Changing gears – a new direction for The Ancient Bridge

childrenAs much as we like to stay in the same place forever, sometimes God places us into a certain mode of operation for a time in order to train us for what we are really meant to do. Those of you who know me, know that I never planned on writing any of my three published books and that every book that was ‘my idea’ never could get beyond the first chapter so generally I sit around studying whatever tickles my fancy, waiting impatiently, and then one day He tells me what my next assignment is.

Ten years ago I got a long term ‘heads up’ in the form of a very vivid dream.

I was in an upper room, sitting at a round table in front of a projector screen. On the table in front of me was a sheet of music and playing on the projector was a documentary about a middle aged couple with 100 children, none of them biological. As I sat there in admiration, I realized that I was watching a video of myself and my husband.

Well, I woke up freaked out, convinced that Mark and I were going to adopt/foster 98 more children. I cannot convey the absolute horror that produced in me. I loved my own kids but pretty much hated everyone else’s. I informed God that if this was the plan He was going to have to fundamentally change who I am from the inside out. Four years ago when we moved to Lakeville, MN – our house just happened to sit next to a home based daycare.

There’s something about children who rarely see their parents that is incredibly endearing – I found that a child values the people who don’t have to spend time with them, but do so anyway. They can tell the difference. As I worked renovating the backyard, they would ask questions and I would answer. Answer time became silly story time, or sometimes I would sing to them. I couldn’t walk out my back door without hearing, “Tyler, will you tell us a story?” They had two stories they wanted to hear, the scary-silly “dark-dark” story and the story about the cute little (various animal) named (one of the day care kids) who really wanted to be a (ridiculous food item) and ended up getting eaten by a T-Rex after quizzing every other animal at the zoo about how to accomplish their goal. I learned that it wasn’t the story that they really loved, but the time and effort spent on their behalf to genuinely engage with them. With some of the really little guys, my name was one of their first words.

We moved away in March. I miss those little stinkers – especially now way out in the country with no neighbors and no kid voices, my own kids being hairy, deep voiced and oftentimes smelly teenage boys.

Anyway, two years ago a dear friend in Ghana named Cassyama – a mighty Christian woman of God – was praying for me and had a vision. She told me she saw me surrounded by “so many children.” I told her about my dream eight years before. She suggested I get into children’s ministry.

What? Me? No way! Yuck – no one respects children’s ministry! Visions of crayons and glitter danced in my head, and my eyelid twitched nervously. My very first ‘ministry’ position was as a Sunday school teacher to Middle Schoolers – not only was I just a brand new believer but I wasn’t even a parent – I was not equipped. They didn’t care – they needed a more mature version of day care and they handed me the little felt dudes and put me to work. It was a disaster. I can assure you it was NOT better than nothing, it was FAR FAR worse.

Anyway, I then wrote and published The Bridge – my outreach to the Christians I had so brutally and arrogantly (and ignorantly) burned my bridges with years before. Then I wrote and published King, Kingdom Citizen in response to the growing divide between Jews and former Gentiles within the Messianic movement. I was getting ready to write a book called Eternal: Our God, His Temple and the Aaronic Priesthood when I got waylaid. I even had majorly respected teachers lined up and willing to help me out with it. But then I got different marching orders – to write a children’s curriculum book on honor and shame culture in the Bible.

Writing a textbook was different than anything else I had ever done – it was harder. When you teach adults you can make leaps and ask them to make the jump with you, but with kids you have to take them step by step, not leaving things out. Teaching children requires a more compassionate pace – and it also means not always being able to teach everything you know, but limiting yourself to what they need and what will help them become critical thinkers, someday able to interpret Scripture themselves. So I wrote the ten week curriculum and published it about ten weeks ago and got my first review this week from a man who has a PhD in Biblical Geography, a University Professor – five stars. Wow, that was unexpected.

I also began my youtube channel, Context for Kids – you can find the link on my sidebar. I am doing short weekly teachings, starting this year with the first five books of the Bible – no doctrine, just context. Like my book, the videos aren’t for kids – they are for families. I am not a substitute teacher – I think that if the kids learn something then the parents should know it too. My book and videos are designed to get families learning and talking as a unit – to be mini-scholarly communities and not scholarly individuals. I read all those horrid scholarly books and articles and translate them into what I affectionately call ‘normal speak.’ I teach kids the exact same things that I teach adults – well, mostly. This week’s Torah portion was tough since half of it involved sex of some kind so I played it safe. My poor kids are never spared the details but I respect differences in approach and the ages involved. Not everyone is teaching 14 year olds.

I’ll be honest – I enjoy writing for adults but I don’t really enjoy teaching them. What I enjoy is putting concepts down on paper in as clear language as possible, but presenting those concepts to adults who are often very critical and wanting the Bible to be plainly understandable as it is – well, it can be pretty hazardous work. Some people are hostile to the thought that Bible people were entirely different than we are today. Adults are invested with agendas and sometimes with legends and many read only so that they can react negatively – but kids aren’t like that. Kids are still able to learn new and wonderful things without being offended by them – they aren’t invested with so much tradition that they can’t see clearly yet, the way we are. What I want to do is not to teach kids doctrine – that is a parental responsibility and privilege. I am a teacher of history and character – I believe that when kids get a glimpse of another way of life, the way of life that existed in Bible times, that no one will be able to tell them that the Bible is just a book of fairy tales. They are going to see the Bible for what it is, a history book that reveals God’s character, and His redemptive plan through His Son Yeshua (Jesus).

