Tag Archives: Tremper Longman

03/3/20

Unveiling the Suffering Servant

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The Pharisees and Sadducees were playing a game of “Stump the Prophet” with Jesus. They tried unsuccessfully to catch him with a question about paying taxes, and then one on marriage and the resurrection. Each time Jesus astonished them with his answer. Then Jesus turned the tables and asked them a question about the Messiah, the Christ. Referring to Psalm 110:1, Jesus asked them if the Messiah was the son of David, how could David call him Lord? They couldn’t answer him, with Matthew saying, “And no one was able to answer him a word.”

110 A Psalm of David 

1 The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.” 2 The Lord sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your enemies! 3 Your people will offer themselves freely on the day of your power, in holy garments; from the womb of the morning, the dew of your youth will be yours. 4 The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, “You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” 5 The Lord is at your right hand; he will shatter kings on the day of his wrath. 6 He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses; he will shatter chiefs over the wide earth. 7 He will drink from the brook by the way; therefore he will lift up his head.

In his commentary on the Psalms, Tremper Longman said Psalm 110 was a royal hymn, delivered at the temple by a prophet, as part of the ceremony to a newly minted king. It contains two divine oracles (vv. 1, 4) directed to the king (Adonai, Lord) from God (Yahweh, Lord) In both verses, the use of Lord translated the Hebrew word, Yahweh. Some translations, like the ESV, renders Lord in small caps print to signify Yahweh. The second use of Lord in verse 1 translated the Hebrew word Adonai.

Longman further noted how God was envisioned as a Warrior, subduing the enemies of the Lord (Adonai) king—symbolically making them the king’s footstool. “The picture of the enemies as the king’s footstool points to the king’s dominance and control and the enemies’ humiliation.” Sitting at God’s right hand was symbolic of a position of honor and power. The IVP Background Commentary: Old Testament said an armed warrior sitting to the right of a king or lord would have the privilege of defending him, with his shield in his left hand and his sword in his right hand. “For a king to put someone there would be an affirmation of trust and therefore honor.” However, when the Lord takes up his position at someone’s right hand (as in verse 5), he is in a position to offer defense with his shield.

Through his warring activity, God (Yahweh) will extend the king’s rule, symbolized by his scepter, from Zion. Zion was the stronghold of the Jebusites captured by David (2 Samuel 5:7) and renamed the “city of David.” The Lexham Bible Dictionary said the significance of Zion developed over time. It became the Temple Mount, the place where God was present with his people (Psalm 78:68-69); it referred to Jerusalem more generally (Psalm 51:18); and could even designate the people of Israel as a whole (Isaiah 51:16).

Then with an interesting twist, the Lord (Yahweh) declares the king will be a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek (110:4). Christian tradition would come to embrace Melchizedek as a precursor to Christ. The writer of Hebrews developed this connection in chapter 5, quoting Psalm 110:4 in 5:6, and then saying in 5:9-10: “And being made perfect, he [Jesus] became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him, being designated by God a high priest after the order of Melchizedek.”

Notice in verse 5, it is the Lord (Adonai) who is at your right hand, “protecting him and fighting in his behalf.” The Hebrew word adonai usually refers to men, as when Sarah laughed to herself (Genesis 18:12), saying: “After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have pleasure?” If that is the way adonai is understood here, then verses 5-7 in Psalm 110 would be seen as affirming the armed warrior sitting to the right of his Lord (Yahweh), defending him. But here, there is a particular grammatical construction (o;ădōnā[y]), that always refers to God, according to Robert Alden in the Theological Word Book of the Old Testament. Adonai appears in this form more than 300 times, mostly in Psalms (as here), Lamentations and the latter prophets.

So, this changes who is doing the defending, the shattering of kings and chiefs, the executing of judgment in verses 5-7. It is the Lord (God), not a human lord (adonai). With this understanding, the Lord God is now taking up the role of defending (“The Lord [Yahweh] is at your right hand”), and becomes a fulfillment of verse 1, where unequivocally, it is the Lord (Yahweh), who will make the enemies of the Lord (Adonai), a footstool. If the use of adonai is misunderstood as referring to a human lord here, it can lead to the expectation of the Messiah as one who would restore Israel.

By the time Jesus was being questioned in Matthew 22, Psalm 110 was understood by the Pharisees to be referring to the Messiah, who they thought would restore Israel to its golden age. Interestingly, the psalm is cited more often than any other Old Testament passage (verse 1 in Acts 2:34; 1 Corinthians 15:25; Ephesians 1:20; Colossians 3:1; Hebrews 1:13; 1 Peter 3:22; and verse 4 in Hebrews 5:6, 7:17, 7:21). When Jesus cites this verse (in Matthew 22:44; Mark 12:36; Luke 20:42) he argues that the Messiah is superior to David, rather than subordinate, as the Pharisees believed. When David says God (Yahweh) spoke to my Lord, he was referring to someone he thought was greater than himself.

According to Leon Morris in his commentary, Matthew regards Psalm 110 as messianic, since “it teaches something about the Messiah who would come in due course and is not to be confined to statements about David.” The prophecy referred to the Messiah as sitting on the right hand of God, a place of honor. And while he sits there, God will defeat his enemies. But what about the unanswerable question, unanswerable on the Pharisee’s premises, “how is he his son?” Morris suggested Jesus was reinterpreting what the coming Messiah would be:

Jesus’ contemporaries seem to have thought of “the Son of David” as a Messiah like David, one who would sit on David’s throne, make warlike conquests as David did, and in general be David all over again. Jesus rejected that idea. “At the very least Jesus declares the freedom of the Messiah to establish the Kingdom by another path than the political and military methods of David. The Messiah can be and will be the Suffering Servant rather than the military conqueror and earthly king.”

