Episode 188: Stuff I Can’t Teach Kids about Sodom and Gomorrah

Ugh. When I started my Context for Kids radio show, I was just dreading this series. Genesis 19—really the only chapter in the Bible I would want to teach even less is Judges 19. But, I can’t skip it over, right? I will be teaching the kids Genesis 19 interpretation by using the prophets and how they viewed and spoke about Sodom—as an unhospitable and oppressively wicked society—and leave sex out of it. But you guys need to be able to answer the hard questions that would get me fitted for an ankle bracelet if I tried it. This is a brutal, deep dive into the ancient Near Eastern context of the account of the destruction of the cities of the plain and so you’ll likely be hearing things you’ve never heard before such as the ancient practice of shaming via gang rape, and the dyadic community mindset that drove Lot’s daughters to incest. Not for the faint of heart. Not for little kids.

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If you have kids in the room, better to listen to this later unless they are quite mature. I can’t even begin to tell you how long I have been dreading teaching this chapter of the Bible, Genesis 19, to the kids on my radio show—but I am sure you can imagine. Ugh. Sodom and Gomorrah. Not only do we have the attack that is probably sexual in nature against God’s messengers, but also the offering up of Lot’s daughters to the crowd, and the subsequent rape of Lot by his daughters. This is a nightmare chapter—despite being tame by the standards of the even more disturbing Judges 19 which goes unnoticed because Genesis 19 has been used by special interest groups throughout a lot of church history to attack certain pet sins while ignoring others. But what is going on here? What is the double meaning of “all” the men of Sodom wanting to “know” the outsiders? Why on earth did Lot offer up his daughters and why are we so inclined to excuse it and ignore the world as it was in those days by softening up his motivations? And what on God’s good earth were the daughters of Lot thinking when they raped their father? Obviously, this is going to be a disturbing episode and there is no way around it. And how can I teach kids the one chapter in the Bible which is best summarized by “let’s gang rape these outsiders,” followed by “no, rape my virgin daughters instead,” then “No, we’re going to rape you and even worse instead because you are acting so judgy,” through the destruction of the cities on the plain and ending with, “Let’s rape our father, otherwise we’ll never be moms.” Well, I have to be very strategic and actually teach it more as it was interpreted by the prophets than as it was presented later in the NT epistles when Greco-Roman and not ancient Near Eastern sexual culture was being countered.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. This used to be a standalone ministry but now I am using it to supplement my Context for Kids ministry work—equipping grownups to answer the hard questions kids ask about things I can’t teach them without ending up wearing an ankle bracelet. Lots for adults to learn still but geared more toward discipleship of our youth and less toward context studies—but still very much contextual. I still have a ton of teachings for grownups at theancientbridge.com and on my YouTube channel, and I think that most of the listeners to Context for Kids are probably grownups anyway so you can catch me there as well if you enjoy crawling through Genesis at a snail’s pace. I also have curriculum books and all that jazz available on Amazon. All Scripture this week is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, unless I say otherwise.

So, we start out with Lot at the city gate—simple enough. The city gate was where business was conducted, contracts made and witnessed, and legal disputes heard and judged. It wasn’t like the sort of castle gate we think of from movies. City gates were big administrative centers where elders would hang out and people too rich to have to work for a living. Lot is evidently such a man—and he was wealthy at some point before he was kidnapped by the four kings in Gen 14 but we don’t know what happened after that. At that time, he was outside the city with his flocks and herds but now we find out that he is living inside the city and not in tents anymore. He is no longer a sojourner in the area he chose for himself, he’s settled down and is putting down roots. As we will discover later, he is even marrying his virgin daughters to some of the men of the city. We knew from Gen 13 that Sodom was a wicked place over two decades previous, and from Gen 14 that the King of Sodom was so revulsive that Abram didn’t want anything that belonged to him. But what is the city like now?

Well, bad enough that when Lot sees the travelers, he rushes out to intercept them, even bowing to the ground in a probable attempt to put them completely at ease by honoring them in a situation where they would usually be expected to honor Lot. Hopefully you listened to my two-part series on ancient hospitality because I will only be glossing over that material here. Lot offers hospitality to the two seeming men for the night and, as per the custom of the time, they refuse the first offer but then Lot insists and they agree. This honors both the host and the guests—they get to act like they don’t need help and the host is honored for generosity. Win/win situation. And Lot hurries them into his home, likely because he knew exactly what would happen if he delayed. The men of Sodom are evidently employing a very ancient Near Eastern shaming technique against visitors—one that shockingly gives them honor while stripping honor from their victims. If you remember, once under another man’s roof, the safety and protection of the visitors is sacred—however, Lot isn’t a native of Sodom or even the region and so he lacked the authority to bring strangers into the city and under their protection. As host, Lot can’t ask them any questions about their identity or mission and they also cannot ask Lot for anything he doesn’t provide. Lot has violated the hospitality conventions of the ancient world—the city wasn’t his to provide sanctuary and the men tell him this in no uncertain terms later.

