Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1117: Paying Attention to the Literary Artistry of the Bible: Dr. Tim Mackie

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Tim holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies from the University of Madison-Wisconsin and is the co-founder and content creator for The Bible Project. Tim is passionate about reading the Bbile for all its worth, which includes paying attention to the literary artistry of the text. In this convesation, we talk about how important the Eden Narrative (Gen 2-3) is for understanding the rest of the story of Scritpure. https://bibleproject.com/tim-mackie/ If you would like to support Theology in the Raw, please visit patreon.com/theologyintheraw for more information!

Welcome back to another episode of Theology in Iran. My guest today is the one and only Dr. Tim Mackey, co-founder of the uber popular Bible Project. I would think almost every single one of you listening probably knows what the Bible Project is. If not, just Google it and you can find out more about that amazing free resource. Tim has a PhD in Hebrew Bible from the University of Madison, Wisconsin. He is an expert when it comes to reading the Old Testament, especially with the Hebrew Bible on a literary level. So that's where we go for this podcast. We go deep, deep, deep, deep into various texts of scripture, looking at how the Garden of Eden narrative ends up sort of showing up at various places throughout the unfolding biblical story. And I could have kept going for hours with this conversation. I think you'll enjoy it if you like in-depth Bible study. So please welcome back to the show for the,

I don't know, what is like third or fourth time, the one and only Dr. Tim Beck. Tim, thanks for coming back on Theology in Raw. I think this is at least number two, if not three for you, but it's been a couple of years at least. This might be the first post-COVID conversation we had. Yeah. Yeah, Preston. That's totally right. It's been a number of years and it's great, man. Yeah. Yeah. Preston. That's totally right. It's been a number of years and

it's great, man. It's great. I, I, just for you to know, I'm like, I value this podcast and listen to it pretty broadly myself. I just, I love the variety, the intentional variety of conversations you're having about important things. So I just, I value it. Literally listened to a couple episodes with my wife on the way back from a road trip yesterday. So. Oh, no way. Yeah. Well, that's high praise, man. I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I was just back at Blackhawk Church earlier this year. Yeah. January and your name came up and I always forget that you were on staff there for a number of years. Yeah.

Yes. Yep. That's where I landed for graduate school. That's what landed us in Madison, Wisconsin. And then that's the church we ended up going to. And it's funny, my wife ended up working there when we moved out there and becoming an important leader there. And I was just known as Jessica's husband for many years. Nice. Because I was mostly buried in the library for all those years.

And anyway, but eventually I did get involved and came on to pastoral staff at that church. Wonderful community. Most people don't realize that University of Madison, Wisconsin is one of the top Old Testament slash Ancient Near East programs in the country. Is that correct? Is it still up there like it used to be? Oh, it's not. It's changed. Yeah.

Yeah. Kind of the two lead professors, Michael Fox and Cynthia Miller, retired or moved on. And then the department got absorbed into classics and so there is still a like ancient mediterranean religions in history or something like that and and a jewish studies department but for that season i think for kind of the 80s through the early 2000s it was a cross list between jewish studies uh and the language department and And so it was just Hebrew of all periods and just early Judaism

and ancient Near Eastern literature and history. It was awesome. I loved it. It was a really fun season. Well, I remember hearing about it, yeah, from a distance. It would always be referenced and like if somebody came from there, like, oh, this is like, kind of like,

kind of like, you know, you hear Harvard or Oxford or, you know, whatever, but it's just not, you wouldn't think of it. It, you know, it seems off the beaten track a little bit, but it's been this powerhouse of Old Testament studies. So that's a shame. It's, it's, it's not what it used to be, but. Yeah. Yeah. You know, departments, departments change, but it was, I think for me, it was the first non-religious, conservative religious environment to engage in biblical studies. And I wanted to get outside after going to Bible college and seminary, I wanted to be in a broader, more diverse context to study biblical literature. And that was definitely what I got. It was great.

You're studying alongside and from professors who aren't religious or are definitely not Christian or for sure not conservative evangelical, right? I mean, that wasn't the environment. That's right. In a broad array of Christian and Jewish students, graduate students and undergrad. It was wonderful. You couldn't take anything for granted about your beliefs. And not that you had to give an apologetic every class. In fact, that was discouraged. But the point was just let's come together and read and discuss and learn from these texts on their own terms

in their original languages. And I loved it. And it was such a fun season. That's exactly what drew me to studied Aberdeen in Scotland now Aberdeen did have much more of a at the time I was there the religious religion department had a lot more committed Christians than then your average maybe secular university um but it was for my my desire was the same thing I wanted to go to a non-confessional institution where you could go with a text leads and not have anybody looking over your shoulder. I'll never forget though. You'll appreciate this. I got hired on at Nottingham university just for a semester to fill

in for, um, uh, Richard Bell's a new Testament prof. He was on sabbatical. I, I applied for a, you know, short six months stint and I got it. And I'll never forget. So that department was a lot more... I was probably the only person there who'd be considered evangelical on any level. My New Testament colleague was Maurice Casey, who's a committed atheist, Jesus specialist. People don't realize that exists, but he knows not only the Greek, but the Aramaic behind the Greek better than I know the English of Jesus' words.

I mean, he's a brilliant scholar. Other people in the department were, if they were Christian, they were very much very not evangelical. But I'll never forget asking the head of the department, I'm like, would you ever hire an evangelical like me, full-time as a Bible professor? And he said, in all seriousness, he said, you know what? I wouldn't mind that at all, as long as they would just stick to the text. As long as they would just stick to the text. Yeah, sure, sure.

And I'm like, whoa, whoa. It was honestly a turning point in my... but he, you know, this perception that evangelicals are so agenda driven in their mindset, so politically driven, which might not be too far, far off, but it's like, no, we would love, it's just, they just don't, we just want somebody who just sticks to the text of scripture. Yeah. Yeah. So if an evangelical can actually do that, then I might hire him. But anyway.

