#35 UNDERSTANDING PROPHECY AND PREDICTING THE FUTURE + Dr. Gary Yates

Hello, hello! Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

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Hello, hello! Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I am your host. I am more than excited to introduce a new guest today, Dr. Gary Yates. Welcome to the show. Gary, you are a PhD in Old Testament Studies.

You're from Dallas Theology Seminary. You've taught Old Testament, you've taught Hebrew at the grad and undergrad level for over 20 years at Cedarville University, and now you're at Liberty University, which is how we got connected through Dr. Yates.

You also serve as a senior pastor at the Living Word Baptist Church in Virginia, and you co-authored the Message of the Twelve, Urban Legends of the Old Testament, and Encountering the Old Testament.

So, vetted and well ascribed, I'm so excited to have you on the show to talk about the topic of prophecy and what are we getting wrong about it, because I don't understand it. But anyways, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Cassian. Great to be here, and I really appreciate the opportunity to have a conversation.

What Prophecy Is and Why It Is Not Mainly Fortune-Telling

The prophecy is kind of a trippy and tricky topic for me, simply because I don't understand it. What have your studies led you to believe? Have you studied this topic specifically?

Yeah, I actually did my doctoral dissertation in the book of Jeremiah. So, I've taught courses in the prophets basically my entire teaching career, and one of the books that I did with B &H, The Message of the Twelve, we were looking at the prophets.

So, this is an area that I tell people that a lot of people, when they do their Bible reading, this is the area where they still have the gold leaf on the pages, because they haven't read this very much.

But it's kind of an area that I really enjoy, and I think one of the things that I would try to tell people is that this is not a part of the Bible that you have to be afraid of, because I think once we stop trying to either fit it into contemporary events, or we're trying to figure out how does it fit in certain eschatological systems, and just learning to read the prophets on their own.

I'm sorry, I'm like a nine-year-old reading level when it comes to these terms. What is.

Eschatological? What is that? Well, a lot of people, their views of the future, are they a pre-millennialist, or a non-millennialist, or a post-millennialist, or they preach at a post-trib, and their views of what they believe about the second coming of Jesus, or how the kingdom of God will come to earth in the future.

A lot of times, they're more trying to like, how does this fit into my theological system, than I think sometimes just reading the prophets on their own. I think when you end up doing that, the imagery and the ways that they convey their message in figurative ways, and really rhetorically.

I think it becomes more of a wild ride going through the prophets, and just a very enjoyable part of scripture.

I love that you say we shouldn't be afraid of it, because truly, I am. I mean, if I'm just going to open up my Bible and skip to all the popular characters, the Moses, and the Jonah, and the Job, and the Jesus, and then his apostles, I'm mostly going to skip over the Jeremiah's, or the minor prophets, just because I'm like, I don't know how this fits in.

Are they fortune tellers? Are they just people that got visions from God, and now they're coming true? I think this is why, in part, I'm afraid of Revelation, just because all those things are going to

Revelation is scary, but it's kind of its own category. I think part of it is, if we can understand the historical setting of the prophets, what was going on in their lifetime and in their ministry, because most of the time, their prophecies are relating to either things that are going on in the people's lives that need to change, because God is angry about that, and they're confronting the people with their sin, or they're announcing things that will probably be happening or could happen in the very near future.

They're not always talking about the end times, or the last days, or the future judgment, and these kinds of Most of the things that the prophets are talking about relate to things that happen pretty much in the near future.

Of their ministries. Yeah. I love that you say that, and historical context is everything, and I love that, in these conversations, that my guest can offer that level of intellectual conversation. We'll get to a couple examples of biblical prophecy out of context, and how people kind of use it to rationalize, it's now the end times, and all of the prophecy are coming true right now, but let's back it up.

To me, as an early Christian going to church your whole life, prophecy was always about telling the future. How would you,.

An educated person, how would you define prophecy? Well, I would define prophecy, first of all, the prophets were inspired spokesmen from God. A lot of our key passages about the prophets, or even things related to biblical inspiration, talk about how the Spirit was the one who led the prophets to deliver the message that God gave to them.

I think that's the first thing, is that prophecy doesn't originate with men, 2 Peter 121 says, but it came as these men were moved along by the Spirit of God. So it is the Word of God, you see repeatedly in the Old Testament prophets, thus says the Lord, I think appears more than 350 times or something like that.