The text tells us that all the men of the city come to Lot’s home and demand to have the guests presented to them so they might “know” them and this is more nuanced than it first appears. Hosts cannot ask anything about visitors, and Lot has circumvented their right to know who these people are and what they are doing in a time where travelers can very well be advanced spies for enemy armies. And so, we have this variant of “yada,” which is translated as know and sometimes means sexual knowledge but usually means gaining actual information and is often a covenant term as when Yahweh states that He knows Abraham. I believe in this case we don’t have to choose one or the other because I think they are going to employ gang rape as a way to torture them for information and shame them. And that seems strange, right? Because we live in a society where we believe the rapist is shameful—although even a few decades ago the shame was all on the woman and was rarely prosecuted unless she could prove she didn’t have it coming and especially not if her husband was the attacker—which wasn’t illegal in all fifty states until the 1990’s and not even in one state until the 1970’s. But now things are very different—our culture despises rapists and knows that no one deserves this. Torah is very clear on stating that a rape victim is like a murder victim, completely innocent.

And the reason such laws were desperately needed to protect all women as well as men can be found in ancient works like The Contendings of Horus and Set, written within two hundred years, give or take before or after Abraham. So, this reflects the ancient Near Eastern perspective of the time. To make a long and graphic story very short and far less graphic, Set and his nephew Horus were battling over who would be king after the death of Set’s brother and Horus’s father Osiris—who was also the brother of Horus’s mother. Pharaohs, you know, terribly inbred and even later when the Greeks took over Egypt and realized that endogamous incestuous marriage consolidates power. Did you know Cleopatra was a Greek? It was a very popular Greek name, actually. Because their kings were inbred, so were their gods. It made sense at the time, before they knew enough about genetics to cut it out. Which also explains why it wouldn’t have been a big deal for Abraham to marry his own half-sister.

Anyway, the two are duking it out for the throne and you have to understand that Set is the traditional enemy of both Horus and Isis. So whenever people say that the IHS stands for Isis, Horus and Set as some sort of trinity you know one thing right away. They ain’t never read the mythology. And these fights between them are so brutal and underhanded that at one point, Set tries to destroy Horus by sexually penetrating him in his sleep. But Horus was totally onto him and tricked him into penetrating his hands instead. He took the resulting bodily discharge and through a trick, got Set to eat it on a salad and when Set later tried to disgrace Horus by proving he had raped him by calling up his discharge it came out of Set’s mouth instead, making him a laughingstock. But the key to this story and why it is so important to this teaching is that while Set’s attack was sexual in nature, it wasn’t about attraction or simple gratification but about shaming an opponent. When Set told the other gods, including Isis, what he thought he had done, Horus became the recipient of all the disgust and ridicule of them all. What the heck? Horus gets raped and the rapist gets honor points and the victim loses them? That’s messed up—but that was the ancient Near Eastern world of honor and shame. And no, that didn’t make it into my Honor and Shame in the Bible curriculum book! So, this is backward to us but this is the way ancient men used gang rape on male visitors. It wasn’t about homosexuality but about power, honor, and shame.

At this point, someone often says, “Oh so now you are excusing homosexuality.” And I reply, no, I just refuse to take the Bible out of context to try and prooftext a prohibition that can be found elsewhere. If Lev 18:22 and Romans 1 and other passages aren’t good enough for you because they aren’t as emotionally satisfying as believing that God would destroy a city of homosexuals then there are problems and it isn’t with my exegesis. In fact, Lev 18:22 does something revolutionary in the ancient world—it criminalizes/shames both penetrator and penetrated. Therefore, it is no longer a culturally accepted shaming technique. The man who perpetrates this will die. That’s huge. Most people don’t even see the other side of the legislation because they are focused on homosexuality, but it was way bigger than that. However, that law is many centuries away from being given. The men of Sodom are not only shaming the men but also their entire families, clans and nations. Again, I believe this text is about interrogation via gang rape, which is horrifying in the extreme.

Lot offers up his virgin daughters, which is also horrifying. This is our second mention of rape, but that’s not what bothers us the most. A father is willing to offer up his own young daughters to be gang raped so that he can preserve his own honor by not violating hospitality codes. Notice he doesn’t offer up himself or his wife because that would bring shame on him—daughters are expendable while wives are extensions of their husbands. In fact, in terms of expendability, going from least expendable to most expendable, were the patriarch, male heirs, other men, wife, mother, or sister, and then daughters. It all had to do with who would cost the family the least amount of honor if they were shamed. It was an ugly world and this would have been Lot’s thought process according to the formal rules—think of Paul speaking against the letter of the law and how lethal it is to unthinkingly keep commandments! The Essenes would let a man drown on the Sabbath because they considered saving him to be work whereas the Pharisees considered that work to be justified. As do all Jews today. But Lot was very concerned about doing things the correct way—Lot wasn’t a follower of Yahweh and despite Peter’s claims that Lot was a righteous man, remember that was a legal term and he was truly only righteous compared to the men of Sodom. Lot was worldly—he just wasn’t a violent gang rapist.

The men of Sodom see the insult—not only has Lot overstepped his authority but he is trying to subvert their goals by claiming that this is just about sex. But they are men on a mission, a very wicked mission. And they retaliate against Lot by calling him an outsider and, as such, they have no reason for loyalty toward him. They are going to take Lot and do worse to him than they would do to his visitors and likely they were planning to abuse his whole household out of their anger because in judging them negatively, Lot has heaped shame upon them. This is actually another big reason why I don’t believe this has anything to do with homosexuality—because they were outraged at the thought of Lot suggesting that the reason they wanted the men was just for gratification through offering his daughters as a substitute.

