John Walton opens Lecture 15 on Job by noting Job 19:25 is one of the most familiar verses in the book of Job. The NIV (the ESV is similar) says, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.” This verse has inspired musicians from Handel to Nicole C. Mullen. It has been traditionally understood by Christians including Clement of Rome, Origen and Augustine to refer to the resurrection and Christ. In “Impatient Job,” James Zink observed that most commentators see in Job 19:25-27, “the height of trust in the justice of God and a great new insight into his redemptive nature.” And yet Walton provocatively asked, “So, how should we interpret this verse?”
Walton said we should remember that Hebrew doesn’t have capital letters, meaning that the capitalizing “Redeemer” in the NIV, ESV and other translations for Job 19:25 is interpretation. He goes on to say it needs to be understood in relationship to the Job’s many previous references to an advocate related to his legal case. “He’s looking for someone to represent him before God; someone who will take his case,” who will advocate for him. There are a number of words used by Job to refer to this position, but they all focus on the same kind of role as someone who will be his advocate before God. “Now we have to ask the question, ‘What sort of advocate does Job seek and who does he expect to fill that role?’”
The word translated as redeemer here in Job 19:25 is goʾel. Job desires an advocate or mediator to come to his aid. He wants a goʾel (redeemer) to demonstrate that he is innocent. He is convinced he has not done anything that deserves the treatment he has received. “He’s not looking for someone to save him from offenses;” that’s not what a goʾel does. “He wants it on record, that he did nothing to deserve his suffering.”
Walton observed this was not the redeemer role of Jesus. He added that no New Testament writer drew an association between Jesus and Job 19. In the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, R. Laird Harris said goʾel more accurately referred to the work of God “who as a friend and kinsman through faith will ultimately redeem Job from the dust of death.” If the author of Job intended to refer to the coming of Christ in his work of atonement, “This would be expressed more characteristically by the Hebrew word pādâ,” instead of goʾel in 19:25. Walton said of Job:
He feels like a wrong has been done to him. A goʾel does not work on behalf to right a wrong the person has committed. That’s what Jesus did, but that’s really not the role we find of a goʾel here. Job wants an advocate here, a goʾel and redeemer, who will demonstrate that he is innocent. He’s not looking for someone to save him from the offense he’s committed. He’s persuaded he has not committed anything that deserves the treatment he has gotten. He’s not looking for someone to save him from offenses.
Walton thought Job expects his goʾel to arrive and testify at his grave, in other words, after his death (19:26). He said there are three major theories for understanding when the goʾel will appear in relation to his death. The one traditionally seen in church history by Clement, Origen, Jerome and Luther was that God will raise him up from the grave. But this contradicts Job’s earlier affirmations of the permanency of the grave (See Job 14). Furthermore, according to Walton, resurrection was not part of Israelite doctrine throughout most of the Old Testament.
Others think Job expects a “posthumous vindication.” After he’s gone, somehow Job will be vindicated. But Walton tends to think Job believes there will be a last-minute reprieve. God will intervene and vindicate him before he dies. Where Job said: “after my skin has been destroyed” in verse 19:26, he was referring to scraping off his skin (Job 2:8), as he scraped himself with a potsherd. “Yet in my flesh I shall see God.”
Walton said this means Job believed he would be restored to God’s favor. Even if he scraped away all his skin (a hyperbole), “He will see God’s restoration in the flesh” before he dies. “Job has no hope of heaven. Seeing God refers to being restored to favor, and that he’ll no longer be a stranger, an outsider, out of favor.” He than gave this expanded paraphrase of Job 19:25-26:
I firmly believe that there is someone (perhaps from the divine council), somewhere, who will come and testify on my behalf right here on my dung heap at the end of all this. Despite my peeling skin, I expect to have enough left to come before God in my own flesh. I will be restored to his favor and no longer be treated as a stranger. This is my deepest desire!” (prosperity has nothing to do with it).
Walton said this was a significant affirmation on Job’s part. And you miss it entirely when you try to make Jesus the redeemer. “Jesus is our Redeemer, but he’s not the kind of redeemer Job is looking for here.” He wasn’t looking for someone who would take the punishment for his offenses and justify him. He was looking for vindication, not justification—which was not something Jesus provided. “Job is expecting someone to play a role that is the polar opposite of that which is played by Jesus.”
Viewing Jesus as the goʾel in Job is a distorting factor in the interpretation of the book and runs against the grain of Job’s hope and desire. Jesus is not the answer to the problems posed in the book of Job; though he is the answer to the larger problem of sin and the brokenness of the world. The death and resurrection of Jesus mediate for our sin, but do not provide the answer for why there is suffering in the world or how we should think about God when life goes wrong. That’s what the book of Job does.
We can look at the world around us and wonder will there ever be justice for the death, destruction and war in Ukraine. We can ask why God allowed hundreds of thousands of people to die from COVID; from AIDS; from ebola. Will there ever be justice for the genocide of the Tutsi people in Rwanda; for the victims of terrorism? These questions wrestle with a theological problem called theodicy, how can God be said to be good, righteous, and powerful in a world full of such disorder and evil? Walter Brueggeman, a Biblical scholar, suggested these are echoes of the dilemma of Job.
