The Bridge, 2nd Edition available on Amazon

The_Bridge_Cover_for_KindlePressed into action by third party sellers offering the first edition for $35 because it was “out of print” and therefore somehow “rare and valuable” (rolling my eyes as I type that), I finished my rewrite.

The Bridge: Crossing Over Into the Fullness of Covenant Life is a plea to the Body to re-evaluate the Father that Jesus Christ/Yeshua the Messiah preached and to enter into the relationship that He created us for and longs for. The Bridge is my love-letter to the Father, an apologetic of sorts for the type of relationship we are called to live with Him as His children, ambassadors, servants and Bride. Whereas King, Kingdom, Citizen explores the reality of God as King, and ourselves as the citizens of His very real Kingdom, The Bridge is all about the Body as a Family with God as the Patriarch. In a world where families are so often twisted and mangled with abuse, addiction and dysfunction, that too many believers simply have no idea how families were always meant to relate to one another in an atmosphere of absolute trust and loyalty. Too many modern fathers are absent and we need, as a Body, to learn what it truly means to have a good Father. I call my message “restoration theology,” returning Christianity to the factory specs – I don’t much like reformations and protests, I think they are more about being angry at other believers and what they believe. I believe in going forward into what Messiah and His disciples taught and how they lived.

I rewrote the Bridge after a year of extensive Ancient Near Eastern and First Century research, some of which disproved a few items I wrote about on page 208 of the original edition in the chapter “So what about Christmas and Easter?” Sadly, I fell prey to my own poor scholarship by passing on some very popular urban legends that I disproved last summer, but hadn’t remembered writing about (it isn’t as easy to remember everything in a book as you would think, even if you wrote it yourself). When I figured it out, I realized that one paragraph was hurting the witness of the rest of the book and so I pulled it from the market and put the rest of the book under the microscope. I removed 4,000 words that weren’t really necessary and added 20,000 more of new material – including expanded understandings on subjects like animal sacrifice, tithing, headcoverings, women teaching, and the Roman legislated/forced split between Christianity and Judaism in the 4th century.

If you already own the original, I am not asking you to buy a new copy. First weekend in March, Amazon will allow me to give it away for free on Kindle for a few days and you can get a free Kindle ap for your computer, phone, or android device. If you subscribe to my blog you will get the notification when it is available.

I can’t even begin to express how much I regret that one paragraph, but it did give a more experienced me a chance to offer a better book for new readers. I just couldn’t sell the old one anymore. No matter how many people believe something, we have to be able to prove it in order to teach it as truth – theory is for evolutionists and goodness knows we bash them over the head with their need for absolute proof in order to be credible. We are servants of the Most High – we have to do better and as much as possible, what we teach has to be above reproach, especially when we claim to be teaching from the archaeological record. I was lazy and I assumed that everyone else was doing their homework so I didn’t have to – even though I had carefully researched the Bible verses and made sure that they said what I claimed, I fell short when it came to “common knowledge” of some things that aren’t in Scripture but could have been researched. The bulk of what I teach rested upon the integrity of one paragraph, and I was devastated when I saw that I had fallen short. Our Heavenly Father and His Messiah deserve better. When we teach about Him, His reputation is at stake, not simply ours. People see us, they don’t see Him – we have to do our very best.

So I did better. It still isn’t Hemingway, Bronte, or Austen – but I feel a lot better about what I have produced.




A Nation of Priests, Part III: Holiness

priestsnationIf you haven’t read the previous installments yet, this is the third part of a series (part 1, part 2) that I started last year covering the much misunderstood concept of the “nation of priests” written of in Exodus 19 and the book of Revelation in 1:6 and 5:10 (The KJV “Kings and priests,” I have come to find out, is not necessarily the best translation – Kingdom of priests is a viable alternative and would actually hearken back to Exodus, however).

So, in the past I have covered this conceptual idiom in terms of the unique Ancient Near Eastern relationship between the major gods and the king and priests (to the virtual exclusion of the laymen – aka, normal people), which in Israel was given to all and not just the elite. I also explored this within the context of the individual mandate to do justice and righteousness – something that would have been implicitly understood by the congregation at Sinai. There was something, however, that I lacked understanding of last year – and that is the ANE and, specifically, Biblical concept of Holiness. Allow me to explain.

No god can be approached on human terms – not pagan gods and not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He is Holy and therefore must be treated with our absolute respect, and with the honor He deserves. As we could not go over to England and barge into Buckingham palace and demand an audience with the Queen, unbathed and dressed however we feel like it, in the same way, God presented Himself as the King of kings and the Lord of lords – therefore deserving of far more respect than the gods and kings of the surrounding nations. That meant that in order to collectively have an ongoing relationship with Him, the Israelites themselves needed to have a special status – they needed to be a Holy nation. They needed to have the type of set-apart status that was reserved in the ANE for kings and priests.