I believe, that in learning the Ancient Near Eastern historical and First Century context of scripture, that all believers in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and His Messiah can find common ground. We parents see the obstacles facing our kids, we see the terrible character of believers in our real and online lives, we see the needless wars being fought between people who genuinely all want to honor our God but disagree about what that looks like. I think that we can be united around a desire to equip our children to BELIEVE the Bible is true, and to UNDERSTAND in context why Yeshua (Jesus) is the Messiah. The world is going to pelt our kids with loaded questions that quoted Bible verses won’t be enough to answer. University professors, and even many believing professors, will tell them that the Bible wasn’t written when it says it was or by who it says it was written by. We need to stop that before it happens. Believe me – I used to specialize in asking those types of questions, and now I answer them.

Right now I am transitioning TAB towards children’s ministry. I  have nine different curriculum books in my brain and another one on developing Biblical character through the proverbs. I am trying to figure out a way to gather a group of parents together online, in a place where doctrine and agenda are outlawed and we all work together to better educate our kids on the provable context of the Bible. I firmly believe in the Biblical principle of throwing the divisive brothers and sisters out in the name of a healthy and respectful learning atmosphere. I have said it many times – I believe that this generation coming up is THE generation. They’re different, and we have the opportunity to undo some of the divisiveness that has characterized the Body of Believers for too long. We may not be able to unite around this or that doctrine, but we can unite as parents who see a desperate need for our kids to be able to prove that the Bible is our history, and our future. You may not agree with my doctrine and I may not agree with yours – but I don’t teach mine and I won’t question you about yours, I only teach context and character through archaeology and the written Word.

I don’t want children’s ministry to be an afterthought – I want to teach them grown up context at kid speed. They deserve to be our priority because their spiritual lives are most certainly going to be harder than ours. There are people out there trying to do great kids ministry, but too many are struggling because they aren’t considered to be the ‘real’ teachers (in my case it was actually tragically accurate) – the glory and investment goes to the adults, but that just doesn’t make sense to me. I am 46 years old and I don’t need to be equipped as badly as someone who is a kid right now. I think we need to re-examine what we have been doing and what it is we value. Kids ministry can be fun, but it has to accomplish the goal of equipping our kids or it is nothing more than daycare. I am taking a break while I get this figured out – video teaching might be late this week. I don’t want to rush in but I don’t want to delay either.

I have a few grown up “meme” blogs that I am working on in various states of being finished, but other people are beginning to research this and speak out so I feel the need for me to do it is lessening. I don’t know what all this is going to look like yet, but I guess I am eager to find out.

 



Novus Homo: The ‘New Man’ of Rome with Respect to Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians

Novus homoFirst of all, credit where credit is due. I am not the person who noticed this. My friend and teacher Rico Cortes of Wisdom in Torah ministries contacted me on Tuesday morning and asked if I wanted some homework.  Unlike my 14 year old sons, I actually love to do homework and so I jumped at the chance. Rico said, “Homo Novus – research it and I want to know if you see what I see.” I told him that I would get to it after school, not knowing what to expect, and went off to make the boys breakfast. While they were eating I snooped around and within about 30 minutes my jaw was hanging down and I responded to him with something like, “Oh my gosh, this is phenomenal,” but no one had written about it. There are no scholarly papers linking this piece of historical context to the First Century Biblical writings that I could find. So what I am going to present to you is something that Rico noticed and did the original footwork on. I put my findings into writing and sent them to him so that he could look over what I was seeing and we found that we were in agreement. He went ahead and shared what I wrote to him on his facebook page, and will be incorporating it into a much larger teaching on his website www.wisdomintorah.com very soon – it is going to be mindblowing and so if you are not already a site member, you want to become a site member. Everything I write, I write because Rico instilled me with a passion for learning as much as humanly possible about the Word of our King and God. So without further ado, here is what Rico figured out and I wrote in witness of:

Roman leadership (administrative authority) during the years of the Early Republic was restricted to the Patrician class (aristocracy) and certainly at no time in the Roman Empire do we ever see a complete eradication of the caste system, although at times advancements were indeed made. The years of 494 to 287 BC brought a great civil struggle between the Patrician class and the Plebians (commoners) which did eventually result in the granting of rights of Plebians to run for public office.

Of course, running for office and achieving office were two entirely different things and it was a rare event for a commoner to break in to the world of Roman politics. It was not until the passage of Lex Gabinia in 139 BC that secret ballots allowed Roman citizens to vote their conscience instead of being required to vote for the candidate of their patron’s choice. Still, even in the wake of this new legislation only the rare plebian was able to climb his way to the top echelon of government power – the Consul, which gave a man automatic entry into the Senate.