Yeah, that's totally right. Well, so that speaks to a broader issue that's interesting, maybe overlaps with at least something I thought to talk about, because you asked me to talk about whatever I'm thinking about. But it is about how do we know that we're not just making all this up when we read the Bible? Like, how do we actually get in touch with a tool set? Excuse me, how do we gain a tool set that gets us in touch with actually hearing somebody's voice that's not around when we read the Bible? And for me, that was the value of being in a really pluralistic, diverse context where all you could take for granted with each other is your language,

your grammars, your lexicons and dictionaries and things in ancient context. And it was really good for me just to sit in years in that setting because that is a value historically that at least the Reformed Christian tradition has said to value about ad fontes back to the sources you know yeah yeah to hear from the prophets and apostles all over again and so that's a part of the protestant tradition that i love and value it's a part of why i'm in that tradition and so it is ironic though that that's not how non-religious people think of bible nerds who are themselves conservative orthodox or whatever but so there you go just so my audience knows yeah i i you know as i often do tuesday afternoons i sent a bunch of podcast invites and i was like i gotta have tim back on

and um i and i i said you know i have no agenda i don't even know're going to talk about, but I would love whatever is stirring in your heart and mind. Let's just go for it. So you told me offline you had something, and I said, well, don't tell me ahead of time. Let's just do this in real time. So can you tease that out a little bit? What is this thing you've been thinking andive method, but it's about how I've been trying best as I can for over 25 years now from primarily Jewish and Israeli scholars who were immersed in the Bible in its ancient context and Second Temple Jewish context. That has just deepened, sometimes inverted or shattered my previous understandings. But usually that's just me being over-exaggerative. But it's usually a

deepening and a realizing like, whoa, I had no clue that this was like what's really going on. It's challenged me so many times to see my past self as assuming I already knew what the Bible was going to say or be about. And then when you actually can get some tools to get in touch with what it is saying on its own terms, it's so surprising to me. And it's so much more beautiful than I already thought it was. So I have a specific set of examples that I could bring up that have become really important to me, but they raise this bigger issue of how do we gain some leverage or controls to make sure the bible doesn't become an echo chamber what so that's kind of the meta issue so maybe we could you know i could talk about the specific parts of the bible that have been doing that to me and then

but that's the meta issue i think that'd be helpful let's let's start with some concrete examples and and then go top or down i guess Yeah. So I think the basic insight that for me is just like the fountain of life, pun intended, as you'll see in a minute, is that the Garden of Eden narrative is both literarily, it's at the front of the biblical story, Genesis 2 and 3. the front of the biblical story. Genesis 2 and 3. So you have the seven-day creation narrative, and then you have the Garden of Eden narrative, which spans from Genesis 2, verse 4, to the end of chapter 3. So it's from the creation of the Garden of Eden, Genesis 2, verse 4, to the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden. That sequence right there, the seven-day narrative, and then the Garden of Eden narrative, is the equivalent. I'll use a couple analogies.

If you're listening to classic, blue-note era American jazz, this would be the first 30 to 45 seconds of a ballad, a jazz ballad by Miles Davis or something like that. of like a ballad, a jazz ballad by Miles Davis or something like that. And you get the core melody, all the key notes and the note progression, just right there. You get a full cycle of it in the first, always under the first 60 seconds of the song. And then what the rest of the song is, is just variations through cycling repetitions through the core melody.

So the trumpet will take it this direction, and then you'll cycle back around and then the piano will go through the cycle and you go that direction and then you cycle around, and then the drum and the saxophone will do another progression. But that's essentially the structure of improv jazz is you take one core melody and then you just work it in as many directions as you can. And biblical literature is like that. core melody of words, ideas, and images and themes that just get explored on replay as you go throughout the Hebrew Bible, and with ever more sophistication as the stories go on. And I think it explains why, when you get to the Gospels, which are Second Temple Jewish literature, the story of Jesus is simultaneously being told as the story of a new Adam, a new human, and as the Messiah representative of Israel at the same time.

Those stories are not different from each other. They're overlaid on each other. But the reason the gospel authors tell the story that way is because that's already how you tell the story from its roots in the Hebrew Bible. So I could give a number of examples just to show what I'm talking about. But essentially, if anyone listens to the Bible Project podcast, this is just kind of what we do all day, unpacking this basic insight. Well, I'm already thinking, I mean, you even called it the exile of Adam and Eve from the garden. So here you have the garden of Eden, and then the land of Israel is described as kind of a new Eden. The temple, I almost said obviously, it's not obvious to maybe a lot of people, but the temple is described with a lot of Edenic imagery.

And so you have kind of a renewal of the garden. And then the exile to Babylon is in some way seems to be echoing or linked to or overlaid upon the exile of Adam and Eve from the garden. If you do these things, you'll be blessed. If you don't do these things, you'll be cursed, the kind of Deuteronomy 28, 29 vision. So, yeah. And then even the verbiage, you said, even all the way down to the language. So, off the top of my head, I don't have a Bible in front of me, but I'm thinking like seed, land, blessing, what else? Curse. What are some other kind of linguistic things that are?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, that's excellent. So even what you're just naming is that the rough structure of the sequence of like from something really good to something really bad inside to outside from blessing to curse. Like those are really broad movements of the story. But it's even more like it's even more dialed in. For example, you know, the human, the story begins with a wilderness. This is the Garden of Eden story in Genesis 2 verse 4. So it begins with a wilderness, and there's no water, the narrator tells us. And because there's no water, there's no plants, there's no trees, there's no human.

And so the next thing you know is that water pops up out of the ground, and the water that pops up out of the ground is spelled with the first two letters of the word adam, human. But the spring is called an ed, which is Aleph Dalet, and the word human is spelled Aleph Dalet Mem, adam. So an ed comes up out of the ground. Oh, and the word ground is Adama. It's adding a fourth letter. So the spring, human, and the word ground are all spelled with the growing sequence of the same letters. It's really cool.

So an Eid, spring, comes up to water the Adama from which God creates an Adam. comes up to water the adamah, from which God creates an adam. And so God brings life out of non-life through water, through this stream. And then plants can grow, and God plants a garden, and then he puts the human in the garden with all these abundant trees. And then two specific trees are highlighted, the tree of knowing good and bad, and then the tree of life. So that tree of life is really interesting because God already breathed his breath into the humans so that they are alive.