The kings of the nations claimed to be the sons of the gods, suckled at the breasts of goddesses, and were destined to become one with those gods in the afterlife (we see this especially in Egypt). Israel was called the children of God for precisely this reason, BUT the pagan elements of being suckled at the breast of a goddess and attaining oneness with God in the afterlife was stripped from their understanding. They were set apart like priests, but not according to the Egyptian culture that had become their context for hundreds of years.

Joshua Berman’s incredible chapter on Kedushah, or Holiness, in his book “The Temple: Its Symbolism and Meaning Then and Now” has absolutely transformed how I see these “nation of priests” verses – especially in light of my ANE studies into the religion of the nations. I absolutely recommend this book – even if you do nothing more than read that first chapter it is worth every cent. It was recommended to me by my Temple teacher Joseph Good as part of the extensive Temple study course that he offers.

I grew up thinking that Holy meant “super good” and in recent years I simply thought it meant “set apart” but I have come to learn that my understanding was woefully lacking in what is probably the most important term in all of scripture to understand. First, the basics –

Only God can decide what is and is not Holy to Himself. Despite our declaring this or that to be holy (Batman was really good at doing that), we don’t have the right to make that call ourselves. Our sanctuaries might be set apart for our use, but they are not Holy ground. In fact, in Scripture God declares very few things to be Holy. The first is the Sabbath – nothing else in creation was declared holy (we’ll see why in a bit), the second is the ground around the burning bush. You will notice that no people have been mentioned yet… and no single person ever will be, not by God (and no Nazirite’s don’t count as personally Holy, the station, vow, condition of being a Nazirite is Holy). What is designated as Holy is the Nation of Israel as a whole, collectively, not individually. The Aaronic priesthood is also Holy unto God, but the people themselves are not intrinsically holier than other Israelites – their office and function is.

Holiness is attributed to things, to specific areas, to periods of time, to functions, and to the People of Israel as a whole.

Everything Holy has a certain thing in common – restrictions. Things and people that are Holy can not be used for, or participate in things, that things and people which are not Holy can participate in. The garments of the priests, for example, were never to be worn outside and could not be re-used as rags afterwards – instead they were turned into Menorah wicks when they became unusable. They were too Holy to be used outside of the Temple/Tabernacle or for any purpose that was not Holy. The Sabbath, and later the Feasts – especially Yom Kippur – were Holy convocations and hence there were restrictions (which is why the Sabbath alone out of Creation was called Holy). Certain activities are forbidden when you are operating on Holy time. The offerings to God at the Tabernacle/Temple had restrictions on where they could be offered, how they could be offered, who was able to offer them, who could eat of them and where they could eat of them. Entrance to the Temple grounds themselves were subject to restrictions and even the High Priest could not go anywhere He wanted whenever He wanted, nor could the King (Uzziah found out the hard way). Moses had to take off his shoes when he walked on Holy ground and the Priests likewise ministered in the Temple in bare feet. The Priests were restricted in whom they could marry. Israelites cannot eat of animals that God created to be garbage disposals. Holiness is always accompanied by restrictions.

All of these restrictions were due to the Holy nature of specific things, times, offices, and general life as an Israelite. (The Pharisees and their whole beef with Yeshua (Jesus) in Mark 7 came down to the fact that they were trying to bring those Holiness standards of the Temple into people’s houses, as though to declare them Holy ground and Yeshua had a problem with that. Today we see similar circumstances when people try to strictly enforce some (but not all) impurity laws that were meant for the Temple – case in point, enforcing menstrual impurity requirements within congregations, but not those related to seminal emissions, normal sexual relations or corpse impurity, which is the most serious impurity and can be contracted by even being in the same room with a dead body). Holiness belongs only to the things, times, functions and nation that God ascribes  – not the things that we ascribe them to.

Holiness was ascribed to the entire Nation, and thus they were (and we are) expected to behave accordingly – our behavior is restricted because we serve a God who calls the shots on how and when He will be worshiped, as well as how He will be represented before the unbelieving world. Holiness is about God’s value system, not about random, outdated laws that are meaningless.

Israel was called Holy and thus compared to a nation of priests (set apart ones), but their Holiness came part and parcel with living according to restrictions. There is no Holiness where there are no restrictions – it is an impossible situation.