It was widely accepted at the time that the golden age for the Jews was in antiquity, and historically it had been downhill since then. So culturally, the great king David was held to be greater than his descendants. So, if the Messiah was to be one of those descendants, then on Pharisaic terms, he had to be inferior to David. Yet David speaks of him as “Lord,” with the implication that the Messiah must be greater. Again, listen to Morris:

There was a widespread idea that the Messiah was “the Son of David,” and that meant for first-century Jews that he would be someone in David’s mold. They recalled that David had been a mighty warrior and that in his day Israel’s conquests had been extensive. But Jesus was not that sort of Messiah. For him being Messiah meant being a teacher, and being a redeemer, one who would die for others, not one who would head up great armies and slaughter people. By drawing attention to a defect in the way the Pharisees understood the relationship of David to David’s Son, Jesus was encouraging his hearers to think again about what Messiah meant.

So, the exchange was not simply an exercise in debating skills; or Jesus spinning the game of Stump the Prophet back against the Pharisees and Sadducees. He illustrated how the common belief that the coming Messiah would return Israel to their golden age was a mistaken belief. Instead, he urged his audience to change their understanding of the Messiah—to that of a suffering Servant, rather than a military conqueror and earthly king.

10/9/18

The Not-So Global Flood Part 2

credit: Douglas Simmonds/British Museum; Cuneiform tablet containing an ark story

There are flood stories in addition to that found in the Bible from Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) cultures such as Babylon, Sumer, and Assyria. The Sumerian account is in a text known as the “Eridu Genesis,” which combines a creation story and a flood account. The Babylonian account, known as the Epic of Atrahasis, also combines a creation story and a flood account. A better-known Babylonian version of the flood in the Gilgamesh Epic casts Gilgamesh, a mid-third millennium BC king, as the flood hero. The storyline in all three tells a similar tale.

The above description, and much of what follows, was taken from The Lost World of the Genesis Flood by Tremper Longman and John Walton. In Part 1 of this article we looked at how Longman and Walton suggested the literary use of hyperbole in the Genesis flood account helps suggest why geological science does not support the biblical story of a global flood. Here we look at the similarities and differences of Biblical and ANE flood stories, as well as scientific evidence of a flood that possibly spawned them.

Because of their displeasure with humanity, the gods (at least some of the gods) decide to bring a flood to destroy them. In each case, an individual was saved from the impending destruction through a warning and given instructions to build an ark. The ark’s shape differs in each account. There is a round one in the Epic of Atrahasis (more on this later), a cubical ark in the Gilgamesh Epic, and the oblong ark of Noah. “While the shape of the arks in the various stories differs, remarkably the floor space of the arks is nearly identical.” Ken Ham seems to have taken some creative license by building his Ark Encounter to a slightly larger scale and with more modern looking contours than described here.

After building the ark, the flood hero and others (family and in some cases even more people) as well as animals enter the ark. The flood waters rise and finally ebb to the point that the ark comes to rest. The Gilgamesh Epic and the biblical account note the ark settles on a mountain (Nimush [Nisir] and Ararat, respectively). In these two versions we also hear that Uta-napishti and Noah let out three birds to determine whether the waters had receded to the point that they could disembark. After stepping off the ark, the flood heroes offer a sacrifice to (the) god(s). . . .The flood is understood across all accounts to be motivated by encroaching disorder, and sending the flood represents a strategy to restore order. Though all descriptions are general, each literary reflection provides its own perspective on what constituted the disorder. . . .While the similarities are striking, so are the differences. Indeed, there are so many differences in detail that we won’t mention them all, but they include things like the length and duration of the flood, the size and shape of the ark, the number and identity of people that go on the ark, the name of the flood heroes, and the order of the birds sent out to determine whether the waters of the flood had yet receded.

There has been an interesting and recent discovery with regard to the Babylonian flood account. A cuneiform tablet about the size of a cell phone was brought to the attention of Dr. Irving Finkel, Deputy Keeper of Middle East at the British Museum. He is one a handful of experts capable of sight-reading cuneiform. As soon as he saw the tablet he knew it was an account of the Babylonian flood. The front side of the tablet contains a detailed description of the construction of the Babylonian ark, which was a round vessel with a diameter of about 230 feet and 20-foot-high walls. An intriguing detail provided on this tablet was that “the animals enter two-by-two.” Given the detailed description on how Atrahasis was to construct his ark, Finkel resolved to see if he could replicate the process. You can read about his discovery and then watch a forty minute video, “The Real Noah’s Ark,” of his quest on The History Blog: “Noah’s round ark takes to the water.”

The assumptions by Finkel in the video about the biblical text and their dates won’t fit with conservative Christian scholarship. He believed the Epic of Atrahasis was based on an actual flood and that the biblical flood narrative was added to Scripture after the Jews returned from Babylonian captivity in 537 BC. However, The Lost World of the Flood noted excavations at Megiddo unearthed a fragment of the Gilgamesh Epic dating from the time of the Judges (1400 BC to 1050 BC) at the end of the second millennium.

Finkel disregarded the possibility the cuneiform tablet used hyperbole to describe the dimensions of the ark in his attempt to “prove” it could have been seaworthy. His single-mindedness reminded me of Ken Ham wanting to “prove” the truth of the biblical dimensions of Noah’s ark by building the Ark Encounter. Longman and Walton commented that like the biblical ark and the other Mesopotamian arks “this vessel [the round ark of Atrahasis] is inherently not seaworthy.” If you watch the video notice how you can see the bilge pump working to keep the leaking ark afloat at the end of the documentary.