The problem of theodicy is a concern throughout the Bible, from the first pronouncement of judgment against the entire human race for the sin of Adam in Genesis, to the last plague of Revelation. But John Walton sees the dilemma of Job more particularly as the retribution principle. Satan, the adversary, claimed Job’s blamelessness and uprightness was simply because God has “blessed the work of his hands” and put a hedge around him and all that he has. If he were to lose all that he has, Satan said Job would curse God to his face (Job 1:9-12).
The retribution principle essentially says the people get what they deserve. The righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. Satan voiced this principle to God in Job 1:9, when he asked: “Does Job fear God for no reason?” The implication is that Job follows the retribution principle and obeys God because he knows it will result in his prosperity. If God were to reverse that and have Job suffer despite his righteousness, Satan predicted Job would curse God to his face (Job 1:11).
The retribution principle is an attempt to understand what God is doing in the world, to articulate it, to justify it, to systematize the logic of how God is working in the world, that God is working a justice system. You do good, you get good. You do bad, bad things happen. So, the retribution principle assumes an understanding of how God works in the world. It’s an attempt to sort of quantify or systematize it.
It’s common for people to assume their circumstances in life somehow reflect that they are in favor with God or the gods; or that they are out of favor. The retribution principle is behind the modern idiom, “What goes around comes around.” We casually say when something goes well, “Oh, I must be doing something right.” Or, “What did I do to deserve this,” when things go badly. But people in the ancient Near East widely thought that way too.
In fact, the book of Job is putting the retribution principle under the microscope because Job and his friends all believe very firmly in the retribution principle. That’s really part of the problem. They see the retribution principle. Not only do you assume that if someone is righteous, they will prosper and if someone is wicked, they will suffer, they also turn that around. If someone is suffering, they must be wicked. If someone is prospering, they must have done something right. And so, when Job’s circumstances turn so dramatically, so tragically, we know what conclusion everyone is going to draw. They’ll decide he must’ve done something really, really bad to bring this kind of disaster, to go from the heights to the depths.
That is really what we see with Job. He was living the lifestyle of the rich and famous and he fell into the lowest depths of suffering. Walton said remembering those extremes is important in order for us to think clearly about the retribution principle as we read Job. If the retribution principle is truly part of God’s policies, yet righteous people like Job suffer, then God’s justice is suspect. This seems to be the belief of Job’s wife, who encourages him to curse God and die (Job 2:9).
But if the retribution principle brings benefit and prosperity to good, righteous people, it is detrimental to true righteousness, because it sets up an ulterior motive, the anticipation of gain for doing good.
Walton suggested thinking about there being a triangle of claims within Job. At one of the lower ends of the triangle is the retribution principle; at the other lower end is Job’s righteousness. At the top of the triangle, is God’s justice. As long as Job is prospering, the triangle holds together nicely. “God is doing justice. Job is righteous, and the retribution principle is true and everything’s happy.”
But when righteous Job begins to suffer, something is wrong with the triangle of claims and it begins to fall apart. All three corners of the triangle— God’s justice, Job being righteous, and the retribution principle—can no longer all be true. But which two do you hold on to? You can’t hold on to all three; something’s got to give.
Job’s friends hold fast to the retribution principle. “Repeatedly in their speeches, they affirm the retribution principle. They apply it; they use it as part of their argumentation.” Are they really going to say God isn’t really being just with Job; or are they going to say Job isn’t really righteous? They continue to affirm God’s justice and ask Job what he did to deserve his suffering. But Job holds onto his righteousness.
Job tries to find fault with the retribution principle, but he really can’t. An so he turns his eyes towards God, and as Job’s speeches continue, they become more and more accusing of God; it becomes more and more doubtful, skeptical about God and whether He does justice at all. So, Job builds his house in his own corner and holds onto the retribution principle. He’s giving up on God’s justice.
Elihu Redefines the Retribution Principle
Then another voice, that of Elihu, who had kept quiet because of his youth, enters into the discussion. He takes his stand on God’s justice, essentially saying the retribution principle is true, but Job and his friends have got it wrong. Elihu wants to refine and expand it. He says most people think it refers to bad things you’ve done in the past— people get what they deserve. Elihu says this way of thinking about the retribution principle makes it remedial; fixing or responding to what’s gone wrong. But what if it is actually preventative, or developing?
It’s not so much what you did in the past that’s causing negative consequences, it’s something you are just getting ready to get involved in that you’re on the brink of this kind of behavior; that it’s supposed to turn you away from it. So, the retribution principle could be a response to, present developing things, instead of things in the past.
So, Elihu doesn’t have to find unrighteousness in Job’s past. He says the reason for Job’s suffering is his self-righteousness—his willingness to vindicate, to justify himself at the expense of God. The problem is not what Job did before his suffering began. It has become evident in how he responded once the suffering started. The problem is Job’s self-righteousness.
Walton said this seems to be cheating with the dilemma of the triangle of claims. By redefining what the retribution principle means, it gives Elihu an alternative the others never thought of and could not choose. Job himself is also less able to defend himself; and as he continues to affirm his righteousness, his self-righteousness becomes clearly evident. Elihu sees Job more realistically, more appropriately than the other friends. But he has his own problems because he makes the retribution principle the foundation for how he understands how God is working in the world.