And then you also have these statements like utterance or declaration of the Lord. So they are very aware and convinced of the fact that they're speaking for God. And there's even a couple of passages in the prophets where the prophets believed that they were the divine council up in heaven, where God's having his cabinet meetings and making decisions and those kinds of things.

These prophets will claim that they actually were there for the meetings. So prophet Micaiah in 1 Kings 22, he says, I saw what was going on and God was sitting around the table with the members of his council, and they decided that they were going to deceive Ahab and send out a messenger to trick him into going into battle.

And so he's like, I was there, I saw what the deliberations were. And the prophet Jeremiah does the same thing over in Jeremiah 23, he says, look, the difference between me and all of the false prophets is that I'm speaking what I heard in the divine council, I was there.

And these other prophets are just speaking the dreams and imaginations of their own mind. So I think part of it is just at the beginning, they're speaking for God. And the words of the prophet are the very word of God itself.

Okay. Wow. A divine council, that's a whole other episode. So I won't go too far to that.

But just an interesting way of thinking about, like the prophets received their message from God. I mean, it's pretty audacious for a human prophet to claim, yeah, I was there at the meeting, I know what happened.

But that's really the way that they, that's the way they viewed their message and the authority that they had when they when they spoke it.

Prophets, the Gift of Prophecy, and the Role of Moses

Okay, a couple questions come up. Because what would be the difference between a prophet who, you know, was in the presence of the divine council and like a praying person? Because to me, we've shifted from prophecy is telling the future to now prophecy is having the word of God come through them that they're speaking.

So could I technically prophesy if I felt like God was telling me something? Or is there a clear distinction between who is and isn't a prophet?

Well, I that that gets a little bit into maybe even what you think about the gift of prophecy in the New Testament. But I think at the very least, there's a distinction between prophets that were conveying like, special messages from God that became authoritative scripture, versus maybe even sometimes people that had prophetic gifts that could give a word from God, but didn't necessarily have that specific designated chosen role as an instrument of God's revelation.

So I think I would probably make a distinction there. But again, some of that has to do with well, what do you think the gift of prophecy and when we hear people, or when we read texts in the New Testament that talk about having that gift?

What exactly does that mean? But yeah, I think I'm sorry, even that is, even that is somewhat different from, you know, those that that are speaking authoritative scripture and that sort of thing.

It's different from that. It's different from like a pastor getting a message in the middle of his sermon being like, I feel like the Holy Spirit is telling me to say this, that would be a different thing than a prophet speaking.

Yeah, well, it could be it could be a prophetic utterance that's coming from the Spirit. But a little bit different than what we're talking about in terms of like inspired prophets like Moses or Jeremiah or in Isaiah or others that were called by God with this special role of proclaiming, you know, his special revelation.

Interesting. It seems to me that there's a lot.

Of prophets in the Old Testament, but not so many in the New Testament. And I feel like even fewer.

In 2024. Would you agree with that? Yeah, there really is. You know, prophets are everywhere in the Old Testament. And, you know, the first person that's referred to as a prophet is Abraham all the way back in Genesis 20.

Then you have kind of the office of prophet, I think, really originates more with Moses. And God promises in Deuteronomy 18, he says that in the future, I will raise up for my people a prophet like Moses.

And it's in the singular, but I think it's probably talking about as a, you know, generically all of the prophets that God would raise up, they would have the same role as Moses. They would take a message, they would get a message from God to convey it to the people.

You wouldn't say that was just referring to Jesus?

No, I think Jesus is the culmination of that. But I think, you know, it's more just talking about the prophets in general, because as you read that passage, you know, it's clear that this is something that will be happening throughout Israel's history.

And then in the New Testament, like in Acts 3 and other places, those passages are applied or that passage is applied to Jesus because he is the ultimate prophet like Moses. But even in the Old Testament, like with an Elijah or a Jeremiah, the writers often kind of, to me, go to pains to try to say, this is what God was promising.

This is a prophet like Moses. Because Elijah, for example, met God at Mount Horeb or Mount Sinai, same place that Moses did. When God calls Jeremiah, Jeremiah says, Hi, Lord God, I don't know how to speak.

I'm just a child. And it's like, I think I've heard someone say that before. So they were trying to present themselves as prophets like Moses. And throughout the Old Testament, God raises up these prophets that speak to Israel.