Such men who achieved this were called novus homo – ‘new men’ – the first in their families to achieve Senatorial status.  There were two types of novus homo – the first came from well-connected equestrian (or greater) families and the second came from families on the outside – the aforementioned plebians. Here’s the catch, they were Senators (called ‘small senators’) but they weren’t in the ‘in crowd’ – the caste system that made it so hard for them to achieve success still held them back. They had the elected position, they had the recognition, they had the authority – but they were still treated like second class citizens for a few generations.

How does this relate to Paul and the Ephesians? Ephesians 2:11-22 details the problem going on throughout the mixed assemblies of Asia – a problem related to another caste system. In this case, the caste system was not Roman patrician vs Roman plebian, but Jewish believers (and nonbelievers) in Yeshua vs believing yet uncircumcised former gentiles. In city after city we see this same problem of a caste system between believers with a definite legal wall of separation between the groups. The edicts of Shammai had really solidified existing Jewish prejudice against Gentiles to the point that, even when said Gentiles lived an entirely Jewish life in obedience to Torah Law to the exclusion of all idolatrous practices, they were not considered to truly be Jews unless they underwent formal conversion. In essence, the problem facing first century converts was much the same as was faced by the novus homo of the Roman Senate. They had a place, but it was resented and sometimes even undermined by the existing aristocracy.

11 Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; 12 that at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: 13 but now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. 14 For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; 15 having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; 16 and that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: 17 and came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. 18 for through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. 19 Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; 20 and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; 21 in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: 22 in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

Paul was a Roman citizen living among a population all too aware of the unjust Roman caste system – they would understand all too well the allusion that Paul was making to the political situation in Rome and to the difference between the equity of the Kingdom of Heaven under the great King YHVH and the Empire of Rome under the divine-pretender emperors. Gentile converts were being brought into the Kingdom in droves, but what status did they have? Were they regarded by God as johnny-come-lately’s, charity cases, or there merely to be a servant class to God’s chosen people – forever second best – a very distant second best? No, like any novus homo, they were chosen members of the upper echelon of humanity, not only full citizens of the Kingdom but on an equal level with the established jewry. What did that mean? It meant full authority, the same access to the Father through the mediatorship of Yeshua. Unlike the ‘new men’ elected as Consuls (and therefore automatically made members of the Senate), when they received election through Yeshua that middle wall of petition was broken down, and the man-made ordinances that set up a genetically based caste system was abolished because unlike Rome, God is no respecter of persons:

Acts 10 34 Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: 35 but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.

Here we see the precedent in Acts 10 – Cornelius and his family are righteous commandment keeping gentiles – ger tzadik – but they are excluded from the fullness of Jewish community life because Cornelius, as a Roman Centurian, is uncircumcised. When the Spirit falls on Cornelius’ entire family, it was an act over-ruling the ordinances of men – Cornelius was elected as a full citizen, and so was his entire family. Peter, realizing this, stays in his home and eats with his family. Peter, far from treating Cornelius like a Roman ‘new man’ who was grudgingly acknowledged but never accepted, embraces Cornelius’ family and shares the intimacy of table fellowship that would have been, up to this time, forbidden to them.

We see Paul fighting this same battle again and again, a battle against both his Jewish brethren who very much wanted to see and enforce things in terms of ‘them vs us’ and the Gentile converts who kept falling for it and assuming the Jews were correct. Yeshua, however, didn’t merely make ‘new men’ out of the Gentiles – the language is plain:

‘for to make in himself of twain one new man’

Yeshua made ‘new men’ of both Jews and Gentiles – it is through Him that we came to the Father. He preached to those who were near, and to those who were far off – holding each to the same standard, preaching the same message. We were called by the same message to the same life, the same rights and the same authority as believers – different parts of the Body with different functions according to His gifts to each man and yet all equal citizens, none above another.

 

Gifford, Paul Review of T. P. Wiseman’s New Men in the Roman Senate, Constellations Vol 2 No 2 (Winter 2011) pp 154-156

http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100240795

Gruen, Erich S, Review: New Men in the Roman Senate, 139 B.C.-14 A.D. by T. P. Wiseman The Classical Journal Vol. 69, No. 3 (Feb. – Mar., 1974), pp. 251-253

Unknown author, The Novus Homo: a study in politics and social mobility in ancient Rome

Wikipedia entry for Novus Homo



Confessions of a Former Torah Terrorist Pt II

terrorist2So anyway, last night was one of those nights where Father was really able to show me some things. Funny how reading a book like 1984 all over again in homeschool really brings things into perspective the way it never did as a teenager. I remember a time when I was part of the out of church movement – you know, I would often read the Bible three hours a day before everyone else woke up (that’s kinda what happens when you live on adrenaline). I would get up in the wee hours before the twins would wake up and pour through my Bible, but I did it with an agenda. I was reading my anger at the Christian Church into the text (even though I was a Christian). I hated churches after having gone through some really bad experiences. I decided that whatever people told me about structured churches outside of people’s homes was true and I zealously read the Scriptures to prove it. And when I say I believed what people said, I mean that I believed absolutely everything bad they had to say about it and nothing good. If someone made a pro-church claim, I set out to disprove it, and if someone made an anti-church claim, I simply thought about how much sense it made to me, read it into the text, and repeated it. I learned a lot about the Bible through these readings, but what I learned was tainted by my hatred – it poisoned me. I found proof for everything I believed at the time, because that is why I was reading. In talking to many people over the years, I have found that I am in no way unique – we tend to read not to find out what is there but to justify what it is we already believe. In other words, we read not to find out what is true but as an act of self-justification.