The men lunge for Lot and the two angels, now revealing themselves, save him by blinding the attackers. They then reveal the plan to destroy the city but offer Lot, his family, and anyone attached to him a way out. Here’s where it gets sad and we really see that Lot hasn’t made a difference in Sodom and also that he isn’t respected by anyone there. Even the men betrothed to his daughters think he is joking and that word for joking is related to the word laughter and Isaac. We have these two hospitality chapters in a row, including big announcements and now laughter. Lot not only isn’t a big shot in Sodom, he’s merely tolerated and has no authority even with the men he has chosen for his daughters. The ramifications and consequences of Lot’s life choices couldn’t be more tragic. We even find out later that the only reason God spared Lot is because of his relationship with Lot’s kinsman Abraham. Lot wasn’t saved for his own sake, and he was only marginally righteous compared to the truly wicked residents of Sodom.

And still, Lot delays and doesn’t want to go. At this point, we want to smack him but what we really want is for the angels to throw their hands in the air and leave him there and transport his wife and daughters out. He is still there at daybreak, and the angels start warning them to run for their lives and to get out and the angels literally had to grab their hands and take them out of the city to force them to leave even after they tell Lot that God is going to destroy the city whether they leave or not. But Lot has no trust in God even though He’s going to a lot of trouble to save him for the sake of his uncle Abraham. And he says he won’t make it to the mountains in time to avoid being killed. And I’m like, then you should have left earlier but God agrees not to destroy one of the five wicked towns because Lot wants to go there instead. He’s just not getting it, and it isn’t until after the destruction of the cities of the plain that he decides that being in this small town isn’t a good idea either and he takes his daughters into the mountains because his wife disobeys the angels and looks back—probably to take a picture for snapchat after her head took up too much of the selfie she took in front of the destruction. But that’s just a guess.

Here’s where things get complicated again because we wonder why on earth the daughters would get him drunk and sexually assault their father. I have seen a lot of really nasty explanations—like lust or revenge or whatever but the most probable explanation is that they were trying to do what had to be done to serve their roles in society. Let me explain by lifting a chapter from my book Context for Adults (affiliate link)–

I am going to tell you something that might surprise you–this has absolutely nothing to do with revenge, and is unrelated to Lot offering his daughters up to that rape gang because they would have understood the situation perfectly. We’re going to go back to dyadic social identity, the community mindset of the ancient world, and this situation more than any other is why I spent so much time teaching it to you. Now we are going to put it into practice. This is unpleasant stuff, but once you get the hang of it, puzzling situations in the Bible are going to start making perfect sense to you. I will not be pulling any punches here, so be warned.

From their infancy, Lot’s daughters were wives and mothers in training. Their goal in life, as I have mentioned before, was to be virtuous daughters and then honorable wives and mothers. Lot had no sons recorded in the Bible. When the angels warned him to get any loved ones out of the city, we only have a record of him warning his future sons-in-law. They had the ancient legal status of being his actual sons-in-law, but by our modern understanding, we need to know that the marriage had not yet taken place, and the union was not yet consummated.

Their father had no sons, and because of this, they were in a peculiar and uncommon situation. They had the added burden of carrying on their father’s lineage–no small thing in the ancient world but something people don’t think about nowadays. As I have discussed in my other books and teachings, to be childless in the ancient world meant that you ceased to exist once you died. There was no one to care for you in your old age, and you would go unburied. Any servants would be in danger once you were gone, or might even try and run off with your wealth once you became too old to stop them. The very thought of having one’s dead body exposed to the elements, to turn to dust that could be trampled underfoot, or (horror of horrors) be eaten by wild animals was so shameful that it was a source of very real fear. Lot would probably be marrying one or both of his daughters to “second sons” in a family whom he could formally adopt as his heirs–they would then have been responsible for performing the duties of natural born sons in his old age and after his death.

Of course, after the destruction of the cities of the plains, those potential adopted sons were gone forever. Lot, terrified and now deprived of his wife, took his daughters into seclusion and the burden of carrying on their father’s name, of needing heirs to carry on and care for him and even themselves when they died, must have become overwhelming for them. They could not leave their father–that was not an option. A woman alone in the ancient world had no conceivably good outcomes available for her. If they were not outright raped and killed, they would be captured and enslaved. If they avoided all of that, they would arrive at a town where they have no family honor, no dowry, no way to secure a marriage and would only have one alternative to starvation–prostitution. There was no more wealth; their livestock (which would have constituted the bulk of the family’s cash on hand) had been destroyed or were hopelessly scattered across the plains or had never been regained after the war of Gen 14. These were two young women who had trained their entire lives to do one thing and one thing only–honorably perpetuate their father’s house–had only two options: Do nothing or become impregnated by their own father.

It is unthinkable to us. We live in a world full of options–a world where women are not treated like this anymore. Girls grow up, become educated, and are always keenly aware of the endless possibilities of what they can do with their lives. Potential spouses only care about falling in love and not about family history and honor. When I tell you that these young women had no concept of there being an honorable life outside of being wives and mothers, I am not exaggerating–and a life without honor was no life at all. Life without honor (much like exile) was a fate worse than death.

So, they did the unthinkable. The girls got their father drunk and did the only thing they could to fulfill their created role–they had sexual relations for the express purpose of becoming impregnated (which would have been no mystery to a couple of girls who had been raised around livestock). In their minds:

They had an obligation to become mothers to fulfill their God-given purpose. They had an obligation to continue their father’s lineage. They had to secure a future generation in order to be cared for in the future and to be properly buried. They could not, under any circumstances, leave the protection of their father. They had no other options–they were not thinking individualistically and could not even begin to imagine operating as individuals. The result of these incestuous encounters were two sons, Moab and Ammon. Interestingly, God still honored the Moabites and Ammonites to a certain extent and King David was descended from the Moabitess Ruth. In Deuteronomy 2, we even see that God expressly forbade the Israelites to conquer and take the land that had been given, by God, to those nations.

