle of course these were the priests who serviced the holy of holies they were koathites so they were specifically the ones who serviced the inner the inner And they're saying, hey, we don't need anything. They're like the Reagan, you know, tear down this wall kind of. They suppose this, right? And all Moses does, him and Yahweh, they say, like, look, we're going to lay it out tomorrow. You go stand over there, and whatever happens in history will answer the question as to whether your view, your interpretation of what's going on here is right or wrong, of holiness, right? That is not playing within the world of omenology, right?

That's actually playing within the world of a God who instructs and takes time to intervene physically in history in a historically voracious event that people can then recount, say, this time that this happened. then recount, say, this time that this happened. That's just a very different, like, on every front, that's a very different view than everybody else in the ancient Near East, and even significantly different from the Greco-Roman tradition that emerges later. What's the cause of the difference? Because I think, you know, at least in the field of biblical studies, we're often looking for similarities, parallels. You look at the code of Hammurabi and see parallels and differences. But I feel like the similarities help you expose the differences too. And it's really interesting to look at Hammurabi's code and see a lot of similarities, but then once you connect those dots, then you see the differences of, wow, the law code that Moses delivered, we look at it from our modern lenses and see a lot of misogyny and inequality and all these things.

Well, compare it to Hammurabi and you see a lot more. It's like, wow, this is more of a progressive kind of document than we maybe first realized. Even compared to itself, if you actually take the view that that the laws are in general are always looking to protect the most vulnerable in the community you can read the same law that looks misogynistic uh and all of a sudden see like oh no this is meant to protect women in their in their vulnerabilities and weakness right can you give us an exact that's a provocative statement and i i know like sandy richter and yeah yeah katie mccoy and others have done yeah

yeah um um well i think you know i mean the one that i love is eye for an eye tooth for tooth right which is a great example because it's called lex talionis you know the law of retribution um and i have to point out and you know in all three instances of that uh that principle in the torah and uh exodus uh leviticus and deuteronomy never does it actually demand you know it states the principle but then it puts it in a concrete situation the concrete situations never actually demand an eye for an eye or tooth for tooth or direct retribution so you're instantly in a world where we're saying like you need to be careful how you read uh read this right? So you have this principle,

eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, which is found in Hammurabi, which is a class, like how the eye for an eye, tooth for tooth is applied in Hammurabi. And the laws of Eshnunna has something similar to it. The way it's applied is by class. So if you're an upper class citizen, the worst thing that's ever going to happen to you is you're going to have to pay a fine for knocking out the eye of a freeman or a slave, right? If you're a wheeloo. But if you're a free person or a slave, you know, you're going to get treated worse depending on if you strike up, right? And then you get to Exodus 21. I'll just stick with Exodus 21 because it's the first iteration. Each iteration does something slightly different within its own context. But the first iteration, it's eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And then it gives two concrete examples.

And we know there are two concrete examples related to eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth because it's if you hit somebody's eye and if you hit somebody's tooth. You're like, okay, well, they're trying to help us not miss this one, right? Go figure, yeah. But, I mean, honestly, I can't tell you how many times I missed it. And, you know, if you ask people, like, okay, it says eye for an eye, tooth for tooth in the code in Exodus 21. What does it say right after that, right? Like, what's the examples? Most people don't know, right?

It says, if you strike the eye of your slave, then you must release your slave. If you strike the tooth of your slave, male or female for both of them, if you strike the tooth of your slave, you must release your slave. If you strike the tooth of your slave, male or female for both of them, if you strike the tooth of your slave, you must release your slave. So the concrete instance, eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, which is a classist principle in Hammurabi and purely retributional. When it's a high class person striking, sorry, when it's a low class person striking a high class person, it's like you take out their eye, you can have them whipped and fines paid, right? Here it's, no, if you're the

one who has power over somebody else and you even touch their tooth, you lose all of the economic value of their work for you, right? And if you go through all of that section of Exodus 20, 21, 22, there's a lot of concern for losing the economic value of somebody who's indentured themselves to you, right? So real quick, so the eye for eye, tooth for tooth principle is basically, in its own context, would be a blatant leveling of social classism? Don't abuse any kind of socially structured power, right? And if you do, you lose. You lose a fairly big fine. I mean, depending on where you are

in the years of release and whether people are actually practicing the years of release or not. But yeah, you could potentially lose six years worth of work that you've already basically paid for, right? Or that you've given out some money on. And then in Deuteronomy later,