How can we resolve these tensions? Bad things do happen to good, righteous people and evil people do prosper. How can we resolve the tension of the retribution principle? “Most people at one time or another experience life in such a way that it looks suspect to them. How are those tensions resolved?”
One way is to qualify the nature of God. Walton said this is what people did in the ancient Near East. “They had no confidence that God was acting justly.” Others qualified the purpose of suffering. Some said it was character-building. Today, they might refer to it as participating in Christ’s sufferings. They ultimately qualify the purpose of suffering. Walton said this does resolve some of the tensions in the retribution principle.
In the biblical texts, the Psalmist sometimes thinks about timing. In the lament psalms, most of the lamenting is in the context of the retribution principle. Why is this happening? Eventually things will smooth out. God will, at the appropriate time, act against the enemy. In Christian theology, we look to eternity. Things may be bad now, but on the scale of eternity, the things we suffer now are minor.
Or you could qualify the retribution principle according to the role of justice in the world. God acts justly, but we live in an unjust, chaotic world. “In this world, non-order continues.” We know that he hasn’t made the world conform to his own justice, because we know we’re sinful and yet we still exist. “If the world fully conformed to God’s justice, it wouldn’t be a world we could life in.” Therefore, perfect justice is not obtainable in a fallen world.
God and his world are different and he has not imposed his justice upon it. In his wisdom, God is concerned with justice. But given the constraints of an imperfect, fallen world, a not-yet fully ordered world, we’re not living in a perfectly ordered world yet. And therefore, it does not reflect his attributes throughout. None of these explanations is completely satisfying.
Walton suggested we think of the retribution principle as proverbial in nature. It’s often how things are, but does not always explain how things work. It’s not a guarantee or promise. And it does not provide an explanation of all the suffering or evil in the world.
The retribution principle tells us about the heart of God. He delights in giving good things to those who are his faithful servants. He also takes seriously the need to punish wicked people. “But he doesn’t carry those things out throughout, because it’s a fallen world and none of us could live through that.”
We shouldn’t expect it to work all the time. We have the theology of God—what he is like—standing against the theodicy of God, which explains life as we experience it. The contrasting positions of the theology and theodicy compels us to turn to God and ask him to resolve the dilemma.
The book of Job is, as it were, doing some radical surgery to separate these two principles so we don’t make the mistake of thinking that a theology of God leads to an explanation of how he is working in the world. Yahweh’s justice must be taken on faith rather than worked out philosophically. God does not need to be defended. Our attempts at theodicy, are in one sense, an insult to God. “He doesn’t need our defense.”
Walton added we cannot defend him very ably anyways. God wants to be trusted. We can’t tell when God is going to choose justice or when he’s going to choose mercy. We can’t tell where his compassion might override something else that he “ought” to be doing. Justice is a part of God, but does not trump all the other attributes God has.
Jesus and the Retribution Principle
Jesus was repeatedly challenged with retribution questions. For example in John 9, Jesus heals the man born blind. The disciples posed the retribution principle in their question saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” If the answer is the man sinned, why was he was born blind. If the answer is his parents, why did he suffer? Their question is a question of cause; a theodicy question.
But Jesus said: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” In effect, Jesus tells them not to look to the past and ask about cause. That’s not the answer. Instead, he tells them to look to the future and think about purpose, namely that the works of God might be displayed. The glory of God is a purpose, not a cause.
Walton said this was the same answer Job got from God—“trust God’s wisdom and seek out his purpose.” Don’t expect to get causal explanations. When Jesus addressed issues concerning retribution principles, he consistently turned away from giving reasons or explanations for cause and pointed to what God intended to do. That’s essentially what the book of Job is about.
This was a retelling of Lecture 7 of Dr. John Walton’s YouTube series of 30 mini lectures on the book of Job, “Theological Foundation: Retribution Principle, Tringle.” Dr. Walton also wrote the commentary on Job for NIV Application Commentary Series, for which he was one of the contributing editors for the Old Testament.
“The Bible is written for us, but it’s not written to us. It’s not in our language. It’s not in our culture. It doesn’t anticipate our culture or any other culture since that time.” So, when John Walton teaches about the book of Job, he dives deep within what the surrounding cultures of the ancient Near East thought and believed about their relationship with their gods. Here are some of his insights on the book of Job and its relationship to the ancient Near East.
The book of Job is fully embedded in the ancient world. Even though it’s nor indebted to any particular piece of literature in the ancient world, it’s embedded in that world. That means the conversation about Job is unfolding in that context. Even when the book is taking a different perspective from what others in that time and culture might take, it’s still having the conversation in the context of that culture. As you read Job, notice how Job’s friends represent Near Eastern thinking and how he resists it and them.
While Job is not an Israelite (he’s from the land of Uz), it’s evident the book of Job is an Israelite book. It was written by Israelites for Israelites. Also, since it talks about the situation of a pious sufferer, it fits into a literary category known in the ancient world. There are several other pieces of literature that discuss the pious sufferer. However, the answers given in the book of Job are very different from what is found in other works of the ancient world.
