Brandan Robertson on the Death of Christianity, Jared Wilson and Galatians 2, Open Phones

Well, greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. It is Thursday, and we're eventually going to open the phone lines at 877 -753 -3341, because I only have a couple of items here that I really want to get to today.

And so please remember, this is not the Bible Answer Man broadcast. I do not make claims to be able to do that kind of thing. A man's got to know his limitations, as one theologian once said, one very well-armed theologian once said, and I do.

So there you go, 877 -753 -3341. But if you call in now, you're going to be sitting on hold for a little while, because there are some things I want to get to. There's a danger in how we handle the issue of support, and that is, we almost never talk about it.

We don't have, you know, a lot of people have regular stuff at the beginning and end of the program or commercials in the middle or stuff like that. We don't do that, and it's not because we don't need it, and it's not because we've got a bunch of rich people out there that pay all the bills.

I'll be perfectly honest with you, our experience with rich people is you can't really trust that direction. They're there for a while, and then, oh, shiny thing, and off it goes someplace else. So for a very, very, very, very, very long time, our funding has been just from basic people that go, you know what?

I want to have the dividing line around. I want to see James doing debates. I want to see him traveling the world and teaching in all sorts of places he wouldn't be able to go and teach if the ministry didn't support and make it possible for him to get there, and I want that consistent voice, and so I'm willing to do 20 bucks, 30 bucks, 50 bucks, whatever it is, on a regular basis, and that's how we are funded.

I mean, we used to fund a lot of stuff by selling mp3s and stuff like that. We've made that all available for free, so, you know, we just throw it out there, and it's available, and so we need folks to stand with us.

I mean, we're taking some pretty unpopular stands on a lot of stuff these days, and so if you'd keep that in mind, and then there's one other thing. One thing that's been really, really, really encouraging to me, to be honest with you, is the way that people have stood with us in providing for what's the Travel Fund.

It's the fund we draw from to kick me out of here and to cancel the show. That's brilliant. We're just the world's greatest marketers, we really are, but the reality is there are not only, you know, I'm going to have the opportunity of teaching in Samara, Russia, coming up in just a matter of weeks, where the last guy who taught there during this class period mentioned it hit 40 degrees below zero, and yeah, I'm borrowing a jacket from them, because I'm like, why would I even bother buying something like that in Phoenix?

You know, I mean, it would hang in my closet and take up, I'm sure, a lot of room and would never ever get used again unless I went back there, and just transporting it would be tough enough, but anyways, I get to teach in places, get to go to churches that, because folks support the Travel Fund, I can go to smaller places, I can go to places that are a little out of the way, because we don't have to ask from those small, really small places, you know, we just get me there.

And so it's really, really, really encouraging when the Travel Fund is well supported. And so I've got a lot of traveling at the end of this year, and then throughout next year to be doing. I've got some dissertation research to do over in Germany in February, and all in regards to, you know, the text of the New Testament, things like that.

So on the Support Us page, you've got the regular support thing, and then you've got the travel link there. And if you can help us to continue doing the things we're doing, and set up those debates, and do the things we've been doing all along, we would very much appreciate it.

We don't talk about it very much. I might mention it, you know, again next week, just because not everybody listens to every program, try to cover everybody. But as you can tell, we're not really good at this type of thing.

In fact, you realize what October is, and we totally... It would have been perfectly legitimate to point out that right now, October of 2018, is the 35th anniversary of the founding of Alpha Omega Ministries.

35 years? It's been 35 years. And, I don't know, I sort of feel sorry for the 35th wedding anniversary, you know, because, you know, 25's big, 40's big, 35 just sort of sits there, you know. And Kelly and I are at 36, and we sort of commented at 35, well, okay, you know, the next few years, you know, get a cupcake or something like that, you know, and just sort of wait for 40, you know, because how much can you make out of, you know, 37, you know.

But, you know, 35 years of ministry for a, and especially an apologetics ministry, is a long time. I, sadly, can think back through and think of a lot of folks that used to be doing this that ain't doing it anymore.