Prophecy kind of enters a new dimension when you have Samuel, because now prophets are going to speak to kings. And we have a lot of these passages where kings and prophets are kind of having these sort of angry confrontations and things like that.

And then when the people and their apostasy has reached a place that God says, I'm about to send the judgment of exile, then we have more the classical prophets or the writing prophets that come and preach to the people and warn them, look, time's running out.

Judgment's coming and it's on the way.

If you don't repent and get right with God. Yeah. I'm going through Exodus right now. So a lot of like Moses going to God and God being like, we'll go back to Pharaoh and say this, and this is what's going to happen.

Could you kind of walk me through at least like contextually, how do you think that was happening? Do you think it was like God appearing before him? Do you think it was like a voice in his head? Do you think it was like a burning bush every time?

Like.

How logistically did this work? Yeah. And that's an issue that some prophets do at times have encounters with God, like Moses did at the burning bush. There's other times when they receive like visions or maybe things are conveyed to them in dreams, but it seems like that they are more, it's just something that God sort of intuitively reveals to them.

I don't think it's necessarily a vision or, you know, it may be a divine voice that they hear. But there's an intuitive sense that the message that they've been given, however God communicates that, you know, is something that's come to them from God and from God's spirit.

But again, we don't always know exactly the process by which that happens and everything.

Of course. Yeah. Not all of it's going to be fully understood at that time. I know we're spending a lot of time on prophets, but I'm just so curious. Do you feel like today there are, you know, if Jesus, well, yeah, I guess you don't think he is the main prophet, but like prophets today, you know, like some, like I've encountered a vision from God.

I would not call myself a prophet, but it sounds like, you know, becoming a prophet is more of like a set apart designated gift from God. How do you feel about like modern day prophets? Do you feel like they exist?

Is there like one that you're like, definitely this one, or like even distinguishing them from false prophets?

That was so many questions. Yeah. I think I'm at times with those types of things open, but cautious, but I do think that there's a culmination point with the kind of special revelation from prophets that I think like John the Baptist is the kind of the culmination of the old Testament prophets.

Hebrew says in these last days, God has spoken to us by his son, Jesus. And so with Jesus and John the Baptist and the apostles and the kind of inspired prophecy that they receive from God, I don't think that prophets today fall into that category.

But again, this sort of goes back to what we were just talking about in terms of is the gift of prophecy that, for example, Paul talks about in his letters, does that involve actual revelation from God or they're receiving, or is it simply, you know, they're empowered by God to preach and proclaim the word of God in a passionate way or something like that?

It does seem that there's some type of revelation or some type of message from God that those types of prophets receive. But I think in my theology, I would be careful to distinguish that from what we're talking about when we're discussing the biblical prophets.

Yeah. Let's talk about that because I, again, like prophecy for me is about telling the future, but you would disagree how like prophecy should be more so taken within context of the gifts that were given, of the purpose that they're being told, and also as revealing God's will, more so.

Giving us a view into the future. Right. Yeah. And I think this goes back and, you know, we're kind of going back to the Old Testament now. What was the role of a prophet then? And some of this comes from Fee and Stewart in their book, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth.

They talk about prophecy and they make this distinction that they say that two thirds of the preaching of the prophets was simply what they call forth telling, just telling forth the word of God. So in other words, preaching a message that God had given to them and, you know, primarily talking to the people about their relationship with God, their sins, things like their idolatry, their false worship, their social injustice, mistreatment of the poor.

And so most of the preaching of the prophets dealt with that. There was probably like one third of the prophets preaching would be more what we would talk about as foretelling or predicting the future or telling what would happen in the future.

But the statistics they give along with that is that, again, most of that foretelling was actually dealing with things that would happen in their day and in their time. And so they say like there's only two percent of biblical prophecy that we have in the Old Testament is messianic.

So two percent that's talking about Jesus. There's five percent that talks about the new covenant era that we're living in today. And so there's like one percent of what all of the biblical prophets in the Old Testament are predicting.

One percent of that is still in reference to things that haven't happened yet. So when we're going to the prophets to try to get these detailed roadmaps or very explicit, like, yeah, this connects up with the things that are happening today.

We're really looking for something that's a very minor part of what the prophets were doing. So I do think there are predictions and I think there are things in a very general way that the prophets say about the future.