Longman and Walton had a discussion of the difficulty for moderns to understand what an ancient communicator meant because we do not think the same way the communicator did and because elements referred to in the text or story may be foreign to us. Although they were discussing the ancient human communicators of Scripture, what they said has relevance for what seems to have been Finkel’s error with the cuneiform tablet. They said: “A prophet and his audience share a history, a culture, a language, and the experiences of their contemporaneous lives.” If we are to understand Scripture (or any ancient document) rightly, we have to start by putting aside our own cognitive environment or cultural river, “with all our modern issues and perspectives, to understand the cultural river of the ancient intermediaries.”

We can begin to understand the claims of the text as an ancient document by first paying close attention to what the text says and doesn’t say. It is too easy to make intrusive assumptions based on our own culture, cognitive environment, traditions or questions (i.e., our cultural river). It takes a degree of discipline as readers who are outsiders not to assume our modern perspectives and impose them on the text, but often we do not know we are doing it because our own context is so intrinsic to our thinking and the ancient world is an unknown.

In their attempts to replicate the arks described in their respective texts, both Ken Ham and Irving Finkel failed to recognize the use of hyperbole by the ancient authors in their description of their “arks” and the circumstances of the flood. Yet the parallels between ANE flood stories and Genesis 6-8 suggest a common previous event. Could there have been a devastating flood where many people died that generated both the biblical and the ANE flood stories?

Longman and Walton believe there was a real event behind the flood story just as there was an actual conquest behind the report of Joshua’s campaigns in Joshua 1-12. “We cannot be sure, but we have evidence of more than one flood that would be potential candidates for the inspiration of the story.” They identified one possibility described by William Ryan and Walter Pitman in Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event that Changed History. Ryan and Pitman believe that around 5600 BC a flood from the Mediterranean burst through the Bosporus, pouring saltwater into what had been a freshwater lake four hundred feet below the breached dam in the Bosporus Strait. The modern Black Sea was the result.

Ryan and Pitman suggest that those who survived this flood remembered it as they immigrated to new locations, thus inspiring flood stories that we are aware of among later cultures, including the Babylonian and biblical accounts. We add that each would have taken specific shape according to the cultural and particularly religious beliefs that they had.Ryan and Pitman’s thesis is intriguing. Before they encountered this evidence, they doubted that the biblical flood had any reference to a real historical event. Rather, it was pure myth. Now they believe a real event stands behind the flood story.

The above graphic, found in Noah’s Flood, captures the thesis of Ryan and Pitman. The rising floodwaters flowing through the Bosporus Strait from the Mediterranean Sea (seen at the southwestern corner of the Black Sea) forced the diverse people groups settled around the original fresh water lake to migrate to safer areas. The people groups to the south embedded their experience into the flood stories of the ANE cultures that arose from them.  Longman and Walton said: “the literary-theological interpretation of the event is inspired, not the event itself.”

Still, Longman and Walton hesitate to say this particular flood generated the biblical flood story. “We do not believe we can reconstruct the historical event from the biblical account.” Whatever the precise historical event, the story was told from generation to generation and eventually included in the Pentateuch as the story of Noah and the flood.

We don’t think it’s possible to date the event, locate the event, or reconstruct the event in our own terms. That is not a problem because the event itself, with which everyone in the Near East is familiar, is not what is inspired. What is inspired and thus the vehicle of God’s revelation is the literary-theological explanation that is given by the biblical author. . . .The similarities in the telling of the flood story between the Eridu Genesis, Atrahasis, Gilgamesh tablet 11, and the biblical account may be explained not necessarily by literary borrowing but by the fact that this story has been passed down from generation to generation by those who float in the same cultural river.

10/2/18

The Not-So Global Flood, Part 1

Noah’s Ark by Simon de Myle (1570); in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons

Even a casual reader of the Biblical account of the Flood in Genesis 6-8 will see the text describes a worldwide, not a local flood. The problem is there is no scientific evidence to support a worldwide flood. Some people believe this means the science must be wrong if the Bible says there was a worldwide flood. Young earth creationists point to the so-called scientific evidence of flood geology for a global flood, but it just doesn’t “hold water.” So do you have to choose between the Bible and science with regard to the Flood?

In their book, The Lost World of the Flood, Tremper Longman and John Walton noted how some scholars, feeling the persuasive power of the lack of any geological evidence for a worldwide flood, want to argue the biblical text describes a local flood. They said the local flood interpretation was “a noble attempt” to make sense of the lack of scientific evidence for a global flood while it held fast to the Bible. “In spite of its good intentions and proper motivations, the attempt to interpret the biblical text as knowingly describing a local flood remains unconvincing.”  Longman and Walton believe while the rhetoric of the flood narrative is intentionally universal, “it is actually the impact and significance that is universal rather than the range and scope” of the flood itself. In other words, “Genesis 6-9 pertains to a local flood described rhetorically as a worldwide flood to make a theological point.”

The rhetorical device used in the Flood narrative is hyperbole, conscious exaggeration for the sake of effect. In How to Read the Bible as Literature, Leland Ryken said hyperbole does not intend to be factual. It actually suggests a lack of literal truth in what it says. For example, Genesis 41:57 says that “all the earth” came to Egypt to buy grain from Joseph because the famine was so great. Deuteronomy 10:22 said while only seventy Israelites went down to Egypt, “the Lord your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

Ryken added that hyperbole expresses emotional truth. “Hyperbole is the voice of conviction.” People use hyperbole in everyday discourse when they feel strongly about something—“No one believes that!” In the Gospel of Matthew after finishing with the rich young man, Jesus said the rich only enter the kingdom of heaven with great difficulty. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

Longman and Walton noted how the Bible also describes historical events besides the Flood narrative hyperbolically to make a theological point. They pointed to the conquest of the Promised Land in Joshua 1-12. “If we read Joshua 1-12 as a straightforward, dispassionate report of the wars in Joshua, we would have to conclude that all of Canaan was taken by the Israelites and not a single Canaanite survived.” Yet Joshua 13:1-6 is a description of all the lands that remained to be conquered when he was “old and advanced in years.” A rough estimate would place at most only fifty percent of Canaan in Israelite hands at that time. Judges 1 confirms the Israelites still had more of Canaan to conquer, as the Israelites “did not drive them out completely.”