And so there you go, 35 years, we could have put together offers, you know, send in $35 and get the, we just don't do that kind of thing. I think it's Rich's fault primarily. It's supposed to be his job to think up this kind of stuff, and he's just sort of falling down on it.

That's just all there is to it. But there you go. So if I see any $35 donations, I'll know what that was about, you know. And if I was smart, I'd say $350 donations and things like that. But, you know, there you go.

But so just to let people know, because we get new listeners all the time, and they're probably sitting around going, well, if they never talk about anything like that, then they just must not need anything.

No, no, we are 100 supported by individuals. That's the way it works. So there you go. So Travel Fund also needs your help. I didn't get to this last time, and I don't want to proverbially beat the dead horse, but you need to understand.

I briefly mentioned the situation with Reverend Brandon Robertson. I mentioned the fact that if the name rings any bells with you, it's probably because at some point over the past five years or so, you would have seen this young man speaking on the subject of homosexuality as a same-sex attracted person or bisexual.

I'm not really sure. I think both. Either I don't remember, I don't really keep track of that kind of thing. But as a person not in the standard realm of sexual expression, and when I first heard him, he was, at least that time, attempting to maintain some level of what I would call historic theological orthodoxy in regards to key issues of the Christian faith.

The problem was, in listening to where he was going, I knew beyond all question that something would have to give. As much as people might try, you can't maintain that position with any level of consistency.

The people who are going to be inviting you to come speak and things like that, you're going to be constantly being under pressure to go one direction, and it's not toward orthodoxy. It's certainly not in maintaining it.

And so there was a column from October 4th, so just three weeks ago, by Brandon Robertson, Why Traditional Christianity Must Die. At the end of his most recent book, Unbelievable, Bishop Spong, who knew he was still around?

I'm not going to start telling the backstory on the debate with Bishop Spong, but if you want to just go watch it for yourself, you can almost figure some of the backstory out just from watching the debate.

But the story I've told, I will tell this story because I've told it many times before. During the break in that debate, so go to YouTube, put in John Shelby Spong, James White, it'll come up. We debated homosexuality in Tampa a number of years ago.

And during the break, which direction did it go? He was sitting over there. All he had brought to the table was a yellow pad and a pencil. He didn't have a Bible. He did not bring a Bible to a debate on whether homosexuality is consistent with the Bible.

And so, if I recall correctly, I think I asked him to sign his books because I had his books with me, because I had read his books and I had listened to his lectures and I had prepared for the debate.

And of course, I then offered him my book on the subject, which he had never seen. And it was just illustrative of how all leftists are. I don't say liberals anymore. I say leftists because it's much more accurate.

It's how they all are. He had not looked me up. He could care less what I had to say. Didn't think I had anything worthwhile to say in the first place, which makes it next to impossible for him to meaningfully interact with what I'm actually saying.

But that's just how people on the left are. They don't think we have anything meaningful to say. Anyway, Spong is technically an Episcopalian, but I think he's honestly barely a theist. And I really don't think it's fair to saddle, certainly not the believing Anglicans, but I guess the Episcopalians, they've had their atheist priests too.

So anyway, at the end of his most recent book, Unbelievable, Bishop Spong poses a question that should be grappled with by every person of faith in this modern era. Essentially, he asks, can Christianity in its theology, liturgy, institutions, and practices evolve to meet the rapidly emerging new textures of reality in the 21st century?

As a Christian pastor and public theologian, I have often grappled with this very question, especially as I witnessed my own worldview shift dramatically away from a traditional Christian perspective towards a new way of seeing and being that could only scarcely be called Christian by the standards of the dominant institutions within the religion.

Well, that's about as good a confession as you're going to get that I am an apostate. I have left the faith, I have left orthodoxy, I have left what the church has taught down through the centuries. And why?

Because of his views on sexuality. It's not that the Bible's teaching on homosexuality and marriage and gender is confusing or difficult or anything else. It is that it is so very clear and so very opposite that of a Western society that is running with all of its energy toward its own self-destruction by abandoning everything that is good in God's law.