Evolutionists do the same thing with science, and so do Creationists. What happens when we go into our readings with an agenda? Well, the same thing that happens when evolutionists and creationists approach science – they toss the data that doesn’t fit and will oftentimes twist whatever data can be twisted. Each side fervently and genuinely wonders why the other side doesn’t ‘get it.’ And yeah, that’s what happens when people discover Torah as well – it gets easy to start reading the Bible in order to prove the other side wrong and ourselves right. But does God’s Word exist for the purposes of massaging our egos? What happened to the desire to find out what is actually there, even if it means finding out that we are wrong? Finding our own errors revealed in the Word is far better than finding our justifications in it.

When we discovered our fathers inherited lies (Jer 16:19), some of us got so angry that we stopped believing in and started believing against. I did that for a while, and those were the dark days of bad fruit for me – I treated people badly. I talked a lot – talked a pretty good game at that – I am a very persuasive person when I want to be, when I want to manipulate and discredit the person I am disagreeing with. I had to resort to that sarcasm, the mocking and manipulation because I really was against and not for. I was against the organized Church, against Christians, against Sunday Sabbath, against Christmas and Easter, against ‘lawlessness.’ But what was I for? Was I for seventh day Sabbath? For the Feasts? For the Law and the testimony? I thought I was – and I should have been, but my focus was on the things I was against – while deceiving myself that I was actually for the opposite of those things. I was so busy railing about the people who don’t get it that I wasn’t really getting it. I was very busy trying to be right and I wasn’t very busy becoming the kind of person that the Torah was designed to make me into. Zeal makes it easy for us to look like we are for when we are actually against.

What am I now? I am a person who reads the Word and studies context so that I can understand everything my Bible has for me. I spend my time and money so that not a single Biblical treasure will be left beyond my grasp – I want it all, even though I know the task is beyond me. It isn’t about being right anymore, but about finding out what is actually right – it isn’t about being against Christmas and Easter. Of course I don’t keep them, and of course I don’t approve of them – I don’t need a houseful of questionable European rituals when I have the Feast of Sukkot, and I don’t need the sequel that comes around in the spring to replace the Passover and First fruits. Of course I am against Sunday sabbath – but my faith is no longer defined by what I am against. What I am against is pretty much in the rear view mirror. I am merely and profoundly grateful that it is in the rear view mirror because I cannot go forward lugging them behind me. I am looking forward to the Feasts of the Lord, setting my sights on them, learning them, rejoicing in them – striving to live the life that I was called to live. I don’t have time to mock people whose eyes are not opened, or worry about the ones who do know but refuse to do what is right – or to think that I necessarily know which of those two scenarios this or that person falls into.

It’s about perspective, and when I was looking behind me I was stopped dead in my tracks, or at best, stumbling and tripping in a haphazardly slow forward direction, but mostly staggering to the left and to the right because we can’t walk while looking backwards – we weren’t designed for it. Maybe I simply see clearly now that I don’t have enough reason to be impressed with myself to dare spend my time looking backwards and mocking others. Once we start having our focus being “against,” we start getting into trouble. With me, it resulted in nothing but bad fruit – but I was so pleased with myself at the time that I never noticed. So last night as I was laying in bed I was deeply ashamed of the years I spent focusing on what everyone else was doing – and especially the efforts I took to shame them, thinking that I could convert them through pushing them down and degrading them.

I have been studying the Sanhedrin lately, and I am in awe of the requirements that they had in place for good judges. The Bible tells us time and again the qualifications for a good leader and never do they include the words we look for when deciding who to listen to and vote for – nothing there about being entertaining, or passionate about what they are doing, or convincing, or oozing charisma. They had to be experts in the topic they were speaking on, they had to be fair and yet merciful, mature in the faith, and respected – but in modern times, we don’t want to oftentimes listen to people unless they are entertaining. I was repenting last night of being the type of person who really used to believe what entertaining people told me. I was repenting for enjoying hearing people being mocked. I was ashamed for appreciating a compelling argument and rushing to judgment based on how much more quick on their feet one person was over the other. With my track record, I might have followed Korah rather than Moses – nothing charismatic about Moshe and he was too humble to spend his time mocking and insulting the people who disagreed with him. We follow personalities because they tickle our ears by propping up those who follow them with accolades and making those who don’t seem to be fools. Everyone wants to be one of the cool kids, we never really do outgrow high school.

Nowadays, we have the Presidents we deserve, and the lawmakers we deserve – because we act the same way they do, and we gleefully enjoy their antics, well at least the antics of the ones who agree with us. We are quick to hate and denounce the same behavior from those with whom we disagree. Ever wonder what it would be like – if we all stopped the antics and divisive behavior within the Body of Messiah? If we could present our facts without telling everyone something terrible about the person who disagrees? If we could just preach without telling our audience that everyone who is sane agrees with us and therefore why they should too? What would happen if we stripped the manipulative language, the mocking, and the sarcasm from our message and stopped telling people we are right – and instead just started acting right.

