Which Biblical scriptures are we reading incorrectly?

Okay. Hello. Hello, James. How are you? Good, Cassian. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I'm really excited to talk about our topic today about translations.

How are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm excited about this as well. I've been thinking about the original languages and translation and even interpretation issues for quite some time.

Okay. Yeah. And you're a professor. I'd love to just let you introduce yourself and the work that you're doing currently in Ohio.

Yes. So, I'm a professor of biblical languages. I teach courses at several institutions right now.

I'm under contract for an institution called Israel Institute of Biblical Studies.

And for them, I teach Hebrew and Greek. I'm also on contract to teach

Greek at a school called God's Bible School and College. And I'm teaching master's level courses there.

My background is in both Hebrew and Greek. And along with that, the different languages that help us understand something about rare words in Greek and Hebrew.

Wow. Would you say that you're fluent in Greek and Hebrew then? We define fluency of ancient languages a little differently than how modern languages get defined as fluent.

For example, in a modern language, you're fluent if you can carry on a conversation and read the most recent novels produced in that language.

Not technical books, but a regular reading level. For biblical languages, fluency is defined as being able to read the text and interpret their meaning.

Being able to speak and hear someone else speak in the ancient language is not really tested for the most part.

There are a few institutions that work on something called immersion in biblical languages that attempt this.

But generally, fluency is described as being able to read and interpret, and I do that.

Got it. Got it. So I shouldn't call you when I need to order food in Greece, but definitely to interpret the original text of the

Bible. I can get by, but I wouldn't consider myself fluent in modern Greek at all.

I can read some. I can speak some. But it's slow. Okay. Got it.

And do you have any areas of specific interest when it comes to translations of the Bible? Like any personal favorites when it comes to books of the

Bible or just things that you think are the most profound things to translate and just more thorough meaning when you do translate it?

I get excited sometimes. I wouldn't say there's a particular place in the Bible that I like to translate from.

I like to translate any of it that I happen to be reading for whatever reason. If I feel like reading something in the

Bible, I might look at it in English first. I might not. I might go straight to the Greek or Hebrew first and read it there.

And then if something sparks my interest, then I'll do research in that area. Got it. Translating, the things that I notice when

I'm reading that sparks my interest is when I see something

I know isn't the typical, most common way to express an idea.

And I've been reading enough for enough years that I can spot these things.

When you see something that's unusual, that's when you jump and see, how did the

English translations handle that? And then you see them all over the place. And then you know why.

It was a place that was a little more challenging to translate. But it also sometimes is a center of a theological debate.

And those are my favorites. Got it. Got it. So there's sometimes translations where what it may be, if it's in Greek, it means something completely different.

But if it's in Hebrew, it means something else. Well, the ones I'm thinking of are the ones that are in Greek, but in our

English versions, they mean a variety of different things instead of the same thing.

One verse that comes to mind is Romans 5 .12. When we read how our

English Bibles handle that one, they're all over the place. Especially if you take a look at older and newer

Bibles, if you look at the latest five translations off the shelf, they're almost saying the same thing.

But if you look at the history of the English Bible, go back 400 years and work your way forward through a lot of translations, you can see that the translators were making a lot of different choices there.

And the key word, I would say, in Romans 5 .12 is the one just before all sinned at the end of the line.

I can read that first, if you like. Please. I'll read it out of the

ESV. That's a fairly recent translation. Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because, and that's the key word

I want you to think about, because all sinned. It almost reads like there's a cause and effect going on here in this verse.

And if you look at your latest three English translations, they all say that. In fact, there's probably half of all

English translations that say because there. If you look at some older translations, in so much that all sinned, in whom all sinned, in who all sinned, for that all sinned, and that's probably the clumsiest one.

But you know that the translators are wrestling with something if they put a clumsy construction in there that doesn't sound very smooth in English.

They don't want to go to cause. They don't want to go to in whom, but they can't decide what to do.

And that was the King James that went with for that all have sinned, which is a really odd construction, even in Shakespeare's day, which was the time that was translated.

What the issue is, is because is normally written a completely different way in Greek.

It's not written the way the Greek is here. We have a little preposition there that's pronounced

F, but it's an adaptation of epi. And epi normally means on or upon.

So neither one of those translations sounded like on or upon. Because doesn't sound like on or upon, and neither does in whom.

And so it's one of those things that once you see the phrase that's there in Greek, it's like, well,

I can see why the translators are going different ways, but none of them landed on the most natural reading of that preposition.

The most natural reading for that preposition is to say on the basis of which. In other words, there's just a pattern here.

Human beings sin on the same pattern that Adam sinned. It's not that Adam's sin caused people to sin, and it's not that some other force that Adam brings in caused people to sin.

People just simply sin on the same pattern that Adam did. I'm so glad you spelled that out, because I was trying to remember all of the translations and find the connection.

But yeah, I mean, I definitely grew up thinking, you know, because Adam and Eve sinned, that's why we sin.

They kind of set the precedent. They set the standard. But that is way more humanizing for the

Bible to say, listen, they were human too. You're human too. It's what's going to happen.

You guys are very sinful creatures. And I think if we just read that text naturally and let the words that are there do the speaking rather than theological concerns, which is where I think our translators have gone.

They've reached out to theological concerns about original sin. And these original sin debates get very, very particular at times on exactly how did it go from Adam to us.

And a lot of times this verse is the key text, and we're looking at this epipreposition that is actually simple to translate, but none of our

English translations translate it the simple way. On the basis of which we all sin.

It's actually natural read, and it actually flows naturally here with what Paul's doing in Romans 5.

What do you mean by theological concerns? Are you saying that when people translated the Bible, they wanted to,

I want to say, stick to an agenda? Or is that what you're trying to allude to here? People just didn't want to make any presumptions beyond what they're...

I don't know. I don't want to say anything that might be assuming, but what do you mean by concerns?

The English translation doesn't happen in a vacuum, right? It happens in the middle of the

Protestant Reformation. During phases of it, different English translations that come out are in different phases of the

Protestant Reformation. There's these debates that are going on that are forming the way that they're reading the

Greek text. Now, some of these debates go all the way back to Augustine. Augustine was a church father, lived in and around the year 400, a famous writer, famous theologian, but he also had some things to say about Romans 5 .12

that I think have been impacting the later generation's understanding of that phrase.

He was a bishop that lived in what we think of as Carthage. It was the

Carthaginian empire that was now part of the Roman empire. That's where he was from.

I'm sorry, I don't know what that is. Sure, no worries. Modern day Tunisia, a

North African shoreline. It's the closest part of Africa to Sicily. Oh, okay.

So that was a time period or that was more location or that was like a ruling era? Carthage is a place.

It was the place that Tunisia used to be called. And then inside that, the period of the 400, that was the time

Augustine lived. That's about the same period that the New Testament canonization was taking place.

So he is in the debates on that as it's forming. So he's one of the guys that's there then when that happens.

Right. I mean, it makes perfectly good sense why, you know, at the time period at which the

Bible was translated, the current group thought of that time period would be definitely inserted within those translations and just the directions that it takes.

Can we go back to the written, you know, the God -breathed word, and then to the first writing of the

Bible on, you know, paper or a tablet, you know, carved into stone. And then from there, the translation, just historically speaking, how did that process go?

You know, who was designated to begin writing it and then who was decided to begin translating it? Because that's a huge role that can't just be any

Joe Schmo. Right. So the first person that we know of that's actually writing scripture down is

Moses. And he lived, oh, 3 ,500 years ago.

Okay. And he was writing on papyrus or like tablet or he had like a slave taking notes.

Like, how did that probably go? We don't know. We do know that some things got wrote on stone.

So scratched into stones, like the Ten Commandments, for example. But other things were written down that we weren't told exactly how they're written down.

But we can surmise that desert antelope hide was probably what they wrote on.

And they probably used an ink. For most writing. Yeah. That was at least traditionally what we know happens later.

But in actually Moses' day, we're a little fuzzy on the details of when he wrote.

Okay. The only thing we know is that he wrote five books and they came down through history as five individual scrolls and sometimes as one combined scroll that we call the

Torah scroll. Got it. So that is the way the first writing took place.

Now, when he writes, though, only four of the five books happen in his lifetime.

The first book is way before his time period. So he's going back to recount a lot of things that took place before he was alive, before the kingdom that he's a part of was a kingdom.

And so it has always raised conjectures as to where did he get his footnotes from?

Because we don't know. We're not told. There's never a statement that, oh, by the way,

Moses got it from here. And another assumption that we sometimes make is that, oh, a voice out of heaven just said the words and he wrote them down.

But it never says that either. There are places in the Bible where it says God spoke and the prophet wrote.