So, the more I've leaned into this question, the more that I have come to believe that the religion called Christianity itself may be irredeemable. Isn't it interesting that you would use the term irredeemable in getting rid of the Redeemer?

It is common knowledge in progressive circles, I would say regressive circles, that the imperial religion that has dominated the world for the past 2 ,000 years is almost nothing like the radical, ethical, and social movement initiated by that first century rabbi named Yeshua.

What he initiated wasn't primarily a religious movement at all, but a socio-political movement that challenged the fundamental ordering of his society and called for an egalitarian and communal way of existing as a human community.

Now, that's not what you're going to get from reading the Gospels. You're going to have to ignore the vast majority of Jesus' conflict with the Jewish leaders. It is a perversion. It is laughable on any exegetical or historical account, but it is so common at Union Theological Seminary or any of the other, quote-unquote, progressive seminaries where what the Bible actually teaches is irrelevant.

It's what you can clothe in modern Marxist ideology that matters. So, yeah, along with these ethical and political teachings, Rabbi Yeshua, yeah, I remember the apostles calling him Rabbi Yeshua. Sorry, I still have the stuff that's going around, and so I'm going to have to drink fairly regularly, and in fact, I should back the volume off.

I can tell right now. Or we're going to sound like Barry White very, very quickly. Along with these ethical and political teachings, Rabbi Yeshua incorporated what could be called a perennial spirituality, which called for each human to move beyond our egoic projections.

Have you been trying to move beyond your egoic projections recently, Rachel? Every day. Yeah. We have a studio audience today. I'm not going to say who it is, though. If I did, you'd all be going, why isn't he in here?

Because he doesn't want to be in here. But he's well known, very, very well known, though he only looks like the guy that he's supposed to actually be, at least, that's another story. Oh, okay, yes, he's going beyond his egoic projections.

Move beyond our egoic projections in the world and to embrace our divine nature with our divine nature within, which unites us to all things. Could someone light up some incense or something here? It might make things work a little better.

Do we have some little chimes or something? By moving beyond our carnal desires and identities, to use a Pauline term, oh yeah, I can just see Paul embracing Brandon Robertson's stuff, and seeking to live from our truest nature, which Paul taught was corrupted, we could overcome both our struggles with sin, in scare quotes, all of our greedy impulses that create inequity in the world.

Oh, there's what sin is. It's inequity in the world. Did Karl Marx write this or what? And our identification with the false constructs of identity that we've been conditioned to own as our identity, which probably means God created you male and female and husband and wife and that old stuff.

Only from that place of inner union could we truly create a united and equal society that Rabbi Yeshua dreamed of. Well, he must have just dreamed about it because he never bothered to say anything about it.

It's not written down somewhere. Well, there you go. So he wants, it goes on and it's leftist drivel is what it is. That's what you would expect. And it's why traditional Christianity must die. So there's the trajectory of apostasy.

Sadly, saw it coming, knew it was coming, and there you see it. That's sad. It's sad to see. But as I said, we went back and forth a bit and I informed him very straightforwardly on Twitter, you are a false teacher and you're leading people astray.

And I think people need to mark you out in that way. And he said the same thing to me, which is fine. Only one of us has a biblical basis and the other one's just making things up as he goes along. So, oh yeah.

Someone on Scott Hunt on Twitter just said the sword behind James makes me think of only one thing and it's William Wallace screaming freedom. Except this was the, when he was still William Wallace and hadn't had his guts cut out, William Wallace.

So, with his war paint on and stuff like that. And yes, it is a Scottish Claymore. And let me tell you something, it's not as big as the Wallace sword. I've seen the Wallace sword in Stirling, Scotland.

And so, it's a beast. But I don't know how anybody could swing that thing around for more than about five minutes without your arms falling off. It is heavy. And the Wallace sword would have to be twice that.

And so, he must have been, those were very short battles, which they weren't. Or he was an aerobic beast. I'm not, I don't know. But, either that or, yeah, you know, the last person to win was the last person.

It was bloody stuff. No two ways about it. But yeah, thank you, Scott. That is a Scottish Claymore. And while it is not sharp, well, since we're talking about it, and I'm going to transition anyways, that's the Claymore.