There is an early Sumerian work called, “A Man and His God.” In this work, the person is suffering. He confesses himself ignorant of any offense that he might have committed. He suffers illness. He’s a social outcast. “But at the end of the book, sins are revealed to him and he confesses his sins and is restored to health.” The philosophy here is there is no sinless child born; everyone has sins.
There is an Akkadian Mesopotamian text called “A Dialogue Between a Man and His God.” Again, the person is ignorant of any possible offense. The pious sufferer motif is the idea that someone who on the surface looks like they’ve done everything right, that they are pious in all the right ways, yet they are suffering. Here, the man suffers illness and eventually is restored to health. There is no philosophy given here; no divine favor assured.
“One of the most famous pieces of literature in the ancient world is another Akkadian, Babylonian one called “Ludlul bel Nemeqi,” “I Will Praise the God of Wisdom.” Again, there is a character who is conscientious and pious, ignorant of any possible offence. And yet, he finds himself a social outcast. He’s suffering illness. What the gods say is unclear. His protective spirits have been chased away. He talks about demon oppression. In the resolution of his situation, the god appears in a dream and gives him a way to make a purification offering that brings appeasement. His offenses are born away; his demons are expelled; he’s restored to health.
Again, the implication is that he was not really without offense. The philosophy behind this work is that the gods are inscrutable. Who can know what they are doing? It ends in a hymn of praise to the Babylonian god, Marduk.
There is a final work called “The Babylonian Theodicy.” Here the person claims piety, but his family is gone and he’s suffering poverty. In this case, there isn’t any resolution of his situation. The conclusion is that the purposes of the god are remote; you can’t tell what they’re doing. It seems to say that the gods have made people with evil inclinations and prone to suffering. That’s just the way things are.
“We can see that they offer a very different perspective on the gods and the suffering people experience.” The answers we find here is divine inscrutability— you really can’t know what the gods are doing. Everyone sins, “and therefore in suffering, you can never claim that it was not deserved.” Or even that the gods made humanity crooked. No one can do everything that the gods require. “So, there would always be something that the gods can get angry about.”
There tends to be less of an inclination to assign blame for suffering in the ancient Near East. “People are really without information. The gods have not communicated forthrightly.” The Egyptian, Babylonian, Canaanite or Hittite gods have not really revealed themselves. There is no clear communication about what they desire, what will please them. “There is no sense of that in the ancient world.”
People in the ancient Near East believed the gods were largely inconsistent and had their own agendas. They might act differently from one day to the next. Therefore, even though they feel their situation is the result of the god’s neglect, anger or change of mind, “they really have no way to think through it all.”
In the ancient world, if the gods became angry, people believed they would remove their protection; and as a result, the individual would be vulnerable, “in jeopardy from demonic powers” or other forces. In “Ludlul bel Nemeqi,” after the person has done everything he can think to do, he says,
I wish I knew that these things were pleasing to one’s god. What is proper to oneself is an offense to one’s god. What is in one’s heart seems despicable is proper to one’s god. Who knows the will of the gods in heaven? Who understands the plans of the underworld gods? Where have mortals ever learnt the way of a god?
Notice the frustration in what the speaker says. What would it be like to live in such a world, where there are powerful beings who affect everything you do, but have not told you what they expect of you or what will please them; or what will make them angry. What if you had a job like that, where you were being held accountable, yet your boss never made it clear what it was you were supposed to do or not supposed to do? And that you were punished or rewarded based on your guesses.
The Bankruptcy of Polytheism in Job
This is a little of what is in the literature behind the book of Job. “But Job so far transcends them; has so much more to offer.” For example, with Job there is no inclination toward polytheism even though in the ancient world, polytheism was the common way to think about the gods. There is a small bit of a community in the opening chapters with the divine council, but no suggestion of polytheism. Job even makes some affirmations to stand against polytheism. In Job 31:26-28, he swears he has not been enticed by the sun or moon, which would have been iniquity, “for I would have been false to God above.”
This only makes sense in a monotheistic Israelite context. All the other people groups around routinely worshipped the sun and the moon. This wasn’t an aberration. Only in an Israelite context would this have been a reasonable claim for Job to make that he had not raised his hands to praise the sun or the moon. Job has a good deal of certainty about his righteousness, giving the book a very Israelite feel.
Job shows no curiosity about which god has brought him trouble. He seems to know exactly which God he is talking to; no others are in the picture to confuse the situation. “Sometimes if one god is giving you trouble, you can appeal to another god to help you out of it.” Job makes no such an appeal to any other god. “He is only working through one God.”
In the ancient world, they believed the gods had created humans because they had become tired of meeting their own needs. The gods would get hungry or thirsty, they would need clothing and housing. “They had to grow their own food, irrigate their own fields, build their own houses.” This was tiring, exhausting work. The gods decided to create slave labor; people who will meet their needs.
“So people were created so that they would meet the needs of the gods and pamper them.” But then the gods had to do things for the people they created. Once they became dependent on people to meet their needs, they had to preserve them. They had to send enough rain for people to grow the crops to feed the gods and themselves. If the people died of starvation, they couldn’t feed to the gods.