you have to send out slaves wealthier than they came in, right? So that's something that, you know, on the surface, if you read it without paying any attention to any of the details, it feels like a very, you know, biblical law meant to bring the hammer down. And if anybody does anything to me, they're going to get theirs. And it's actually a warning to people in power. does anything to me, they're going to get theirs. And it's actually a warning to people in power. So it doesn't surprise me that when Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount is trying to show his chops and say like, look, I understand what you've been told, but I'm telling you, this is what's going on in the Torah. That's exactly the axes upon which he interprets eye for an eye. You've heard

eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, but he goes into a list of issues of vulnerability and and he basically flips it on its head and he says like go ahead and be vulnerable be the slave who gets beat uh if somebody asks you to go another mile um you know it doesn't surprise me that he says if somebody strikes you in the face you know near the eye or the tooth right and and i assume also there that it's all principle of extension so you know it know, it's not saying, well, therefore, you should beat your slaves in the ribs or the back or something. That if you break anything on them, if you hurt anything on them, right, you lose their service. So something that seems very brutish in context of the ancient Near Eastern code that it's clearly riffing off of. And I mean, I don't think it's any mistake to connect this to Hammurabi. Whether it actually knows of Hammurabi, the actual code itself,

it knows of the law, the legal precedence of Hammurabi. It's using that to signal up to you, hey, we're doing something very different here. And it's actually, surprise, surprise, the vulnerable that we're worried about. And you, when you come into power and of course if you follow the logic of hebrew enslavement there any hebrew could fall into poverty and become enslaved right it wasn't something that happens to just the poor and disenfranchised it could happen to anybody you could have a crop failure and have to go to your your brother and say hey i need to work for you for a year or two so that we can eat this summer.

So it's just a very different, I think it's just in the nitty gritty of what the law is doing. There's some very different procurements there because it's not working along the legal frameworks that Greeks and Romans later developed. It's not trying to lay out rules that you follow or don't follow. It's laying out principles and then how can you live these? then it's a feel that it sets up for you it sets up fences that guide you from going too far but then there's a lot of improvisation on the inside of that and that's and that's why i would say the torah is a wisdom tradition right because it actually demands for you to think through like the proliferating effects of small like how do you play

out the do not strike your your slave you could go the greco-roman and sometimes the i mean there is a jewish tradition that plays out the route that would say well now that's why you have to strike your slave in the you know but you know because lest you hurt his tooth or his eye or whatever right that's one way to go but i think it's actually demanding for you, therefore, to then start proliferating that principle where else it might apply. Hey, friends, it's Chris Sprinkle here. Preston and I are always looking for ways to come alongside and help empower vulnerable people. And that's why I'm so excited to tell you about Noonday Collection. I learned about Noonday Collection several months ago and have been so impressed by its heart and mission behind it. It partners with artisans in 15 different countries by creating dignified jobs and employment opportunities for people in vulnerable communities.

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By doing so, you are making a difference in the world's most vulnerable communities. Go to chrissprinkle.noondaycollection.com. That is chrissprinkle.noondaycollection.com. If Theology in the Raw has blessed you or challenged you or encouraged you on some level, then I would like to invite you to consider supporting the show by visiting patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. You can support the show for as little as five bucks a month and get access to various kinds of premium content like monthly Q&A podcasts, the ability to ask me questions and dialogue with other Patreon supporters.

Gold level supporters are able to participate in monthly Zoom chats where we talk about pretty much everything. Those chats can get pretty wild sometimes, and I absolutely love it. So join the Theology in Raw community by signing up at patreon.com forward slash Theology in Raw. First of all, you mentioned in passing Josh Burnham's book, Created Equal. I recently read that. I have it right here, I think. It's a great book. It's amazing.

Josh is a great guy. Yeah. Oh, do you know him? Oh, yeah, yeah. He's a fellow from the Center for Hebraic Thought. Really? Oh, you got to – I would love to have him on the – I can't find the book right now. He's fantastic.

Yeah. It was – I mean, first of all, he's he's brilliant and it really it's a scholarly work but very clear and understandable and he's a rabbi as well so he knows he likes to communicate yeah he's but he is he's brilliant he's a scholar and he knows how to clarify ideas but he he pointed out the stuff that i and i look i've been my phd is a new testament but i did i did a lot of like old testament stuff taught old testament yeah yeah yeah I've been, my PhD is in New Testament, but I did, I did a lot of like Old Testament stuff, taught Old Testament. That's what I thought, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So I, I remember my dissertation was on Leviticus 18.5b. So, yeah, and traced that through early Judaism. But I, so I feel like I've got a decent handle on the Old Testament. But man, he was bringing up stuff like, oh my word, just how so many things were aimed at leveling classism in the Old Testament. And it's really fascinating. Subtle things like that. Every time I hear him talk. He has a whole section on the method of writing or something.