We believe that rather than trying to woodenly harmonize the two accounts, we should recognize that the author of Joshua emphasized accounts of victories and omitted setbacks and defeats in order to celebrate the beginning of the Abrahamic promise of land. . . . The conquest narratives, thus, are interested in the success of the conquest since they showed God was fulfilling his promise made in Genesis 12:1-3.

Beginning with Genesis 6:5-8, the account of the flood uses hyperbole to describe the pervasive chaos and wickedness of humanity—every intention of the thoughts of the human heart was only continual evil. The Lord was sorry he made humans and intended to return all of creation to chaos or non-order by blotting out humanity and all other creatures, “for I am sorry that I have made them.” Yet Noah found favor in his sight.

Only the most literally minded would take this language to mean that everyone on earth had only evil motives for every act. However, the hyperbole certainly expresses well the fact that evil had reached an unprecedented level and that God was going to act to restore order.

Even the ark’s dimensions are hyperbolic. Genesis 6:15 described the ark as about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. Ancient ships that could navigate in the Mediterranean depicted in ancient Egyptian art from around 2500 BC were no longer than 180 feet in length. “It is hard to imagine ancient readers taking this description as if it referred to an actual boat. There would have been nothing like it or even close in the ancient world.”

Indeed, it is probably easier for a modern audience to misunderstand the text and take it as if it is describing an actual boat. Certainly that is the case with Ken Ham, a leading young-earth creationist. In July of 2016 Ken Ham opened the Ark Encounter, a “life-sized” replica of the ark that people can go on. Ham’s stated purpose is to show that a literal ark of these dimensions can be built and can house all the animals necessary to survive the flood.

Mid-eighteenth century wooden boats reached lengths of 327 to 329 feet. But they were “built with iron bolts and steel supports” which were not available to Noah. And they were notoriously unstable in the water. “Let’s remember that the ark as described in the Bible, if taken as precise measurements of an actual boat, is larger than any wooden boat built not just in antiquity but at any time, including today.”

An ancient reader would have recognized the description of the flood itself as hyperbolic language. The fountains of the great deep burst; and the windows of the heavens were opened (Genesis 7:11). This reflects an ancient cosmology of a flat earth with subterranean waters (the fountains of the great deep) and more waters above the firmament released by opening the windows of heaven. See “Why Is The Sky Blue?” for more on this cosmology and its presence in the Babylonian creation myth.

As the waters flowed from deep within the earth and from the sky, “they lifted the ark high above the earth” (Gen 7:17). Even the “high mountains” were covered (Gen 7:19), and not just covered but with water rising to more than fifteen cubits (twenty-three feet) above the mountains. The description truly is that of a worldwide flood, not a local flood. Though modern readers don’t see it, the original audience would have understood that such a description is hyperbole.

Longman and Walton believe the biblical authors sometimes used hyperbole to make important theological points. And they used it in a way they expected their readers to recognize, not only with the Genesis flood narrative. Recall the last verse of the Gospel of John, once again clearly using hyperbole: “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

The presence of hyperbole in Scripture is also not contradictory to a belief in the evangelical doctrine of inerrancy. They pointed out where this is substantiated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, Article 13:

WE AFFIRM the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term with reference to the complete truthfulness of Scripture.WE DENY that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.

Seeing hyperbole in Genesis 6-8 does not take us back to the forced choice referred to in the opening paragraph, with hyperbole neutralizing the Biblical text in order to have it agree with science. Describing a real event in hyperbolic language doesn’t make it a myth. As Longman and Walton said: “There is a real event behind the story just as there was an actual conquest behind the hyperbolic presentation of Joshua’s conquest.” The parallels between Ancient Near East flood stories and Genesis 6-8 suggest a common previous event—a devastating flood that killed many people. “Stories about the flood were passed down orally for generations from those who descended from the time the flood actually occurred.” The similarities and differences between the Biblical and ANE flood stories, as well as tantalizing scientific evidence of a possible flood that spawned them will be discussed in Part 2.

07/27/18

All About the Flood

Creative Commons license (CC by SA 3.0) for Noah’s Ark: The Flood begins by Phillip Medhurst

In July of 2016, Answers in Genesis opened the Ark Encounter in northern Kentucky. Ted Davis noted in his article, “Flooding the World with Creationism,” how a so-called “literal” interpretation of the Biblical Flood story was crucial for the view of Scripture held by Answers in Genesis and other young-earth creationists. Woven into their position is the idea of flood geology, namely that fossils are relics of the biblical Flood. This idea was first named and popularized by George McCready Price, a self-taught geologist and author, who claimed that the fossil-bearing rocks seen in the various geologic layers had been produced all at once in a single worldwide flood. But what if flood geology is wrong and there is a more “literal” way to read the Genesis account of the Flood?

Flood geology is one of the foundational beliefs of young earth creationism. Ted Davis noted that “commitment to the YEC duo of a young earth and flood geology remained on the far periphery of conservative Protestantism from the Civil War down to 1961.” In that year Henry Morris and John Whitcomb published The Genesis Flood, which supported Price’s flood geology and eventually birthed the modern young earth creationist (YEC) movement. “Ultimately, then, young-earth creationism is all about the Flood. That’s why AiG built the Ark Encounter.”