Although we look at the passage in horror now, the Bible doesn’t present it this as horrifying but simply as the origin story of their distant relations, much as it does with the stories of Ishmael and Esau. So anyway, that’s the stuff I can’t teach the kids and really don’t want to. That’s your job to teach your own kids or to have them listen to this if they are old enough. Genesis 19 is so crammed with historical context but it gets lost when it just gets boiled down into an anti-homosexuality agenda piece. As GK Beale would say, right doctrine but the wrong scripture. We don’t get to misuse the Bible to make cases that can be made more clearly elsewhere and not out of context. The prophets were clear—the sin of Sodom wasn’t homosexuality but oppression and a lack of hospitality toward the needy—every other sin was simply an extension of those two things. It wasn’t until the Greco-Roman era when many Jewish and Gentile men and women were being kept as sexual slaves that the story of Sodom was reinterpreted to emphasize the heinous nature of the sexual sins that were running rampant in the Roman Empire. But throughout the Bible, we don’t see sexual sin as being the most offensive to God but instead oppression—and that’s exactly what the men of Sodom were doing.

Episode 187: Hospitality or not? Rahab, Yael, Abigail, and Lydia in Context

Now that we’ve covered the ancient rules for hospitality, I want to talk about the commonly misunderstood accounts of Rahab, Yael and Abigail. And we’ll also talk about how the world had changed by the time of the apostles with a quick look at Lydia.

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Last time, I taught about hospitality in the ancient Near East and how incredibly important it was—sacred even—within communities regardless of religion or nationality. This week, I am going to go deeper and beyond the examples of Abraham and Lot (which were important for laying the foundation for the next two chapters of Genesis that I am teaching for Context for Kids) and I want to talk about famous examples of things that might or might not be or be mistaken for hospitality throughout the Bible. As important as it is to know what hospitality is, it is also important to understand what didn’t count and also how it changed from Abraham’s time to the days of Yeshua/Jesus and the early church. As the world changed, so did hospitality—although it really stayed the same far more than it changed. It was a great system, one we would do well to emulate more today even though I am not crazy about many other aspects of honor/shame culture and wouldn’t want all the rest that went with it. Really, hospitality as practices in the Biblical era can’t exist without honor/shame culture and we are way too individualistic to go along with that now anyways. So, let’s look at Rahab, Yael, Nabal, and whoever else I can think of to figure out whose behavior did and didn’t fall under the rules of ancient hospitality.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. However, everything changed last year when the Lord told me in no uncertain terms that my days of teaching adults are over, so now this portion of my ministry is devoted to teaching adults how to teach kids by making sure that we are supporting their growth and faith in the Messiah instead of hijacking it. Which is super easy to do, by the way—hijacking it. I’ve done it, and you’ve done it. Let’s stop doing it and teach kids how to take Yeshua/Jesus seriously as the greater Moses, greater Temple, and greater Prophet whom Matthew tells us He is. So, from now on, this is a satellite ministry of Context for Kids, which has become my primary ministry. Lots for adults to learn still, but geared more toward discipleship and less toward context studies—but still very much contextual. I still have a ton of teachings for grownups at theancientbridge.com and on my YouTube channel, and I think that most of the listeners to Context for Kids are probably grownups anyway so you can catch me there as well if you enjoy crawling through Genesis at a snail’s pace. I also have curriculum books and all that jazz available on Amazon. All Scripture this week is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, unless I say otherwise.

I am going to quickly review the guidelines of hospitality during the early biblical period that we see mirrored in Scripture. A male head of a household who was in good standing with the community or head of a camp had the authority to invite a stranger into his home for a short period of time—extending to that person temporary community membership. During this time, the guest was safe and also could not do harm to the host or his community. The potential host would approach the stranger, offer him bare basic hospitality and perhaps lodging depending on the time of day, and the stranger would usually refuse the first offer in order to preserve their own honor. At this point, the host would repeat the offer with a stronger sense of urgency and the stranger would accept and return with the host to his dwelling. The basic offer of bread and water could then be upgraded according to the means of the host, magnifying the honor of both the host and the guest. The guest was not permitted to ask for anything, and the host wasn’t permitted to ask the guest any questions about their mission, travel, or intentions. No prying allowed. The offer of hospitality was not open ended but came with strict time limits. Upon leaving, the guest was required to place a blessing of life upon the host and his household. It was like a dance that everyone knew the steps to and was really something that everyone in the ancient world could depend upon—which made the deviations from hospitality in Genesis and Judges 19 so shocking to the original audience.

As I mentioned last time, during the early Biblical period, a woman couldn’t offer hospitality—only a man of good standing within the community could and we talked about why that was. By the first century, that had changed and women could and did offer hospitality provided they could do so in a way that didn’t compromise their reputation. Obviously, a woman who ran a large household with male and female servants and children would have no reason not to serve as host to travelers, which is exactly what we see happening with Paul on his journeys as a large number of the people named as benefactors and leaders of local congregations were women.