I forget exactly what it was. It was something I never would have thought about. And then after reading his section, was like blew my mind but um can you give us an it's so helpful to hear you unpack kind of a concrete example eye for an eye tooth for tooth what's another one that stands out where maybe modern readers might take it as wow this is really angry and offensive and classist and misogynistic whatever that is actually what much more leveling than we maybe appreciate i mean and of course everything that i'm saying like i can hear other people going well no not really you know you're you're reading that really generously or whatever but but the reason i read it in that sense towards

the vulnerable is because there's so many spots in the hebrew bible where god threatens death of israel death and like you know i will you, your children orphans and your wives husbandless, right? If you don't look out for the vulnerable. So like there's very, this very strong repetitive drumbeat that you well know well, not just in Leviticus, but other places of looking out and making sure that you don't treat people in these various ways. And especially exploiting people at the moment of their vulnerability seems to be the worst thing that you can do. Right. So I think there actually is like thematic precedence and like philosophical precedence for this, but I would go to like numbers five, the, uh, the woman who, who her husband suspects adultery. And, and now part of this is a literary reason that it's a

long ritual in numbers five, um, where you Numbers 5 where if a man, if the spirit of jealousy comes over him, but what's interesting about that is people will read that as like, oh, this is shaming the woman. It's a trial by water like that you see in Ishnun and in Hammurabi, which it is a trial by water. But again, a very different,

they're not throwing her in a river and drowning her, right? I'd say because there's this parallel language throughout, from the beginning to the end, the very closing line is this is the law in the case where the man suspects adultery or where the woman has actually committed adultery. And so throughout it's, he could be wrong, right? So you could read this as this really unfair, shaming ceremony.

I think, you know, if you think phenomenologically, live daily life, structurally speaking, husbands are going to have a little bit more power as to how certain things happen in the household. If we take Bedouins as any kind of model or Canaanites as any kind of model for what households might look like. And it's, again, I don't think it's patriarchy is the right term. Maybe something more like Cynthia, Shafia,

Elliot's a heterarchy. It's mixed power relations. Can you wait? You just open up a can there. Can you, can you unpack that? Well, it's,

this is Carol Myers too, out of Duke, um, who, uh, we, we we did this we put together this book called the uh forget what it's called the biblical world of gender or something like that oh yeah yeah and carol myers her book rediscovering eve you know she's just like this a who can read the book of genesis and say this is a patriarchy right like women are calling almost all the shots right or wrong like they're sometimes it's for ill right it's not necessarily a good

thing and men are listening to them right uh and that creates like 80 of the drama of the book of of genesis right so in what world from the biblical from the biblical depiction of what's going on in what world is this a patriarchy right uh so you can say there is some social structure power uh laban is handing over his daughter and switching them out uh there are some structural elements but carol myers kind of uses anthropological research since cynthia shaper elliott does as well and kind of augments and says okay what does this actually look like in the daily life of these people? Well, actually, so bread making is one example. Um, women bread making is a communal activity. The belief is in Canaanite villages and Israelite villages in kind. Um, most of the things that you, and this is, this would actually be true in my marriage today. I have to make all

kinds of decisions about things, but my wife knows a lot more about certain people and situations than I do. And I need her understanding, even though I'm the one who's ultimately going to have to make a certain decision for something. Again, not because of structural power, but just because for some reason it's on me or whatever. And so Carol Myers shows very carefully that bread making, which looks like menial labor handed out to the women, actually is the thing that gives them the political power in the village. Because they're the only ones who actually know what's going on. And so to call that patriarchy basically flattens it out and misunderstands the entire situation. Um, but that there are, there are exchanges of knowledge and power at various degrees and levels in various relationships, uh, which that's where the heterarchy, uh, term comes in.

Seems to more accurately capture what's going on and then forces you to think about, okay, I think maybe a couple of times, like that God is meeting Israel that is living in a patriarchal society, but on many levels is actually critiquing some of the internal workings of patriarchy. Like it's still within the shell of patriarchy. Like you said, the labor given away, you do have some kind of patriarchal shell, I guess, but there's just as many critiques as there are, or maybe more critiques as there are affirmations of the fundamentals driving that kind of system? Or am I not going far enough? No, I think that critique goes all the way through the entire Hebrew Bible into the New Testament. I mean, I have this open question in my mind, like, if these texts are written by men, why would they ever describe themselves this way? Why would they make women look so glowingly wise? Yeah.