“The gods had to protect their interests by providing for people and protecting people.” Today, we would say there was a codependency between the gods and people. The gods depended on the people to pamper them; and the people depended on the gods for protection and provision. Here is one of the places where justice fits. The gods were interested in preserving justice not because it was inherent in their nature, but because if there was mayhem and chaos, if society was not ordered and just, then people could not attend to their duties in pampering the gods.
“The gods had some self interest in making sure there was justice, order in society.” So, when Satan asked, “Does Job fear God for no reason?” (Job 1:9), the question hit at the very foundation of the symbiotic, codependent relationship between the gods and people. “In the ancient world, nobody served god for nothing. The whole idea of serving god was so that god would return the favor.” No one in the ancient world served god for nothing; the rituals were so that the gods would bring prosperity and protection.
The very premise of the book of Job denies that this so-called codependency between the gods and people will always be in place. “Only in Israel could you begin to think in that direction.”
“The book’s answers do not hinge on human nature or divine nature, but on God’s policies in the world. How does God work? And in that sense, again, it’s very unlike what we find in the ancient Near East.” The book of Job, then, is not indebted to any piece of ancient Near Eastern literature. “It uses the ancient Near Eastern literature as a foil.” It wants you to think about the other answers that were given, to see how bankrupt they are.
This was a retelling of Session 5 of Dr. John Walton’s YouTube series of 30 mini lectures on the book of Job, “Job and the Ancient Near East.” Dr. Walton also wrote the commentary on Job for NIV Application Commentary Series, for which he was one of the contributing editors for the Old Testament.
The book of Job in the Bible is not about Job. “Job” is the title of the book, and he is a main character, but the book is not about him. In the beginning of the book, Job loses all his wealth, his children and his health, but the book is not about suffering. When you get to the end of the book, all of what Job lost at the beginning is restored, and then some. So, what is going on here?
If you go to the book of Job, thinking that you are getting an answer to why there is suffering in the world or in your life; you’re going for the wrong reason. And you are going to be disappointed. It is not going to tell you that.
Dr. John Walton, an Old Testament professor at Wheaton College, has a YouTube playlist of 30 mini lectures on Job. The above quote and the discussion that follows on were based on his first lecture, “Interpretation problems and false ideas about Job.” Dr. Walton also wrote the commentary on Job for NIV Application Commentary Series, for which he was one of the contributing editors for the Old Testament.
Job is unique, not only in the Old Testament, but within the entire ancient world. The first problem Walton wants to address is what does the book of Job actually say. The Hebrew in the book is the most difficult in the Old Testament. There are many words in Job that only occur once in the Hebrew Bible. So, there are difficulties understanding the meanings of some words and how they are used.
Then there is the issue of what kind of literature or genre Job is—how did the author communicate what he wanted to say? Walton sees Job as a unified, coherent text. In his commentary on Job, Walton said Job is unarguably wisdom literature, rather than historical literature. “As wisdom literature it makes no claims about the nature of the events.” A discussion about whether the events are real events misses the mark.
As wisdom literature, Job could be thought of as a “thought experiment.” If this is the case, the author is using various parts of Job to pose philosophical scenes that address wisdom themes. Walton said in both philosophy and science, hypothetical situations are explored for their philosophical value. “The point is not to claim that the events in the thought experiment did happen, but they draw their philosophical strength from the realistic nature of the imaginative device.”
So, if the book of Job is a thought experiment, the reader should draw conclusions about God from the final point, not from every detail in the book. For example, the opening scene in heaven is not intended to inform us about God’s activities and nature. “We would not rule out the possibility that such a scenario could happen, but we would be mistaken to think that author seeks to unfold a series of historical events. It is wisdom literature.”
A common misperception when reading the book is that Job is on trial. Job thinks he’s being accused of wrongdoing and is being punished for it. He claims he’s been wrongly accused and treated inappropriately; he sees himself as the victim. However, he thinks he’s on trial and so do his friends. Job has trials; he’s not on trial. The book makes this very clear from the beginning; Job is not on trial.
The book is not about Job. It doesn’t present Job as a role model for us to follow in the midst of suffering. It is about God. We need to see what it teaches us about God, not what it teaches about Job. It is a wisdom book, and wisdom is ultimately about God.
It is not a treatise on God’s justice. If you look for an explanation of God’s justice in Job, you’ll be disappointed. The book of Job does not explain or defend God’s justice. Job’s accusations against God concern His justice. And our questions about suffering often concern justice. “But the book of Job does not defend God’s justice. Instead, it defends God’s wisdom.”
If we think it defends God’s justice, then we’ll try to justify or somehow explain what happened to Job. But to do that, we’d need all the information there is on the issue, but only God is omniscient. From the beginning of the book, we know Job and his friends do not have all the information about what’s going on. They know nothing about the opening scene in heaven. “We are not in a position to try to talk about whether God is just or not.”
The book of Job is also not designed to help us think about suffering. Rather, it is designed to help us think about God when we are suffering. “That’s what we really need to know.” It is a book about trusting God, rather than answers that explain the suffering we see in the world. Trusting God should be our response when we don’t know what’s going on—as it was with Job.