But we don't get that for Genesis when Moses writes. And one of the things

I always try to emphasize when I was teaching intro to Bible or intro to scripture, that God got his message down to mankind a wide range of ways.

It wasn't just one standard way. Somebody heard a voice saying, write this down.

They wrote it down. Somebody else had a dream, woke up and said, well, that was divine.

I better write that down. Somebody else lived a chunk of life and then they reflected on it and said, wait a minute.

God's hand was at work in my life. I better write this down. Yeah. Do you think like just thinking about the gospels, do you think like John and all of them were hanging out with Jesus and then also scribbling down notes at the same time?

Or do you think they lived their full life and then looked back and started writing things down? That's a good question.

And when we get to the four gospels, we have Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Matthew was the tax collector that was one of Jesus's disciples. He was located around Tyre, Sidon area.

It's a north of, it's basically on the coast of Lebanon. It was part of the old

Phoenician. It was the old Phoenician capital. It was no longer an empire, but that was their capital city.

That's where he was found. A lot of the other disciples of Jesus were found in the fishing industry on Lake Gennesaret.

That was their place where they did fishing. Peter, James, John, Andrew, Nathaniel and several others.

We don't know the precise location of all of his disciples, but Mark is kind of like not one of them.

So who is he and why did he write? Well, in the church fathers, we find a tradition that it was

Peter's voice, but Mark was writing it down for Peter. And it was written before Peter dies.

So it makes sense that it's Peter's words, but Mark's penmanship. Why do you think

Mark wrote about Peter and not himself? Well, he wrote the gospel that Peter wanted written.

That's so Mark probably wasn't in contact with Jesus like personally, but he wanted to write

Peter's gospel for Peter. And so we probably should be calling it the gospel of Peter instead of Mark, but it is

Mark's handiwork. He wrote it. So we want to give credit to the author of the words that are actually on the page.

But it's probably a good thing that Mark wrote it. Honestly, Peter was not a good grammar guy.

He had a lot of problems. If you ever look at 1 Peter and 2

Peter in Greek, you'll see the difference in the style and the vocabulary, the grammar, and you'll realize that you're thankful that there was a scribe writing one of them.

Are you saying 1 Peter was written by Peter and 2 Peter was written by somebody else? It's the other way around,

I think. Yeah. 2 Peter's the rough one to read. Got it. So it's probably a good thing that Mark wrote for him and probably why he wanted somebody like Mark to write it for him.

He probably wasn't a strong person with Greek. Where he was located, it wasn't necessary to know

Greek. So he was in an area that spoke Aramaic, where some of Jesus's disciples were in an area that spoke

Greek, like Matthew. Luke, on the other hand, would have not met

Jesus, probably. But in his day, he's concerned that there's a bunch of different accounts going out about Jesus that's causing confusion.

So he's a journalist. He wants to get the record right and set into detail the right chronology of events so that it can be understood as a comprehensive whole.

Instead of this story and this story butting heads and we don't know how to put them together or one story conflicts with another because we think they're at the same time, but really they're a year apart and that kind of thing.

So he tried to create a comprehensive understanding. And probably his biggest contribution was personally interviewing

Mary. He got the scoop on the before -Jesus -was -born stories and the after -Jesus -died stories from Mary.

What was it like for her? Wouldn't have Jesus's disciples also gotten the scoop on that?

Like, why did Luke get that? I think they could have. They just don't.

In their Gospels, they don't present Mary's perspective the way Luke does. And so Luke, as a journalist, he wanted to go...

If you think about how modern journalism is done, it's similar. He wanted to go to the source. Jesus has gone to heaven now, so let me find the closest person to Jesus.

Mary. She's still alive. Let's talk to Mary. And he gets some scoop on stuff that probably the other disciples know, but it wasn't what they witnessed.

So they didn't write it down. Luke isn't trying to write what he witnessed. He's trying to write an orderly account of what several witnesses have seen.

A comprehensive multi -witness account. Oh my gosh, that is such good insight.

I had no idea. So that's the only book written that way? Yeah. Luke's Gospel is the only one in the

New Testament written that way. Very interesting. Other philosophers would have written similar things about the lives of other famous people.

So in Greco -Roman literature, the life of so -and -so kind of stories, they would do similar things.

They would try to get to a close source, try to provide detail that wasn't available in other places, because they want their version of the biography to be accepted and useful, probably more so than acceptance.

I have a quick question. Yeah, go ahead. I'll ask it after Luke. It's going to take us on a different path.

So you just keep going about Luke. I'm sorry. Oh, no worries. No worries. When I think of Luke, I think of somebody who was a physician in his day.

So whatever version of medical school the first century would have had, he would have been to it.

And the style of his Greek writing in Luke reminds me of classical

Greek more than other New Testament documents. I tend to think he was trained in Athens.

That was the number one medical school of the ancient world, especially the Greco -Roman world.

And it was also the place that still used and wrote materials in a classical feel, using the old

Attic rules of grammar rather than the Koine period. And Luke does this in places.

Your other writers don't do that as much as Luke. And Paul does it a little bit. John, Mark, Matthew, no, not a chance.

They're using standard Koine Greek. And so when we think of Luke, he was a trained expert in something in his world, a highly trained expert who decided to create a more orderly account.

What was disordered? When we look at the other Gospels, we don't necessarily find them disordered.

But the order of events is different in Matthew, for example, than Luke. And it's caused a lot of commentators to wonder about this.

But if we notice how Matthew groups the stories, he's grouping the stories of Jesus into five topics.

He never says they're chronological. Well, so it's always been, we've always read it with the assumption that chapter six happens after chapter five, and that's the

Sermon on the Mount. So they probably do, but like chapter eight happens after seven or chapter 13 happens after six.

And we can't make that assumption. Matthew tends to have a five -fold pattern where he groups all of his thoughts about Jesus's ministry.

And those are identical. They match up very neatly with the five books of Moses. We mentioned Moses earlier.

Matthew is trying to pattern Jesus as a new Moses. And so these five sections merge.

And if we're not paying attention to those patterns, then we misread sometimes the flow in Matthew.

And we say wrong things about why Matthew's different than Luke. They're not different because one of them had the facts and the other one has all its facts mixed up.

They're different because Matthew groups the stories of Jesus according to five themes, and Luke puts them in chronological order.

This is insane. It's so many things that are going on right now because there is, you know, the people that experienced

Jesus in real life writing down their experience or covering his story. And then there is the people that translated it according to kind of their socio -political time period, you know, the way that they translated it for St.

Augustine versus if they translated it today in President Biden's world, you know, it's going to be a completely different path,

I want to say. And then there is just the multiple translations and the way that it's getting interpreted in different religions and different types of Christianity, not religions, but Protestant versus, you know, non -denominational or Catholic.

So all of these factors are so interesting because they all come down to, you know, how do you experience Christ? The question that I had earlier, that was just my own comment.

The question that I had earlier was, do you, the scrolls found in the cave?

Oh, yes. Where does that come into play here? Yes, yes. So the

Dead Sea Scrolls found in the Qumran area, pretty near where Jesus was baptized in the

Jordan River, pretty near where the Israelites crossed over from the wilderness into the

Canaan land, the big crossing over under Joshua. So both of those events take place at the same spot.

And I don't think it's accidental that Jesus' baptism is in that same spot. A lot of times, this is something

I'll probably say more than once, a lot of times our New Testament experts have only been reading

New Testament and they haven't looked at the Old Testament to see how they're connected.

Hmm. And so when Jesus is doing things in the New Testament, they often have something that they're parallel to in the

Hebrew Bible. And these are the things that I like to bring out with the

Jewishness of the New Testament and the things that your typical Western mindset on the

New Testament overlooks or misses. Yeah, let's jump into it. So thinking about the

Dead Sea Scrolls, they were a big find. A shepherd boy throws a rock in a cave and hears something shatter, decides to see what it is, comes across and finds the first scroll that would later become called the

Dead Sea Scrolls. There was more than one cave there. Once people realized that there's more of these things in the caves and they didn't want these things to just end up in a marketplace somewhere being sold as a trinket.

They wanted them to be preserved and studied and not dissected, cut into pieces and sold as trinkets for your jewelry or something.

And so scholars went and tried to recover these things, preserve them to the best they knew how.

The earliest people there didn't use the best methods. For example, one manuscript

I'm aware of was held together with scotch tape. They put scotch tape on it to hold the pieces together, and that actually ruined later the ink that was under the scotch tape.

But it was a growing field. How to preserve ancient texts that are fragile grew from the 1950s to what we now see.

When I went over to the Manchester Library Scriptorium, things are under vacuum sealed glass and you've got to wear white gloves.

You can't use certain kinds of light around the manuscripts, and that would be standard for any place that's storing old manuscripts.

I think in the Smithsonian, we also have some old manuscripts as well that are preserved there.