And like the cool-headed, why would they make men the irrational, hot-headed people who make everything worse for everybody around them? And on the whole, you know, if you ask biblical scholars, who comes out looking better on the whole in the Bible, women or men? Like, it's by far women right and again so you can say that's a patriarchal system of writing but there's all kinds of weird um usurpations of normal gender expectations and and just the description like why would the disciples ever describe the women so glowingly in the gospels in themselves as the biggest doofuses of all time who never really understood what jesus was talking about or doing um it's just a weird like it's just a like it's just an odd like literary phenomenon if you want to put it in like just you know

completely neutral terms exodus one through five yeah yeah i mean all the heroes are women why would you start with a nation and you're like, where are the men standing up to do, you know, like, where were the heroic men who were standing up to power? You know, it was like, it was woman, woman, woman, even for Moses, right? His own life was saved by a foreign woman who seemed to understand the importance of circumcision and the economy of God's plans for Abraham. How did we get on this? Well, I was just saying. Heterarchy, right? Yeah.

So, heterarchy, like dual or male-female rule together. Yeah, mixed relations. Yeah. And in that book, I got stuck writing the essay about the bad women in the Bible because nobody had time or whatever. So, I was like, we got to put a chapter in there about the evil women in the bible right and Jezebel's it was kind of well I mean it was kind of surprising when you walk through the whole thing you know women are raping men they're

killing men they're conniving situations to murder people like they're doing they're doing all the women raping men well I mean or if you think David is raping Bathsheba, which a lot of people do, then you have to say Lot's daughters roofied him and sexually assaulted him. Like, you can't have Ammon and Moab unless there's a lot of wine, strong wine involved, right? Right. So, I mean, I hesitate at using kind of our modern sexual assault terms in these texts because it's not always clear how they apply or where they apply correctly. But yeah, if you're getting your dad drunk in order to have sex with him and getting him drunk to where he doesn't know he had sex with you, I think today we would call that rape. That's going to be, I'm going to get some emails about that. I'll send them your way. that's gonna be that's i'm gonna get some emails about that i'll send them your way so well i mean i i would just say what you see is a picture that women are just as bad as men right um jezebel who who will get worthless men to two witnesses to lie to throw nabit out a window yeah in order to be eaten by like anything men anything men will do, women will do as well, right?

What do you do with Tamar in Genesis 38? I always took her as crafty and sinister, but there's another view that she's, well, it's a pronouncement at the end, you're more righteous than I, now that it comes from the mouth of Judah, but is she a good character? I mean, there's some good Jewish commentary on this.

I can't remember off the top of my head, but I remember thinking like, okay, that's a nice way around it. But I mean, a guy, you know, a woman who says, I'm going to dress up like a prostitute on the way to the sheep shearing field because I know that my father-in-law likes to have sex with property. I mean, she doesn't say that, but the implication is because I know he'll buy into it. that but the implication is because i know he'll buy into it um and then that guy's saying you're more and and this is also the guy who withheld unto death uh his own children uh from her so we can't really trust his moral pronouncement very well yeah i mean it's it's it's a morally let's just say complicated situation so when he when he says she's more righteous than i i think we can all agree yes i mean there's also like some shooting yourself in the foot, right? Comparatively, like, you know, to live lifelong in the land, you have to have generations.

And he's not even participating in the very things that create generations, right? He's not allowing his children to create generations for his one son, and he's lost two. But it's out of fear for the last one. I mean, you know, there's lots of echoes of the Akedah going on, of Abraham, anti-Akedah, the Abraham and Isaac situation. So, yeah, so women and men are equally participating in all kinds of messed up stuff, right? But women do often, women are also often, especially by the time you get to Judges and 1 and 2 Samuel, women are the ones. I mean, you get to the end of 2 Samuel and we don't even know these people's names. They're just called the wise woman from Tekoa, the wise woman from Aval, who come in and settle down the men who are acting emotional and irrational and to keep them from doing harm to other people and themselves right um so i i think i think the biblical

literature is actually giving a lot more earned credit to women than we think it is but you but i am also talking about you got to read across the whole thing and get kind of like the big the big story on men and women yeah the particulars it can get, you know, there can be ugly moments in there as well. I think I did remember Josh actually, because he didn't touch the women question. I think I remember in his book, him saying- Inequality? Yes.