The book of Job is more about what constitutes righteousness than about why we suffer. In Job 1:9-10, Satan said to God, “Does Job fear God for no reason?” Then Satan said God has put a hedge around Job and all that he has. Walton thought Satan is asking God what really motivates Job’s righteousness. Here is one of the theological, philosophical issues grappled with in Job.
If Job behaves the way he does because he expects to get prosperity and reward, his “so-called righteousness is just going to dissolve in the wind.” This seems to be the view expressed by Job’s wife, who asks why he continues to hold on to his integrity and counsels him to curse God and die (Job 2:9). The book of Job challenges its readers to be righteous even when they are suffering. “It challenges us to be righteous because righteousness is what should characterize our lives.” It calls us to be faithful because God is God, and not because he is generous.
“God is not a vending machine,” where we insert righteous behavior and expect his favor in return.
This was a retelling of Session 1 of Dr. John Walton’s YouTube series of 30 mini lectures on the book of Job, “Interpretation problems and false ideas bout Job.” Dr. Walton also wrote the commentary on Job for NIV Application Commentary Series, for which he was one of the contributing editors for the Old Testament.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In an appendix to their classic book, The Genesis Flood, John Whitcomb and Henry Morris discussed the question of “Paleontology and the Edenic Curse.” They questioned the validity what they referred to as “uniformitarian paleontology,” which dated the formation of fossil layers in hundreds of millions of years, not the thousands of years allotted in their own timeline for creation. This uniformitarianism assumed the death of billions of animals by natural or violent means and the extinction of untold species of animals, like dinosaurs, before the Fall of Adam. “Long ago before the Edenic curse giant flesh-eating monsters like Tyrannosaurus Rex roamed the earth, slashing their victims with ferocious dagger-like teeth and claws.”
But how can such an interpretation of the history of the animal kingdom be reconciled with the early chapters of Genesis? Does the Book of Genesis, honestly studied in the light of the New Testament, allow for the reign of tooth and claw and death and destruction before the Fall of Adam?
In Part 1 of this article we looked at some of the challenges to the modern young earth (YEC) theodicy that Whitcomb and Morris birthed with their book. The organization, Answers in Genesis (AiG) seems to be at the forefront of the current debate over how to interpret Genesis 1-11 from this perspective. For AiG, the age of the earth, the day of creation in Genesis 1 and whether there was animal death before the Fall are all tied together into the same bundle. Writing for AiG in “Did Death of Any Kind Exist Before the Fall?,” Simon Turpin said:
If Genesis is interpreted through the lens of uniformitarian geology then the fossil record documents that millions of years of earth’s history are filled with death, mutations, disease, suffering, bloodshed, and violence. However, if the days of creation in Genesis 1 were only 24 hours long then there is no room for the millions of years of death, struggle, and disease to have taken place before Adam disobeyed God.
Along with others, the work of David Snoke in A Biblical Case for an Old Earth was presented as evidence countering the YEC and AiG claim that their interpretation of Genesis 1-11 is the only biblically valid one. Dr. Snoke said that if you were to acknowledge that the Bible taught animals died before the Fall, many of the other objections to an old earth melted away. Here I’d like to further unpack another of his statements, “The whole point of an old-earth view is to say that things are as they appear, and the earth is full of fossils and fossil matter such as coral and limestone.”
Dr. Snoke noted where YECs like AiG and Whitcomb and Morris identified the Edenic curse in Genesis 3:14-24 as the origination of carnivorous animals. Before the Fall they were said to have been herbivores. Whitcomb and Morris stated that the sharp claws and teeth of the carnivores came from the Fall: “The point is that such specialized structures appeared for the first time after the Edenic curse.” Yet there is no discussion in Scripture of how these modifications (dare we say evolved?) or new species emerged, according to Snoke. “Nowhere does it say that new species of animals [or alterations to existing species] will appear or that the entire order of the physical world will change.”
Snoke suggested that two different interpretive models of the creation, fall and new creation played a role in the debate over whether animal death occurred before the Fall. The models are illustrated below in the following table reproduced from A Biblical Case for an Old Earth.
View I
World of
Genesis 1-2
World of
Revelation 21-22
Our world
(digression)
View II
World of
Revelation 21-22
World of
Genesis 1-2
Our world
In the first model, the original created world and the new heavens & earth of Revelation are essentially the same. The lost, perfect Edenic world is restored; and our present world is radically different from either. In support of this perspective, the imagery of the Garden of Eden found in Revelation 22:1-3 is noted: There is the Tree of Life, a river and the declaration that “No longer will there be anything accursed.” Snoke does not further elaborate on this model, but the assumed lack of death, disease, and suffering for animals (what AiG calls natural evil) and humans before the Fall would fit in equating them.
In the section of his article addressing whether there was natural evil before the Fall, AiG’s Terry Mortenson said the declaration by God was that his creation was “very good.” Not only did this indicate that land creatures were vegetarian before the Fall, but how could “millions of years of death and other natural evil be called ‘very good’?” He went on to Isaiah 11:6-9 and 65:25-26, which speak of a future state of creation, where the wolf and the lamb will dwell together; the lion eats straw like the ox; the cow and the bear will graze together and their young will lie down together.