I think University of Michigan also has some. There's a lot in Jerusalem. There's a lot in Oxford and Cambridge, and there's various places that have old manuscripts.

But these Dead Sea Scrolls are interesting because we found some things in Hebrew, some things in Greek, some things in Aramaic, and it gave us a picture of what's been happening to the text in different points of time.

For example, when we translate today the Hebrew Bible into English, for example, we use something called, well, most translation committees are going to use the

Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and that's produced in Tübingen, Germany.

It's the Bible in Hebrew based on what we call the Masoretic Text.

The oldest, it's just a name for the Masoretic. It's the name for the Hebrew scrolls that are actually being used.

For a typical thing, a way to say it is this is what the

Jewish communities received in their Jewish communities as they were scattered around the world.

This is what came to them in their hands. We might call it a received text because that's what it is.

The oldest manuscripts we can find that are definitely what we would call proto -Masoretic

Text or proto -those received texts that are in these communities are not extremely old.

A thousand, A .D. 1000 or A .D. 900 is the oldest ones, and these are way after the time of the

New Testament. Well, and that's a little concerning because it's like, how do we know that for the previous thousand years, the text was always the same?

That was an issue. No, that's a great point. A lot of people conjectured and debated a few things about the text.

We might have time on this call. I don't know, but there's one that I discovered that I wouldn't mind sharing in the text of Samuel.

Absolutely. Yeah, but the search was to find older, if possible, older Hebrew manuscripts.

We had Greek ones of the Old Testament that were older. So, for example, talking about translation, about a hundred, two hundred years before Christ, the scribes, the

Jewish scribes in Alexandria, Egypt, were commissioned by the

Ptolemy king, one of the four breakaway Greek empires when the

Alexander the Great's empire went four ways. So under that king, he commissioned the

Jewish scribes to translate the Jewish Hebrew Bible into Greek. This was about 200 years or maybe a little more before Jesus' birth.

And then this fresh translation, and for the lack of a better term, we'll call it the

Septuagint. That's the term we call it today. They probably did not call it that back in their day. But the

Septuagint. What is a Septuagint? A Septuagint is, it means the number 70 in Greek.

It's just like calling it the 70 in English, if we want to do it. So this is like the 70th version, or why did they say 70 of all the numbers?

So the tradition has it that when the Torah scroll, that's

Moses' first five books, was being translated, the committee of translators was 70.

Seventy people. Seventy people worked on it. And how were those 70 chosen?

They were already Jewish Torah scribes. That was their expertise. They were fluent in Greek, fluent in Hebrew, and they would be the kind of person that if you saw them in the marketplace and you had plenty of time and you paid them enough money, they could produce for you a manuscript of the

Torah from memory. Oh my gosh. This was during Egyptian times under King Ptolemy.

Yes, in the Egyptian sphere of the world and under the Ptolemies, the

Greek Ptolemies. Before Jesus was born. Yeah, yeah. A couple hundred years before.

We don't have an exact date. We have some conjectures about that date that are all landing somewhere around 200, 250, something like that.

And the other thing is, is they didn't stop there. They translated the Torah and then they kept going and translated the rest of the

Hebrew Bible. And we don't know how many people worked on the rest, but the whole thing is still called the

Septuagint because the 70 translated the Torah. That's why the name. Got it.

When going back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, they found multiple scripts in multiple languages.

What does that suggest? That suggests that the community was already doing translating work, making sure they could translate the

Hebrew text into Greek and into Aramaic for people that didn't speak Hebrew. So you're saying the script, the scrolls were all the same text, just different translations, or are you saying that, because I guess

I assumed that one scroll was written by Peter and another was written by Moses and we just happened to stumble upon the original text.

But that doesn't sound like that's correct. These would be all scrolls that were copied from other texts that this community kept.

So think about a manuscript collector culture who collects manuscripts from all over and they want to make sure they have a copy in their scriptorium of every manuscript that's out there.

And then they may make copies for people who need it too. But they were involved in some translation work, some what

I would call that collector mode, just trying to preserve scripts.

Okay, so we found somebody's stash, essentially. Yeah, we found a community's or maybe more than one community's stash.

There's also some thought that when the Jewish -Roman War happens in 66 to 73, that a lot of people would have been fleeing the destruction of that period.

They may have also contributed scrolls into these collections. But we don't know for a fact on any one scroll if that was the case.

But it's at least a possible thing. Yeah, you'd never think if you were fleeing war, the first thing you would do is to preserve some paper.

You know what I mean? Like that just shows the value of that at that time, that you're basically seeking asylum and your first thought is,

I need to preserve not some of my artifacts or my family heritage, but the written word of God that is so important to me right now.

And that's true. And one of the big finds in the Dead Sea Scrolls was something we call the

Great Scroll of Isaiah. And it flows from what we can read on it.

There's a couple places where it's got some damage, but it's still fairly complete.

I would say it's the most complete scroll from that time period. And it matches the

Masoretic text of the 900s. So now we see a document that's 1 ,100 years older than what we thought was our oldest one that's agreeing with it in most respects.

Yeah, that was the big find. Now for Isaiah, that's been great. Yeah, the same story can't be said of all books.

But for Isaiah, that's great. For Torah, that's great. We found Torah copies that agree with the

Masoretic text. For some books, we find three different traditions of Hebrew text.

They're not the same text on the Hebrew. I'm not talking about Aramaic translations or Greek translations.

I'm talking about the actual Hebrew manuscript. And so the scholars that have looked at the manuscripts that are different have grouped them and thought about three basic text families for them.

Babylon, for example, is the place of the Judah kingdom's exile, and then they return later.

Some of these are called Babylonian texts because they went to Babylon and back. And the

Babylonian text tradition matches what we think of as the Proto -Masoretic text, the one that is received into the

Jewish communities of the diaspora. But there's two other text families that are not on that track.

They're not from the Babylonian exile and back. Because you have to remember, when a nation goes through hardship and people are carried off and exiles happen, not everybody travels along the same path.

Some people scatter ahead of the invasion. Other people are still around after the invasion's over and wondering what to do.

They just go move somewhere comfortable. So you had a bunch that are carried into Babylon that later return and rebelled.

You also have some that just scattered north to wherever they could find a place. And then you had some that went down to Egypt.

I don't think it's an accident that the Septuagint was translated in Egypt. The communities of Jews that would have went into Egypt would have been the forerunners of the ones who later do the translation into Greek.

And in some of these Hebrew texts, we call them the Alexandrian family of Hebrew texts because those have a bunch of similarity.

And it's amazing, in places where the Greek Septuagint reads a little bit differently than our standard

Hebrew Bible does, it matches the Alexandrian Hebrew texts rather than the

Babylonian ones. And this is kind of an eye -opener kind of thing in the last 40, 50 years.

It's like, oh, there's more than one Hebrew text tradition. And the Greek Septuagint Bible, in books outside of Torah and Isaiah, used a different text tradition than what is now in the

Masoretic Bible. Really interesting. That all translators use. Like, if you're translating the newest

English Bible, you're going to translate from the Masoretic text on the Hebrew text. But the

Septuagint, in certain books, isn't coming from that text tradition. It's coming from an

Alexandrian Hebrew text tradition that we don't always have a full picture of. We just have some scraps, some books here and there.

So, for example, one of the test cases is Samuel. Samuel is a book that its

Hebrew text tradition, the Babylonian version of the text, is notoriously full of problems.

And I don't mean theological problems. I mean, the rabbis have all been saying over the years that something happened to that scroll.

When it went into Babylon and came out, there was damage on it. And the reason they're saying that is because there are so many confusing things for the copyist later to copy it, that they think it's this, and then the next copier thinks it's that, and then you end up with two things that are different.

And that was always confusing the rabbis. So Samuel's got some issues like that.

So I want to read two verses, one in Samuel and one in Chronicles.

And this was listed for years on skeptics, Bible skeptics websites, and before that in books, hard questions that biblical scholars can't answer kind of books, you know, those kind of things.

Kind of like the Reddit for scholars reading the Bible? Kind of the Reddit for anyone wanting to say, oh,

I got you with this one, and you can't figure this one out. This will stump you. That sort of thing.

I just want to make one note before you jump into that verse, because I want to hear it. But it made a lot of sense to me when you just said, when people fled war, they're not going on the same bus, you know, they're not being shuttled out together.

Some people left early, some people left last. And for them to end up in different places while still recounting the same event just a little bit differently makes complete sense, you know, if you were to be in those shoes.

But I don't think it excuses the validity and the occurrence of the event.

I think a lot of people take, I think, you know, just in the conversations I've had, people say, you know, one of their biggest things is like, look, there's contradictions.

There's been so many translations. How can you trust the Bible? I feel like we hear that pretty often in the biblical debates.