Aside from the clear kind of inequality between men and women, all these other things are being challenged, you know. But you would even, if I hope I'm not misrepresenting him, but he seemed to still say no there is a lot of inequality between men and women um in the old testament would you do you know if that's what he would say and would you disagree with that or i mean i don't know if

inequality would be the term i think you know he would talk about like gender roles maybe okay men still having more power over women? Well, certainly that men have functional power. I mean, I, this, I'm not, I'm not pumping it, but this, this book I worked on on Darwinism, you know, I worked on scarcity, sex and fit to environment. And so you had to deal with all these, you know, I was reading all this evolutionary biology on sex and rape. And it turns out there's a, there's a very common view amongst evolutionary biologists that most hominid generation is created by rape. Because hominids are unique in that most animals, the males are smaller than the females. But hominids are not unique, but they're one of the few categories where the males are much larger than the females, which creates the unique possibility for what they call forced copulation,

but what we would probably call rape today. So that human evolution is actually, I mean, it's kind of like a given in the water of evolutionary biology that human evolution is actually a history of rape. And this became a big question amongst anthropologists, is this the right way to talk about this? And what are the implications? If you have evolutionary encoded rape in men, then how do you hold them responsible for those acts when they're in an evolutionary lapse or whatever, you know, where the feature is no longer needed to do the thing that, or was the feature ever needed? You know, like it gets hairy really quickly. But what kind of struck me is that in the evolutionary conversations, what I appreciated was there was no mincing words about the size of males actually dictates a lot of what happens in prehistory. And you just can't get around that. And the biology of females dictates a lot of what happens in reproductive history. So, and you just can't get around that. And the biology of females dictates a lot of what happens in reproductive history. So, and you just can't get around that. Is part of your, I know we're jumping around, but this is,

you keep, every time we turn a corner, it's like there's a shiny object. I'm like, Ooh, let's go after that. So is part of your, your project there pointing out some of the moral, let's just say complexity slash problems with the evolutionary biological framework? No, that project is, again, it's another example of my larger trajectory, which is to show there is an intellectual world of the Bible. And so if you ask, what would the biblical authors think of natural selection? Well, there's actually an answer to that, right? Because starting in Genesis and carrying all the way through, they have a very thick discussion about scarcity of resources and how it's related to violence. That's a direct conversation that comes up in Genesis 3 and 4 and gets carried all the way through.

Fit to environment, what makes humans fit to certain environments and not, and then genetic propagation, right? Like genealogical propagation. fit to certain environments and not, and then genetic propagation, right? Like genealogical propagation. It just so happens that the way that Darwin conceives of genetic propagation, like that model that he uses, the tree and the pruning off, the only other model of that kind of genealogy in history is in the Hebrew Bible. Like Greeks did not make those kinds of genealogical models. Egyptians did not make those kinds of genealogical models that's a uniquely hebrew genealogical model i'm not saying like darwin stole everything from the hebrew bible i'm just saying he is actually something that you can put in conversation with the intellectual world of natural selection biblical

authors have a view of natural selection i would say they have a different view of what counts as natural but they definitely think there's something to this. And then questioning where is the overlap and then where are the points of conflict and finding kind of different and more profound points of conflict than the general evolution versus creation debate, which I find to be mostly boring and unhelpful. In what way? The deeper conflict or the boring and unhelpful. In what way? The deeper conflict or the boring and unhelpful? Both. You can start with whichever one you want. Maybe explain on a one-on-one level

exactly what the issue is. Yeah, I think if you read most creation and science books, there's a very standard theme and variation which is what do we do with Genesis 1 through 11 or Genesis 1 through 3 do we read it literally wouldn't Lee which I know you have talked a lot about on this podcast right what what that mean or should we read it

historically and I say like look you know you those are all interesting things everybody's got a mythology everybody's's got origin stories. Evolutionary biologists all tell origin stories. They also have mythologies that we put technically under a story that they don't believe is actually, you know, one for one historically perfectly true. But it's a good enough story to describe why things are the way they are now, right? If we take for granted that Genesis 1 through 11 is at least that. It's a good enough story that the biblical authors believe explains enough about why things are the way they are now. So what you see in these debates is often people just argue about how to

read those texts, and then they either hyper-literalize them to where they have a very specific way of reading them. They say, if you don't read them this way, you're not reading the Bible correctly, and you're ditching all of that or they just say history doesn't really start till genesis 12 and all that other stuff is just kind of like poetic mythology so we so we're going to take our origin story of like evolutionary biology and you know what and again you have to say well which one because there's only like 20 different versions of evolutionary biological evolution right um i'm going to take this version 2a of the evolutionary biological story sit it back over here and then say and that created a bunch of people that eventually led up to abraham and okay now we're in abraham now we'll go forward in history right and it's different version i mean

and again it's not it's unfair to say that's all that's going on in that debate, but a lot of it is variations on that basic. So it's, it's too neatly dividing myth from history and these different theories of cosmology and creation. Yeah. And then you end up saying, well, no, the Genesis one through 11 is, it's a functional story. And since it's just just functional it's not trying to do all this other stuff and um i believe it's it's probably doing functional storytelling and lots of genealogical storytelling and lots of other things but the problem is most you know what it's doing is not taking seriously that okay darwin comes up with this idea of natural selection i think my original proposal for the book title was what scripture and Darwin both noticed, right? That they're actually noticing and telling you something about the nature of the world and why it is nature, red and tooth and

claw, which that's even a controversial view in evolutionary science today. But they both are trying to tell a story about how natural selection works. But I've never read anybody who actually takes seriously the biblical view of natural selection and says like, oh, they have a view that actually corresponds quite nicely. And I, you know, in researching it, and I love it, if anybody knows in your audience of something, I would love to hear about it. But I looked pretty broadly for anybody else in antiquity who was telling any kind of story that sewed together scarcity with violence, genetic propagation, and fit to environment the way that the biblical authors do.