The scene in view is one of complete peace and harmony. For some animals to hunt and kill other animals is described as hurting, destroying, and doing evil. Given this language, is it really possible that carnivores would be destroying other animals (whether healthy or diseased) and earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and asteroid impacts causing animal death and extinction would be happening for hundreds of millions of years in God’s “very good” creation before Adam sinned?
In the second model, the original created world and our current world are essentially the same. The old earth premise is that things are as they appear. Here, the world to come in Revelation is utterly different. Dr. Snoke illustrated the differences by comparing Revelation 21-22 and Genesis 1-3. Revelation 21 said there will be no more sea, night or sun, while the sea, sun and night are part of the created order in Genesis 1. Also it’s “the first heaven and the first earth” that has passed away in Revelation 21:1.
In other words, the heaven and earth of Genesis 1 (presented in Gen. 1:1) are lumped in together with our present heaven and earth, as a unity that will be destroyed when Christ comes again to make all things new. There is no mention in Scripture of a major physical change of the world at the fall.
The Garden of Eden is a type of heaven in the second model, but not equal to it. Other types in Scripture include the temple in Jerusalem for the true temple of God in heaven (Hebrews 8:1-5). King David was a type of the Messiah. The Garden gives us a picture of heaven as the temple in Jerusalem does of the holiness of God in his heavenly throne room. “The Garden was a space of special protection made for human beings, where God walked with man.”
John Walton seems to have a similar sense to David Snoke of the Garden of Eden in The Lost World of Genesis One. He said scholars have recognized the temple and tabernacle contained a good bit of imagery from the Garden of Eden. They also point out how gardens commonly adjoined sacred space in the ancient world. Strictly speaking then, the Garden of Eden in Walton’s view was not a garden for man, but the garden of God. Walton then quoted biblical scholar Gordon Wenham, who said:
The garden of Eden is not viewed by the author of Genesis simply as a piece of Mesopotamian farmland, but as an archetypal sanctuary, that is a place where God dwells and where man should worship him. Many of the features of the garden may also be found in later sanctuaries particularly the tabernacle or Jerusalem temple. These parallels suggest that the garden itself is understood as a sort of sanctuary.
Outside of this Garden, according to Snoke, was the dangerous natural world. The model fits with God forcefully driving the man from the Garden he had been originally charged to work and keep. Instead of dwelling in the pleasant and peaceful Garden, God banished him into the outer darkness where “nature, red in tooth and claw” was the rule. There the ground was cursed and he would work it by the sweat of his brow and eat of it in pain. He said:
In my view, the powerful forces that existed outside the Garden, which included darkness, the sea, and carnivorous animals, existed prior to the fall as judgments held in readiness, as visible threats to Adam and Eve of the contrast between their protected state of grace and the possible consequences of leaving God’s presence.
There seems to be enough biblical evidence to say animals died before the Fall. As I mentioned in Part 1, there is also credible biblical evidence to allow for the old earth creation acceptance of millions of years for the process. Things in our world today are as they appear. The nature of animal life was not changed from grass eaters to meat eaters by the Edenic curse. Nature, red in tooth in claw existed outside the Garden before the Fall, apparently for millions of years, and became part of human existence when we were banished from the Garden—until Christ comes again to make everything new. Maranatha.
For more articles on creation in the Bible, see the link “Genesis & Creation.”
According to John Walton, the seventh day of the Genesis creation account can be something of a theological afterthought. “It appears to be nothing more than an afterthought with theological concerns about Israelites observing the sabbath—an appendix, a postscript, a tack on.” There is a literary structure to the first six days in Genesis 1 that C. John Collins called “exalted prose,” but the pattern ends there. Then we hear that God rested from his work of creation on the seventh day. But what does God resting have to do with creation? And why would God rest? It’s not as if He was actually tired from all his creative activity. Then what does it mean for God to rest?
Walton believes that rest is the objective of creation. In fact, without the seventh day of rest, the other six days of Genesis 1 don’t achieve their full meaning. “Even though people are the climax of the six days, day seven is the climax of this origins account.” To make his point, he turned to Scripture. The Hebrew word for “rested” in Genesis 2:2 is šābat, which means to sever, put an end to, cease. The English term “Sabbath” is derived from it.
In Deuteronomy 12:10, God told the Israelites that when they crossed over the Jordan and lived in the land He was giving them, they would have rest from their enemies and live in safety. After Moses died and Joshua was preparing the Israelites to cross the Jordan, he told them to remember what Moses had told them about the Lord providing them a place of rest. As Joshua was about to release the Reubenites, the Gadites and the half-tribe of Manasseh to return across the Jordan to their lands, the narrator said the Lord had given them rest on every side, just as He said He would (Josh 21:44). When David saw that the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies, he thought he would build a house for the Lord to dwell in (2 Samuel 7:1-2).
The rest that God offers his people is freedom from invasion and conflict. Now they can live at peace and conduct their daily lives without interruption. “It refers to achieving a state of order in society.” When Jesus invited those who were weary and burdened to come to him, he offered them rest (Matthew 11:28). He invited people to participate in the ordered kingdom of God, where their yoke would be easy and their burden light. The author of Hebrews looked to a future rest, where anyone who entered it would rest from their works as God did from his (Hebrews 4:10-11).