But even when they're talking about the kingdom of God or last days or future, they give us, I think what some people would say, a very soft lens kind of focus. They give us a general picture of what things are going to be like, but not ways that we can typically pick up the newspaper and say, oh, that's what the prophet Zephaniah was talking about, or he was looking into the future and seeing.

And that's, to be honest, that's a way a lot of popular approaches to prophets. That's the way the.

Prophets are read. Okay. So, yeah. So it sounds like a prophecy is way more contextual as far as like, I always think of Daniel and like the crazy last couple chapters of Daniel and what it's prophesying.

And it's so hard to decipher just in modern terms, but you think of like the rise of each kingdom and then the fall and then the dreams you start to think of like, well, that's our future government. You know, that's the government that we live in today.

That's going to fall one day, just like Babylon fell. Do you feel like it's obvious or do you think it's just literally impossible to know which part of those 1 prophecies are like, yeah, two?

I think the 1 of the prophecies are generally easy to recognize, but it's more like things, and I'll bracket Daniel out of the discussion just for a minute. But if you go to passages like Isaiah two and look at verses one to four, where Isaiah is saying that in the future day, Mount Zion will become the highest mountain on the face of the earth and the nations will stream to Zion and they will learn the ways of the Lord and follow his ways and those types of things.

They're portraying what the future kingdom will be like. But as you look at that, you notice, yeah, it's very figurative. It's very soft lens. We don't get a lot of details and specifics. And you have that, I think in these other, like Isaiah 11, the lion is going to lie down with the lamb and the Messiah, the future king will bring a kingdom of righteousness and peace and justice.

But there aren't a lot of, like even the specific events that will lead to that or the details of those kinds of things. So I think we can recognize when they're speaking of like the future or things that are dealing with eschatology.

But part of the way that we distinguish them or see them is that they're very kind of general and generic in their way, in the way that they.

Portray what's happening in the future. Okay. I feel like there's a lot of room for error, which to me would terrify me if I was a prophet that like I would be caught in something that was too generic, kind of like all encompassing and someone's like, well, you're a false prophet.

That would be worst case scenario. Well, here's something that makes that even a little more complicated if it's okay to discuss that. But sometimes when a prophet was talking about the future, the events that they were describing weren't necessarily set in stone.

So an event that a prophet was announcing this is going to happen in the future, often that was what, this is what God intends to do. But there was also the possibility that if people responded to the message in the right way, if they repented, if they turned from their sinful ways, if they cried out for God to be merciful to them, if they changed their behavior, then God wouldn't necessarily send the judgment that he had threatened.

So what does that mean? Oh no, I'm going to be a false prophet. My batting average just got messed up. But I think people understood in their culture, they understood what a prophet was supposed to do I think better than we do.

And so they knew that just because what the prophet said might happen didn't, that didn't necessarily fit the criteria of like this prophet has to be a hundred percent accurate. That seems to relate to things that were more like explicitly, like this will happen no matter what, and was more explicitly verifiable and that sort of thing.

Got it. Yeah. I think the example that you just referenced was Jonah and him going to the Ninevites and being like, Hey, God said he was going to destroy you, but God's on his way. He's going to destroy you.

And then they responded, they repented and then God didn't destroy. So it's Jonah sounds like you were wrong because look at the Ninevites. So that's great. But I do have just like a ridiculous question is back then, contextually, historically, were prophets like a pretty common or like a non-shocking type of job?

Like, is it like, Oh, my neighbor on the left is a carpenter and my neighbor on my right is a prophet. And that's his business. Like based off what you just said is people took prophecy very seriously, whether or not it came true, they understood that person's role and how that works with God back then, you know, without the internet to talk about it without like a global sense of community in those times, how are prophets perceived?

Was it kind of like a very niche group of people or was it very commonplace to kind of.

Know and respect that living? Yeah. I think just in light of how common it is in Israel, I think they recognize that off. Of course, there's always a struggle sometimes in recognizing the difference between true and false prophets.

But prophecy wasn't a phenomenon that was exclusive to Israel either. So we have prophets that are in other ancient Near Eastern cultures as well. Kind of the ethical dimensions of the prophets or the ways that Israel's prophets would challenge their kings and those kinds of things does seem different from some of these other cultures where some of the court prophets, it seems like are basically there just to sort of cheer on the king and affirm whatever he wants to do and that sort of thing.