I look out there and see shadows and reflections of who I used to be, and wonder how much of it is still left in me. I know that I could easily slip back into it again, all I have to do is turn around and focus on battling someone else. I fight the urge to give in and return to those tactics, because those tactics are easy and they draw a crowd, but I don’t want the attention of that crowd anymore. I see how they treat people, and then I look at who does and does not respect them. Then I look at the people who don’t act that way, and I notice who does and does not respect them.

A long time ago I noticed something about myself that I think is pretty typical. When I have facts behind me, I am much less likely to manipulate, mock and divide because I don’t need to – and I am not tempted to compromise the truth. It’s when all I have is ideas and theories that I get down and dirty – because the facts are facts and they don’t need to be violently defended, they need only be presented and then people have a choice whether to believe or not. But when I am promoting my deeply held ideas or theories and they are shot down, it hurts – because their source is always emotional; the source is always about me, my opinions, my intellect, my ego and my desires and defending that at all costs – well in the past it meant that the ends justified the means of what I was doing, even if those means came at the expense of the basic dignity and humanity of someone else. The more I desperately need to believe something and the more desperate I am that everyone else believe it too, the more likely I am to compromise truth and sacrifice people on the altar of my agenda.

This is why I don’t spam people with my teachings. I put them on my wall and on my ministry page, and that’s it. No one has to read them and no one is required to agree in order to have me treat them with dignity – when I was a Torah Terrorist, everyone had to hear me and everyone had to agree, or I most certainly would not treat them with dignity. Father forgive me and guard me from slipping back into that pit if not for my sake then for the sake of Your reputation and for the sake of the lives of the people I would damage.

My teacher tells me all the time, “Just because we are right doesn’t mean we are right.”

When we are willing to compromise on the way we treat our brothers and sisters whose only crime is to dare disagree – it no longer matters what we are preaching, because we have become wrong. And if we are going to be wrong, it would be better if we stopped teaching the truth because when we teach the truth while acting badly, we make the truth look like a lie and make the lie look like it is good.

Part I is here.



How many wives did Jacob have? Is polygamy really Biblical?

polygamy2(Note: Yes, I do understand that it is actually called polygyny when a man has multiple wives, and polygamy can be either male or female but for purposes of using a familiar term to everyone I am simplifying this by calling it polygamy)

To the modern proponents of polygamy (as opposed to Biblical polygamy, which was entirely different), our forefather Jacob is the shining example – after all, he had four wives right? Well, that’s what I thought for many years as well and it was no wonder – I was looking through a lens colored by modern movies, television shows, and ten years spent living in uber-Mormon southern Idaho. One of the hardest things there is, is to contemplate the possibility that our point of view has been utterly contaminated – after all, they never taught ancient Near Eastern context in any of the churches I attended. I had no idea about what dyadic social identity was all about, or concubinage, and although I did understand the importance of political marriages (Solomon did NOT need that many alliances, just sayin’) I was way too caught up in idea that “black Mormons” (not meaning color, but it was just what they were called in my neck of the woods) represented a sort of an ideal Biblical model for what was going on in ancient times. Even though I never watched either “Big Love” or “Sister Wives,” I knew about people who lived like this and I will bet that anyone who lives in certain parts of certain western states can tell you the same thing. But like everything else, modern context is not Biblical context – we don’t think the same way or have the same needs and therefore we don’t live the same way; we certainly don’t have the same expectations.

So Genesis 30 is what I was teaching my boys yesterday morning. I put up the white board and I was marking out the family tree of the patriarchs. Every time a son was born I asked my boys to tell me who the sons belonged to and it worked fine until we got to Dan. “Who is Dan’s mom?” I asked. “Bilhah,” they replied. I smiled, and told them to listen again.

“Rachel is his mom,” one of them gasped. I smiled. We passed on to Zilpah, and they noticed it again – “Gad is Leah’s son!”

“Very good,” I smiled. “Now why? The text says that they are Jacob’s wives, and yet wives would retain ownership over their own children, so how can they be actual wives?”

The problem lies in the fact that the Hebrew word for wife, ‘isha,’ is also the generic word for woman (we see this same phenomenon in Greek), and so Bilhah and Zilpah were given to Jacob as women who were there for the express purpose of bearing children – otherwise known as concubines. In the ancient Near East, according to the laws of many of the surrounding nations, a woman had two years to bear a child to her husband and if she didn’t, she could legally be divorced. Families desperately needed heirs, and the dyadic social identity of a woman depended on her being not only a wife, but also a mother – it simply didn’t matter if your husband loved you best, if you had no children – Rachel knew that (so did Sarah, Rebekah, Hannah and Elizabeth). What Leah knew was that her husband, although she had given him many sons, had no regard for her – Jewish tradition even states that Jacob moved to Bilhah’s tent after the death of Rachel (I don’t think he ever got over that anger from the morning after the wedding). Both women had a crisis of identity – Rachel wasn’t a mother and Leah wasn’t really a wife in her own eyes. Rachel had the perfectly acceptable legal recourse in those days to provide her husband with a surrogate, and according to the laws of the surrounding nations, any child borne by the concubine would be counted as coming from her – which is exactly why Rachel, and not Bilhah, named the boys.