I couldn't find anybody who's doing anything like it until Darwin, really, Wallace and Darwin. find anybody who's doing anything like it until darwin really um wallace and darwin so kind of apples to apples comparison right like let's let's do apples to apples see what they would say about these things that darwin thinks he's discovered i think the more profound conflict is a metaphysical one they believe the universe used to be one way it's now a different way and it will be one day another way right okay sense well i'm curious in this, you know, we're now looking into a closet of a door that we opened up to a bedroom, but, um, I, I, cause I have not, I've barely dabbled in this discussion. Um, so I, you know, um, and I have heard from people who have spent a lot of time in it that um it is now through genetic

research and everything been more or less proven and i was right there i always get nervous like heard that before as well you should okay um proven that philosophy of science long enough that's not a true statement um that genetically it's impossible that um all humanity came from one human pair it had to have come from at least maybe a hundred different humans and then you know then that raises conflict with the genesis account and how do you reconcile that and trevor longman and others have you know is that true what is is there a consensus on the origins of all of those statements really because genetic science does not actually show that um and i'm i'm speaking on behalf of josh They've had to recant all of those statements. Really? Because genetic science does not actually show that. And I'm speaking on behalf

of Josh Schwamidas, who wrote this book called The Genealogical Adam and Eve. He is actually a computational biologist at Washington University. He's like a legit guy that... Yeah.

He's a senior in his field. Let's just put it that way. He works adjacent to the genome project. Like, he's... Yeah. Like, he's in it, right? he writes the articles these things are based on and he's actually called venema who wrote with scott mcknight that book uh bio logos he's called them to the carpet and said

you you can't say these things because they're not empirically true um and they have they've retracted those states so if you go on their websites now, now I don't know the whole story. I know Josh fairly well. But if you go on their websites, like they have, if you go on the internet archive, you will see that they have changed over the last couple of years as Josh basically confronts them on the wording of some of these things. He has an interesting, which I don't know if I can buy it, but it's very interesting and compelling view of both evolutionary humanity, like humanity coming about by evolution, but also the special creation of garden. And he would say through

computational biology, he can confidently say, and he's run this past all of his non-Christian colleagues, and they're like, yeah, those numbers work, that all you need is one man and one woman intermixing with an already evolved human population. That's the trick, right? So you have to have an already evolved human population outside the garden. You have one man and one woman from inside the garden, and he needs about 4,000 years to explain every person's genome on the face of the earth. So just from a genealogical perspective that on some level would resonate with a certain reading of the Genesis account, you could have Adam and Eve being created single-handedly by God while outside the garden there is an evolution of human species that aren't created in God's image or how do you well so that that's the

cake and eat it too problem right um yeah he he would say he calls it theological humans the ones coming from the garden um and then the non-theological humans he maybe has a different term for it but I still think he runs into some pretty profound conflicts with what the, what scripture is doing. I think what's interesting about, he's got a website called peaceful science or something. You should have him on. You love him.

He's brilliant guy, a lovely person. But one of the things he's really interested in is helping these science and religion organizations like stay stay on the tight and narrow with what they say about science and stay away from overstatements and like well there's a bottleneck of 10 000 and it never goes below that so you can't have you know and he's like no actually i do the science right now that's not true according to what we understand um and so he's just been that's like been one of his we understand. Um, and so he, he's just been,

that's like been one of his crusades is to keep everybody on the street. He, he read my manuscript and a lot, a lot of ready inquiries. Quit saying that. Like, that's not how we talk. Don't describe us that way.