And then this is the sword from Gladiator, the Maximus sword, from the opening scene. If you remember, at one point, Maximus is in the cavalry charge and he swings at a guy with a sword and it takes guy's head off and then it lodges in the tree.

And he has a secondary sword, which they normally would, the cavalry officers would. And that's what he uses for the rest of the battle. And then after the battle's over, they show him retrieving his sword from the tree.

And then you sort of get a little more of a look as to what it looked like. And I really enjoyed Gladiator. It was back during the Bill Clinton days. So it was such a contrast to our current commander in chief at that time, as far as character was concerned.

And so I saw it a number of times in the theater. And so some friends of mine bought the movie prop. It is not sharp either, but the Claymore is sharp at the point. You could run somebody straight through with that baby just as well as any other Claymore.

So if the progressives ever attack the program while we're on the air, it'd be sort of hard to swing in here, but they only got one place to come in at. And with that Claymore, I'm going to take a few of them with me.

Well, yeah, I'm not going to talk about that on the air. I don't want anybody to know about the automatic machine guns. Oh, did I say that? Oh, no, man. The Claymore is, the real Claymore is boom. No, we don't have those.

They could swing it if they were doing keto. I'm not going to comment about that. I'm not going to go there. Okay. One thing before we start taking your phone calls, 877 -753 -3341, 877 -753 -3341. We'll go ahead and start taking your calls.

It's not going to take me that long to go through this. Last program, actually it was on Monday, remember? We talked a little bit about Jared C. Wilson's tweet. And I'm not sure why I didn't leave that up, but I will now need to find it again.

I think it should be that one, right? There it is. On the 16th, Jared C. Wilson, who is from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, some anonymous criticism bot has equated nonstop critique with Paul confronting Peter, which is weird and hilarious, given that Paul's concern was that racial justice was an entailment of the gospel.

So this is Galatians 2. So on the last program, we took the time to walk through Galatians 2 and to consider its background, consider its specific meaning in context, in the original language, and then looked at its application.

And its application is specifically in regards to how a person has peace with God. And the topic is the danger of a split in the church between a Jewish Christian church and a Gentile Christian church.

Peter was not orthopodeoing, he was not walking straight in accordance with the truth of the gospel, in that he was allowing the pressure from James and the Jewish church in Jerusalem to push him back in the old ways.

He had been having table fellowship with Gentiles. See, God had given him that vision from heaven. And yet, you can have a vision from heaven and still have to think through what it is that that means and the application that that has.

And tradition, folks, I've certainly learned that tradition is so vitally important for us to examine. If we do not examine our traditions, we will be controlled by our traditions. They are powerful things, they provide the texture of our thinking, and the reason to do serious exegetical study is to keep your traditions constantly in the light, or your traditions will end up ruling you.

And so, with Peter, divine revelation, he's still compromising. He's still compromising. And so, anyway, Paul stands up, says, don't do this, here's where you're wrong, you've been living as a Gentile, we're all justified by faith, whether we're Jew or Gentile.

And we didn't get to this, but I just want to point out how central this is to Paul's thinking. You know, he says in verse 16, you know, nevertheless, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, who are not Gentile sinners, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ, not by the works of the law, since by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.

He talks about having died to the law, lived to God, and then, of course, we have one of our favorite verses, I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. Life which I live unto flesh, I live by the faith and Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.

But then you have verse 21, I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died dorean. Now, that particular term could mean simply freely as a gift, but in this context, it would be vainly, without result, needlessly, needlessly.

So, this has to do with whether the death of Christ will be meaningful or not. You want evidence of something being a gospel issue? That's gospel issue, as to whether the cross is going to be emptied of its power or whether it's not.

That's what's at stake here. And the issue with the Judaizers was circumcision. It was not race. It was not race. Had nothing to do with skin color, had nothing to do with ethnicities, it had to do with the boundary markers of the covenant, it had to do with circumcision.

Now, if you want to go and see, because of what we see here, then we see the importance of not allowing anything to divide the Church, and therefore, we should not allow issues of ethnicity to divide the Church.