When Rachel had successfully provided Jacob with an heir, Leah felt her position was tenuous. She was no longer the mother of all of Jacob’s children – Rachel had a child now and she was the one who was truly regarded, by Jacob, as his wife. On top of all this, Leah had stopped bearing children – perhaps because Jacob was no longer performing his legal obligations to continue to provide her with marital relations (at one point, she actually had to buy a night with him from her sister). Because she was now barren (for whatever reason), she was in the legal position to give her own maidservant to Jacob as another woman, concubine. As with Bilhah’s offspring, Zilpah’s children are claimed and named by Leah as her own. This was the legal world and social context of the time of the Patriarchs. Although Bilhah’s and Zilpah’s children ranked lower than Leah’s biological children (as Joseph will prove with his behavior later on) and Rachel’s future children, they were officially counted as the sons of the wives, not as the sons of the concubines. We think of it differently, because we simply cannot imagine a maidservant being willing or even eager to consent to such an arrangement but when we look at it in terms of the times you will see a poor woman who was a servant, probably sold by her impoverished father to Laban’s family because he had no money to get her married off – not out of coldness but because if he died without seeing her provided for her only options were starvation or prostitution; she was resigned to perhaps never marrying, or if she did it would be to another servant, to give birth to servants. Really Bilhah’s and Zilpah’s lives would have looked bleak but they would have accepted it as their lot in life – in ancient times people firmly believed that their conditions and station in life were pre-determined by the gods and hardly worth complaining about or trying to get out of. They were survival oriented, and so when greeted with the opportunity to be something greater in the family, not wives but the mothers of some of the heirs of the House, that was a chance to have a much better life and better prospects for the future.

So, did Jacob have four legally wedded wives? No, he had two (and not by his choosing) wives and two concubines – four women to whom he was connected through children. As we progress through the stories about Jacob and his family, you will notice that his wives are respectfully addressed by name while Bilhah and Zilpah are repeatedly called, ‘the maidservants.’ Culturally, they were never elevated to the level of either Leah or Rachel – and they probably never expected to be. When Jacob calls his wives to him in Gen thirty-one – only Leah and Rachel are named. When they flee Laban in chapter thirty-two, verse twenty-two specifically mentions two wives and two female servants, and again in thirty-three verse one, Leah and Rachel are named, along with the ‘two female servants.’ In chapter thirty-five, after Rachel’s death, Reuben is specifically stated to have had sexual relations with his father’s concubine.

To add to the distinction within the family, in chapter thirty-seven, when Joseph goes tattling on his brothers, it specifically mentions that they are the sons of the ‘neshe‘ Bilhah and Zilpah. That’s an interesting word, because although the lemma is the same isha as I discussed above – neshe is tied in to the idea of a debt. As Bilhah and Zilpah were almost undoubtedly purchased by Laban as young girls from fathers who either needed to pay debts or who could not afford to provide dowries, this term does make sense – again, these were women of a special class.

Although this very well may offend our modern sensibilities, Zilpah and Bilhah had a better life than they had hoped for, in the end. And as for Jacob, he never intended to  have any other wife but Rachel and only ended up in this polygamous situation because of trickery – he chose to be a polygamist because it would seem that a man who was willing to work a grand total of fourteen years for a woman evidently could not imagine living without her. Abraham had one wife, and then only took a concubine when she was still barren at 80; he took a second wife only after the death of his first. Isaac had one wife. Elkannah had two women but again, one of them was barren so I suspect that Peninah was a concubine. As for kings – marriages were largely about political alliances (especially with David who was shoring up support with the various tribes as well as maintaining his connection with Saul’s royal line), except for Solomon, who was…. well, that did go well. The other polygamists in Scripture were Lamech (a descendant of Cain who killed a guy) and Esau (who… well he was Esau, nuff said) – we don’t see any of the twelve sons of Jacob having mutliple wives, Moses, Joshua, Caleb, the Judges (not even Sampson) or the prophets. It simply was a rarity.

To sum up, true Biblical (as well as ancient Near Eastern) polygamy (having more than one wife on purpose) was really limited to Kings, and that was historically for the purpose of creating alliances and safety for the kingdom. It served a specific societal function within a context that no longer exists (much like the need for Levirate marriage). Paul even specifically said that male leadership within the Body was to be limited to those men who only had one wife (I Tim 3:2, 12; Titus 1:6). So if someone is pushing polygamy, know that according to Paul (an expert in the Law and in the Scriptures) they have disqualified themselves for leadership – rendering their opinion merely an opinion.

Edit: I have been getting some great questions so I will share my answers.

What happens when a man is required to take his dead brother’s wife, if he is already married Deut 25:5?