So he saved me from a lot of errors as well. Wasn't your documentary that came out? The real Adam and Eve. Is that part of, I think it was a secular, it wasn't like a Christian thing. I think it was, but it sounds similar. I have to say it's, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you're talking about. I didn't see it. I've waded into this world enough and I read, you know,

enough of the books where I'm like, I don't want to live in this debate. I do want to, I do think there's a unique contribution, listening to the intellectual world of the biblical authors on these topics that it creates for this discussion. My editor said, this is a disruptive book. It's trying to say, hey, you guys might be missing something here in this whole discussion. And that metaphysics, the metaphysical views of the biblical authors, all the way into the new testament as well um really uh have not been allowed a seat at the table in the discussion so that's fascinating and i you know i'm not a huge philosopher i mean i i enjoy some philosophy it's helped me think through some things with clarity but i'm not i don't want to drag everything into a like a

ontology and uh an epistemological discussion i do think the biblical authors though often want to draw us into epistemological discussions there i mean the idea of who knows what and how is kind of a central question like you know the garden knowledge of good and evil and uh even in the exodus account you know exodus 1 through 14 is sprinkled with i'm going to do this plague so that you will know that i am yahweh amongst uh amongst the the egyptians right and there's what a dozen so that you will know statements in there so like the topic is philosophical topics are right there ready to hand throughout scripture you don't have to read philosophical topics into the discussion

the the broader question that i'm trying to deal with is, did the Hebrews across these various texts, all these texts do different things, right? And they treat sometimes the same topic in different ways, but is there some kind of uniform philosophical view that emerges? And this is what we call the Hebraic approach is what I've been using. Even then, I haven't convinced myself that there's just one approach. I think I have some real insights that are true-ish to what's going on there, but I definitely don't think I've in any way in one book nailed the whole system and understand everything that's going on. And so I actually argue in that book, not for a philosophy,

but for a philosophical style. They definitely have a way of reasoning and thinking through abstract issues that is very different than the Greeks or the Romans or the Enlightenment. Very similar to the way African communities think through things. And Anne is just as philosophically rigorous and aimed at developing wisdom rather than discrete binary knowledge of something that's either black or white. It's actually aimed at developing wisdom rather than discrete binary knowledge of something that's either black or white. It's actually aimed at developing wisdom and that we don't value. It's a philosophical system that essentially we don't value today because we think that it's mushy. It's got too much narrative. It's got poetry in it. How can poetry be philosophically viable? Like, we can't even comprehend that, you know? So, I mean, I say that I know you understand why Hebrew poetry could be philosophically rigorous. But your average person is just going to be like, how can a psalm be philosophically rigorous?

Well, yeah. I mean, especially psalms that wrestle with wisdom questions, you know, problem of evil. And I'm just fascinated at how much of the old Testament in particular is written in poetry, just the different genres, the need for different genres and literary genres, but also, you know, just the very nature of wisdom literature, even Ecclesiastes, which most people don't, I don't think read it correctly. Um, yeah, the, it's just so they just don't read it well they don't read it or they

you know read ecclesiastes 311 and put it on a bumper sticker or something but right right but yeah the fact that that book is in the canon ecclesiastes read correctly as this like extensive like cynical view of the world or how would you have knowing too right like if a cynical view of knowing too because like yeah you know the admonition if a man claims to know he doesn't you know wait a second i mean i think it has to be weighed in the balance i think like job you know it's it's it's a book that gets weighed in the balance of wisdom literature which we always have to say sorry to will kynes when we say wisdom literature but no i love i i always say say we should be reading this publicly at the beginning of every semester of university, right?

Because it has some very strong warnings. Do you take Ecclesiastes as – I think it was Tremper Longman in his commentary. Or there's others. It's not just him, but that you have the beginning and the end that's kind of the healthy divine perspective. you have the beginning and the end that's kind of the healthy divine perspective but the bulk of the book is largely written from kind of a formerly religious kind of cynic or somebody who has this kind of like almost like a deistic view of of god um to where it's yeah well yeah again i don't i since i think it's public wrestling i mean it's it's, it's earnest wrestling. Uh, my favorite essay on it is by, um, a poetry scholar named Jamie Grant. He's at, um, Inverness. Oh yeah. Jamie Grant.

But he has this article called Frustrated Man or something Frustrated Man, I forget. But essentially, his argument is that through Ecclesiastes and some of Proverbs, but kind of once you see that lens, you see it everywhere, is that the problem, the philosophical man is really somebody who is ultimately, and I think this is where Darwin's insights are so helpful, is somebody who's ultimately just frustrated with the nature of reality as he's found it. That death is imminent, that the limits of our capacities to love, to help, to that we have maximal capacities of desire that do so much damage to other people and minimal capacities to repair from that damage we do.