In chapter 19, after being told that they will be a nation of priests, we still see a priestly division among the people. When given the commandments about keeping clear of Mt Sinai – it was given to the people and to the priests. They were not all called priests and never at any point in the Scriptures is there a lack of priestly designation. Certain people were allowed to ascend to certain levels of physical closeness to God.

There are those who say that the Tabernacle and the Priesthood were only given because of the golden calf incident in Genesis 31, but the furnishings were commanded in Exodus 25, the Tabernacle itself in Exodus 26, the provisions for the Courtyard in Ex 27, the Priesthood for Aaron and his sons in Ex 28, the consecration of the Priests in Ex 29, and other functions in Ex 30. It was only after all of this happened that the Israelites sinned. The Tabernacle and the Priesthood were all part of the plan.

Why? Because a Holy God who has deigned to live among His people deserves to be treated like the King of kings, with a splendid dwelling place, with the best of everything, and served by those He purposefully set apart for the task – those who lived by more stringent guidelines because of the gravity of their position and their nearness to the Holiness of God. Frankly, the job of the Priests was to keep the pollution of day to day human living as far away from God’s Holiness as possible (not all pollution was sin, mind you). They did this through teaching people what is and is not clean and what is and is not holy (there is a big difference – everything holy is clean but not all clean things are holy). The maintenance of the Holiness of the Tabernacle (and later the Temple) was about God’s honor, and a big part of the job of the Priests boiled down to decontamination – mediation, cleansing through lifeblood, and through instruction in holiness and cleanliness. Their job was Holy, they ministered in a Holy place, with Holy things and even they had to seriously ramp up their own personal Holiness level during Holy times.

The rest of Israel didn’t have those responsibilities, or those restrictions – they were a “nation of priests” in that they were Holy, but they cannot be confused with actual Priests because they never served that function.

 

 




Question: How do you study Bible Context and how do I find good sources on my own?

bookGot asked this several times this week and since I hate rewriting the same things over and over again I figured it would be a worthy blog – and useful for my Context for Kids families who are wanting to know how to find answers for themselves.

In the past week I have come in contact with two cases where absolute lies were passed off by lazy “historians” and people in the media that should have been immediately checked. Here is what I posted yesterday on facebook – and hence the reason for writing this today. Quotation from A History of US, Book 5 by Joy Hakim

A few days ago I shared about how the “curse of the Pharaohs” became common knowledge as one person made a claim which got repeated and then repeated again. I had no idea that this also happened to a great hero Joseph Cinque (Sengbe Pieh), but we read this as we were studying the Amistad slave ship revolt in school this morning (and of course, I verified it).

“You will read in some books that Cinque returned to Africa and became a slave trader himself. That is not true. And yet that story has been written many times. Why? Because an author who learned the story of the Amistad and Joseph Cinque decided to write a novel about it. A novelist CAN WRITE ANYTHING THAT MAKES A GOOD STORY. He decided it would give the story an ironic twist to have Cinque become a slaver himself. A historian read the novel, THOUGHT IT WAS TRUE, and retold the story in a history book. (History books, of course, should always be true.) Then ANOTHER historian QUOTED the first historian, and then ANOTHER, and then ANOTHER. And that is how made-up stories sometimes come to be history.”

If you want to know how easy it is for an author to make unsubstantiated claims and how hard it is to disprove something that there is no evidence for check out this article on the attempt to find out the truth about the Cinque allegations and how people still insist on believing the lie http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/caribbean/amistad-cinque.pdf

About nine months ago I asked a local homeschooled high school student, who always aces the State tests, “If you were assigned a report, how would you research it?” He gave exactly the answer that I expected.

“Google and wikipedia.”

He was shocked when I told him that more often than not, that was a recipe for disaster. Why? Because anyone can have a webpage and frankly, anyone can edit or create a wikipedia page. All you have to do is make claims and you can even choose to or not to cite sources, but you don’t have to accurately reflect those sources and the sources don’t even have to be legitimate. Unless someone comes along who is fact checking, errors and myths can go unchallenged. Here is a quote from wikipedia which is “allowed to be imperfect”

“Don’t be afraid to edit – anyone can edit almost every page, and we are encouraged to be bold! Find something that can be improved and make it better—for example, spelling, grammar, rewriting for readability, adding content, or removing non-constructive edits. If you wish to add new facts, please try to provide references so they may be verified, or suggest them on the article’s discussion page. Changes to controversial topics and Wikipedia’s main pages should usually be discussed first. Contributing to Wikipedia will provide you with resources on all the basics needed to use, comment on, and contribute to Wikipedia.