But at the end of the day, it's not a malicious intent to not be aligned. It's not somebody reading the

Bible or translating the Bible and intentionally making up something to make it different than what actually happened.

It's just, in reality, the story is told by people who experience the same event differently.

Yes, especially when you've got multiple eyewitnesses on the same event. They're going to see it different.

In basic psychology, we learn that there are 16 personality traits, or there's four types, if you want to think of types.

But we've all been exposed to a little bit different version of it in intro to psychology, or even in high school.

I think it's a common thing now to take psychology in high school. But everybody's different.

And no two people looking at the same thing are impacted by the same details. So if Mark writes a detail that John leaves out,

John writes a detail that Mark leaves out, it's not because they're bad observers. It's because they're different people.

And so I think that's an important point to say.

Yes. Now let's jump into the Word, because I have so many more verses I want to run through with you. Yeah.

So I'm going to read 2 Samuel 21 -19, and follow it up with 1 Chronicles 20 verse 5.

So 2 Samuel 21 -19, and there was... I'm going to read it from the New American Standard, just because that's the one that's on my screen.

And there was a war with the Philistines again at Gob, and Elhanan, the son of Jaer Oregim, the

Bethlehemite, killed Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver's beam.

So when you read this in Samuel, immediately you're scratching your head. Because didn't

David kill him four chapters earlier? David and Goliath. David and Goliath.

Now we got Elhanan killing Goliath. Now, this is sort of the wow moment.

When we go to Chronicles, it's telling the same story. Okay, that's the first thing we have to realize.

Chronicles 20 is telling the same story as the 2 Samuel 21 was doing.

And there was again a war with the Philistines, and Elhanan, the son of Jaer, and that particular edition left off the place where Jaer was from, but struck down Lachmi, the brother of Goliath, the

Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver's beam. All of the same details, but we got a different identity for the one who died.

It's not Goliath, it's Goliath's brother. And it's clear that Goliath is a name in 1

Chronicles, because Lachmi is his brother. If it's just a class noun, class nouns don't have brothers.

Names of people have brothers. So in biblical commentaries, this thing was tossed around as, oh no, one of these books is in error.

Which one? The second thing that was tossed around, maybe Goliath isn't a person's name.

Maybe it's a class of a giant or something. And there's a lot of Bible dictionaries and commentaries that pretty much made up a class noun out of Goliath, because they wanted that to be a class noun to prevent this problem.

Because there's more than one Goliath here, it's just a class noun after all. Well, when we start looking at these things, this is the book that, when we look in the

Dead Sea Scrolls, has three text traditions. And we have 4Q -SAM -A is one manuscript, 4Q -SAM -B, and 4Q -SAM -C.

They are not from the same Hebrew tradition. They are from different Hebrew traditions. And one of the things that we see is that the

Greek Bible seems to agree with one of them. What I mean by agree, it has an easy -to -see connection between the translation into Greek and what you're seeing in Hebrew.

And then the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible agrees more with a different one.

So it seems like the Greek Bible is not reading the same one that landed in the Masoretic tradition.

And so some of our Bibles actually did translate from the Greek instead of the

Hebrew for the Book of Samuel. And when they do, they don't say

Goliath. They say the brother of Goliath. I'm going to read that right now with the

NIV version. So they caught it. Well, what is the thing that they're seeing?

What is the piece that makes this puzzle fit together? When you draw in Hebrew, I don't know if I have a writing ability on the screen here, but I can maybe do finger signs in the air.

When you draw a Hebrew particle that stands in front of a direct object, it starts with an aleph and it has a tav after it.

Those two consonants are called aleph and tav. And all it does is it marks direct objects.

If you spell the word for brother, it uses the same two letters. Except it's not tav, sorry, it's chet on the end.

The only difference in shape between a chet and a tav is one tiny little foot at the bottom of one stroke of the letter.

Think about the difference between a capital I when it has just the straight line up and down and the capital

I when you have the caps on the top and the bottom. Mm -hmm. Now imagine on that capital

I, you don't have the top cap. You only have half of the bottom cap.

So only pointed one way, like a miniature L sort of shape, right? Now, one letter has that, the other doesn't.

It's a very, very small piece. And when we read the ancient rabbis on the text of Samuel, they mentioned two things.

That the end of the scroll of Samuel was actually burned. And worms had eaten holes in the parchment before it came back from Babylon and was then copied.

So if you've got a wormhole sitting exactly on that letter, you could easily mistake the letter for the other letter.

And that would explain why we have both renderings in different Hebrew manuscripts.

That's a very reasonable explanation. It's more reasonable than anything in print in the last hundred years.

Mm -hmm. But that makes sense. I mean, the wear and tear might cause you to mistake an

I for an L, you know, or a B for an R, you know, if some portion of that letter has been eaten by a worm.

Yes, it's just the little tail on the tip of the tov that would have to be eaten.

Yeah. Or all you need is a hole there and you might think, oh, it should be a tov, not a chet.

Right. And so one scribe thought it was a tov and the other one thought it was a chet.

And this produces a transmission error, not a text error that was in the original writing, not a theological error, but a misreading just from copying from one generation to the next.

And so how often do texts have to be recopied? If it's written on animal hide, probably about every hundred years.

You've got to recopy the thing or you can't read it. You can't use it. It's going to start crumbling up in your fingers.

If it's written on papyri, it's about 20. Whoa. It's a massive difference.

And in the Hebrew text traditions, they generally use desert antelope. So it was a good leather.

It was a good animal hide. You're only having to replace them about every three generations of people. For New Testament texts, on the other hand, most of the earlier texts were written on papyrus.

So they had to be recopied every 20 years just to maintain a copy at any given church or facility.

Oh my gosh. And it's one of the reasons we have so many New Testament manuscripts in the scrap bin of the ancient world that we can go find and put side by side with another one, because they had to keep copying this thing in order to have a usable copy very, very frequently.

This is so important. The New Testament has more copies of it than any other ancient piece of literature.

When we think about Homer's Iliad, for example, in Greek, there's only nine copies in manuscript form.

Everything else is recent stuff that's been repeated on printing press, right?

It's not a manuscript. Half of them are too late to matter in terms of us having any sense of what the original would have looked like.

So some of them are, you know, thousands of years after Homer's, more than a thousand years after his lifespan.

And then it's like, well, how can we be sure what his original text was? Well, you have many ancient attestations to his work.

And so in the details that are given in the attestations, they still match the copy we have. So it's a reliable copy, but there's only nine of them total.

In the New Testament, we've got thousands and thousands of them. And you have to say, Homer's Iliad was a pretty important book.

I was about to say, they clearly knew that the New Testament and these biblical works were, they needed to be preserved.

Yes. And I think part of the fact is they had to be preserved often because of the type of material they were first written on.

And secondly, every church wanted their own copy. So it's like, eventually you've got to copy it for those guys.

Think about people doing church plants today. What if your first task as a church planner was to get your own copy of the

Bible? That would have been a standard thing. At least get key books.

Like you want Psalms first and you want maybe the Gospels next. If I started a church back in the day and I needed obviously some reading material for my congregation, my task number one was to begin transcribing the books of the

Bible. So I had my own copy. I feel like that would take my whole life. It takes a while.

Yes. How long would that typically take?

I feel like that would take a hundred years. I'm not an expert at fast writing, but when

I was teaching high school, I gave myself a sort of a test. I wanted to know how long it takes to just write out the first chapter of Matthew, doing it the way an ancient scribe would do it and having to roll the thing as I worked on it.

It took incredibly longer than I thought it would just to get the first chapter of Matthew. I was into the project for weeks.

Of course, I'm doing it in between other tasks. I'm trying not to write scribbly letters. I'm trying to make sure they look neat.

I could probably do that faster now, but I would have more practice writing in Greek now than I did then.

So all of this takes time. For a scribe that was an expert, it would have taken a lot less time, but it still takes a lot of time.

Think about the last time that you had to write by hand, pencil on paper, a 10 -page research paper.

Nobody's done that in forever because we've all typed it or we've even spoken into machines and they put our words on the screen.

I actually did that in high school. I hand wrote a paper. It was probably the last time anybody would want a handwritten essay of that size because typewriters were out.

When I finished high school, actually, I started using Microsoft Word. By then, you have carpal tunnel from writing for so long.

Yeah, but my 10th grade composition paper was handwritten. It was not typed. It was handwritten neatly.

I had to rewrite it three times before I was happy with it, and I actually got graded on penmanship as well as the paper.

That was a lot to sit down and force yourself to write neatly. Imagine a scribe who's going to make sure that lots of people can read this, not just one teacher.

So it's got to be very well done. So if you've got an artist who's going to do the lettering for you, you're going to pay a little bit for the artist to do that work.