I want to start with two rather scandalous stories—the first being Rahab in Joshua who was, yes, a prostitute but not specifically a cult prostitute as that terminology isn‘t used. In the ancient world, prostitutes would often have their dwellings within the casement walls of the city—which were two serious stone walls filled with rubble in between. Prostitutes often had their homes/offices there, as it was a very useful place to advertise their business to passersby and would even have windows in the outer wall where they would appear in order to attract clients. As Rahab has such a dwelling—we know this because she lowered the two unnamed spies to safety outside the city after nightfall, there is little doubt as to her profession. People get antsy about the two spies visiting a prostitute but let’s not forget that in the ancient Near East, there were still some serious double standards between what adultery meant with men versus women. From last week, if you recall, Judah had no qualms about visiting a temple prostitute—literally binding himself to another god—but wanted to burn Tamar for her perceived infidelity. Yeshua and Paul both had things to say about this sort of double standard, but we all know the wilderness generation of Israelites weren’t exactly known for their moral excellence. We do see Rahab protecting them and giving them shelter, but as she was not a man within the community, she had no ability or authority to offer the two spies formal hospitality and temporary community status. Not only that, but she refuses to let them go until they swear to protect her and her family. So, although we see things that look like hospitality, it is most likely that Rahab sees an opportunity to ally herself with the God who decimated the Egyptians, as well as the two Amorite kingdoms on the other side of the Jordan. She is staking her claim to the superior God and bargaining for her own safety. She clearly knew who they were and what they were up to. The Bible makes no attempt to hide the sexual nature of the entire episode.

Our next misunderstood example of “not” hospitality concerns the episode in Judges 4 where, at first glance in English, this appears to be an example of a woman offering hospitality to the defeated general Sisera, with whom her husband had been an ally. When we are unfamiliar with hospitality rules, this seems like a clear case of betrayal of hospitality but what we see here is as important as what we do not see. Her husband isn’t there, Sisera’s entire army has been destroyed. He has been completely shamed and has nothing left except his mommy waiting at home for him (according to Deborah’s song). Sisera comes purposefully to Yael’s tent—a clear violation of his alliance with her husband. Yael’s greeting, which is often translated as “come inside” can also mean “turn away”—as in, “Get out of here, you have no business here.” Soldiers who came into a camp of women while their men were away generally had one thing in mind and it is more than likely that Yael assumed that rape was in her future. Such was the way of the world and Sisera, by raping Heber’s wife, could take control of his household. It’s complicated but this is exactly why Solomon had his brother killed for wanting to take Abishag, their father’s newest wife before dying, for his own. To possess the women of the King was to be the king—Absalom also did this when he raped David’s concubines on the roof of the palace.

One thing is certain, Yael was not offering hospitality because she had none to give. At best, she was scrambling to make the best of a bad situation while she figured out how to save both her virtue and her husband’s honor. Sisera certainly didn’t see this as a hospitality situation because he begins ordering her around in her own tent in the absence of her husband. Although some translations say “please give” because of the use of the emphatic “na”, it can just as easily be translated as “give me” and making it a command. “Give me water to drink!” She very wisely gives him fermented milk instead, no doubt hoping that after the exhaustion of battle that he will fall asleep and buy her some time. He then commands her to lie if anyone asks if a man is in the tent—which is actually played to comic effect because she can honestly say that no man is in her tent since he has shamed himself so deeply that the term no longer applies. He falls asleep and she takes the only weapon in the tent, the mallet and tent peg she uses when she pitches her own tent, and drives it through his skull. Instead of him penetrating her, she penetrates his skull. So, like Rahab, not a hospitality situation and unlike the residents of Sodom, who are lambasted and decried by the prophets as violators of hospitality despite having great resources, she is called a hero.

What about the situation with Nabal, Abigail, and David in I Sam 25? David is still a fugitive on the run from King Saul, who has been trying unsuccessfully for years to kill him. He’s been camping out with his six hundred men (probably an exaggeration) on Nabal’s land while raiding Philistine encampments and cities. While there, their presence alone is enough to ensure the safety of Nabal’s shepherds along with his three thousand sheep and a thousand goats. Yeah, the dude is loaded for sure. And we are uncertain as to whether or not Nabal knew they were there but if he did, he never turned David in. Likely it was a win/win situation for them both as David was protecting what was Nabal’s while refraining from stealing any of those critters for dinner. Certainly this is no hospitality situation. As we come to find out, Nabal wasn’t really a hospitable guy. In fact, according to his wife, he’s the worst sort of fool and idiot.

Along comes a festival day and David and his men are feeling peckish and probably tired of living off Philistine rations. Nabal is nearby shearing his huge flocks and David sends ten of his soldiers (armed? We really don’t know) to Nabal and “ask” him for whatever he has to eat so that they can celebrate, reminding Nabal that they’ve been protecting his people and that they haven’t stolen anything. Remember, in a hospitality situation, the guests can’t demand anything or even ask for it. Nabal has never extended hospitality to them and they are not under his protection. Whether they should be is another matter entirely and not a hospitality one because hospitality has time limits and they have obviously been there a lot longer than a few days. Nabal responds to what might have been an affront to his honor like the fool he is and provokes David by insulting him in front of both their men. This is just a mess. Fortunately, Nabal’s wise wife Abigail saves the day by going behind her husband’s back and providing a feast for David and his men complete with wine, meat and even dessert. But this still isn’t hospitality as she has no authority to provide it—this is tribute, a bribe, whatever you want to call it. This is a ransom to buy the lives of all the men in her household. She even offers David a rebuke for wanting to commit mass murder over an insult from one fool.