So that creates this interesting kind of puzzle in the story of like, okay, so the creature's already alive, but apparently there's a kind of life that comes in connection with this tree that is some kind of next level life or an enduring kind of life. And later in the story, you're going to learn that that tree connects you to God's own eternal life, that it becomes a gift of God for eternal life. But then there's a command about how to maintain access to the tree of God's own eternal life, and that is about this tree of knowing good and bad. We're told it's desirable to look at, all the trees are desirable to look at, and that it's really beautiful like all of the other trees. Now, the tree of knowing good and bad represents kind of a longstanding puzzle in the story because knowing good and bad is something really good in all the rest of the Bible.

In fact, it's like really important that you develop a healthy sense of knowing good and bad. Like in the Proverbs, Proverbs tells you straight up, that's what the point of the book of Proverbs you develop a healthy sense of knowing good and bad. Like in the Proverbs, the Proverbs tells you straight up, that's what the point of the book of Proverbs is for, is to teach you knowledge of good and bad. It says it in the introduction, right? So it's kind of this puzzle, like why doesn't God want human? Why is that a bad thing to, yeah, this tree of... So that's the famous puzzle, right, of the story.

So this is a good example of how then it links up and it's been put alongside the seven-day creation story. In the seven-day creation story, what we're told seven times over is God saw something that he had made and it was good. God saw that it was good. So the seven-day story sets you up to see God as the ultimate provider and knower and definer of what is good, and by implication of what is not good.

So what this tree represents then is God knows what is good. Apparently, it feels like God is holding out on the human. Like, why wouldn't God want me to know good from bad? In fact, when the snake crawls in to the garden, that's exactly what the snake draws attention to. It's like, no, you aren't going to die. The tree won't kill you. It's good for humans to know good from bad. In fact, it will make you like God or like Elohim, which could technically mean like spiritual beings,

but that's a little rabbit hole. So I think what's happening in the story, it's this wonderful moment where the first human set on the stage has been given all of these gifts, this gift of abundance, this gift of blessing, the gift of life. But there is one choice. There is one choice away from potentially ruining it all. And it might feel like God is holding out because he's saying, if you're going to be my partners in ruling the world together, it seems like you're going to need to know good from bad. And so it might seem like God is holding out the thing that I need to do my life well.

But ironically, in telling the human not to eat from the tree, God is initiating a process of actually helping them discern good from bad. But it's going to be by observing the command and instruction of God not by doing what I see with my eyes and so it's very interesting in the story when the snake you know spins his tail spins his web the phrase used in Genesis 3 verses 6 and 7 which is if you structure it out it's the literary center of the Eden narrative. It's actually been placed at the center of the center in the paragraphs.

It says, and the woman saw the tree that it was good. And that's exactly the same phrase in Hebrew. She saw that good that was repeated seven times of God in the seven-day creation story. So that's a good, and this is how the biblical authors do it. They'll put stories or scenes next to each other or structurally linked. And then they'll use an identical phrase or a similar sounding phrase so that you compare and contrast the things that are linked together. So now you have Eve, who's just told she can become God

if she takes from this tree. And then the narrator describes her doing exactly what God, we know God knows and sees and provides what is good because otherwise nothing would exist in the story. But now we have a human taking it upon themselves to see what is good in their own eyes. And so she sees that it's desirable, beautiful to look at, desirable to eat, and desirable for gaining wisdom. And so she took and she ate.

She gave to her husband and he ate. So that core portrait right there about seeing, desiring, taking, a human doing what is good by their own wisdom becomes the sad, tragic pattern that sets in motion everything that comes with the fall. So it's very interesting. So here's an example. The word fall isn't used in the Eden narrative. And there will be lots of rebellious people who expressly break the command of God, willfully rebel. But the story of Eden is more like of watching a moral infant get tricked and make a really stupid decision that they had no idea what the consequences would be. And they set in motion a destructive series of consequences that just get out of control. And that's the portrait of the Eden story. And the longer I've sat with that, and so that's the

story. We can talk about the way it gets echoed in a couple other creative examples. But for me, just that right there is such a powerful portrait of the human condition. Maybe it's because I feel like I play that scenario out every day of my life. But that was different than how I was first introduced to what happened you know, when I first started following Jesus in my twenties. So maybe we can session that a little bit and then I can talk about some examples. Well, a few questions and thoughts. First of all,

real quickly, first John is often referenced as unpacking that, the desires of the, what is it first on to the, the desires of the flesh, the world, the flesh and the devil. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is that drawing on exactly what you're saying is it kind of teasing out those

elements or i've often seen those two linked yeah uh yes i think with a couple other little layers little seasoning layers okay that he's working with but for sure the idea of desire and this this voice this voice of influence that you think will lead you to life, but actually is leading you to your own ruin. That's for sure John's way of echoing that. Yep. I've also seen people reference kind of, well, I guess Adam and Eve, but specifically Eve's interaction with the snake and her falling for his deception and ended up, you know, eating the fruit, um,

as kind of like a model for like human sin in general. And I've often wondered, it's like, is that too neat? Is that too like, is that really intended to be this model? But if what you're saying is this is really getting this kind of cycle going, that's going to see, that's going to reverberate throughout scripture. Then the answer is yes. It's not just a, a convenient kind of example to go to. It's actually looking at the very beginning of this human project that went

south and why it continues to go south and in need of God's redeeming grace. So, so it really, all that, all I'm saying is like, it actually is a good example to look at kind of the inner workings of human sin and deception and that's a proper way to read the Eden narrative. Yeah, I guess it's worth pointing out the name of the characters, Adam and Eve, or Adam and Chava, mean human and living one. Eve means living one. So the name of the characters when you put them together are living human. Adam Chai is often the phrase.