Remember – you can’t break Wikipedia; all edits can be reversed, fixed or improved later. Wikipedia is allowed to be imperfect. So go ahead, edit an article and help make Wikipedia the best information source on the Internet!”

I’ve had people tell me that Wikipedia is properly vetted – this proves otherwise. This is not to say it is always wrong, but we should not put too much faith in its reliability. I’ve had folks claim that a book cited in a Wikipedia article says one thing – then I read it and it says the opposite. Of course, when they cut and pasted the reference straight out of Wikipedia complete with ISBN # in the exact same order, I knew they hadn’t actually read it – but I digress. It was a great book though, so it turned out for the best.

As for Google – type in something ridiculous, and someone has probably already “proven” it, complete with Bible references and quotes from Abraham Lincoln.  You can prove absolutely anything using Google and that’s because both the sane and the insane have equal access to producing websites, the educated and the uneducated, the saint and the con-man, the wise and the gullible.

Can Google be used to study? Yes. Find out the experts in your field of study and do a search for them and you might get lucky and find a free online paper, or a website, but most people in this life who work hard and study put the information into books and legitimate scholarly articles. They didn’t receive their information for free and they won’t give it out for free. I actually bought over 120 books last year and fortunately my book sales covered the expense – that means I wrote books to buy other people’s books so that I can write more books lol. In studying, I learned who the legitimate scholars are and who some of the pretenders are. (Hint: the popular people are often the pretenders because the real story is generally boring unless you are a total nerd, which I of course am)

The key is going with the established experts in the given area of study, not necessarily with the celebrities, and not necessarily the people you agree about everything with. People wanting to read casually about mythology like Joseph Campbell, but true experts roll their eyes at him because he is not credible upon deeper study. I also make sure I am dealing with an objective source by seeing how their findings line up with people from different backgrounds.  Believe it or not, I have found integrity and good scholarship (as well as a lack or integrity and bad scholarship) from Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Jews, Muslims and Atheists! Good scholarship is marked by providing source material and not just by making wild claims, no matter how many people are making the same claims. When we are talking about archaeology and Bible context, the proof is either there or it isn’t and we teach what has been unearthed – and a lot of material has been unearthed over the last 150 years.

Start with some legitimate names in contextual research – John H Walton is easily the most readable, really no contest. Look at who he works with and whose work he cites in his studies – they will be legitimate. Get a copy of Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, as well as his IVP Bible Background Commentary on the Old Testament, as well as his Illustrated Zondervan Commentaries, and The Lost World of Genesis One. Certain names will keep popping up as sources. Learn the differences between scholarly books like his, and commentary like my King, Kingdom, Citizen – a book that is properly documented but I am not an actual expert even though I seriously study the experts. I wouldn’t tell anyone to write a report citing me, but citing my sources, definitely. Get as close as you can to primary source material.

Read what a number of people say about a subject before jumping to conclusions – after all, the first thing we hear sounds reasonable until it is rebutted.

Pro 18:17 The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. 

Even a good scholar can be wrong on a point, we all have our blind spots – the more scholars you get together, of differing backgrounds, the less likely it is that they will have the same blind spot. If an Atheist, a Muslim, a Protestant and a Jew can all agree on a piece of Ancient Near Eastern context, then chances are excellent that you have yourself a very objective piece of information. However, if your only source is a bunch of people with a narrow agenda who quote each other, back away quietly before they try to convert you – no matter how many people follow their youtube videos (especially if they do that scary thing with obscuring their voice – that’s just creepy!).

JSTOR.org is a great starting place for looking at scholarly articles and you can register and have 3 free articles in your bookshelf at a time, checked out for three weeks before you can get a new one to replace it. You can’t print them out, but it’s worth it to check it out before you pay money for the privilege of being able to download it. Even scholars have to eat, after all.

Start small. I started with listening to teachings, but then I decided to actually test drive the information. Rico Cortes was my first context teacher, and then Ryan White and then Joe Good. If I listen to a teaching and I want to know it and not just decide to believe  it, I buy the books they recommend and then I read others as well. As I have grown in this, however, I am knowing who to take seriously on certain subjects and who not to waste my money on. And just because I take an expert seriously doesn’t mean I automatically accept what they are saying – there has to be supporting evidence and not just claims.

Parents of my context kids – be studying with your kids, if they are interested, but I wouldn’t let them study alone. Bible context is not always G or even PG-rated – especially Egyptian mythology, dang, ANY mythology. Please, please do not hesitate if you have a specific interest, to ask me who the real deals are doing the good research.