But yeah, prophets were a common phenomenon as part of ancient Near Eastern and Israelite religion and people understood what their roles were. And this is outside of the Hebrew religion? So like other belief systems had their form of a prophet?

Yeah. The Assyrians and some of the other ancient Near Eastern people that were exposed to in the Bible, they had their prophets. And one of the more interesting kind of, I don't know if the word pagan prophet is the right way to use it, but we have Balaam who is a non-Israelite prophet over in the book of Numbers.

And there's a pagan king that tries to hire him to put a curse on the Israelites. And this guy has, I mean, he has genuine prophetic gifts and supernatural connections in some way. But the problem is every time he opens his mouth to put a curse on Israel, God sort of overrides that and he ends up pronouncing a blessing.

And in fact, it gives us one of the earliest prophecies about a future great king in Israel in Numbers chapter 24. And this king is like, hey, this is not what I paid you for. You're talking about how great Israel would be in the future.

But I think it illustrates there were prophets outside of Israel. And from what we can tell, there were times when they may have had genuine supernatural occultic powers to really tell things that you couldn't just know from the human realm.

Yeah. That is terrifying that it's not even like, oh, because they weren't Hebrew or Christian, oh, they're a false prophet. It's not going to come true, but it's no equal forces of the good Christian prophets are prophesying a good future for Christians.

Whereas a more paganistic prophet can still prophesy a future on their paganistic behalf. It's not like only one of them works. They both have powers, quote unquote.

Well, and I think sometimes demonic and satanic deception and we were talking about contemporary prophets and things like that. I think that's something that we have to be very careful about is that when people are making these kinds of claims and that sort of thing, often their message doesn't even really jibe with what we have in scripture.

And I think that was one of the things God really conveyed to Moses is that a prophet who comes along and disagrees or conflicts or calls you to worship other guides or doesn't agree with what I have already revealed to you, that's one of the ways that you should know that this is a false prophet,.

Someone you shouldn't pay attention to. That is terrifying. Oh my gosh. I'm not going to lie.

Okay. Well, I want to talk about gives us discernment and has given us the word to assess and to critique and analyze what these people are claiming and saying. And I think that's why the finality of scripture is such an important thing.

We have that final ultimate standard to judge the claims of any religious.

Claims by. Right. Yeah. It's so important to just equip and arm yourself with the armor of God because of these very powerful but negative and opposite forces and authorities and dominions that are designed to be set against us.

And if you're not protecting yourself, you can be easily a victim to it. And I'm an idiot. I would fall for a false prophet. I could fall for there's MLMs that I fall for. I am just human at the end of the day.

So for these things, someone is predicting the future and has some sort of power behind it, even though it is evil, how can that not be.

Convincing? Yeah. I think that's where knowing scripture and knowing what the truth is and always making sure that no matter what supernatural power or element seems to be behind that message, if it's not in line with what God has revealed to us in his word, then we know it's counterfeit.

And Satan, there are warnings about that. Satan disguises himself and masquerades as an angel of light. And that was a recurring problem for the people of Israel as well. There were always the false prophets that were there, either because of their different understanding of the covenant between God and Israel or for purely financial reasons or those kinds of things, were always promoting at times these false messages.

I'm going to say something and it.

Might be problematic, but would you say that a false prophet is either a demonic or.

Be possessed slash attached to the demonic? I don't know that you can always say that they're demonic in the sense that, but I think their message has that demonic element behind it. And if they're trying to deceive and to present a message that's contrary to the truth about Christ and those kinds of things.

So I think there is that demonic element about it. Now, that doesn't mean that every person that claims to be a prophet has supernatural powers from Satan or those kinds of things, but they're preaching a deceptive message.

And I think sometimes the supernatural deception that's behind all of that may be a reason why people at times seem to be more gullible about, you know, we look at people and they're like, this is obvious that this is a fake or a con artist or that's a, how does that person, you know, win an audience or establish a cult or those kinds of things?

Well, there's definitely that satanic element behind.

That. Terrifying. Okay. Let's get into the juice. Okay. Okay. Okay. So I love the environment. I'm sustainable. Like I was a hippie once in a past lifetime. So for me being a Christian and caring about the environment, I started seeing all these changes in climate change and the like floods and famines and droughts, and then saying, well, we're clearly in the end times because look at all these horrible things happening.