but their names and then how the cycles play out to follow make it clear, at least to me, that they're also meta characters. Every single character to follow is a living human in the story and then in history. to compare my own struggles and limits and insufficient attempts to define good and bad as somehow in comparison to that of living human in the beginning. Do you find, Tim, do you find questions around historicity and science to be wrongheaded or uninteresting to you when we look at Genesis, the first few chapters, I mean, whether it's one to three or one to 11, cause like, you know, when you said like we, you know, these characters almost designed to be kind of representative, somebody with like a different question of mine could say, Oh wait, no,

no, no. But they're literal figures. They're not just representatives. And it's almost like, well, maybe yes, sure. But that's not maybe the literary, that's not how we're supposed to, those aren't the questions, the main questions we should be bringing to the text. It's kind of where I go. I'm like, okay, let's set aside some of those scientific questions. I'm not saying they're irrelevant. I'm just saying like, let's just at least appreciate the main theological point that is embedded in the very literary kind of layout of the text let's just linger there for a little bit before we kind of race to ask scientific questions that that's what i that's that's kind of how i navigate that how do you navigate those historical scientific questions yeah they're very important questions

because what we're asking is how does the narrative world portrayed in these, in this case, Hebrew, ancient Hebrew texts, how does that portrait of the world correspond to my portrait of the world as a modern Westerner? And then these corporate portraits of the world that our cultures construct through historical method or scientific discovery and so on. That's such an important question, right? How does that narrative world relate to or reference what we might call the real world that we've constructed through historical science and so on?

So that's a very good question, but it's a different question than asking the meta question that I was kind of cuing to was what happens when I just sit down and leave my questions at the door and try to see what this author or how the text has been shaped by someone in the shape we have it now to take me on a journey that actually wants to communicate something about the nature of God, the nature of humans, the nature of the world as we know it.

And in that sense, it's like, who's the famous playwright that was George Bernard Shaw? To engage theater, you have to engage in the practice of the willing suspension of disbelief. You have to just enter into the story and willingly suspend any suspicions of like, no, that didn't happen that way. Like no way that would never take place. And you're right. Cause, and you, when you watch Star Wars, for example, you're like, none of this would ever happen, but you enter into the world and you just sit in it and you sit in that as an experience designed to do something to me. And I guess that's what I find is the longer I've done that and the longer I invite students and learning in classes to do that, it just changes

the questions that you ask. And it doesn't make the historical reference or science questions unimportant. It just puts them in a different category. It's a different type of task. So I guess there are plenty of listeners who would be like, oh, Tim's fully trying to dodge the question. And maybe I'm just saying I'm separating it out. It's a separate conversation from sitting down with this ancient author and trying to understand what they want to communicate to me. I agree. Those questions, they can be important. I just, I'm always nervous about forcing an ancient text to answer a question that we are asking, but that it's not designed to answer. Or even as, you know, to use C.S. Lewis's phrase, the chronological snobbery,

or maybe not so much snobbery. Maybe it's just like, maybe it could be arrogant. The arrogance, let's just go with that for the sake of being raw. You know, the arrogance of thinking that our questions are the most important because we have them, you know, as modern Western America, you know.

Yeah. And to almost be frustrated if an ancient text doesn't answer the questions we have in the way we want it to be answered. Again, that's kind of where my mind goes. I don't want to discount the importance of those scientific or historical questions. And I mean, at the end of the day, I do think that more than like the age of the earth to me isn't super interesting. I do think that the historicity of Adam and Eve and correlating that with our understanding of the science or scientific knowledge of human origins, that one's a little more interesting because that does play a theologically significant role, you know, in scripture. Actually, that's a wonderful example because in the seven-day narrative, the number seven plays a key role in the structuring of the story, seven days.

Also, the number of times God speaks is ten, ten times. And ten acts of speech is going to become a really important literary principle as you go on into the rest of the Hebrew Bible, most famously in the Ten Commandments, but a bunch of other times. And in fact, the biblical authors will often tell later stories highlighting the number 7 and the number 10 as a way to signal restarting the melody. as a way to signal restarting the melody. So in other words, what the biblical authors saw in those numbers 7 and 10 is really different than maybe what modern people tend to debate about those numbers. And I just want to show you an example, because once you just see it, it's so cool how this works. And this will be all the pieces coming together, in case this is sounding like a semi-incoherent conversation

so far to any of your listeners. I'm having a good time. I hope you are. Okay. So let's just go, I'm just going to plop us down in a section later in Genesis chapter 15, for example. So here's a story. God has promised this guy, Abram, his name is still Abram, and God's promised that he's going to have a really big family, a great nation through whom God's going to bless all of the nations. That happened back in chapter 12. So the number one question on Abram's mind as he walks into Genesis 15 is like, hey, God, you know, it was a couple decades since we talked last, and I have no kids, and I'm pretty old, and so is my wife, right? So, Abram begins the conversation saying, verse 2, oh, Lord God, what will you give me since I am childless, and the inheritor of my house is a guy named Eliezer of Damascus. Now, here's what's really interesting. That word childless doesn't actually mean childless.

What it means is stripped naked. So I'm like one who is naked. And the only guy, it's ariri, I'm like one who is naked. And the only guy, it's ariri, which means to be bare or naked, exposed. So I'm naked. And the only one I have as a son of my house is this guy named Eli Ezer, which is a compound name in Hebrew, Eli meaning my God, like Jesus on the cross, Eli, Eli. And then Ezer is the Hebrew word for helping ally or supporting ally. It's what the woman is called in Genesis 2. So I'm naked. And the only ezer I have is this guy named my God is my Ezer. So all of a sudden we're using Eden words here. And you might not buy it, but just let the case build here. So we have a guy who says he's naked and he's not able to duke

the thing that God has promised that he will become, which is a great nation. It sounds a lot like it is not good for the human to be alone. So I will make an Ezer, right? A supporting, right? Or that delivering ally for him. I think that's what we're echoing. Abram said, well, you haven't given me any seed, any offspring. And the one born of my house is currently my heir. The word of the Lord came to him saying, no, no, no. My paraphrase. I'm sure Eliezer's a very nice man, but he will not become your heir. Rather, one that will come out of your own body. That one will inherit you. So what God takes him famously out to look up at the heavens and count the stars.