That would be task number one for church planning in the ancient world, getting your own script. Imagine almost completing a chapter and you have a little mess up with your ink.

You got to start all over. That'd be horrible. And I wonder sometimes, this is one of the things that we have to think about when we start examining piles of New Testament manuscripts.

We found them where? Some of them in the trash heaps of the ancient world.

How do we know that this one was one that was good and used in church? Or is this one somebody's mess up document that they threw away?

Oh, my gosh. It's one of the things you have to think about. If you've got obvious wear on the edges, the fingering marks on the edges, then they were used a while.

And the other thing that you also have to consider with manuscripts too is who copied it and for what purpose.

There were private collectors that wanted copies of things. Then there were churches that wanted copies of things.

There was also critics that wanted copies of things, just so they could refute the main points of it. And so are they all equally going to make sure that they have an excellent copy from it?

It really depends. When you find a copy and you don't know its provenance, that's who used it and where it's from.

You always have these questions. Is it a church document or not? So if it agrees to a high degree with other well -known manuscripts, like especially the ones that were bound in book form, then you're not too worried about it.

Because when Constantine was an emperor, he ordered 50 copies made for all the capital cities of the provinces.

And they were book bound. And so we don't know for sure, but we think maybe two of the ones in the museums today are two of those.

But it's a conjecture. If they are, I don't know if they are, but Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, which is in textual critical world, they're known as Aleph and Bee.

Those two might be. They're thrown in the right century. They're certainly whole books. They have the

Hebrew Bible translated into Greek in the front, and they have the New Testament at the back. So they fit the profile of what

Constantine was asking for. They're from the right century and they're built the right way. They could actually be two of the 50.

But it's still a conjecture to say that they are. But it's an interesting possibility.

And when you've got a document like that, you know it was a church document. Yeah. And so you use the documents like this to compare the other scraps from the junkyard or the trash heap with and say, do they match it?

And where are they different and why? And so you can build what's now called a dependency tree.

Like this is the parent manuscript for this daughter and this son manuscript.

And you can build family trees of these things to some degree. The scribe must have been copying from this kind of manuscript and not that one.

And you can do that because we have so many. When you only have nine, you can't do that.

When you've got several thousands of these, you can do that. And so that's been the beneficial thing for textual criticism to be able to say, well, we can build a good map of how we got all these documents.

And so we can conjecture backwards with a high degree of accuracy as to what the original document looked like.

Yeah, it's like detective work. Yes. I want to spend some time going over some really common verses that my mom has hanging on a sign on top of her sink or people have tattooed.

I have a tattoo of some... I have a prayer tattooed on me, but some people have Bible verses tattooed on their bodies.

I want to know, are some of them interpreted differently? You know, is the American... I'm sorry, the

English translation of this verse, maybe not what we think it is. And I have four verses for you.

I actually have five because I want to start in Genesis. And this is one that you sent me. And Genesis is fascinating to me.

So I really want to talk about this is Genesis 1, 1 through 5. In the beginning, God... And this is the

NIV version. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, let there be light. And there was light. God saw that the light was good. And he separated the light from the darkness.

God called the light day and the darkness he called night. And there was evening and there was morning the first day.

Where does that... What's wrong with that? Right.

Um, so a couple of things in the whole passage that are interesting to me is, that very first word in Hebrew is b'reishit.

B'reishit is a combination of several words that are smashed together the same way we do when we say the word don't.

It's a contraction of several words. And the center word is head.

So, the head of things, in the head of things, during the head of things, is sort of the meaning of it.

And we probably don't translate it too badly. It probably what we think it means is about right.

Because a head can be the source, it can be the origin, or it can be the first point in time on a timeline.

So it makes sense in all of those meanings. But it's somewhat challenging to translate.

When people are beginning to translate from Hebrew to English for practice, how do we go from head to in the beginning?

That's like... Because it gets translated in the beginning. But there's several ways to translate it.

We could say in the first moment, instead of in the beginning, in the first time, in the first moment, we could do that.

Or in the head of things, God created heaven and earth. The other thing that stands out to me in verse 5, and for me, that one's not a huge deal, though.

Is it in the beginning, in the head of things? Whichever way we're translating, we probably still mean the same thing.

So we're not, we're not, we're not... Really? I feel like that's such a point of like scientific contention of like, what was the beginning?

What are we saying the moment, you know, like the Big Bang is when the bang happened? Or is this just like the upon us of God?

Is that the beginning? And I think, I don't know, do you feel like there's any translations there that kind of lean into what, you know, just especially when it was translated in that time, is the head supposed to represent something that back in biblical times means something that we wouldn't recognize as the head today?

The word head is used for so many relationships. Like in Hebrew, the head of the mountain is the top mountain.

The head of the river is where the river starts. So we get this.

Another form of head is rishon, which means first, like first place. First place ribbon would be a rishon.

So the word gets a lot of range of use like our English word head does. We can talk about a head as a source, as the top of something like the head of the ladder.

We can use the word head to talk about the beginnings of a process. The different things we could interpret from Genesis 1 would still be interpretation options, no matter which way we translated that word.

I think, because two big options come to mind. Is there a beginning of all things, and then a beginning of creation that happened a long distance in time apart?

Or is this all in an instant? And I don't think either translation of that actually has much of a weight in that decision.

Because the issue there becomes, how do I know what the right referent for head is?

It's not, what does it mean? It's what is the right referent? What does it point to? One of the things in language or linguistics that we say is semiotics.

Semiotics is a system of signs and the things they point to. And we can use language to point to lots of different things.

Think about how a pronoun is used to point to a noun. I can say,

Sammy was a good dog. He was brown and white. He was a beagle.

Okay, I can do that. That was one of the dogs we used to have. But I'm using a pronoun to refer back to Sammy, right?

So, head of something doesn't have a noun after it.

And so, we don't have a referent that's explicit. Is it the head of all time, the head of all created matter, or in the head of something special that's happening?

I think those interpretation options are still open for debate and discussion, regardless of which specific way we translate the first word.

Okay, okay. You had a point for later, verse five. Yeah, in verse five,

I got three translations up on my screen. God called the light day, the darkness he called night, and the evening and the morning were the first day.

God called the light day, the darkness he called night, and there was evening and there was morning the first day. And God called the light day and the darkness he called night, and there was evening and there was morning one day.

Those translations kind of evoke little bits of differences on how we're referring to that day.

It was the first day out of many, or it was the first day as a apposition tacked on to the sentence, or it was one day, not necessarily a numerical number.

Like it didn't number a sequence, it's just one day. So we have three options that seem to be suggested by the three translations

I read, and I read King James Version, English Standard Version, and New American Standard Bible. When I teach

Hebrew, this is one of the verses that we go over in beginning Hebrew, very early on.

It's one of the first verses I have students read, and when we first start to translate, we get into that verse pretty soon.

And when I read it in Hebrew, a completely different arrangement of clauses emerges to my mind than what we typically see in any of those three

English translations I read. For example, they sound like a person just giving a summary of what happened.

And the next verse, if you read the first verse like a summary, you're going to read the next one like a summary. And I think sometimes the way we've translated

Genesis 1, we haven't distinguished between what is a summary statement, or a setting statement, and what is dramatic telling.

When you tell a drama to a group of people, you don't put clauses in the same order that you do when you're just giving a summary.

Like if your friend said, oh you went shopping yesterday, what happened? I went to Walmart, I went to the mall,

I went to somewhere to eat, and I went home. That's a summary. But if you say, while I was at the mall,

I ran into this person I hadn't seen in a while, and I said, oh wow, how are you? That's dramatic, right?

It's not just a summary. So when I'm reading through this in Hebrew, there are things that are not natural clauses here.

When reading along how the words are connected, and the clause markers that are there, it suggests something else to me.

And I've translated it this way, and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.

The first half is pretty similar. And there was evening. Pause. And there was morning.

Pause. Day one. It's not organized the same way as the first day.

It's not organized the same way as a tack -on clause for a preceding clause. It's organized as its own separate clause.

One day. Day one. And we do this when we're being dramatic. We would say there was evening, there was morning, day one.

Whoopee. And that's exactly how it reads. So what do you think it's suggesting with these? I guess, what's the takeaway?

When people orally handed down stories from the ancient world to the next generation, they were usually orally told by a dramatic retelling of the event.

And what we have recorded here in Genesis, in Hebrew, is Moses giving us the dramatic version as a storyteller would tell it.

It's not a narrative summary. It's not just blah, blah, blah, this detail, that detail, and now let's all fall asleep.

It's this happened, this happened. And then right when we pause long enough, whoa, this happened.

Somebody's in front telling this to the kids. We have a recording of a dramatic telling of Genesis, and we should read it that way.