So, we can see how stories can have elements that appear to fall under the ancient rite of hospitality without actually being that. But during the first century, we can see that hospitality has really changed a lot. We see that travel is no longer quite the oddity and deviant activity that it once was—even if it did make you a bit suspicious to the locals. As the early apostles and evangelists and teachers spread the Gospel, they were only able to succeed as well as they did because of hospitality. We can see from the book of Acts especially that Paul tended to go to areas of the city where he could meet up with fellow artisans who would extend hospitality toward Him, and would offer him space in their courtyards to teach and preach. In those days, formal synagogues were a rarity within the Roman Empire and so meeting in homes wasn’t so much a “business model” as much as a necessity. Rome didn’t care much for people gathering in groups without permission, and so gathering in private/public settings (because there was really no privacy in the public areas of homes) depended upon the gracious hospitality of local households. Many of these households were run by women, who would then be the leaders of the local congregation—one could hardly be a leader in someone else’s home. That wasn’t how things worked in those days.

The early church really changed things up as far as hospitality went because the church as a whole was considered to be family, and the church itself a community within the community. That doesn’t mean that the early leaders didn’t have to crack down on those who abused the generosity of others—there were terrible problems with people travelling from place to place, not working, and imposing upon the local body. Paul had to tell some to work instead of abusing their family status. Others used their status as teachers to prey upon the good graces of their hosts to overstay their welcome. But when we think of classic first century Christian hospitality, we can go to the story of Lydia in Acts 16. She was a dealer in purple cloth and so she had money, and she is described as the head of her household, where she extended an invitation to Paul, Silas, and Timothy to stay with her after her entire household heard the Gospel and was baptized. She continued in loyalty to them through thick and thin until they were forced to leave the city by the local magistrates.

Really, the book of Acts is just teeming with examples of hospitality offered by both men and women, Jews and Gentiles alike. Oftentimes, in Paul’s letters, his reprimands have to do with breaches in the sort of hospitality that family members should have been able to anticipate from one another but were being withheld due to status differences. I am going to cut this short because I believe between this time and last that I have given enough examples to outline how to approach the text in terms of looking for hospitality and what does and doesn’t qualify. Our modern use of hospitality just means being generally welcoming but in the ancient world it was a sacred social contract that wasn’t optional for honorable or even dishonorable people.

The next time you hear from me, I will probably be talking about the very awful reality of shaming men in the ancient world through rape. It was something that heterosexual men would do as a power play, and I will be citing some ancient near eastern literature in context. Nasty bit of context, but if you want to understand what was going on in both Sodom and Gibeah and how it differs from homosexuality (which is mentioned elsewhere as in Lev 18:22 so doesn’t need to be read into these accounts), it’s needful.

Episode 186: Hospitality, Family, and Travel in the Days of Sodom

Genesis chapters 18 and 19 read as very shallow morality tales without an intimate understanding of the social dynamics going on in the arena of hospitality expectations. This is the first of two teachings describing the established parameters and rituals associated with dealing with strangers to a community and the who, what, when, where and why’s of offering sustenance and lodging. What did Abraham do right? What did Lot do wrong? This is where we can begin to understand these two complex chapters of Scripture—as well as Judges 19.

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So, having finished up with the fruit of the Spirit backward through kindness—which segues excellently into hospitality—the kids and I are ready to delve into some of the complex issues of Genesis 18 and 19 because there is a lot more going on there than most preachers would lead us to believe. The concepts of travel, hospitality as a social non-negotiable, and family dynamics are all going to be very important throughout the rest of Genesis because as of chapter 12, Genesis has become the story of a family of travelers and, with the birth of Ishmael and then Isaac, an increasingly family related story. The dynamics, therefore, become more and more complex and very different from what we would see as normal in our own lives and in the world around us. As I teach the kids all the time over on Context for Kids, the only perfect examples in the Bible are God, the Holy Spirit and the Son of God Yeshua/Jesus. Everyone else, almost to a person, is portrayed as deeply flawed and as living very flawed lives according to sometimes very messed up understandings of right and wrong. We need to treat the Bible people with a lot of grace sometimes—remembering that Abraham and Sarah are “Straight Outta Babylon” and have to be taught how to stop seeing Babylonian ways and Canaanite ways as normative and acceptable in God’s Kingdom. They often do what makes sense to them, and since the Bible is a rescue story, let’s not pretend that they don’t need rescued from their own nonsense. The Bible makes no excuses when they behave badly and so we don’t have to either. That’s why we have the Messiah as our plumb line of absolute excellence and perfection instead of Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets, or even John the Baptist or Paul. The Bible tells us what did happen and not always what should have happened. We can’t enshrine any era of Biblical life as though it represents an ideal because God through His prophets was always after them about something—or a lot of somethings.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. However, everything changed last year when the Lord told me in no uncertain terms that my days of teaching adults are over, so now this portion of my ministry is devoted to teaching adults how to teach kids by making sure that we are supporting their growth and faith in the Messiah instead of hijacking it. Which is super easy to do, by the way—hijacking it. I’ve done it, and you’ve done it. Let’s stop doing it and teach kids how to take Yeshua/Jesus seriously as the greater Moses, greater Temple, and greater Prophet whom Matthew tells us He is. So, from now on, this is a satellite ministry of Context for Kids, which has become my primary ministry. Lots for adults to learn still, but geared more toward discipleship and less toward context studies—but still very much contextual. I still have a ton of teachings for grownups at theancientbridge.com and on my YouTube channel, and I think that most of the listeners to Context for Kids are probably grownups anyway so you can catch me there as well if you enjoy crawling through Genesis at a snail’s pace. I also have curriculum books and all that jazz available on Amazon. All Scripture this week is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, unless I say otherwise.