You're like, oh yeah, I learned about those on day four of Genesis 1. Look up at the heavens and count the stars. You're like, oh yeah, I learned about those on day four of Genesis 1. Look up at the stars. In fact, that's the last time the stars were mentioned, is on day four of creation. Count the stars if you can. That's what your seed will be like. And so, Abram trusts. He trusts God. So we have the sequence of God promising to provide seed for Abram, even when he seems to be naked and having no ezer. It's important that the word ezer and zera, seed, the helper, supporting ally, and seed are the same letters, just inverted. So I have no Ezer, I have no seed or descendants, and the only guy I have is this guy named Eli Ezer. And God says,

no, no, no, he's a nice guy, but I'm going to give you Zerah. And it's just the same letters. And those words, seed and Zerah, are key words in the Eden narrative because there is no future of seed lineage from the lone human. But when God splits the human into one and then the supporting ally, then you get the future of the Zerah. So essentially, and it's a nighttime scene. This whole thing's happening at night. So this gets even better. So I'm going to skip forward. So in verse 9, okay, so then verse 7, God says, you know,

I'm the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans. I'm going to give you this land to possess it. And Abram says, no, how do I know that I'm going to possess it? And so God said to him, bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old lamb, and a turtle dove, and a young pigeon. So he's supposed to be like a little Adam collecting the animals here. So it's a little Eden scene, except this time he doesn't live in harmony with them. He severs them in half, which is a little brutal.

Then the birds of prey came down on the carcasses, and Abram drove them away. That's a fascinating little rabbit hole. But then check this out. When the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram. When's the last time that a deep sleep has fallen upon a character in the Bible? The creation of Eve from his side. The same exact word, Tardema.

In fact, it's a very rare word, Tardema. And the Eden narrative and this narrative right here are two of the key narratives where it occurs. So we have a guy who's naked, who can't reproduce, and God causes a deep sleep to fall upon him, and he's going to make a promise, right, about what's going to come from his loins. I mean, you see, we're trading in Garden of Eden imagery here. So this scene is being set on analogy to God's provision of a future and a

partner and a future family for Adam and Eve. So it's just a good example. And we have these random, all these random stuff about go collect these animals and weird vocabulary. But in doing so, the narrator is trying to set this whole scene on comparison to Adam and Eve. Now, I want to show a couple other things in the following chapter,

but this is how they do it. And so this is a good example of why when we look at specific words or images and we ask about first from our perspective of historical reference or like scientific questions based on words, specific words in the Bible. And I think for me, the imagination kind of conversion was the specific words that biblical authors choose are usually driven by another communication agenda. And often in a case like this, the words they're using are determined by this desire to set Abram in his crisis of need on analogy to Adam in his crisis of need in the Garden of Eden. And that's why the story is told the way that it is.

Hey friends, Preston here. I just received the coolest message from a Theology in the Raw listener, and I wanted to share it with you. Take a listen to this. I'm Ashlyn, and I'm a Theology in the Raw listener. I was listening to a podcast and heard Preston talk a little bit about when you're in ministry and you're teaching scripture, the importance of biblical languages. And I felt really compelled by that. I've always been interested in biblical languages. And I tell my students all the time, like context is key.

And so much of that lies within the biblical languages. And I was praying. I was like, okay, Lord, I want to learn biblical languages for an affordable price in an environment that's conducive to my stage of life, where I'm at and what I need. And I kid you not, the next podcast I clicked on was advertising Kairos. And it was just a perfect opportunity. Checked all of my boxes of not homework heavy, very practical based on learning, not on passing tests, very much the way that I learn. And there was an opportunity to take a class on a Friday morning in my own home online. And it's just been so practical and so effective and so helpful. And it's been really cool just how fast you begin to pick up on it because it

is so practical. So if you have been wondering if you should learn the biblical languages, if that's something that you would benefit from, the answer is yes. You will always benefit from gathering more context into the scriptures that shape the entirety of our life and our belief system. And it's not as complicated as I think we can make it out to be or as daunting as we make it out to be. The way that the teachers teach and the way that the class is oriented, the way that the homework is, is it's very practical. It's very digestible and it's little by little. It's fun, you know, whenever months upon months upon months to grasp a language because this isn't something that you're learning to speak or write necessarily. You're

reading and understanding and recognizing it's a lot more practical than it may come across. And it's definitely worth it. You should definitely check it out. It's been a really great decision for me. It's so awesome when we get to bring to you the theology in the raw family resources that actually make a big impact in your life. And Kairos Classroom has quickly become one of those resources that I hope you'll check out by visiting www.kairosclassroom.com. And don't forget to use our special code TITR. That's kairosclassroom.com with the code TITR. T-I-T-R. That's kairosclassroom.com with the code T-I-T-R. First of all, I'm totally into this way of reading scripture. I used to teach Old Testament survey. I don't know if you know this, even though I'm a New Testament guy.

Yeah, I do remember that. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For several years. Yeah, a long time actually. And yeah, I would often point out some of these things. The book of Judges is filled with these literary allusions that typically go back to the account of the patriarchs. Little, little details where I'm like, whoa, are they doing this intentionally? describing the horrific incident that the rape of the concubines, women and Judges 19, is so clearly mapped on the Sodom and Gomorrah story. That's not really disputed, but it's interesting that, you know, the whole theme of Judges is the canonization of Israel. I think Daniel Block coined that phrase where, you know, if you don't drive them out, you become like them. And by the end, the Judges are becoming like them. And so you have this incident where, you don't drive them out, you become like them. And by the end, the judges are becoming like them. And so you have this incident where you guys think Sodom and Gomorrah is bad.