We should read it as a dramatic telling of the story of God. But that doesn't negate it being a literal telling.

No, no, it doesn't. But I think if we read it like the drama that it is, we begin to pick up some of these things as dramatic elements in the story, as opposed to just, okay, we've got six days of detail, one right after the other, in the same phraseology, one after the other.

That's not how they are in Hebrew. Some of them are summation stories or pieces.

Some of them are dramatic pieces. It's almost as though the teller of the creation account wants to kind of summarize bits and then wow us with other pieces of detail.

And that goes missing in your typical English translation. The dramatic pieces are gone.

Emphasis. Yeah, emphasis. There you go. I like that word. There's emphasis on certain acts of God and certain results.

Like when God says things are good, that's a big deal. And we sometimes pass over that, but it's actually repeated after each day of creation.

He looks and things are good. So repetition is one way of giving emphasis, but also the clause structure.

It's just a relative clause marker in good. It's truncated, it's choppy.

And when we get excited and we're telling something, we don't put the smoothest of sentences out there. We make it a and have explosions of drama here.

It reads that way to me. Okay. I'm going to keep going to another verse.

And this one is my favorite verse. Jeremiah 29 11.

This is my confirmation verse. I love this verse. It hits home for me. So I'm a little scared that you're about to tell me it doesn't mean

God has a plan for me and everything's work out for me. This is the way that I read the verse.

It's the NIV version. Jeremiah 29 11. For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you.

Plans to give you hope and a future. I love that. That makes me feel so secure, so safe.

Is that not what it's saying? Well, when we look at this verse and there were,

I think I highlighted three two other ones that are similar to it. And I grew up with the one in Philippians, Philippians four.

I think it was as a magnet, like a refrigerator magnet, but it was on my, on the end of my bed when

I was a kid. And it was for, I can do all things through Christ, which strengthens me. I can be

Superman. I can be Batman, which were bad interpretations of that verse, right? We all know

I can't be either of those Superman or Batman. I can do all things. Well, one of the things that occurs to me is that often in, we have two ways of reading the

Bible that have come down through history and both of them are valid. One of them is to understand the context of each verse and how it was historically understood by its first readers.

How did a first century Jew understand Jesus's statements? What would be typical for them to understand by?

That's an important question to ask. And then what does the context around this verse say to it?

Well, we have another way of reading scripture too that has come down through us, to us in history, and that is what we call the devotional reading of the text.

What can I read in this verse here that will speak to me and give me shape, give me direction, give me something that I can apply to me as I read it?

Both of these are valid readings. So what I think of when

I think of a verse like this one or the verse that's in Philippians that I cited, these are verses that have a greater context.

And when they were uttered, they had a meaning that was based on their context. And we should understand what that meaning was as we read it.

That's important. And then I wouldn't say that it's not also true that we can read it as a devotional reading for our own benefit.

So let's take a look at Jeremiah 29 .12. They are different readings though.

That's thing I want to emphasize. Jeremiah 29 .10

is where I'll start. We probably could go back a little earlier and capture some more. Yeah, let's sandwich it.

The verse before, the verse itself, and then the one after. So back in 10, for thus says the

Lord, when 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you. And who is the

Lord talking to here? He's talking to Israel or the kingdom of that's just been yanked off into captivity, or in Jeremiah's case here, about to be.

It hasn't yet happened by chapter 29. God is saying these things ahead of time.

So when the 70 years are completed, that's the years of the captivity, I will visit you.

I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place, back to Judah. For I know the plans

I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

Then I will call upon, then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear you.

So what the issue is, is that for the most part, you can't say it's true for everyone.

It's hard to even want to say it's true for most people, but it's true for the elite at least. And maybe they've affected most people in Judah.

They aren't praying to the Lord. They're praying to idols and they're entrapped with several cycles of pitching

God's message and picking up a different message and running with it. So this is their situation.

And so people crying out at this moment are not heard because judgment's coming, but God is promising that he will restore, he will bring back, and then when they pray, he will hear.

So there's a whole process that's involved there. And so in verse 11, the plans

I have for you refer to God's statement to Judah to limit the captivity to 70 years.

It's not going to go on forever. And then return them and restore them so that they will build a nation again.

And they actually do that. When we read our Hebrew Bibles, we don't see the whole picture of it because we just see some rebuilding efforts.

We see the temple get rebuilt, a lot of internal struggles and strifes. We don't see much more about that.

But there's a book that was written between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament called the Book of the

Maccabees. There's book one and book two.

And in the Books of the Maccabees, it details them becoming a powerful nation again during the time when the two

Greek regions had gone to war and devastated the land. And in that power vacuum, they emerged powerful again for a while.

And at that time, the kingdom is as large as Solomon's kingdom. But we don't read about it in the

Hebrew Bible because it's in a different time period. It happens after the Hebrew Bible was written, before Jesus comes as a baby.

So the verse speaks to that. But yeah, here's what

I would say. What I would say for devotional reading, God always has, even when bad things are coming,

God always has a way of using it to bring us back to the good end. So even though this is a bad thing that's going to happen, there's a good thing at the end of it, and restoration is there.

So if we read it alone as verse 11 by itself, we don't see the context of the

Babylonian captivity and the return. It's kind of chopped off there. But it is giving us a picture of the character of God.

And this is how God generally operates. So in this kind of thing, it's not a bad reading to say, well,

God has plans for me too. So sometimes we have to separate those two readings.

Yeah, go ahead. And I can do all things through him who gives me strength. It's not saying that you'll be all powerful like Superman.

It's saying that when that hard time comes, God will give you the strength to get through it, right?

Yeah. And there's another one in 419 Philippians, and my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches and glory in Christ Jesus.

I shouldn't suffer financially then, right? Right. You're good to go. I shouldn't have any trouble.

The Bible said so, right? And here's where I like to think of when we try to say, what does this text mean?

Not only do we go a little broader and pick up the verses before and the verses after it to see what

Paul is talking about there, but we also want to get our heads around the idea of what's in the whole of scripture.

It's an important thing to not only look at this verse and say, what does that say about God's care of me?

But what does all of scripture say from beginning to end about God's care of me? And we build a comprehensive picture, then it's easier to interpret this verse within that framework than it is to only try to think of a good analogy.

I love biology and I love microscopes, but if the only things you look at in a microscope is an amoeba or a single -celled organism of some sort, which are easy to see in a microscope with all the setup, it's very hard if you don't also see a dog or a cat to extrapolate that what you're seeing in the microscope is also true for a dog and a cat to some level.

There's some correspondences there, the way cells work and whatnot, because they're completely different.

And so if we were to, let's say, pluck a hair out of our head, scrape off a piece of skin from our knuckle or something, and do the same thing with maybe an animal hair or a piece of a toenail,

I know it sounds gross, but if we were to look at all of these things under a microscope, they're all different, yet they're all cells.

And seeing the cells doesn't give us a picture of the being that dropped that cell onto the floor.

So sometimes we have to step back from the microscope and see the whole picture, and then go back to the microscope and then interpret the data.

So here with Philippians, Paul has been addressing the church at Philippi.

One of the things that we have to remember is this is the hometown of Alexander the

Great. Currently, Philipp II, I think they recently found his dad's tomb.

So it's located there. And that was a new find not that long ago, within the last decade anyway.

And so we now know where Alexander's parents were buried. And so this is that town, this is that region.

And this is the place that the horses came from for Alexander's cavalry that were famous in battle.

So this is a prestigious city in the history of the Greek world. And so I'll go back to verse 16.

Even in Thessalonica, you sent me help for my needs once and again.

And in Thessalonica is one of those churches that is just sponsoring

Paul as he goes around planting churches. They're like, when things were happening bad in Jerusalem, they handed money to go help the

Jerusalem folks out. When things were happening bad in Corinth, they did the same thing. So this group is like that.

And so Paul says, you met my needs. Not that I seek the gift, he's not asking for it, but that I seek the fruit that increases to your credit.

So them giving gave them a spiritual blessing. And Paul is saying, I am glad you did that because you're going to grow in spiritual blessings because of it.

That's what I seek for you. I wasn't actually seeking the gift, but I do seek your spiritual blessings.

I have received your full payment and more. I am well supplied. Having received from Epaphroditus the gifts that you sent, a fragrant offering.

What was that? They sent him some cologne in the mail, something like that, some perfume. That can't be bad, right?

And a sacrifice acceptable, pleasing to a God. And here's what we realize, he's using the fragrant offering.

They're giving gifts to him to help the ministry metaphorically was a fragrant offering up to God.

And now we see the metaphor is related to sacrifices and incense. So their giving is parallel to a sacrifice.

He didn't really get cologne in the mail, but it makes us wonder sometimes when we read just a phrase, a fragrant offering, a sacrifice, acceptable, pleasing to God, and my

God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory. Now we see the bigger picture.