Getting back to the books is time consuming and expensive, but required for real studying. Watching a video isn’t studying, it simply gives us something to agree or disagree with, but it is very valuable to get us started and to alert us to new areas of study. It’s also good to hear someone else’s take on it, someone who actually speaks English (unlike most of these ANE scholars, sheesh, who write “ivory tower intellectual” instead of “normal people language”). I sometimes disagree with my teachers because we will see the facts in a different light, but we are seeing the same facts, not just making them up.

Once I have a topic, I will find a book on it – usually I get a recommendation. Sometimes I will even contact an author as ask who they recommend in their field and they are often surprisingly quick to answer. That book will have references, and if they are papers in journals, I can oftentimes find them online and read them myself to make sure the author is being honest about what is there. Sometimes a book will lead to another book and especially on topics like Honor and Shame where it led to six books, plus a bunch of articles. When I studied it out, I felt like I could finally teach about it with  integrity – not just asking you to believe something that I had chosen to believe.

References alone do not mean legitimacy – I can reference a book I have never even cracked open and tell you it says something, when I have cherry picked or twisted the information. There are some very popular books out there that have done just that, and then they get quoted, and someone quotes the book that quoted them and then you have a Cinque situation,  only now it’s believers doing it, and the subject matter touches on God.

Just one last thing – If you ask a teacher for proof of what they just taught and they respond with “google it” or “If you give a man a fish you will feed him for a day but if you teach a man to fish he will never be hungry again” or “it’s just obvious to everyone,” then it’s time to realize they aren’t teaching but regurgitating. Feel free to disregard what they are saying. Most people have not verified what they are saying and have no wish to because information limits us – kinda like it does with a defense attorney who actually knows his client is guilty. Information limits what we can and cannot pass off as truth, so a lot of folks avoid it – thing is, they never make it sound like they haven’t actually studied.




“This is the beginning of months for you:” Egyptian Calendars, the birthdays of the gods, and why Goshen was the “best of the Land.”

sphinxEx 12:2 This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you.

Slaves don’t live by their own timetable, and after over eighty years in slavery (we know they were enslaved during the reigns of two Pharaohs but we are not told when the actual slavery started), they once again had to be set straight – this article will show you the reason for the confusion. 

In preparation for teaching Exodus, I reviewed all my Egyptian books because it was very much Egyptian religion (the first mention in scripture of anything is important and Egypt is where we have the first mention of heathen priests, magicians and our first real exposure to false religion) that infected Israel during their sojourning. Like I always say, “Aaron didn’t figure out how to make a golden calf out of his own imagination, that took a specific skillset.” He had seen something that was generally only seen within the confines of a Temple or in a public processional and on top of that, he actually made one – but we’ll talk about that in a few weeks.

Egyptian literature is full of interesting and funny stories like this one about the birth of the “big five” gods and goddesses that also gives us an insight into the Ancient Near Eastern mindset of what gods (unlike YHVH) were like and this one provides a window for the ancient calendar system as well. I enjoy studying this because we see in these stories, oftentimes, the reasons for the plagues on Egypt.

Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys were born during the last five days of the Egyptian year (called epagomenals) but their year is unlike the Hebrew year which starts in the Spring, or the late era Roman year which started in January (beginning in about 45/46 BCE). Egyptian years are tied into the inundation (flooding) of the Nile, which begins in late June – and is today celebrated in August at the culmination. You know, in the ancient world you really don’t find the birthdays of any gods pointed out, Egypt seems to be rather unique and only seems to be mentioned as a way of “correcting” the calendar by acknowledging that 360 days was’t truly a solar year. In fact, I have found birthdays of gods to be singularly unimportant (and unmentioned) until we get to Imperial Cult, when the deified Emperor’s birthday became a holiday. Up until then, the focus was on their lives and their birth would only be mentioned in relationship to the circumstances around it, not related to the dates which were hard to pin down with any accuracy. It was the legend around the birth, and not the date, that was mentionable because calendars worldwide were a total mess until 45 BCE (before then, Roman months alternated between having either 29 or 31 days, ugh) and we cannot accurately tie ancient events to a Roman calendar system that wasn’t even set in stone until then. In fact, the Roman year for a long time only had ten months with the entire winter kinda left out in the cold, so to speak. Hence in Egypt we have rare birthdays of gods pinpointed to the last five days of the Egyptian year. That’s why we see ancient events narrowed down to a year and a season within that year, as best as possible, but even that can sometimes be debatable. The Bible, of course, will sometimes name a date on the Hebrew calendar which then still cannot be absolutely lined up with a Roman calendar date that was not yet in existence.