Well, you guys are doing stuff that's actually worse than what Sodom and Gomorrah did. Anyway, just by example. But here's where my skeptical mind goes, which is about 48% of the time. My brain is just shouting like – I know where you're going. It's great. Well, if I was a skeptic, I would say, you know what, Tim? What you're saying makes sense,

which shows that this is clearly a literary work and not a historical work. You probably didn't know. Oh, I see. I didn't know you were going there. This is a crafty literary thing, but I mean, there's so much literary stuff going on here that are you, are you trying to tell me that these things just happen to happen this way as well in history,

that everything maps out? Like, is it that's orchestrated so intently that that's, that's my one skeptical question. My other skeptical question is, and this might be my own naivete being a modern reading ancient text, is were the ancient writers, few of whom even existed, they can actually write? Were they that good? when you start really unpacking some of this stuff. Like, are the biblical authors slash editors who put this thing together, is this typical in ancient literature

to be this careful and creative all the way down to numbering this many, you know, as you said, there's number seven and 10 in Genesis 1. Like, did we see this in other ancient texts or is it really unique to the scriptures? So are these two questions, by the way, throwing you off, I don't really unique to the scriptures? Sorry, these two questions might have thrown you off. I don't think this is—

Yeah, no, they're great. They're great. They're great. I'll go—the second one first. The second one I'll address first and just answer emphatically yes. Okay. And what actually is really interesting is—I guess it's all relative by comparison— but the fields of Egyptology and Assyriology

are undergoing huge renewal, rebirths right now, both in North American and European scholarship. Even some new texts, there's been some recent new Egyptian papyri found, really ancient. But a lot of this work is truly trying to understand the native mindset of scribal schools and traditions of the ancient world, especially Mesopotamia, that is Assyria and Babylon and Egypt. And in these fields, the degree of sophistication, of training, of high literary skill, and literary subcultures is off the charts, man. And what's funny is that there has not been a parallel analog revitalization in biblical studies. biblical studies and especially in critical biblical studies, the kind of the default is this is ancient kind of more primitive folk literature, oral traditions that it got,

you know, crystallized into literary remnants and in critical biblical scholarship, it's sort of like, you know, they were doing their best. So there's almost a default against an argument for literary sophistication. And I think all I can say is I'm very interested and excited about the day thought in the late 70s, early 80s-ish with Brevard Childs and others, wasn't there kind of this pushback against all this higher critical stuff and more of a move towards more literary, canonical readings of Scripture? And did that not take root to the extent that we wanted it to is that what you're talking about not not not i

mean if we're just taking biblical studies as the way discussions go in the guild so to speak you know if you just if you track with society of biblical literature's annual meeting trends um uh the literary studies approach that was really uh popularized by ro Robert Alter in a good way. He's amazing. And Brevard Childs made his own contribution to that. On the whole, that has been dismissed in the field as imposing modern standards of literary sophistication onto these ancient texts. And the more echo chamber than reality is the claim.

texts and the more echo chamber than reality is the claim that however there is a always there's always been a minority report going on there and that minority report has mainly been by an explosion of scholarship by israeli and jewish scholars who are just like no no way dude this this stuff is next level um so i'm thinking here of the work of somebody like Joshua Berman, of Moshe Garciel, Michael Avios, Seth Postel. Actually, Seth Postel, who's a Christian, a Messianic Jew, has written this excellent work called Genesis 3. This is the subtitle. Genesis 3, 1 through 3 as the introduction to the Torah and the Tanakh.

I can't believe the title slipped me right now. Oh, Adam as Israel is the name of the book. Oh, interesting. So he and I are thinking along very similar lines. But what I find is that it's mostly Israeli or Jewish scholars who have grown up reading the Bible in their own language, in Hebrew, from childhood. And there's a degree of deep familiarity so that the way I know the Star Wars canon, for example, or my kids, is like the familiarity they have from childhood. But they don't view the Bible as children's literature,

but they're able to just hold so much in their head at once that they can see almost like waves through the text of repetition of vocabulary and themes and ideas in a way that if we just plop into Genesis 15 like we just did, it almost seems like I'm just kind of cherry picking and showing you this and that. But if we could take a year and crawl through Genesis 4 and how it picks up Genesis 1 through 3 and then Genesis 5 and how it does this with Genesis 1 through 4 and then Genesis 6. And so

the cycle just keeps going. So by the time you're to Genesis 15, it's already, like what I just showed you is already like the top 10 hits of what's already been on the vocabulary recycle in Genesis 1 through 14, for example. And what's remarkable is just how it keeps building on throughout. And so maybe just like to show why this matters to me also. I'm a follower of Jesus. just like to show why this matters to me also. I'm a follower of Jesus. And so I have this conviction based on what he said is that all these texts are somehow fulfilled and carried forward in his own life and announcement of the kingdom of God, his death, his resurrection, and the gift of the spirit. And so the story of like his testing in the wilderness, for example, and the way that Eden images get inverted or recycled just in that story alone, the GSS3 wilderness test,

is truly remarkable. Can you go there? Can you tease that out too? Yeah, totally. Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm just going to go with Matthew's account just because I've been working on it recently. But Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, so the opposite of a garden. Actually, it's what the land of the garden was before God provided the spring. Yeah? It was wilderness. And it's the Spirit, which the Spirit is the agent of life in the Eden narrative. And it's the spirit, which the spirit is the agent of life in the Eden narrative. But now it seems like the Messiah is being led by the spirit into, is standing, so to speak, at their own tree of knowing good and bad with a choice.

That word gets introduced in Genesis 22 as an echo of the Eden test of Adam and Eve. To be tested by the diabolos is the Greek word, the slanderer. He fasted 40 days and 40 nights and he became hungry. So notice the inversion of Eden. Instead of eat from every tree, now he's eating from nothing. Yeah, so it's the opposite of a garden

and it's the opposite of a feast, like in Eden. So we're in like anti-Eden land. That's the inversion that we're doing here. The tester came and said to him, if you are the son of God, command that the stones become bread. So now this is a food test. You're like, of course it's a food test. Somehow food is now going to become this test of loyalty, of trust in his father. And you're like, what else was the tree about? Except a trust that somehow God will teach me what I need to know about good and bad, even though this tree could shortcut it for

me. We're imagining what Adam and Eve might think. But I'm going to trust that God will teach me what I need to know in His own time. And very similarly, the tester comes, well listen, if you are the Son of God, clearly food should not be a problem for you. Just say a command. In Eden, God gave a command about the tree with food. Now here, the Son of God refuses to command the stones to become food. And then verse 4, Jesus' answer, he quotes Deuteronomy and says, human, that is Adam, it's the Hebrew word Adam in the Deuteronomy quote, human, that is Adam, it's the Hebrew word Adam in the Deuteronomy quote, Adam will not live, have life by bread only, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

So apparently God's command about the tree was actually the way to life, not taking and eating of the food of the tree itself. And so here, Jesus inverts that by saying, the life comes from the word of God, not by providing food for oneself. So just even just that right there, you can just see it's deep. Like you really have to think about it, but we're actually thinking through the nature of what was happening at the tree in Eden.