They gave sacrificially to help God's mission grow. Now God will supply every one of their needs.

There's something in there with that context that if we just take the verse and go with it, we miss what's happening.

And so it makes a different sense in what Paul's talking about if we realize that this is on the tail end of just having received a bunch of stuff from these guys.

And how many times do we do this in speech?

Thank you for what you gave me. May God bless you. I wish that God blesses you now because you've given to me.

It's very similar language here. It's not that different.

We sometimes miss it because the other thing that helps too is if we realize where we are in any

Pauline letter. We're near the end of the letter. This is the closing. We're about to close off the letter.

And this is where people normally say these kind of things. Since you gave such a good donation to the

Christmas fund, I ask that God blesses you good this year. And yours truly, goodbye.

And this is where this verse is located. It's right in that tail end as he's summing up his thought and he's about to say goodbye.

It makes sense that that's how he's ending on a high note. Yeah, he's ending on a high note and he's acting as an ambassador of God to say that God's going to give you stuff right as he's closing off.

When you see it in that light, it's not saying like a blanket statement of like, here's a rule.

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. It's the context of, well, I've been given supplies.

I've been given resources. Because of that, I'm very strengthened. That is because of God. Thank you for your service.

It's just a part of the whole. And you have to see it as such versus just taking that blanket statement of like, see right here, he said

I would be good. But it's like, well, it was during a very specific time that it made sense to say something like that.

I want to get into our last verse and then we can wrap up. This is such a good... We might go two hours if I...

Well, yeah, we're almost there, aren't we? Yeah. So I feel like this is one of the most popular, one of the biggest, and it's the

Psalm 23, the Psalm of David. And I have an NID version, but you suggested, or no,

I sent this one to you and you specifically noted it as something that can be misinterpreted.

So which area of this, I mean, do you want to read the whole thing, but give emphasis to the area that needs more clarification?

Let's have you read it in whatever version you like. Got it. Okay. I'll read it in NID.

So Psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd. I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures.

He leads me beside quiet waters. He refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his namesake.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil. My cup overflows.

Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life. And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Oh, so sweet.

My cup overflows. I love that. Yes. One of the things that comes to mind, go ahead.

Yeah. I was about to say, but is it not that sweet? Are we missing something here? Would we want a bunch of oil dumped on our heads?

That could be a real mess, couldn't it? And yet it's in there. When I see anoint,

I see like a thumbprint of oil, not like a mask. Try a 16 ounce jar of olive oil.

No. That's the overflowing cup. It's flowed over.

Here we go, buddy. Lots of oil. Yeah, there's pieces of it that makes us scratch our heads.

What's going on here? It's obviously got a good tone to it. We like what it says.

It sounds very caring. Someone's caring for us, right? And that is the point of the psalm.

God cares for his sheep, us. But we often miss the metaphors in here because we don't realize that this is about sheep tending.

Every line in here has something to do with the sheep tending of the ancient world. And David was a shepherd.

He guarded sheep in his lifetime before he became a king. And so he's comparing God taking care of David the same way as David used to take care of the sheep.

In the life of a sheep herder, there's a season.

There's a cycle about taking care of sheep. It lasts about a year, and then you have to repeat the cycle again.

In Israel and Africa, several places do this about the same way.

You have the rainy and the dry seasons. Here in the states, we have spring, summer, winter, and fall.

Over there, the winter is not as pronounced, and the summer is a little less.

It's different than here. When we think of summer, we think of thunderstorms, big storms, lots of rain.

The spring and the fall, we think about pretty colors, flowers blooming, leaves turning color.

The winter, we think about snow and going out to play in the snow. So we have exciting things for all four of our seasons.

And depending on where you live, you may have all four of those seasons or not. I've lived in places where we had six months of winter and only a week of summer.

And then I've lived in places where everything's fairly temperate. Where I live now, we get a real winter about every three years.

Then the other two are very, very mild. Exactly what you're talking about. I said seven years in Ohio.

Okay, yeah. So I would say one good winter out of three. And sometimes a really serious winter is only every 10 or 11 years.

It's not very often that we have to think about whether we're going to the store or not. When I lived in upstate

New York, we had to have doors on the upper floor of the house for emergency crews to get in in case you got snowed in.

It wouldn't be possible to get the front door of your house open. A 12 -foot blizzard is common.

You can wake up one morning and you've got six extra feet of snow to deal with. Oh my gosh.

And I've personally had to go outside three times a day and shovel a fresh foot of snow.

And the other thing is, is it doesn't melt. All winter, it isn't melting.

So you're not going to just say, well, I'll shovel and then it'll be gone in three days. No, it won't.

It's just going to keep getting deeper and deeper and deeper all winter. So you have to make your path and eventually when you're shoveling snow, you're pushing in the shovel and you're really fleeing it at the high end of the stick to get it over the pile of snow to keep your sidewalk clear.

And we're talking walls of snow higher than your head on your sidewalk to get to your car.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, that place didn't have much of a summer. But we have different weather.

In the ancient Near East, even modern Near East, this is still true, you have rainy and dry, rainy and dry.

So when are your rainies? Your rainies are the spring and the fall. Your dries are the summer and the winter.

But that's how they name it. The early rains and the late rains in the year. And you see this phrase in the

Bible a lot, the early rains and the late rains, or just one of the two phrases. And sometimes that misses our attention.

We don't know what that means. But it's because that's the time of the year you get a lot of water during the spring rains and the fall rains.

The summer you don't. It's dry. Winter is also dry. So the sheep cycle is built around the weather cycle.

So the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. This is the attitude of the sheep. I've got a good shepherd guarding me.

I won't have anything that I need. He's going to make sure I have what I need.

When we think about this in a modern secularized world, I shall not want means

I'm going to get everything I want. All I want for Christmas is a hippopotamus.

No, $15 ,000 out of the toy catalog. Why not? I shall not want.

That's a bad interpretation, because it isn't about we won't have desires.

And it doesn't mean that all of our desires are fulfilled. That's not what's happening here. What's happening here is that the sheep won't have anything lacking in the things they need, because the shepherd is good.

All right. He makes me to lie down in the green pastures. This is the early rains. This is the spring.

He moves them out of the barn lots near the village and moves them up to where the grass is starting to grow in the spring.

So he leads me, makes me lie down in the green pastures. He leads me beside the still waters. The waters are still at this time of the year.

And so as the sheep moves, he keeps guiding the sheep to where it's green and where the waters are still.

If you take the sheep past fast -moving water or dangerous water, they jump in and they drown, or they get ripped off downstream and their life is at risk.

So the shepherd has to know where the wadis are and which thing is flooding and when, and make sure.

Sometimes the shepherd leaves the sheep with other shepherds and goes on ahead and scouts out the path and then comes back to make sure that he's leading the sheep to good grass and good water that won't harm the sheep.

Bad water is also a place for predators to ambush the sheep from, and so you want to bring the sheep to a good place.

He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. When we think about a righteous path, we think about morals.

That's what our mind first goes to. But in paths of righteousness is the paths where the scorpions are not going to be there.

The shepherd has already cleared the path and made sure the path is clear of typical things that harm the sheep before he takes the sheep through it.

And that reminds me again on the green pastures part, the shepherd also has to remove certain weeds that cause belly bloats in the sheep so that they would get sick and fall over and die.

The sheep are pretty helpless if they get that, and then they'll just go four legs up and they can't get back on their feet and they're dead.

And so they're a very fragile animal compared to cows, for example.

And even compared to goats, sheep are pretty amazingly fragile.

If they eat the wrong thing, they're done. And so the shepherd goes through and picks those things out of the grass before taking the sheep through there.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, this is summer now. What does that mean, the valley of the shadow of death?

The wadis are drying up, and we're going to have to pick a wadi, and we're going to have to get up on the high plateau if we're going to find food.

This is the riskiest time in the life of a sheep in the year cycle, because in order to move from the foothills to the high plains, they've got to go up these narrow wadis where the mountain lions live.

A wadi, just for clarification, is just the ridge of a ravine. Yeah, think about like in the

American Southwest, we have these arroyos. Yeah, same thing.

Wow, this reads completely different if you read it as if you are a sheep. Yeah, and so this shadow, the valley of the shadow of death, is when you're transitioning from low ground to high ground, and you're moving through those ambush points where the mountain lions like to ambush the sheep.

The shepherd's got to be on his game there, and it's not accidental that when

David is a lad talking to Saul, he says, I killed a lion and a bear with my weapons to protect the sheep.

This would be the time when the shepherd might need to do that. In verse 4, this is when the sheep are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.

Death's on every hand. If they don't move, they die because the grass is running out down here.