Maybe just maybe, I mean, like I'm not, maybe these are indicators of things that were mentioned in revelation and I've got three examples here, but I'm sure there's much more. Um, the first one is revelation 16 where it's talking about the bowls and it's the sixth angel poured out, uh, poured out his bowl on the great river of Euphrates.

And then the water dried up to prepare the way for the Kings release. So for me, it's like, Oh, well, climate change, things are drying up. It's so dry. Look at this in the Bible, it's drying up. So, you know, we are just, this is the, this is an overlap, you know, in the Bible, it was talking more conceptually, but here it is like the physical manifestation.

So to me, when I read that, it was like, well, this is prophesying the future. Our 2024 language of this is climate change. But back then it was the end of the world, again, early Christian. This is, but I feel like this is an uncommon.

Belief. So how would be the proper way to interpret the Bible there? I've read some of a, of a scholar by the name of Rob, uh, Rob Dalrymple, who has talked about, you know, the possibility that things related to global warning and climate change may be a part of kind of the end times, uh, judgments and things that could be involved in that.

Um, there's a couple of things, um, if I can share this about Revelation 16, uh, a couple of things that I would want to, you know, just as I'm thinking through how we process this, um, and so you can let me know what you think about this, but one of the, when, when you look at these, uh, the bowl judgments that are in Revelation 16, um, it's very interesting how many of them parallel the, uh, the plagues that God brought on the Egyptians.

And so you have the water turning into blood and you have darkness. And, um, the, the one with the, uh, the, the scorching heat in one place, we don't see that parallel, but a lot of this is, I think, trying to create some biblical typology for us to where, uh, what, what John is saying, and John has hundreds of old Testament illusions in the book of Revelation and his imagery is often derived from the old Testament.

I think he's saying that the judgments that God will bring in the future, um, are like the judgments that God brought on the Egyptians. And in a, in a more, it's now, it's not just the judgment of one nation, but now we're talking about the judgment of humanity.

And this is preparing the way for, uh, the ultimate deliverance and salvation. So it's, this is going to be the ultimate Exodus. So before the Exodus, you have the plagues. Okay. And so with this one, and there's just a couple of other things, uh, that often in the Bible, the idea of God pouring out his wrath is a, is a common image.

So the idea here of pouring out a bowl is probably, you know, figurative rather than literal. Uh, the judgments that God often brings against people in the old Testament are described as fire and burning judgments and those kinds of things.

So I think we have to be careful reading too much into those details, but I don't, I don't think that that means that we should exclude the possibility that, um, you know, uh, things related to climate change or global warming may be part of the final judgment.

I'm just not sure that in these specific texts that I would want to like explicitly interpret them that way. Um, and, and I think the interesting thing in this one is that where do we have another example of water being dried up?

Well, that again is the Exodus. Um, so I think this is connected to all of that, but now, you know, at the original Exodus, the water was dried up and then the Egyptian army was drowned when they, but here the drying up the river facilitates this army that's going to march against God and then God is going to destroy them.

So I think there's a lot of Exodus imagery involved in all of this. And even like, this is a judgment that will be even like greater and more awesome than the Exodus itself. And, and so, yeah, I think we just have to be careful, understand the theology behind this and the imagery that's related to the old Testament, understand the biblical things that are going on rather than always trying to speculate on what the, uh, you know, what the contemporary significance of that might be.

Is there any like contextual evidence of like how they wrote things out? Because you would think that if he was saying like, Oh, this will be just like Exodus or the Egyptians, he would have said that, right?

Like, I hate this, you know, margin for wondering. I mean, I'm not expecting the Bible to be written in a way today, 2000 years ago today in a way that I can understand it. But is that just like the nuances of typology that just go over my head?

Well, I think, you know, sometimes they are explicit and they will say, you know, this is that, or this is going to be like that. But I think one thing that helps us is that when you have a preponderance of these, like when you have dozens of references to, to things that are like, wow, this parallels that this parallels that when you have a preponderance of those kinds of things, even if it's not explicitly stated, like, Hey, this is like the Exodus.

There's enough of that there that, uh, you know, you're not just being speculative when you make that connection, but, but you're right. They don't always like directly. And sometimes, um, I think, you know, being a reader who's in on, you're kind of in on the insider, you know, picture that's being drawn here.