But the locations have all been turned into their opposites. The garden into a wilderness, right? The abundant food into a lack of food. The second test is about Jesus being taken up to Jerusalem and to the very top of the temple. and to the very top of the temple. And here, the narrator is using Eden-associated ideas connected to the temple, specifically from the Psalms scroll, the book of Psalms,

where the New Jerusalem temple is depicted as a new Eden. And that's the vocabulary that Matthew's drawing on here. And then here, it's a, if you are the Son of God, throw yourself down for it's written. And then, right, the tester quotes from a poem that we call Psalm 91. So, it's about asking the Son of God to force God's hand of protection. God to force God's hand of protection, if God was really committed to you, he'll surely rescue you in your moment of need. That's like the test. So it's this idea that if the Son of God is truly set up as the beloved of God, he won't let anything bad happen to you. He would never allow you to face anything that's difficult. He'll rescue you.

And so there's something similar here about what I think the angle of the snake is working, that surely if you're God's partner here, he wouldn't hold out a tree on you. He will give you what you need. In fact, he's already given, just take it for goodness sakes. So there's a tree on you. He will give you what you need. In fact, he's already given, just take it for goodness sakes. So something going on there. Then the third test is about being taken up to a high mountain, which Eden is depicted as a high place because it has a river

that flows out. All the rivers of the earth come from eden um ezekiel straight up calls eden the mountain i was just thinking ezekiel 28 was the yeah that correlates eden with the mountain which which makes sense in the ancient mindset of the place where you meet with the gods is a high mountain yep yep and then he shows him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory or their splendor. And the tempter says, all these things I will give to you if you fall down and worship me. So here we're working the angle of Adam and Eve's commission from the seven-day creation narrative, which is to be fruitful, multiply, fill the land, and rule it. Have dominion and rulership over it. So it's all a question of how the human will gain divine authority over heaven and earth.

And in the Eden story, it's actually by not taking it by your own wisdom, but by allowing God to give it to you in your own time. And so similarly here, Jesus is promised cosmic authority over all the nations, and there's apparently two ways to get it. There's a satanic way, so to speak, and then there's the way of wisdom, which is to be patient and wait for God to give it to you. And what Jesus says is,

Hupage satana. Get behind me, Satan, or go away, Satan. And he passes the test. So, dude, this is amazing. On the other side of Matthew, structurally, the way Matthew works, on the other structural matching end in the passion narrative, is the Garden of Gethsemane, which Jesus calls a test. He calls it his great test, and there he's actually in a garden. And he resists the temptation to use violence as the means by which to bring the kingdom of God. And Peter gets out the sword, right, and tries to use

the sword. And the one other time that Peter tried to prevent Jesus from thinking he had to die was later in the Gospel of Matthew. And what Jesus says to Peter is exactly what he says to the tempter here, which is, get behind me, Satan. He calls Peter Satan, right? So I think what Matthew has done is he's taken the Eden test and he split it in two and put it as a frame at the beginning of Jesus' mission before announcing the kingdom of God. And then at the end, you have the wilderness test and the garden test. And there's all these hyperlinks, kind of links in between them and then to stuff in between. But that's part of how Matthew is portraying Jesus as the one who succeeded where Adam and Eve failed.

And the language of the test are precisely the same type of way. So I'm not alone here. Brandon Crowe has a great book on Adam imagery in the Gospels. I think it's called The Last Adam. And he's an example of somebody who's really picking up on how the gospel authors do this. But there you go. We could obviously do, we could talk for a long time. You've given us a lot.

So when I've read, especially Matthew, The Temptation, or even the Sermon on the Mount, I see a lot of like new Israel kind of themes. And that's typically when people look for Old Testament themes kind of interwoven throughout Jesus' ministry, oftentimes they camp out on the new Israel, but that's not an either or, right? Because even Israel is a recapitulation of taking on the mantle where Adam left off and messed up and then Noah took it, he screwed up and then Abraham and it just kind of keeps going on and on and on, right? So it's not an either or, it's a both and, right? Is that how you would? Yeah, that's right.

In other words, Israel entering in the land, the seed of Abraham entering into the land is depicted through these links and comparisons on analogy to Adam and Eve in the, in the garden. And Jesus is set on analogy to them both. So yeah. So that in bringing Israel story to an inverted success instead of failure, he is simultaneously bringing humanity story to its, to its success instead of the failure that happened. So it's just, it's a remarkable way, just to maybe back up and conclude, it's a remarkable way that the biblical authors, they were part of a literary tradition of how to tell their family history. Well, clearly,

I think there was literary creativity involved. This echoes back to the point that you raised. It doesn't mean they're making it up wholesale, I don't think. Just in the same way that my wife and I have retold now for 23 years the story of how we met and dated and got engaged and got married. And if we're at somebody's house for dinner for the first time and they ask us to tell the story, the way we tell it now is pretty tight. And we've got a a five minute version, you know, and you've got the half hour version and it's become stylized over the years. And we've actually, the way we tell it now is been impacted by the 20 intervening years and experiences that we've had that connect back where we can see the threads. So it very much doesn't mean that we're making it up,

the fact that we tell a stylized version, just the opposite, I was there. But the fact is because we've meditated on the meaning of the story in light of everything that's happened, we tell it in a much more tight, stylized, you could even say creative way, where we'll turn up the volume on certain details, right? We'll take elements of one day and night and put it with another because we know that they are actually connected in terms of their meaning.

And I think some process, much more sophisticated, but something like that is at work in biblical literature, that this is a family history. And what they're passing on to us is not just what happened, but the meaning of what happened. And they want us to see the meaning of what happened through the patterns and links that we have all the parts together. That's a kind of, I hope, a simple way of saying it. I'm going to ask you a practical question to close us out. I hope a simple way of saying it.