That would sound like what I've been saying and keep getting in trouble for saying. During the MLK thing, I was in Colossians 3 saying there is no Scythian, there is no Greek, there is no bond free. We spent a lot of time on that.

And then we've gone to Ephesians 4 and we've talked about what that says, and I get into a lot of trouble for that. But some people say, well, couldn't we make that application? Well, we could make an application in the sense that there is one Church and that we should stand against anything that would introduce distinctions into that Church.

Yes, definitely. And was it not central to the argument that I have made over the course of this year, which I have not heard anyone else making? I didn't get this from anybody. There is one justification, there is one righteousness that is imputed to any believer in Jesus Christ.

It does not matter what your ethnicity is. And that's how any one of us stands before God is that one righteousness of Jesus Christ. And so, the unity of the body is found in the cross itself and in the righteousness that is imputed to the believer in Jesus Christ.

No question about it. But unfortunately, in our day today and in the social justice movement, racial justice is not being defined biblically because that phrase never appears. There's God's justice, there's everything about justice, but racial justice has all sorts of imported meanings that the wild-eyed progressives, they're open about it.

Did you hear Brandon Robertson? You know, equality and, you know, everybody's, you know, it's communism. It's, you know, he was saying Jesus was an early communist type thing. So, it's economic equality.

Everybody has the same. You don't have rich and poor anymore. Everybody's muddling along in the middle, which historically means everybody's muddling along like in Venezuela with nothing. That's how that works.

But anyway, but this phrase, racial justice, when you ask for definitions of it, what you'll get is, well, I have a certain view of what's happening in the United States, not necessarily what's happening in the United Kingdom or in Canada or in South America or in, you know, I have yet to meet, I'm sure there are some, but I have yet to meet one of these racial justice warriors who has a clue as to what's going on in India.

One of the most populous nations on the earth is a tremendous amount of racial injustice and tension in India. They don't seem to care. It doesn't seem to matter. In fact, in comparison to India, what we have in the United States is nothing, nothing in comparison to that, nothing.

There are all sorts of places around the world where racial tension, ethnic tension, far beyond anything we have here, far beyond it. But if you listen to a lot of these folks, this is the worst place in the world.

I mean, people are getting gunned down every day. Well, people are getting gunned down every day in Chicago, but they don't want to talk about that part. That's a different thing. No, no, no, it doesn't fit the meme, doesn't fit the narrative.

Got to move on. I tweeted to one of the leaders of this movement and asked the question, how many, I asked him how many unarmed black men have been shot by, been killed by police in 2018? Because I didn't know.

And I figured if you're a leader, you know all about this. He didn't know. Had no idea. The narrative seems to be one every day or a dozen every day. And you only hear about the one. Looked it up. Twelve.

Now you don't, when it's, all that says is unarmed. That doesn't mean unarmed, non-aggressive, unarmed, not fighting. We don't know. But there are 12. I think there were 20 some odd whites. And then you compare that with the murder rate, black on black in Chicago, and it's one, one thousandth, something like that.

Tiny percentage, tiny percentage. Then you compare the 18 million black babies that have been boarded since Roe v. Wade, and my calculator doesn't go that far down in the percentage stuff. But you got to have the narrative.

Got to have the narrative. Got to have the narrative. Racial justice was an entailment of the gospel. That's what he said. Not that we could make an application. Okay, so you go, all right, we knew about that.

That was last time. Well, he made the statement, I think on, I think it was maybe on Monday, that he was going to write an article about it. And guess where it shows up but on the Woke Gospel Coalition.

I'm sorry, the Gospel Coalition website. Might as well call it the Woke Gospel Coalition website these days. And so somebody asked me to review it. So I read through it. I said, it's what I expected. What he does, he dials it back.

He walks it back. And instead of saying what the tweet said, what he says is defensible. And that is what you can make the application that because, you know, Paul's very concerned about the church dividing over these, this issue of justification, how a person is right, and the boundary markers of circumcision and stuff like that, you know, that means he has an emphasis upon the unity of the church, and therefore we should have an emphasis upon the unity of the church and shouldn't allow ethnicity to divide it.