In light of this usage, we can discern that resting pertains to the security and stability found in equilibrium of an ordered system. When God rests on the seventh day, he is taking up his residence in the ordered system that he has brought about in the previous six days. It is not something that he does only on the seventh day; it is what he does every day thereafter. Furthermore, his rest is not just a matter of having a place of residence—he is exercising his control over this ordered system where he intends to relate to people whom he has placed there and for whom he has made the system to function.
God was not only making a home for the people He created in His image when He created the cosmos, he was making a home for himself. But in the ancient world, the temple was not only the residence of a god, it was the throne room from which the god ruled and maintained order. So an ancient reader, according to Walton, would have recognized Genesis 1 (referring to Genesis 1:1-2:3) as a temple story or text. Temple-building accounts often accompanied cosmologies. After he established order, which was the focus of ancient cosmologies, the deity “took control of that ordered system.” When the deity rests in the temple, he is assuming his rightful place and his proper role—he is assuming the throne.
This is the element that we are sadly missing when we read the Genesis account. God has ordered the cosmos with the purpose of taking up his residence in it and ruling over it. Day seven is the reason for days one through six. It is the fulfillment of God’s purpose.
God built the cosmos to be sacred space, and the account in Genesis 1 is an account of the origins of sacred space rather than an account of the origins of the material cosmos. Rather than an ancient temple where people could relate to their god by ritually meeting his needs, “God built the cosmos to be sacred space and then put people in that sacred space as a place where he could be in relationship with them.”
What I’ve presented above are ideas and quotes from John Walton in The Lost World of Genesis and The Lost World of Adam and Eve. His views of Genesis 1 and 2 have their critics, but I’ve found his argument stimulating in a number of different ways. You can introduce yourself to his thought here, in a series of articles and even a video series on the evolutionary creation website, BioLogos. His interpretation of Genesis is certainly consistent with evolutionary creation, but exists independent of it. You can accept his understanding of Genesis without becoming an evolutionary creationist.
I think his sense of Genesis 1 as a temple text fits nicely with a redemptive historical understanding of Scripture as a whole. And I think it could fit there as follows.
Walton sees Genesis 1 as God building a sacred space, a temple, in which He would also place people so He could be in relationship with them. In Genesis 2 and even into Genesis 3, we see the reality of this fellowship with God. Then as a consequence of their sin, God drove Adam and Eve from the sacred space of the Garden (Genesis 3:23-24). However, this was not the end of his plan to be in relationship with people. Even before their sin, God had already begun to point them to the work of redemption He would accomplish in His Son.
In Genesis 2, He made a helper for the man because He saw that it was not good for the man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). Presented with the woman, the man said: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Here God instituted biblical marriage. The following comment on this action by God—“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24)—will later be quoted by Paul in Ephesians 5:31. Paul saw this action by God in Genesis 2 as a mystery referring to Christ and the church. The coming of Christ revealed that God’s establishment of biblical marriage was a protoevangelium, if you will.
In Genesis 3, is the judgment statement against the serpent has been understood by many since Justin and Irenaeus in the 2nd century as theprotoevangelium: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” The protoevangelium is the first (proto) gospel (evangelion); the first reference in Scripture of the idea of a Messiah. So before God put the man and the woman out of the Garden, He gave them two hints of his future plans in Christ.
After Moses completed the tabernacle (Exodus 40:34) and when Solomon had finished his prayer dedicating the temple ((2 Chronicles 7:1-2), these structures were filled with the presence of the Lord and became sacred space. In Ezekiel’s vision of the temple, the glory of the Lord filled the temple and the Lord said the place of his throne and the place where he will dwell will be in the midst of the people forever (Ezekiel 43:4-7).
Then in Christ, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Jesus called people to Him that they might have rest (Matthew 11:28), for he is the Lord of the Sabbath (Matthew 12:8). When he ascended into heaven, he sat at the right hand of the Father (Mark 16:19). When he returns, he will return the same way as he left (Acts 1:11). His return will be to fulfill the mystery of Genesis 2:24, revealed in Christ (Ephesians 5:32)—the marriage supper of the Lamb, and his bride, the church (Revelations 19:7).
In the new heaven and new earth, in this new sacred space, God will fulfill His intent to dwell with his people: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Revelations 21:3). There will not be a temple in this New Jerusalem, the Bride of the Lamb, because its temple is the Lord God and the Lamb (Revelations 21:22). The Sabbath rest of Exodus 20:11 will be made manifest. The seventh day of the Genesis creation account will have reached its zenith.
For more articles on creation in the Bible, see the link “Genesis & Creation.”
John Walton opens Lecture 15 on Job by noting Job 19:25 is one of the most familiar verses in the book of Job. The NIV (the ESV is similar) says, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.” This verse has inspired musicians from Handel to Nicole C. Mullen. It has been traditionally understood by Christians including Clement of Rome, Origen and Augustine to refer to the resurrection and Christ. In “Impatient Job,” James Zink observed that most commentators see in Job 19:25-27, “the height of trust in the justice of God and a great new insight into his redemptive nature.” And yet Walton provocatively asked, “So, how should we interpret this verse?”