The levirate marriage was for the purpose of providing a woman with offspring and so if a man was already married, he could still perform the levirate function and she would be provided for with her dead husband’s share of the inheritance, which then belongs to her son (or daughter, because the Torah also says that if a man dies and has only daughters they can inherit so that his name and inheritance will not pass from Israel). Levirate marriage served two functions – that a man’s name would not cease to go forward and that a woman would not be bereft of support. This would not be a true case of polygamy, because his intention was not to have two wives, but to provide for his sister-in-law – it was considered a mitzvah towards the dead brother as well as to the woman – to refuse to do this for her at her request would be to deprive her of her rights within the family. Her father contracted with her husband’s father that she would be a wife in that house, that she would provide heirs to the house who would have rights to his share of the inheritance. His death does not change the family’s obligation towards her. Hope that makes sense.

Deut 21:15 says that if a man has two wives, one loved and one unloved that he cannot disinherit the child of the unloved wife – doesn’t this say that men can have two wives?

Part of the problem with that verse is that it is almost always separated from the context of the verses before it – the case of the woman taken as a prisoner of war, brought into a man’s home and taken as a wife. If later he is disgusted with her (after all, she was from a pagan nation), he cannot treat her as a slave and simply sell her away but must treat her as he would treat a divorced wife. He has humbled her (had sexual relations with her) and cannot sell her to another man, he must allow her to go out for nothing (she came in with no dowry). Now we get to your verse – if he sends her away and she has provided him with children – despite the fact that he hates her he cannot treat her sons with contempt when it comes time to give the inheritance. The first born of this union is still his firstborn even after he marries another woman, loves her, and has children with her. I think some translators/editors have erred when they separate the two sections.

Could Paul have been saying that the husband and wife need to be one (Hebrew echad) instead of limiting a man to one wife?

The word used by for echad in the LXX (Septuagint, the authorized Greek translation of the Tanach – OT) and the NT (ie. John 10:30) is ‘hen’ and the word used by Paul in those instances is mia. The words do not share the same lemma and so are unrelated.

What about the “Ethiopian” woman that Moses took as a wife in Numbers 12:1?

There is much confusion about the word ‘Cush’ in Scripture – the first being that it does not actually refer to Ethiopia at all but instead a region more in the Sudan. However there are two separate lands related to the epithet ‘Cush.’ Kusite and Kusan are both used and they are spelled almost exactly the same – the only difference being a tav vs a nun at the end of the word. Habakkuk 3:7, in a paralellism (a literary device where something is said twice, slightly differently, in such a way as to equate two concepts), says this of Cushan

I saw the tents of Cushan in affliction; the curtains of the land of Midian did tremble.

Cushan and Midian are equated with each other, as are tents and curtains and affliction and trembling. As Zipporah was a Midianite, calling her a Kusite makes absolute sense.

Sources:

Laws of Hammurabi:
[144] If a man take a wife and this woman give her husband a maid-servant, and she bear him children, but this man wishes to take another wife, this shall not be permitted to him; he shall not take a second wife. (clearly, the reference to a second wife shows that the concubine is not a wife)

[145] If a man take a wife, and she bear him no children, and he intend to take another wife: if he take this second wife, and bring her into the house, this second wife shall not be allowed equality with his wife. (note that the second wife is only permissibly taken in response to barrenness)

[146] If a man take a wife and she give this man a maid-servant as wife and she bear him children, and then this maid assume equality with the wife: because she has borne him children her master shall not sell her for money, but he may keep her as a slave, reckoning her among the maid-servants. (notice that she is given the same treatment as a wife but is not a wife)

[147] If she have not borne him children, then her mistress may sell her for money. (obviously would not happen to a wife)

For an excellent read on many matters pertaining to women in the Bible (not all of which I agree with, of course), see Matthews, Victor H., Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (1998) p 229 is directly relevant to this discussion.

 



Judgment in Context: Honor, Shame, and the Command to “Judge Not.”

judgeI think we’ve all been driven just about nuts with the misapplication of Matthew 7:1 – I mean, it must be the most maddening verse in all of scripture because it is so readily (and inconsistently) used, it is almost never followed up with the requirements for being a righteous judge, and is even more rarely presented within the honor/shame context of the Sermon on the Mount.

7 “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. 3 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

But before we even get into these verses, what is judgement? Let’s look at the related term – justice:

Pro 21:15 When justice is done, it is a joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.

mishpatThat word “justice” is one of the most important words in scripture, the Hebrew word “mishpat,” so let’s look at it in Logos (thanks so much to the ministry supporters who bought it for me!). As you can see, mishpat is about rendering correct verdicts and is overwhelmingly associated with making sure that the oppressed are correctly judged in legal matters when associated with the corresponding concept of righteousness, or “tzedakah.”

Righteous judgement is always something that we want. People go to court, wanting to be judged – but so often because we have decided that judgment is a negative term we do not see that judgment is very much a double-edged sword. When two people come to court, one is judged righteous and the other unrighteous – in other words, someone is judged to be in the right in this situation and the other person is judged to be in the wrong. Without a proper judgment, we can’t even differentiate between good or bad – there are no good or bad parents, just parents. The parents who molest and burn their children with cigarettes are, without judgement, on par with the parents who work three jobs just trying to put food on the table and get their kids a good education. We want judgment – heck, I want judgment. I want judgement when I am in the right (righteous), most certainly, but also when I am in the wrong (unrighteous) so that I can make corrections. Justice can never be done without judgement. Rapists and child molesters, without judgement, can’t be villified, Hitler becomes just another world leader, and ISIS beheading children can be likened to the Wall Street protesters. Without judgment, they are all equal by definition. One of the greatest commandments throughout scripture is that we rightly judge in the case of the oppressed, widowed, orphaned, foreigner and poor. Compassionate and correct judgement is the lifeblood of the Kingdom.