If they move the wrong way, they die because the shepherd, or if they move with a bad shepherd, they die because nobody cleared the path for them.

Nobody took care of the predators. Nobody picked the best path. So there's really a valley of shadow of death all around this transition from the low plains to the high plains.

Yeah. I will fear no evil for you are with me. This is the role of the shepherd doing what's needed for the sheep.

Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. Now, this thing here, rod and staff, gets interpreted a lot of different ways.

I've heard people say, well, that's the discipline for the sheep. No, this is not a discipline for the sheep.

The rod and the staff do two different things. One of them has a crook on the end, and it'll rescue a sheep if they fall off the cliff.

It just hooks around them, and you pull them back up if they get unsteady. You help them up. Like Little Bo Peep?

Yeah, exactly. The other one's a club for fighting off the enemies to the sheep. So you have a defensive weapon, and you have a tool to rescue downed sheep.

Both are necessary as you move through here. And so the sheep takes comfort that the shepherd is going to protect the sheep.

If something bad happens, he's going to help me back up on my feet. And secondly, if an enemy comes, he's going to club the enemy.

And that next part is where we all think we're going out to Sunday dinner. The table is prepared before me.

I'm at the Sunday dinner. I'm at the big smorgasbord. This is a word, the table.

We use it, too, in English in various geology -type situations.

We talk about water tables, right? And we talk about things called plateaus, a table land, a land that's shaped like the table.

It's higher than the other land. And up here, the amazing thing about table land is that it's up higher in the clouds.

And in Israel, especially, and some other places that have mountains not too far from the sea, when the clouds come over on that low ground, they're not dropping water in the summer.

That's why it's dry in the summer. When they get up over the table land, something about that interaction causes rain to happen.

And now there's green grass up there. So once the sheep gets up to the top of the plateau, that's the table land, you have prepared it before me.

And this is also referring to the shepherd going along and plucking out that weed that's going to kill the sheep, plucking out that weed before it would kill the sheep.

And so the shepherd actively has to prepare the table land for the sheep to pasture every year.

And then the sheep goes out and eats prepared grass on the table land in the presence of my enemies, the lions looking.

They pass through those places, but the lions are still lurking. They're watching. The lion knows that these sheep are helpless on their own.

And there's other predators too, but the predators are there and the sheep are still grazing, fine, because the shepherd's there.

You anoint my head with oil. That's where I was joking earlier about the whole cup of oil dumped on us.

But actually, this is the thing that protects the sheep from insects, burrowing insects that get into the skin and the fur and give them horrid skin issues.

And this is the time of the year when they need it. Think about animals on the farm.

We might do something called a flea in a tick dip, dip our dog, dip cattle, whatever, into this stuff to keep insects off of them in the summer.

But here's the ancient method, oil. And it takes a lot of it. Oh my gosh.

So even the irritating little things that can creep into our lives and get ourselves all in a mess can be anointed so that they don't hurt us.

That's the sheep getting anointed for the summer hazards with the insects. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the

Lord forever. They go back down the hill to the barn lot for the winter. That is so beautiful.

You kept reading lines and I was looking ahead. I'm like, there's no way we're still talking about the sheep.

And then you would tie it back with the fact I didn't know. That is, wow. I feel like the depth of that verse just doubled.

So this is so amazing. Oh my gosh. I feel like the more we learn about the

Bible, just the more layers we discover. And when we think about this, this is a line by line, item by item, all year long,

God taking care of us. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

I can't thank you enough for providing all of this insight and all of this wisdom and sharing all of your knowledge.

I feel like this is deepening a lot of the Bible for me personally. And I feel like this is going to be one of the longest podcasts we have because you could do this for every single line of the

Bible and this just adds so much more enrichment. I, you know, maybe one day we'll have another two hour episode of just a couple of different books.

I mean, there's just endless things we could talk about even not just the Bible, but before the Bible and how it applies today.

And just for the sake of time, we'll have to close, but I would love to have you back on this podcast so we can keep talking about this, because this is so enriching and that's the best word

I can put it as. Sometime I'd like to, not this time, but another time, maybe I'd like to talk about the lady who reaches for the hem of Jesus's garment.

There's a lot in there that we don't catch when we read Matthew or Luke. Okay. Well, I'll see you back on here very soon then for us to talk about that woman.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I always like to give my guests an opportunity to plug anything.

Do you, this is your chance to talk about maybe any of your studies, any of your projects, anything for people to look out if you're about to release any white papers, anything you want to plug now?

Well, I can maybe put a small plug in for my recent book. This is published in Peter Lang Publisher in the

Studies in Biblical Greek section. And in this book, I was interacting with three scholars mainly, but also other scholars that had some input on the topic on what a

Greek perfect tense really means. And in here, I challenged the linguistic assumptions of three prominent linguists in their understanding of the

Greek perfect tense. And I implemented some devices in linguistics to show why the

Greek perfect tense means what it does from a linguistic framework. And I showed seven different ways that it works.

Like they're parallel things. They're not dependent on each other. It's seven different avenues where we can think about what a perfect tense means.

Seven different ways of illustrating it or giving an example. This book would be what I call very dense in terms of its linguistic jargon.

So it would be a difficult read for anyone not acquainted with some of the linguistic debates over a

Greek perfect tense. But if you enter that field, reading it, reading about the linguistic arguments for what a

Greek perfect tense means and why, this is a better answer than some of the other answers that have been given in print already.

And so there's a lot of linguistic support for the answer that I gave here. The thing in a nutshell is that a perfect tense can do two things.

It can refer to a past action or it can refer to a present state because of that past action.

We do this in English all the time. I have walked to the store. And I'm intentionally using the perfect tense.

Have and walked. It's a past event. We would agree that walking is no longer still being done.

It's finished. I have walked. But if somebody were to come out to a crowd and say, who has been there before?

Who has done it before? We don't know the way. And you say, I have walked. Yes, the action was in the past.

I'm referring to my previous action of walking there before. But the implications are that I am capable of getting you there now safely because I've done it before.

The present state matters. It doesn't always matter in the context, but it matters in some contexts with the perfect tense.

And that particular thing was what was debated in the perfect tense discussion.

I show reasons why both are true for the perfect and why you can have one perfect tense that doesn't seem like it has both and the other one has both fair and square.

And it's all about how the author or the speaker chooses to package the perfect tense with language.

What kind of language packaging are they providing? So that was last

October that this came out. But it's still in books like this, you get a new book that really deals with a topic like this about every 10 years.

So this would be the most recent one dealing with issues around the perfect tense.

Most of my papers that have been published are dealing with similar concerns.

So I've not published anything yet that is general, that is general

New Testament or Hebrew Bible related. I have some things in the works.

One of the things I'm really interested in, and I think I shared this with Logan as well,

I'm interested in how infinitives work in Greek, because there's some passages that are hotly debated, such as 1

Timothy 2, 12, right around there, where in our typical

English translation, Paul seems to say, I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, and so forth.

There's infinitives in there, and there's more than one. And there are several nouns around those infinitives that are taking cases that are a little bit at odds with a lot of the ways that that verse gets translated or interpreted.

And I have been really wanting to work on this for a bit. And so it's a slow project.

And I have presented a couple times on different aspects of that verse. And just kind of in a nutshell, one of the things that I think has missed the attention of scholars is that Paul is specifically addressing a group of Christians in Ephesus through the letter to Timothy, because he's the pastor at Ephesus, that are dealing with a major cult next door, the

Artemis cult. And unless we understand what the Artemis cult is, and how pervasive it was in society, and how it caused people to think, we don't understand what he's saying.

Because that thing is bigger than life to people that live in Ephesus. It's so much so that it's the only

Greek god or goddess that people are ardent followers of, after most of the

Greek city -states and Roman city -states have gone over to worshiping the emperor instead of the gods.

This group doesn't go to Caesar worship. They don't want anything to do with it. And Caesar is actually very aggressive about converting these guys to Caesar worship.

And we miss this aspect as it's coming in Paul's letters.

So Paul is taking an anti -Artemis approach throughout his letters to anyone in and around Ephesus.

And unless we get a picture of what that worship was like, what it was about, and how people were influenced by it, it's very hard to parse texts that are dealing with the

Ephesus region. That's fascinating. Well, again, we're gonna have to meet again.

I'll just tell you that right now. I need more of your time, Doctor. And I can't appreciate enough of all this time.

I mean, it's Friday night, and here we are talking for almost two hours. So thank you for sharing. If you can, send me a link to that book, and I can share it when

I post this. I want people to know about resources and accessing you. But again, thank you so much.

And I really appreciate your time, Doctor. Thank you, Cassie. And it's been a wonderful conversation.

I've enjoyed our time together very much. Me too. Well, we'll speak soon. Thank you.