I'm going to ask you a practical question to close us out. But I do, you mentioned Abraham shooing away the birds. And you said that's a rabbit hole. You have thoughts on that. And I was like, oh, please, dude. I've often wondered like, why? I mean, okay, so he did that. But like, why include that in a story?

What's going on there? Do you have any brief thoughts on that? Well, yeah, it's interesting. So it's the word nashav here. I'm just recalling real quick here. It's the word nashav. It's not a very common word, but it is connected with the blowing of wind. Literally, it means to blow out or exhale. So we're imagining him going like, like blowing the bird away like that. But I think it's another Eden echo because the exhaling of God's breath that ends up bringing life into the land.

Whereas in this case, I think Abraham's exhalation of breath is what protects the covenant scene as a place where God's going to make a pact with him. So that's where I'm at currently. I'm actually not fully compelled by that interpretation. And I think there's probably some other things. What's interesting is how that line was taken within second temple literature. For example, there's a second temple work called Jubilees that has a fascinating interpretation that takes the birds as analogy to the nations that want to oppress Israel and depict Abram as like the rescuer of Israel's future. And because there's actually all of these links in this story that get picked up in the Gideon story in Judges, that portray Gideon as a new Abraham in really interesting ways. And whoever wrote Jubilees saw the blowing of Abraham

as this image that gets developed in the Gideon story as Gideon's rescue from the Midianites anyway. Okay, so I guess now I have two questions and then we'll let you go. So once you get excited about seeing these connections, it could run the risk of reading too much into the text. I hear maybe that's where your hesitation comes in with Genesis 15 with the birds of prey and stuff. Have you ever gone back and said, oh, you know what? I think I wanted to see more here than

was there. Or how do you protect against that? That's my first question and I'll get another one. Yeah. No, that's wonderful. I mean, yes, just because I think because of my training, I was taught to question yourself and then look for details in the text to make the strongest possible case for what your conclusions are. So that's good. I think that's just good, healthy reading strategy. But I consistently have my imagination expanded by connections that I think are really compelling that I wouldn't have seen otherwise if I didn't know to look for them. So I don't know,

I've more come to the conviction that the default of the biblical authors is towards imaginative connection making. But the point isn't just imaginative. The point is they want you to meditate on how the details of Abram's story are like and unlike Adam and Eve's story, so that you understand both better, so that you understand your own life better, because you begin to see the details of your own life in light of these characters' experiences with God. So they're trying to expand our imaginations, not close us down. But at the same time, I think it's healthy to... So I have columns always in my notes of growing observations.

There's a point at which it goes from maybe to, yeah, I'm pretty sure. Oh, interesting. Okay. Okay. And it's usually just the number of connections that is how the biblical authors signal to you that there's a connection going on. You might've just answered my second question. My second question, I'll just ask it again. And if you want to expand on what you just said is the kind of, so what? Like I could hear maybe some people saying well okay here's a couple bible nerds kind of geeking out over these connections but even if you were correct that the ancient authors were mapping these events upon events on each other and using language

it kind of signaled their previous stories and like so what's the what's the payoff like what's the is there is there a practical payoff to understand the Bible in this kind of 3D lens? Yeah, that's great. through the generations of how God relates to each of these characters throughout the generations and of how people tend to repeat the behavior of their ancestors, but never identically, always with a twist. And so I think it encourages us to see patterns at work in our own lives, in our own behavior, our own motivations, our own choices, to see the mystery of God's purpose at work in our lives by comparing it to how God was at work in all of these character stories. It's formative literature. It's meant to form our imagination

so that we begin to see our lives a certain way. And man, when you read the Gospels and you see the mindset of Jesus for how he approached people, how he approached his mission, you're watching the mindset of somebody who clearly spent a long, long time meditating, memorizing, and prayerfully relating to God through the narrative world of the Hebrew Bible. And I think that's, for me, that's what's capturing about this is I want to be with Jesus. I want to become more like Jesus

so that my life actually looks like the ways that his did in the world. And that's what I think I'm after as a disciple. And so my nerdy, one nerdy way that I do that is this literature has helped me learn how to do that in ways I never would have imagined when I started reading it as a teenager, you know, 25 years. I ask you the question because I think that's what people might have in their mind. I personally, I do get nervous around people rushing to find the, when they say, well, how does this affect my daily life? You know, it's like, I don't know, sometimes they, I don't know, is that, it makes me nervous. Is that reflective of our kind of expedient culture that just wants to kind of like, just tell me what to

do real quickly, you know, cause I got stuff going on rather than just bathing ourself in the biblical narrative and getting inside the narrative and letting that, and without saying, okay, what's the so what, what's the so what, just the so what is like, let's just reorient, reconfigure our mindset so that we start to think and breathe and eat and drink the biblical narrative. And that itself has a practical payoff because it just starts to reorient the liturgies of our hearts to draw on Jamie Smith's work. Yeah. No, that's right. It's a slow work, right? We were all formed over the course of many years and this literature has always played a role in groups of people who are reading, memorizing, hearing it, and living out its value set in a community so that it can reform our imaginations.

And to the degree that I can hear somebody else's voice other than my own when I'm spending time in Scripture, to have it force me to really meditate on my motives and my choices and how I treat other people and how I do or don't trust God. And that's good medicine, man. I need lots of that in my life. Scripture, in ways that I am still only learning to imagine does that for me and the lives of so many of my friends in a way that's so life-giving that it's the thing that I love to

talk about. So there you go. Well, Tim, thank you so much for the in-depth Bible study. I'm not sure if people were expecting this, but man, there's just so much there. So I appreciate that. For the four people that might not know who you are or the Bible Project, can you point people to where they can find out more about this kind of really rigorous, thoughtful Bible study? Yes. Bible study. Yes. So I am part of a co-founder, part co-founder of a non-profit media company making resources that help people understand the Bible. It's called The Bible Project.

And the easiest place is to go to our website, BibleProject.com. We have an app where we'll kind of help people learn how to read the Bible and all of our videos, podcasts. We have free online classes. BibleProject app, BibleProject.com. Hopefully you find it valuable. Thanks so much, Tim, for being on Theology in the Raw. Yeah, totally, Preston. Good to talk to you. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.