And it's like, duh! That's what we've all been saying. But that's not what the tweet said. The tweet said Paul had that in mind, and Paul didn't have that in mind. He didn't. And no effort is made to say otherwise.

And so you walk it back, then you defend what you didn't say, successfully. And then, having successfully defended the new position, which is 20 yards behind the position that you had actually taken initially, which is now a bombed out crater, because it was indefensible.

This happens every day on the internet, believe me. Um, then you do have, um, the Jew-Gentile unity is a tension point with all the weight of Isaiah's prophetic word on Israel as a light to the nations and all the eschatological vision of Revelation 5 -9 at stake.

Again, when you hear folks quoting from Revelation chapter 5, realize that they are attempting to take a text that beautifully teaches the extensive nature of the work of Christ that the elect are drawn from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation, and take the emphasis off of the universality of the work of Christ and shift it down onto ethnicities and skin colors.

As if, well, see, they're going to continue into heaven, see? And so this is, that, that means we're going to have all this stuff going on in heaven. And I just go, you really think that's what John was emphasizing?

Sorry, but when I look at Revelation 4 or 5, the emphasis is not on all the tribes, tongues, peoples, and nations. It's not on the 24 elders. It's not on living creatures. It's on the throng that are worshiping.

It's not on the angels and the cherubim and the seraphim. It's on he who sits on the throne and the lamb and everything else is secondary. My goodness, how can that be missed? I don't get it. I don't understand.

It just seems like a duh thing at that point. But then what he wants to do is to say, well, I'm not the only one who came up with this. John Piper preached an entire sermon on racial harmony from Galatians 2, 11 through 16.

Well, yeah, Piper's been tooting the racial reconciliation horn for a very, very long time and has been responded to for that, but that doesn't change the exegesis of Galatians 2. That just means that he's not the only one who's been willing to do this.

Jared gets really snarky in this part, but anyway, he says, but at least I'm in good company. Southern Seminary's Jarvis Williams cited Galatians 2, 11 following on the issue of race in the church for nine marks.

Nothing surprising about that either. Jarvis Williams is a strong advocate of the social justice movement and has in the past utilized very strong terms of critical race theory. Seemingly, now that he has tenure at Southern, doesn't use that terminology as much.

I don't know. I have recently gotten through his book, haven't had time to write any of my thoughts on it, but at least I took the time to read it. And then you have New Orleans Baptist Seminary's De 'Aaron Washington made the direct connection as well, as well as Timothy Cho.

And so what this means is social justice warriors will misuse Galatians 2 like I did. Okay, that's nice. That's not a response to the reality of what the text is actually about. And what is concerning here is that this is such an Americanized thing.

If you try to transfer this to where there are other kinds of racial tensions, not only might it be poison in those places, depending upon what the source of those ethnic controversies are, but it misses the reality that this text addresses to us.

It assigns to us the very solution to any racial and ethnic problem, which was the fact that there is no ethnicity at the Lord's table. If you want to call that colorblind, call it colorblind. Has nothing to do with not recognizing the good things in a person's history.

I've said that a thousand times before. And if you keep calling colorblind, saying that, then you're just lying and you just don't want to make any progress. That's just all there is to it. But the reality is at the table of the Lord, there is no ethnicity.

Period. That's the solution to all of that warfare going on in the world. And the irony is the very people who want to be talking about how to have peace are the ones sacrificing what the real solution is.

There's the problem. 877 -753 -3341. I'll be honest, one of these, I'm just sitting here going, I don't know that I'm gonna have anything meaningful to say to the second line at all. I don't know how it's relevant to apologetics, but we'll do our best.

Job 2:9 and the Hebrew Text of “Bless” or “Curse”

All right, let's talk to Mark in Houston.

Hi, Mark. Hey, Dr. White, I appreciate you taking my call. Was mine the one that's a problem.

Question? No, no, no, it isn't. Go ahead. I mean, well, I've learned a ton listening to you before.