The Egyptian calendar was 360 days long, with three ten day weeks in a month, and only three seasons, beginning with the inundation (flooding) of the Nile – the time when all the silt was washed down from Upper (southern) Egypt into Lower (northern) Egypt and most significantly, into the Land of Goshen – making it the fertile “best of the Land” – the ideal place for YHVH to place the Israelites. Remember that everyone had to sell their land to Pharaoh in order to pay for food during the last years of the famine but that would not have extended to Joseph’s family because they received their provisions for free. Can you imagine the animosity towards his family once a Pharaoh came to power who did not know Joseph and all these foreigners were landowners and the native-born Egyptians were tenant farmers??

Anyway, I digress, again. So the Egyptians had a dilemma – they had a 12 month calendar with 30 days each month but that left them with a problem at the end of their calendar year at the arrival of the inundation – the beginning of new life in Egypt. So they developed a mythology about the goddess Nut who was cursed with the inability to give birth during all 360 days of the year by her grandfather Re (after having given birth already to the sun, stars and planets). After playing dice with Thoth, she won five more days and was able to bear children during those days, evading her grandfather’s curse – as they were not considered actual days of the year. Egyptian legalism! During this time she gave birth to Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys – the “big five” in Egypt.

(Note: Horus started out as the brother of Osiris and Isis and in later years became identified as their son – in this type of early period mythology he is called Horus the Elder)

People often ask me about my source material for Egyptology, so I am going to try and list all the useful books I have on it. Egypt, as I was explaining in yesterday’s Context for Kids video, is where Israel was born – during the hundreds of years they spent there, Egypt became their cultural context and it caused a lot of problems in the wilderness. They had to relearn everything and become an entirely new people – and one of their chief problems was a continual turning back to Egypt. For my Context for Kids parents who are reading this – exercise great caution in simply handing over any Egyptian book to your kids. Egyptian mythology is filled with the abominations spoken of in Leviticus 18 – pretty much all of them.

This specific myth, I took out of Barbara Watterson’s The Gods of Ancient Egypt but you can find it in practically any Egyptian book. I like to recommend this book to people because it is a very easy read – and considering it was written by a PhD Egyptologist that is rare. PhDs generally don’t write the language I call “normal people” but instead write to impress other scholars.

Information on the actual epagomenal days – Anthony Spalinger, Some Remarks on the Epagomenal Days in Ancient Egypt, Journal of Near Eastern Studies Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1995), pp. 33-47

Donald B Redford, The Ancient Gods Speak is what I have been reading lately. The information I have been teaching lately about the Egyptian priestly/magician class, the mummification of Jacob and Joseph, and such have been coming from this book. He compiled articles from the best of the best of Egyptian experts from all over the world, in their respective specialties – which is always helpful because no one knows everything and it is nice to hear from the people who really know their stuff in the one area. 

John D Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament. Dr Currid has been the Project Director for Bethsaida Excavations Project in Israel for almost 20 years.

Anthony S Mercatante, Who’s Who in Egyptian Mythology – this was my first Egypt book, very readable but not very detailed

Sir Wallis Budge, Egyptian Religion – One of the first books on Egyptology and okay but we have learned a lot since 1899. Never use him as your sole source of information, make sure that modern research backs him up because there were many misconceptions in his time.

Richard H Wilkinson, Reading Egyptian Art – this has been more useful than I first imagined. I originally bought this book because Rico Cortes recommended it for it’s description of the Djed column, the backbone of Osiris that I believe was the Column of Fire that terrified the Egyptians in the wilderness because it would have been seen as a harbinger of death for Pharaoh. But I found better information on this in Redford.

Also, Wilkinson’s The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt.

Ogden Goelet, The Egyptian Book of the Dead – huge and gorgeous book about Egyptian afterlife beliefs, which are vital to understanding the mindset of the Egyptians and especially the Pharaohs.

The Anchor Bible Dictionary

Karel Van der Toorn, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible – can’t even begin to tell you how much I respect this author, one of the best minds on the subject of ANE religion as it pertains to the Bible. His Nimrod research is amazing, well documented, and does not at all line up with what is being taught in the online urban legends of religious evolution.

Sir J Gardiner Wilkinson Manners and Customs of the Egyptians Vol 1, 2 and 3 (it’s an older book – available for online download at archive.org) – originally printed in 1836 and is probably most well known as having been misrepresented by another author in an age where checking references was a lot harder than it is now.

Douglas J Brewer and Emily Teeter, Egypt and the Egyptians – Brewer spent 18 years in the field in Egypt and is a professor of anthropology, Teeter is research associate and curator of ancient Egyptian and Nubian antiquities at the Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago.