The significance of flood geology for young-earth creationism must not be missed: if most fossils were formed in the Flood, then they were not formed through eons of earth history and we cannot draw evolutionary inferences from the fossil record. Thus, the Ark Encounter represents two mightily important things in the minds of creationists. First, the biblical story is literally true—a man named Noah actually constructed a huge wooden boat to save all animal “kinds” from dying in a worldwide flood. Second, the Flood produced the fossils, so we have no scientific evidence that evolution actually happened.

Davis pointed to three threads woven into the YEC understanding of the Genesis Flood story. The first is the biblical understanding of the text. Did a man named Noah actually construct a huge wooden boat in order to save all animal “kinds” from the judgment of a catastrophic worldwide flood? The second thread is scientific. Is there credible scientific evidence to support the claims of flood geology? Are fossils and the geological record explained by a worldwide, catastrophic flood? The third thread pulls at the origins of flood geology and its relationship to a belief in a young earth. Where did they come from and are they peripheral or fundamental to Christian belief and the gospel?

An accumulation of scientific and historical evidence questions whether the biblical Flood account can be taken at face value. Genesis 6-9 clearly describes a global flood that destroyed all humans and land animals except those who were protected in a huge wooden boat built by a man named Noah. However, as BioLogos noted in “How should we interpret the Genesis flood account?” the scientific and historic evidence concludes “there has never been a global flood that covered the entire earth, nor do all modern animals and humans descend from the passengers of a single vessel.” When early geologists (many of whom were Christians) questioned whether the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago, flood geology claimed the earth’s complex geologic record was the result of a violent, global Flood.

So belief in a young earth and flood geology are joined together in the so-called “plain reading of Scripture” promoted by AiG and other young earth creationists. “All other approaches are claimed to require hermeneutical manipulations that ultimately undermine the simple and clear message of the Bible.” Gregg Davidson and Ken Wolgemuth, who are Christian geologists, said the following in “Christian Geologists on Noah’s Flood”:

Flood Geology proponents would have us believe that there is extensive evidence for a violent, earth-wide flood that is apparent if one is willing to consider the possibility. As Christian geologists, we have no philosophical objection to a cataclysmic event of divine origin, and have long been willing to consider evidence of such an event. What we have observed, however, is that evidence for Flood Geology is largely, if not entirely, non-existent. Given the placement and character of sedimentary deposits currently on earth, deposition by a single flood is not only implausible, but utterly impossible unless God temporarily suspended His natural laws in order to establish layers and fossil beds that would subsequently communicate a story vastly different than what actually happened.

Davidson and Wolgemuth presented evidence from salt deposits, tree rings, the fossil record and the sequence of layers in the Grand Canyon that challenges flood geology. YEC counters that these conclusions are the result of human miscalculation and error. Since science is a human endeavor, it is subject to all the errors of humanity, while the Bible is God’s Word. Yet as Longman and Walton commented: “To pit the Bible against science in this fashion is problematic.” They agree with BioLogos: “Because we take God to be the author of the “book of nature” as well as the divine inspirer of the book of Scripture, we believe the proper interpretation of the Flood story will not be in conflict with what we have discovered in the natural world.”

Orthodox Christianity has traditionally affirmed a “two book” view of God’s truth, believing “God reveals himself in both the Bible and in nature.” The study of nature through scientific means it “will never contradict the Bible when both are rightly understood.” While the Bible is true in all it intends to teach us, our interpretations of what it teaches may not be correct. “We need to be open to the possibility that we have wrongly understood a particular passage.” With regard to the Genesis Flood account, is there an interpretative method that does not present us with a forced choice between what the text says and what science tells us?

In their book, The Lost World of the Flood, Tremper Longman and John Walton commented how discussions of the early chapters of Genesis often center on whether the accounts in chapters one through eleven are mythology or history. Framing the question in this way as a dichotomous choice between what is real (history) and what is not real (mythology) not only fails to do justice to the biblical text, it imposes a modern understanding of both mythology and history upon the text.

Today, we often consider the label mythology to imply that what is reported is “not real.” But in the ancient world, they did not consider what we call their mythology to be not real. To the contrary, they believed their mythology to represent the most important reality—deep reality, which transcends what could be reported in terms of events that have transpired in the strictly human realm. Indeed, they further considered that even the events in the human realm, which we might label history, found their greatest significance in aspects of the event that human eyewitnesses could not see—the involvement of the divine hand.

So we should be hesitant to think in such dichotomous terms as history and mythology when reading and interpreting ancient texts. The deepest reality should not be constrained by the limits of human observations of what “actually happened.” The significance of events in Genesis 1-11 is not found in their historicity but in their theology; “not in what happened … but in why it happened.” Israelites in the ancient world did not think about events in the same way we do today. “In the ancient world they viewed reality with an eye to the metaphysical (spiritual) world, and not just through the lens of empiricism.”

The accounts in Genesis 1-11 can be affirmed as having real events as their referents, but the events (yes, they happened) find their significance in the interpretation that they are given in the biblical text. That significance is not found in their historicity but in their theology; not in what happened (or even that something did happen) but in why it happened. What was God doing? That is where the significance is to be found. Our defenses of historicity can become reductionistic if we become too focused on proving the reality of events rather than on embracing the interpretation of the theological significance being traced by the author. The text has no interest in trying to prove the events took place. They assume they did, as do we. Instead they are offering an interpretation that constitutes the divine-human message that carries the authority of the text. Events are not authoritative; the interpretation of the narrator is.