But people love to say, “Judge not” when someone else holds them accountable for their actions. Now, sometimes we need to keep our judgment to ourselves – we have no right being the endless busybodies of the world, holding non-Covenant people to Covenant standards that they never agreed to live by (as opposed to ourselves, who did agree to live by certain standards). Sometimes, however, Covenant people do need to be held accountable for the actions that bring shame onto our Great God and King – we are no longer our own.  ‘Judging’ has become another way of saying ‘disapprove’ – ‘do not judge me’ has become ‘do not disapprove of me.’ In our society, it isn’t even enough anymore to make something horrific, like abortion, legal – we also are being forced to approve of it and people are quick to claim divine backing by inserting Messiah’s out of context quote.

What is Messiah saying here? Yeshua (Jesus) had just spent two chapters judging people and disapproving of their behavior – but in the context of what? The honor/shame culture of the day. I cover this in depth in my family curriculum Honor and Shame in the Bible but I am going to briefly talk about it here.

The ancient world was like judgement central – but not in the way we would automatically think. Well wait, if you’ve ever been on social media or spent the obligatory four years in High School, maybe this will make perfect sense. In a nutshell, men would gather in the public sphere (women in honor/shame cultures are better off at home, believe me!) and pretty much do whatever they could do disrespect each other while still appearing dignified. They would challenge each other in various ways – from doing good deeds simply for the purpose of looking good, praying and fasting in public for the express purpose of looking righteous, to making verbal attacks – sometimes disguised as questions, compliments, or even dinner invitations. Everything done in the public sphere was carefully orchestrated for the sole purpose of gaining respect for oneself and their family by taking it away from some other man and his family – even at the expense of the dignity of the women in the clan (which was one of the biggest reasons they were home, for their own protection – a non-family member often wouldn’t think twice about destroying a woman’s reputation if it meant that he gained prestige over another man).

The Talmudic authors called the first century a time of sinat chinam – gratuitous hatred – and the first century writings cannot be understood without a grasp of the terrible community evils that were being wrought all over the ancient Near East. Almost everything Messiah did publicly fell into the context of these honor challenges as the Judean elites tried everything they could to destroy His honor and get it for themselves. I still haven’t explained “Judge not,” I know – I am getting to it, trust me.

An honor challenge without an audience was nothing more than a private insult, and a private insult was only given to loved ones – someone who you would not want to humiliate publicly. Public insults served two purposes – the humiliation of your enemy, and the elevation of your own honor. Men would gather in the public sphere in order to watch, participate in and judge these honor battles. They would decide who was the most honorable in the challenge based really on who was the most clever – not who was the most decent.

Chapters 5 and 6 of Matthew show Yeshua revealing the Kingdom concepts of honor, literally turning the first century Greco-Roman honor/shame culture on it’s head and commanding His followers not to engage in it – and at the beginning of Chapter 7, He also tells them very plainly not to even sit by and judge those shameful battles either. These men were standing around weighing each other’s value in the balance, judging each other over what amounted to ridiculous schoolyard games for popularity. The previous chapters should have, even before these statements, put them all to shame by showing them how sinful even the most “honorable” of them were on the inside (no one cared about the inside in that culture, only the outside) – that they all had too big of an actual sinful log in their eye to be judging others based on something so shallow as who could verbally outmatch everyone else. The judgments that they were judging with had nothing to do with correcting sin and everything to do with  who could be the most insulting, who had the highest rank in society, or who was seemingly the most righteous in appearance. Over and over again, from Genesis to Revelation we are commanded to judge with righteous judgment – but Yeshua wasn’t talking to a society that was practicing that in the public sphere.

In a way, it was as though Yeshua was speaking in a High School auditorium – telling the popular kids that they weren’t really “all that” while admonishing their great unpopular throng of victims to stop playing their hateful games and to see themselves according to God’s idea of what is and is not honorable. In today’s ‘adult’ society, He would probably scold the folks on facebook who are engaging in and encouraging verbal battles between believers, judging based on appearances and reveling in the carnage that serves only to make God look bad – or those who continually try exalt themselves by pulling others down. If you’ve ever been on the pages of some of my co-teachers, you’ve definitely seen the types of people who only drive by when they want to correct and/or harass a well-respected teacher in order gain respect for themselves.

Yeshua’s message? Clean up your own lives (inside and outside) and then, yes then, judge others. Judgement is necessary to survival. Everyone is judgmental – some people are simply more honest about it than others.

Honor/Shame culture is extremely complex and a working knowledge of it is indispensable in understanding the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation as well as modern day Islamic terrorism. My new fifty lesson course is designed for entire families to explore together in order to get a solid basic handle on honor/shame culture, and gives direction for more in depth study.

All Scripture quotes from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2001)