I have some other books, and I hope I haven’t forgotten any good ones as my book shelf is in disarray at the moment, but mostly I wouldn’t want you to waste your time or money on a lot of them.




Confronting a Devastating Doctrine: Are Children’s Toys Graven Images? Of Course Not.

I guess it was just a matter of time, but I had two sets of parents ask me about this in one week – sending me supporting websites proclaiming this. It’s the natural consequence of the internet community’s preoccupation with potential paganism and probably the most devastating manifestation of it that I have seen thus far. A person with a blog, website, you-tube or vimeo account yet with no academic credentials whatsoever can put out a very convincing and passionate argument, on the surface, as to why this or that is pagan and people  will assume that they are experts. Fear does that, and the internet preachers excel in injecting fear into an audience that is increasingly terrified of its own shadow – unable to live in the modern world or even to open their eyes for fear of contamination (Messiah and the Jerusalem Talmud Sota 22b describes such people as “blind” (blind guides in Messiah’s case Matt 23:16.24) – those men who were so concerned with their righteousness that they would injure themselves by walking into a wall with their eyes closed rather than risk seeing a beautiful woman).

As I have been, since August, increasingly transforming my ministry into equipping children and their families (so they can better teach their children and grandchildren whether in the home or in a classroom setting) into an understanding of scriptural context and character, this is something that I need to address before any more young lives are needlessly hurt.

If you want to know the counterfeit bill when you see one, you familiarize yourself with real money. In the same way, if you want to know what isn’t pagan, you familiarize yourself with what is actually pagan. I have been intensely studying ancient near eastern and first century religion for quite a while now. I wanted to understand all the references in the Bible to it, I wanted to know what was pagan (the worshiping of graven images) versus what was just cultural (i. e. anointing feet with perfumed oil), or decorative (i. e. palm trees, or ankhs), or organisational (i. e. dividing groups of priest’s workload into set times during the year), or legal (for example, a good law is a good law even when pagans have the same law). I also did this because I saw people who started out searching out pagan references in culture then getting upset over elements of the worship of YHVH because they were also used in pagan rites (i.e. sacrifice, incense, etc). Familiarizing myself with what the other cultures did and why they did it made it increasingly easy for me to spot the false forms of worship, and I was also able to rule out a lot of things that do not fall into that category. People obsessed with ‘paganism’ are walking away from the worship of the one true God because they do not understand what constitutes idolatry and they overreact and see the Temple service as simply another aspect of what was going on in the ancient world. However, an in depth study of what actually was going on, instead of a surface understanding, shows that there is absolutely nothing whatsoever ‘pagan’ about the worship of YHVH. I will prove the same about children’s toys, that they are in no way pagan.

For example, what if someone equated nuns with young girls because of their virginity and called all young girls nuns? Context tells us that this is a ridiculous train of thought. In the same way, we cannot equate wives with prostitutes simply because neither are virgins – we need the context of the nature of the sexual relationship in order to discern the difference between the good and the bad. If someone looks at me and my sister in law and says, “Oh look, they gave birth to twins,” because we both have sets of twins, they would also be incorrect. In context, my husband and I adopted our sons whereas my sister in law gave birth to her daughters. When I talk about my “Twin” you would imagine someone who looks just like me and grew up with the same experiences, not an African American RN from Chicago who I have never actually met in real life. Surface knowledge alone will give rise to our active imaginations, but rarely to an accurate assessment of the situation.

Think of a first semester med school student, diagnosing themselves to death. They have a certain amount of surface knowledge and to a certain extent they are limited to appearances – but they lack the overall context that enables them to rule out certain possibilities, and to filter out unimportant data. In a few years, they will no longer have that problem and because they have context, we go to them when we are ill. We see the same thing in computer or automobile repair. If I have limited experience and I hear a sound or get a fatal exception error then I figure it’s broken because I lack the context to know what is really going on.

People who want to shout the alarm are not always legitimate watchmen, usually they aren’t – they are people who got excited about something, felt like they had to warn everyone, mistook that excitement for the leading of the Spirit and stirred up fear. They are generally not experts, and generally they haven’t even checked their facts because they assumed that the people from whom they got the information did the hard  verification work themselves and checked their facts using legitimate sources

So what are the facts on toys vs graven images? After being approached by a parent who was terrified that they were being commanded to bonfire their children’s toys (even their Legos, from the website they sent me), I knew that this had to be addressed. Are toys idols? What does the word idol even mean because Christianity has seriously redefined it so that it can be practically anything. If someone likes something too much, we don’t call it an obsession or a dangerous distraction or an addiction – nope, it’s an idol. We have watered down something with an actual meaning into an over-spiritualization – like the Pharisees did with Sabbath-breaking – it came to mean too much, and was not uniformly enforced, making a mockery out of the day. Sabbath breaking had the potential to become whatever a person wanted it to be – if they had an audience and had been given the authority. These days you don’t even need the authority, and social media provides everyone with an audience.