Events, in other words, were more than just history. Seeing events in this way, through a lens that included both the spiritual and the human world, means that categories we moderns might label as mythical overlapped with what we would call the real world. Ancient peoples had a different way of knowing than we moderns do. However, this does not mean their view of events was any less real. In order to understand the Genesis Flood account, we need to understand what it meant to the original audience.

To the extent that the Israelites thought in similar ways, they would not distinguish between these ways of knowing. If such is the case, stating that they consider the flood to be a real event is not as clarifying as we might hope. We cannot draw distinctions about narratives that we are interested in if they do not draw their lines in the same places we do.

We should not impose an interpretation upon the Genesis narrative of the Flood that disregards how the ancient Israelites understood what was being said. The YEC emphasis on the historicity of a global flood fails to recognize that Genesis 1-11 was not written with our scientific world in mind. Its significance lies not in what happened, but why it happened. Longman and Walton put it this way:

Even though the Bible is written for us, it is not written to us. The revelation it provides can equip us to know God, his plan, and his purposes, and therefore to participate with him in the world we face today. But it was not written with our world in mind. In its context, it is not communicated in our language; it is not addressed to our culture; it does not anticipate the questions about the world and its operations that stem from our modern situations and issues.

06/15/18

Pay Attention to the Ancient World

In the public domain, reproduction of The Israelites Leaving Egypt, by David Roberts in 1828

Pastor Andy Stanley of North Point Community Church recently made some surprising statements about his belief on the role of the Old Testament in the life of modern Christians. He said early church leaders “unhitched” the church from the worldview, value system, and regulations of the Jewish scriptures, “and my friends, we must as well.” Stanley claimed the early church and its leaders showed there was a need to do this for the sake of Gentile believers. “The Bible did not create Christianity. The resurrection of Jesus created and launched Christianity. Your whole house of Old Testament cards can come tumbling down.”

The above was gleaned from an article on the Christian Post website. On the website First Things, Wesley Hill acknowledged how Stanley was motivated evangelistically in making these claims. He was trying to reach individuals who have lost their faith or rejected Christianity because of the perceived violence and legalism of the Old Testament. Stanley did not want these difficulties to keep them from “coming to Jesus.” But it seems he went too far with his attempts to “unhitch” modern Christianity from the Old Testament.

Alas, most of the 39-minute talk can really only be described as an elaborate and educated flirtation with the old Christian heresy of Marcionism—the belief that the Old Testament is not authoritative in matters of Christian doctrine and morals.

Andy Stanley and other moderns—as well as Marcion—seem to stumble over the meaning of an Old Testament passage because of their distance from the time period of the ancient author of that Old Testament book. “At times our distance from the ancient communicator might mean that we misunderstand the communication because of elements foreign to us or because we do not share ways of thinking with the communicator.” In other words, “Even though the Bible is written for us, it is not written to us.” These two quotes are from an essay by Tremper Longman and John Walton in The Lost World of the Flood. Although their book examines the Genesis flood account, the discussion on understanding “Genesis as an Ancient Document” speaks to the potential for interpretive errors that can be made by any reader with cultural and time distance from the original biblical author.

Longman and Walton noted how comparative studies help us to have a greater understanding of the “cultural river” in which the biblical authors composed their texts. Comparative studies help us to understand more fully the form of the genres used by the biblical authors, as well as the nature of their rhetorical devices “so we do not mistake their elements for something they never were.” This does not compromise the authority of Scripture; rather it ascribes authority to that which the author was communicating. Comparative studies are needed in order to “recognize the aspects of the communicator’s cognitive environment that are foreign to us, and to read the text in light of their world and worldview.”

This is not imposing something foreign on the text; it is an attempt to recognize that which is inherent in the text by virtue of its situatedness—the author and audience are embedded in the ancient world. We are not imposing this on the text any more than we are imposing Hebrew on the text when we try to read it in its original language.

They applied the metaphor of a cultural river to illustrate this. Our modern cultural river contains currents pertaining to fundamentals such as human rights, diversity, individualism, freedom, capitalism, democracy, scientific naturalism, natural laws, and others. Some moderns may float with these currents, while others struggle against them. “But everyone in our modern world inevitably is located in its waters. Regardless of our diverse ways of thinking, we are all in the cultural river, and its currents are familiar to us.”

The ancient world had a very different cultural river flowing through its diversity of cultures (Egyptian, Phoenician, Assyrian, Israelite and others). People are people, so certain elements remain the same. “But few of the currents common to the ancient cultures are found in our modern cultural river.”

In the ancient cultural river we would find currents such as community identity, the comprehensive and ubiquitous control of the gods, the role of kingship, divination, the centrality of the temple, the mediatory of images, and the reality of the spirit world and magic. The Israelites sometimes floated on the currents of that cultural river without resistance, and we should be neither surprised nor critical. At other times, however, the revelation of God encouraged them to struggle out of the current into the shallows, or even to swim furiously upstream. Whatever the extent of the Israelites’ interactions with the cultural river, it is important to remember that they were situated in the ancient cultural river, not immersed in the current of our modern cultural river.

In order to be faithful interpreters of the biblical text, we should strive to understand this: “God communicated within the context of their cultural river.” His message, purposes and authority were all framed within the internal logic of Israelite language and culture. In order to be confident of the authority of the message of God communicated through these ancient intermediaries, we must understand the cultural river of these intermediaries.

The communicators we encounter in the Old Testament are not aware of our cultural river—including all of its scientific aspects; they neither address our cultural river nor anticipate it. We cannot therefore assume that any of the constants or currents of our cultural river are addressed in Scripture.