I squeezed the basics of this into one teaching for the kids, which will be expanded as we go verse by verse through Genesis 18 and 19 but for you guys, so you can answer their questions and impress them with your knowledge, this will be a two-parter. Obviously, when we get to Genesis 19 there is a whole lot of stuff that I will not teach the kids about but I will have more in depth teachings for you so that you can answer the hard questions when they come up. And of course, you can always message me through my email or via my websites or through social media. Just not on twitter because I never go there. My goal is to equip you to equip them as your and my equals in Messiah, full brothers and sisters, taking them seriously as disciples.

So, let’s look at travel in the ancient world first and foremost. Travel was weird. Most people in the ancient world never went anywhere unless they absolutely had to. Travel was inconvenient, dangerous, and costly. It was something considered to be deviant behavior—normal people stayed put, near their families and on their own land. It’s been a long time since I have taught about dyadic social identity but it was very important within the ancient world to be very predictable and to fit in to society, to do things as they had always been done, to honor the gods your parents honored, and to do exactly what the community expects of you given your status and gender. This was the whole pagan world, okay? Some scholars refer to this as the cultural waters that everyone was drinking from. Just as sacrifice meant the same thing to everyone in the ancient world—pagan as well as Israelite—so did familial relations, which were modeled after how the gods ran their families and their communities. To depart from society’s expectations was to be a deviant and therefore dangerous influence—an affront to the gods who might retaliate and kill everyone slowly or quickly depending upon their mood.

People often don’t appreciate how radically Yahweh redefined what it meant to be a family and to be the family of God. Before Yahweh, gods were gods and people were just their slaves. Gods had families and people had families but they weren’t the same thing. Yahweh created this innovative hybrid where He was the paterfamilias (a term I will explain in a bit) and all of Israel were His children; children who were meant to mediate His presence and ways to the rest of the world as a priestly nation. Yahweh stripped human fathers of the right to execute, devalue, and violate family members by reminding them that it is Yahweh, and not any human, who is the true father of the nation and thus of every household. He also laid the foundations for seeing all other humans in that light—something that wouldn’t truly begin to bear fruit until the days of the Messiah. When we see the institution of slavery that was normative in the ancient world, and then look at the limitations Yahweh placed upon slavery and even the Deuteronomic law that commanded Israelite cities to harbor escaped slaves instead of returning them, we begin to understand that Torah was a beginning and not the end—paving the way toward total and complete love of other. The prophets went farther still, going above and beyond what was commanded. Yeshua went so far beyond the prophets that their heads would have spun. With grace also comes the command to move toward the perfection of Christ through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit.

But Yahweh hadn’t made any of these changes yet. He told a man from a family of Babylonian idol worshipers to follow Him and to learn to walk in His ways. And it was pretty rough for Abraham and Sarah both and Lot never really got it, as we will see. Lot was very much a man of the world while Abraham was stumbling his way out of it—some days doing a better job than others. You know, just like us. Abraham was a traveler, which made him odd in the ancient world. Even normal shepherds in those days only moved around so much and we do see that Abraham had a few favorite locations he liked to stay in such as Hebron and Beersheba—but those areas belonged to other nations and he wasn’t a citizen but a foreigner. The closest he ever got to belonging was when he would make a covenant with local leadership to do no harm in exchange for going unharmed, or in the case of his ongoing relationship with Mamre and his brothers, a mutual protection pact. But this means that outside of his general campsite, Abraham wasn’t a man with any sort of political power or official standing. In fact, I don’t believe that sort of community belonging was ever even offered to anyone in his family before Jacob was solicited to merge his family with the people of Shechem in Genesis 34, unless I am forgetting something. In fact, I guess they were always outsiders in one way or another until Joseph became the vizier of Egypt. But I digress.

Let’s backtrack and talk about travel. There were limited reasons why anyone would travel in the ancient world—festival pilgrimage, escaping famine, migration due to war displacement, trade (merchant caravans), formal messengers, spying, and armies for the purpose of making war. And so what time of year you saw travelers made a very big difference in how worried you had to be about them. If it was springtime, when the roads finally dried up and the grain was ripening, you had to worry about spies scouting out the land for an invasion. Armies needed dry roads and wouldn’t ever travel in winter during the early rains. They would hunker down for the winter. They also needed grain to feed their armies, which they would “liberate” from the fields on their way to and from the war zone. They wanted to have their fighting done before the hot, dry summer months when there was no food or water easily available. This, by the way, was why the Babylonian women wept for Tammuz in the summer desiring the rains to return in the fall. Messengers could appear at almost any time and would generally travel in the cool of the morning, or in the evening or even at night. Trade caravans were always welcome as they had no supermarkets even if they weren’t really trusted or respected due to their status as suspicious social deviants. Larger people groups might be seen on rarer occasions escaping famine or attempting to find new homes after being forced out of their own. Travelers, unless they were part of an army or on official business, were by definition vulnerable and/or suspicious. They were in danger or they were dangerous. They were either at the mercy of wild animals, weather, bandits, etc. or they were to be feared.

As travelers and foreigners in general were considered to be deviant and outliers—aka not part of the established and safe community—they had to be dealt with and almost every people group handled this through the extension of formal hospitality. Sodom (Genesis 19) is a shocking and notable exception to this rule of thumb, as was the Benjamite city of Gibeah (Judges 19). If you were traveling, you would rely on the kindness of strangers to host you and so everyone (mostly) lived by this social ethic which had an expectation that it was good, right, and required to host and protect strangers. But this wasn’t just some willy nilly arrangement, there were firm rules in place as well as taboos that couldn’t be violated. I promise you will never read either Genesis or Judges 19 the same way again. Hospitality was a matter of survival, as well as an honor/shame issue. Now, we need to get back to the paterfamilias and why that was so important to the expectations and rules of offering hospitality.