Wicked people live long, righteous people die short. Yeah, it's a beautiful essay on like, this is actually what it means to be a human according to Ecclesiastes. But again, weighed in the balance of the larger view, I use the Gloria Patri for this Darwin book of the larger view i i use the gloria patry for this darwin book of the larger metaphysical view though is always as it was in the beginning is not right now but evermore shall be right that's the that's the view that i don't think ecclesiastes loses hold of it lets a very loose grip and kind of floats it out like a balloon you know really far out there to where

you can't see it anymore well the bookends do kind of bring us back, but it lets us linger in the complexity and confusion for a while, you know, you're just reading. But even the, you know, the very last sentence, the issue that judgment is coming. And so what do you do? You do the Torah. And so, okay, you go back to the Torah. Well, what does that mean? Okay. Well, I'm going to keep the rituals that are meant to shape my way, my view of reality, history, myself, and the other. And the Torah is also going to say, like, don't you dare alienate the foreigner. Don't you dare oppress an orphan or a poor person, right? So, like, that kind of fields and fences wisdom development, it just creates a really dark,

big field. And then you hit those little bits of fences out there. Like don't cross these fences either. Right. So, I mean, we've all had undergrads like this, right. That you kind of, we were all this way at some point, right. Where you, you say like, Oh yeah, they don't trust anybody. There's in their instant reaction is like, what? So we should not listen to anybody ever again. You're like, well, no, that's's it's not what we're going for here right but um i i think ecclesiastes trust its hearer i think the uh the the final form whatever the original forms of it look like but the final form it just ultimately really trust the listener to understand, to be old enough to have had enough deep miseries and been involved in creating some of those and been involved in repairing some of those to go like, yep, I know exactly what you're talking about. I make my students watch Tree of Life.

Or I used to. I don't do it anymore. But Tree of Life, Terrence Malick's. Yeah. And like, you can divide the students who have had some hard experiences in life from the ones who haven't by kind of the reaction to that movie, right? So. Well, Drew, taking you over an hour, man, this has been, I'm going to go shove my head in the freezer to cool it off.

I think it's on overload right now. I want one of your viewers or listeners to to what do they call it mind map this conversation it's gonna look like a hairball yeah yeah yeah even though we're arguing for some kind of linear view of the world we definitely went in circles which i i actually enjoy these conversations sometimes more than the organized ones um but yeah where can people find your work um anything you want to let your the the audience know to chase you down? No, I'm not. Your podcast.

Yeah, I have podcasts. I direct the Center for Hebraic Thought. We have the Biblical Mind podcast, which I actually enjoy doing because I get to talk to people like you, which I'll have on the show here in the next couple months. And I have a narcissism website, drewchonson.com, D-R-U. And I have a narcissism website, drewchanson.com, D-R-U. But all it has is a graph of my books and which ones are nerdy and which ones are readable, basically. So, yeah. But other than that, OnScript podcast, which I'm a co-host, but that's a great podcast. I love listening to that podcast, but we interview biblical authors for that one.

So, that's a fun one. What's the difference between biblical mind and on script? You just do two different. Biblical mind. Well, here, here's the big difference. I don't prepare for biblical mind interviews at all.

I show up, no questions and I just get the person talking and then it's a real conversation. On script, we read the book. It's about one book. We read the book very closely. We script questions and like at the end of that interview, you're going to really know what that book is doing's about one book. We read the book very closely. We script questions. And like

at the end of that interview, you're going to really know what that book is doing. Oh, wow. And it's new books by biblical scholars. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's our popular one. That's the one like you, you're probably like famous at SBL, right? No, I don't think so. Do people get selfies with you? Has anybody ever gotten a selfie with you at SBL or ETS? Yeah, a few times at ETS, yeah. SBL, they might not want to be seen with me, but yeah. ETS. ETS sometimes, sometimes, yeah.

Yeah, I guess my podcast is kind of a blank. Sometimes I'll have an author on that I've read their book thoroughly. Other times, it'll be this where I just want want i even sent you questions ahead of time you're like the fourth guest out of over a thousand i've done that like i rarely um send anybody any kind of prep so i read them and i'm like there's no way we're gonna go through those questions no that's uh no that's it's it's a it's a good way to do it so how can people find you like my audience knows where to find me just good i'm uniquely branded i guess your name's with No, it's a good way to do it. So how can people find you? My audience knows where to find me.

I'm uniquely branded. I guess your name with the spelling is a little more unique too. Yeah, I'm weird. Press the sprinkle icon. This is fun. And hopefully, I don't need to sell any books or anything, but I do really hope people consider preciously that Jesus himself really understood how the prophets thought. I take the line seriously from Luke, which is just a quote of 1 Samuel, that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature before God and before men. That he really was processing the thought world of the prophets and how the thought world couldn't exist in the thought world alone,

that it had to actually exist in the world of action and the community and the church, which is what got him all fired up all the time. And so I really do want us to go back and take that very seriously. My pastor's heart is like, that's where I want people to be. Good, good. All right, Drew. Well, have a good one, man.

Thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much preston This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.