When we read modern ideas into the text, we evade or compromise the authority of the text. Ultimately, we transfer authority to ourselves and to our ideas. “The text cannot mean what it never meant.”  While there may be some convergence with modern science or modern culture, “but the text does not make authoritative claims pertaining to modern science [or culture].” The meaning of the ancient author and the understanding of his audience places limits on what has authority.

We can begin to understand the claims of the text as an ancient document by first paying close attention to what the text says and doesn’t say.  It is too easy to make intrusive assumptions based on our own culture, cognitive environment, traditions, or questions (i.e., our cultural river). It takes a degree of discipline as readers who are outsiders not to assume our modern perspectives and impose them on the text, but often we do not know we are doing it because our own context is so intrinsic to our thinking and the ancient world is an unknown. The best path to recognizing the distinctions between ancient and modern thinking is to begin paying attention to the ancient world.

Two voices speak within a biblical text. The human author is the ‘doorway’ through which we pass into the ‘room’ of God’s meaning and message, according to Longman and Walton. So we are reading an ancient document and should use assumptions appropriate for the ancient world of the particular biblical author we are reading. “We must understand how the ancients thought and what ideas underlay their communication.”

Whether the revelation of God in the Old Testament reflects the kind of thinking that was common throughout the ancient world or it exhorts the Israelites to abandon the standard thinking in the ancient world, the conversation that takes place in the Bible is assuredly situated in the ancient world. So the more we can learn about the ancient world, the more faithful our interpretation will be.

What then of Andy Stanley and his view that “God’s arrangement with Israel should now be eliminated from the equation”? He seems to have imposed a modern perspective onto the Old Testament text. He did this in saying believers should ‘unhitch’ themselves from the worldview, value system, and regulations of the Old Testament because of its perceived violence and legalism. Instead of “unhitching” the Old Testament, he needs to understand what it means within its cultural river, within its ancient world. In order to reach those who have lost their faith or rejected, he should first help them realize they also are evaluating it according to the currents of their modern cultural river. Stanley then needs to acknowledge how he compromised the authority of the biblical text by urging others to take this approach.

11/15/16

Genealogies in Genesis

© sylverarts | 123rf.com

© sylverarts | 123rf.com

One of the fundamental issues in the dispute over a Biblical understanding of the age of the earth is how the genealogies in Genesis should be interpreted. Bishop Ussher’s chronology dated the creation of the heavens and earth in Genesis 1:1 to a very specific date in 4004 BCE. Editions of the King James translation of the Bible (KJV) began to disseminate his chronology in the 1650s. Then beginning in 1701, William Lloyd’s annotated edition of the KJV included Ussher’s chronology within marginal annotations and cross-references. The popular Scofield Reference Bible (1909/1917) also used it, which helped establish Ussher’s chronology as one of the key theological pillars of modern young earth creation belief.

Intriguingly, Ussher appears to have done his work in the midst of a dispute over biblical chronology in his time. According to The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Modern England, c. 1530-1700, Robert Carey believed that errors in standard accounts of biblical history, relying on the apparent chronology of the Hebrew text, had provided the opportunity for some to attack the integrity and truth of the Bible. “He was critical of those who wanted to use apparent technical problems in biblical chronology to cast doubt on doctrinal certainties.” Cary and others believed that using the records of alternative sources could help resolve some of the apparent discrepancies. This was later referred to as scientific chronology, using the records of ancient history to make sense of the Bible.

Ussher’s conclusions seemed to bring a greater degree of certainty to a biblical chronology derived from the Hebrew Bible and orthodox readings of the text. His writings did this “at a time when chronology had become one of the most important determinants in a serious debate about the transmission and authority of the text of the Old Testament.” He was one of the first individuals to be fully aware of the variety of manuscript witnesses for biblical history “and the discrepancies in ancient testimony regarding the Old Testament.” His solution was to affirm the authority of the Hebrew Bible by his own extensive inquiries into the preservation and transmission of alternative textual witnesses, such as the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint.

So Ussher’s affirmation of the creation of the world at nightfall on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BCE, occurred within the context of disputes over the apparent chronology of the Hebrew text. At that time, certain individuals used these discrepancies to cast doubt on the transmission and authority of the text of the Old Testament. Today, holding to Ussher’s chronology is still seen as an integral part of affirming the authority of Scripture for many who hold to a young earth creation viewpoint.

Writing for the Institute for Creation Research, John Morris noted the association of Ussher’s chronology with the KJV in “Can the Ussher Chronology Be Trusted?” Morris clearly accepts Ussher’s dating for “all important historical events, beginning at creation and extending to the destruction of Jerusalem in a.d. 70.” He noted where an ICR colleague had modernized the language of Ussher’s original work, and hoped it would re-establish Ussher’s chronology as a standard research tool and restore for some, “their confidence in the Biblical record.”

In another ICR article, James Johnson used ‘simple math’ and the data provided in Genesis to conclude there was no good excuse for doubting the biblical chronological data. He rejected the “irrelevant” issue of whether Genesis genealogies were open (whether they skip generations and have gaps) or closed (the genealogies are complete). Upon completion of his own interpretation of Genesis timeframes, he said there was no good excuse for doubting the biblical chronological data as he presented it.

Yet biblical scholars beginning with William Henry Green in 1890 have continued to raise questions regarding the validity of Ussher’s chronology. Green’s article, “Primeval Chronology,” was published in the journal, Bibliotheca Sacra. He said the biblical genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 were not intended for the construction of chronology.

It can scarcely be necessary to adduce proof to one who has even a superficial acquaintance with the genealogies of the Bible, that they are frequently abbreviated by the omission of unimportant names. In fact, abridgment is the general rule, induced by the indisposition of the sacred writers to encumber their pages with more names than were necessary for their immediate purpose. This is so constantly the case, and the reason for it so obvious, that the occurrence of it need create no surprise anywhere, and we are at liberty to suppose it whenever anything in the circumstances of the case favors that belief.