I never heard of that kind of stuff. And I appreciate you going in and opening up the original text and your insight, your openness, giving us really the whole counsel behind the counsel. And I had some, I had kind of a thing that happened in Sunday school the other day, was where we were going through Job and Job 2 -9, where Job's wife tells him, you know, why don't you go ahead and just curse God and die?

And the Sunday school teacher said, you know, then the original Hebrew actually means bless. Of course, I had never heard that, and most people didn't. And I just wondered if that's, he gave an answer, and I was wondering if you'd tell me what your perspective is on that, because I don't think, from what he told me, it was a technical or a textual variant, as much as more of a, call it the guy that writes.

Them down, I can't even think of it. A scribal issue or a translational issue? Yeah, the scribe.

Didn't want to write curse, he wanted to say, well, bless instead. And I don't know if that's.

True or not. I am looking, he's correct, the Hebrew is barach. I am, I'm looking at, just scanning through the Septuagint, which unfortunately, there it is. Hmm, this is very strange. I don't, it looks like there is a massively major difference in the Greek Septuagint.

So, and I don't have time to figure out where in the, I mean, this thing's huge. I mean, verse 9 in the Hebrew is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, is nine words long. Verse 9 in the Septuagint is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 13 lines.

So, the Septuagint version of that particular verse is huge, probably 40, 50 words in that one section. That would indicate that there is clearly a, a, some sort of interruption in the, in the transmission of the text at that particular point in time.

Now, the problem is that barach, barakha specifically, can mean either curse or bless, depending on what form it's in and what context it's in. So, yeah, so, so the, the ESV renders it as curse, probably because it's a PL imperative.

I haven't looked up the, the route to be able to go through its various uses, but I, it's, it's one of two things. Either it is interpretational in light of the fact that it's, that it's barach elohim wamuth, so something God and I.

I suppose you could come up with either bless or curse, but blessing normally wouldn't result in your death. So I would assume that that is why it's rendered in that way. Excuse me, then the rest of it would be to look at Job 2 .9 and figure out what on earth, because I'm sitting here, I'm sitting here seeing sons and daughters, and I mean, it just goes off into all sorts of wild stuff that I've never seen before.

So that'd be fascinating to find out what in the world happened at, at, at Job 2 .9. But probably the reason for most translations doing it that way is not because they're looking at the Septuagint at all, but it's because of the, the range of possibilities for blessing and cursing in light of its, its use there.

Well, I tell you who nailed.

It was a little grandmother in the class who sounded just like my grandmother, who probably like yours, who never said a negative word about anybody. But when she could say, bless that so-and-so, you knew that bless meant something other than bless, if you know what I'm.

Saying. Bless you in your ministry. Yeah, we have, we have that particular phrase from, Rich and I have that one, so bless you in your ministry. Right. Yeah. And I think she pretty.

Much hit it, you know, we're looking at context and everything, but I didn't know if that had.

Anything to do with it. I'm not gonna, I ain't arguing with granny. No, no. I thought how cool.

Is it that, you know, even though you can look down and dig into the, the word, whatever, if that really is the case, that, let's say that the guy that wrote, the scribe that wrote it knew what he meant to say, and everybody knew what he meant to say without him actually writing.

The word. You know what I mean? Well, you know, I don't see, just looking here, I don't see, um, but I'm not looking at the, uh, at the BHS, um, um, and I don't see my, I need to, I need to get my paper.

Oh, I actually do have one here. Now I'm, now I'm, unfortunately I have to get out the, um, yeah, I got, I got to get out the, uh, the, the, the grandpa glasses, uh, to be able to, uh, uh, try to find this real quick.

Uh, and that's, it's, um, where'd it go? Cause it's not in the same canonical order, uh, as you have in, uh, in, uh, that's not a, where'd you go? Where'd you go? Well, I was going to try to look at the, uh, at the textual, uh, sources to try to see if there is anything listed there, because what I have up on my screen is just the text.

Um, but maybe I'll, when I get a chance to look at that, I'll, I'll maybe make a comment about that, but it's, um, it is interesting. I had not seen that and, uh, but I'm not sure what, um, the teacher was saying about the scribe not wanting.