What is a toy – a toy is a natural function of childhood, modified through form.  A child without a ball will kick a rock or a can, one without a sword or toy gun will use a stick or their finger, a child without a doll will fuss over a rolled up blanket, or a family or neighborhood baby, one without a swimming pool will go to the river or lake to play. The toy is a functional item that serves a purpose, shaped by the culture a child was raised in – sword vs gun is a perfect example of that. Function, and not form, is what separates a toy from a graven image. Function, and not form, is also what separated idolatry from cultural expressions of respect, decorative motifs, organisational strategies, and laws. Function is what, for example, separated the Tabernacle in the wilderness and later, Solomon’s Temple, from the Parthenon – a temple is not bad because the form is used elsewhere – it is the actual function that determines whether or not it qualifies as ‘pagan.’

The same exact form can serve different functions and so we must be crystal clear on what the intended function is.

Graven images cannot simply be defined on the surface as an image that is engraved – as though the English language description conveys intention and function. The Commandments were engraved in stone – including the one telling people not to make graven images.

A graven image was, specifically, an object carved or molded out of clay, stone, metal or wood for the purpose of being embodied by the essence of a god, through a magical ceremony conducted by professional priests. The purpose for the embodiment with the god’s spirit was so that the god could be worshiped – which in pagan religions specifically meant to be cared for through washing, dressing, anointing, feeding it real food and drink, setting it into its throne, where it can be petitioned, adored, fed again, undressed and put to bed so that the god would not starve to death and their function in the universe would not fall into chaos. Modern day idol worshipers can tell you this – someone who was Hare Krishna just gave me an education on some things a few weeks back.

asherah

The above is an idol, an actual idol. Mishnah Tractate Sanhedrin  Chapter 7 Mishnah 7 (some versions list it as Mishnah 6), which was written when people still did this all over the world, is a reflection of this. It will tell you exactly what constituted idolatry (I recommend the Kehati commentary otherwise it is confusing). They knew because they lived in an idolatrous world, they had the context. Legos don’t qualify as graven images, nor did the cherubim in the Temple, or the Menorah, or the bulls holding  up the Molten Sea, or baby dolls, or any children’s toys. No one played with idols, they were set up in shrines and treated like the gods that they represented, but they themselves were not the gods, everyone knew that. They didn’t get set aside, ever. They were cared for not for fun, but by professional priests who were charged with keeping the god alive and healthy and hopefully, doing their job and mostly leaving the people alone (a bored god was a dangerous thing).

Toys serve a specific function that is completely at odds with idolatry. But more than this, I want you to think about the spiritual danger of taking that which is beloved and destroying it simply because someone on the internet tells you to and instills you with fear. We aren’t being careful enough about who we believe and listen to – we are assuming that people wouldn’t have a website unless they had legitimacy – but these days anyone can have a website. You need time and sometimes money, that’s it. A $30 little webcam will get you free access to the people on you-tube. Social media also gives you unfettered access to people – but you don’t need to have any expertise, you only need to sound convincing. The article I read on toys was full of manipulative fear tactics, but not full of any real information. The authors defined what a graven image, an idol, was, and then expanded their own definition so that it could include and exclude things at their own convenience. Idols, however, are real life constructs serving real life purposes, worshiped with real life intentions and we can’t just ignore that real life context and manipulate the words to suit our own agendas. I honestly pity the people who have put this stumbling block in front of children, who are knowingly subjecting them to the horror of watching their toys burned in the yard – and blaming God for it. It’s just cruelty under the illusion of zeal, but it is rooted in a lack of knowledge of the actual situation, and the resulting overreaction.

But frankly, it was inevitable, because we have created an online culture where everyone has a pulpit and people try to undermine the experts for this or that reason if the experts present facts that are in disagreement with agendas based on, in this case, theories. I ignore a lot of stuff on social media because it is outside the scope of my ministry, but this is where I draw the line and I am speaking up because my studies have given me a certain measure of expertise – at least compared to the people who came up with this devastating doctrine. This is hurting children, needlessly, but it is the logical consequence of listening to whoever is speaking the most persuasively and inducing the most fear and presuming that they must know what they are talking about.

Edit: 2/13/16 My brother Ryan White posted this blog explaining this same concept this morning.