Several modern evangelical Old Testament scholars concur with Green. C. John Collins, as he discussed the biblical evidence for a historical Adam and Eve in Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?, noted that the genealogies in Genesis 4-5 do not claim to name every person in the line of descent from Adam, and therefore aren’t aimed at “providing detailed chronological information.” He added there was no way he knew of to assess what size gaps these genealogies allow. “It does not appear that they are intended to tell us what kind of time period they are describing.”

In his Genesis commentary from The Story of God Bible Commentary series, Tremper Longman said not all the genealogies in Genesis are of the same type or purpose. They are “ancient Near Eastern, not modern Western, genealogies.” The two main kinds of genealogies found in the Bible are linear and segmented. Linear genealogies go from father to one son (or ancestor), while segmented ones name a number of sons (or ancestors) from one father, as in Genesis 10. “Ancient genealogies are fluid.” They can skip generations. “They can change in order to reflect contemporary social and political realities.” According to R. R. Wilson, they are not normally created for historical purposes or intended to be historical records.

In the Bible, as well as in the ancient Near Eastern literature and in the anthropological material, genealogies seem to have been created for domestic, political-jural, and religious purposes, and historical information is preserved in the genealogies only incidentally.

The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary had a similar view on genealogies. It too said linear and segmented were the two major types of biblical genealogies. “Both types show fluidity among the middle names; names may be omitted or rearranged, or relationships changed.”

The Hebrews, like other ancient Near Eastern peoples, used genealogies to authenticate rights of inheritance (Num. 27:1–11), enhance the social position of outsiders (e.g., Caleb, son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite [Num. 32:12; Josh. 14:6; 15:13], becomes a son of Hezron—part of Judah; 1 Chr. 2:18), establish royal and cultic lineages (e.g., David, 1 Chr. 3; priests, 2 Chr. 31:16–19; Levites, Neh. 7:43–45; temple servants, vv. 46–56), and organize their social geography (Gen. 10). Usually only men are recorded.

Genesis 10 provides a list of the descendants of Noah. Many of the names in what is called the “Table of the Nations” have been identified with racial, geographical and political entities outside of the Bible. The following map, based on the Table of the Nations in Genesis 10, was taken from the New Bible Atlas:

nationsIn his Genesis commentary, Bruce Waltke said genealogies serve several purposes in Genesis—purposes which depend in part upon the nature of the genealogy itself. Broad genealogies present only the first generations of descendants (the sons of Leah or the sons of Rachel in Genesis 35:23-26). Deep genealogies list sequential descendants, usually from two to ten. Linear genealogies display only depth (Genesis 4:17-18). Segmented genealogies display both depth and breadth (Genesis 10:1-29; cf. 11:27-29; 19:36-38). “The distinctions of broad, deep, linear and segmented genealogies help explain the various functions of genealogies.”

By tracing their lineage back to a common ancestor, broad and segmented genealogies show the existing relationships between kinship groups. Genealogies were used in tribal societies to express the rights and privileges within social relationships, rather than strict biological kinship. The Table of Nations noted above expressed the kinship and distinctions between Israel and the surrounding nations. “The segmented lists of tribes in Gen. 46:8-25 display both the unity of all Israel and the distinctness of its tribes.”

However the linear genealogies in Genesis 4:17-18, 5:1-31; 11:10-26 are used to establish continuity over time without narrative. “Because the genealogies are concerned to propel the story and establish relational links, they cannot be used to compute absolute chronology.” For example, although the pre-flood genealogy of 5:1-31 and the post-flood genealogy of 11:10-26 record the ages when an individual fathered a son and then died, they don’t give the complete sum of time for the life spans of the individuals. If the narrator intended to establish an absolute, or “closed” chronology, this is a surprising omission.

Comparing shorter and longer genealogies that cover the same time periods elsewhere in the Bible suggest the shorter ones contain gaps. We see this in Exodus 6:14-25 with four generations from Levi to Moses, while 1 Chronicles 7:23-27 gives ten. Similar to the division of history into three periods of fourteen generations in the first chapter of Matthew, the division of history between Adam and Abraham into two equal divisions of ten generations (5:1-32 and 10:10-26) seems “artistic.”

Linear genealogies also demonstrate the legitimacy of an individual in his office; or give a person of rank connections to a worthy family or individual of the past. “This purpose was unaffected by the omission of names.”  We see this in Genesis 5, which showed that Noah was the legitimate descendant of Adam through Seth. “By beginning Noah’s ancestry with Adam, whom God created in his image, this genealogy represents Noah and his ancestry as the worthy bearers of the divine image mandated to rule the earth.”

By linking the genealogies by tôleḏōṯ [generations] and connecting the twelve tribes of Israel to Noah’s son, Shem, the narrator demonstrates the legitimacy of the twelve tribes of Israel as image bearers, destined to subdue the earth, and as the worthy seed of the woman that will vanquish the Serpent. From those tribes Judah emerges as leader at the end of Genesis. His eternal son will rule forever over the nations (Gen. 49:8-12).

With all due respect to Bishop Ussher, his chronology has outlived its usefulness. Young earth creationists seem to be trying to affirm the authority and infallibility of Scripture by holding onto it. But they err in assuming the authority of Scripture is undermined if alternative ways of interpreting the genealogies are held. And it seems to me that they undermine their witness of the gospel by insisting their interpretation is the only valid one.

For more articles on creation in the Bible, see the link “Genesis & Creation.”