Hospitality in the world of Abraham could only be offered by a paterfamilias of the community in question. Although this is a much later Roman term, it describes the ancient practice of the eldest male in the household being completely in control of everything and everyone within his domain. That means you could be a seventy-year old grandfather of forty and still be under the thumb of your father if he was still alive and kicking. It was really only a fun system for the top dog in the family. The paterfamilias had the power of life and death over everyone in the household—wives, children, slaves, etc. Under ancient Near Eastern law, the only real restrictions to the rights of the paterfamilias were from outside the household. The king, for example, had the same rights over everyone in his kingdom that the paterfamilias as he had over his wives, children, and slaves. The Torah, instituted at Mt Sinai, made some huge changes to this institution that had previously been considered normal—which is why we see Judah ordering the burning of his daughter in law Tamar because in the eyes of the pagan world, his seeing a prostitute was fine and even expected but her having sex outside of marriage was worthy of being burned over. He had absolute rights over her, and no one tried to stop him. That’s how the pagan gods handled things, after all, they required absolute obedience and were very heavy handed with their retribution. So, male heads of households had that as their example. We also see this all the way through the Greco-Roman era of how they worshiped their own gods through emulation and why they considered Christians to be so weird. Who would emulate an executed criminal when they could be like the big guy Zeus instead?? In fact, city identities could often be traced to the character of the gods they worshiped—a huge reason to have no other gods before Yahweh, who is patient, merciful and gracious. We don’t know who they worshiped in Sodom because the site hasn’t been positively identified, but it sure wasn’t anyone good.

And so, the father of any family would reflect the gods worshiped—this shouldn’t be any shock. Psalm 115 and 135 both warn people that we become whatever it is that we worship. And our behavior over time will always reveal our opinions about the true character of God. There is no way, for example, for a man to beat on or cheat on his wife (or vice versa) unless the god he worships is cool with it in some way. Or, for that matter, a pastor or teacher with their congregation. Which should put a whole new light on the first couple of commandments! But even with the plethora of gods worshiped throughout the ancient Near East, all people pretty much agreed on one thing—hospitality was a sacred duty that brought honor to both self and guests and upheld the fabric of the social order. It was absolutely essential for a functioning society not to descend into utter chaos. Hospitality provided a sense of order within their otherwise unpredictable world. It was something they could control and all agree on. Like, not marrying family members today. Every society has their taboos and for them, refusing to be hospitable was like marrying your mom. Okay, maybe not quite that bad but still fairly unthinkable for civilized folks. It was one of the unspoken rules that everyone lived by. Of course, in the first century, all of the traveling evangelists and teachers depended upon it for their continued existence. By this time, a paterfamilias could be a materfamilias and a woman could indeed serve as host to travelers as well. Yeshua depended upon the personal benefaction and hospitality of quite a few women, according to the Gospels.

Of course, it wasn’t enough to be a male head of household in Abraham’s day. One also had to be a community member. I couldn’t, for example, rent a house and then start inviting everyone who traveled along the road to hospitality. Inviting someone into your community, even on a temporary basis (all hospitality was temporary, which I will come back to later), was a privilege of community members only. A foreigner couldn’t, which is something that got Lot personally into trouble when he overstepped his bounds and invited the two angelic messengers to spend the night—even if he was right in our eyes to do so. Abraham had that right within his camp. Lot would have had that right outside of the city of Sodom when he was living there.

Let’s look at Abraham because he did everything right. His interaction with the three visitors corresponds to almost everything we know about how hospitality was expected to be carried out within the ancient world. Usually, the male head of the household would see or be alerted to travelers coming within the reasonable boundaries of the camp or community. It was his responsibility to or not to go out to the travelers and offer them very meager edibles—maybe some bread and water—along with lodging for the night (depending upon the time of day). Evening would be more likely to gain an offer of overnight accommodations and morning less so. Usually, people didn’t travel at midday because of the heat. Generally, the travelers would respond to the offer with a refusal—saying that they really did have places to get to. At this point, the host would insist and the travelers would usually honor the offer and the offerer by accepting the hospitality. A good host, assuming it wasn’t a time of famine and drought, would provide them with water for their feet and would perhaps wash them personally or provide a servant to do so. Oil for the head might even be offered. Then, instead of the bare basics of water and bread, delicacies such as meat, dried fruit, fresh unleavened bread made with wheat instead of barley, and vinegar, fermented milk or wine might be offered if the traveler came across some well to do hosts. Abraham was very wealthy and so he had the fatted calf slaughtered—which would take quite a while to prepare—and waited on them himself in the meantime. Providing more than what was promised gave honor to both the host and to the guest.

Now, of course the host wants to know all about the guest but he is not permitted to ask. The guest can volunteer information but he cannot be interrogated—not even gently. While in the home of the host, the guest is under the absolute protection of his household. This doesn’t, however, mean that the guest is always right or the boss or anything. The guest cannot ask for anything not freely given to him. He cannot look around, covet something and ask for it. If you remember Jacob and Laban, it wasn’t until Laban asked Jacob what he wanted that Jacob was free to ask for Rachel as a wife. To make a demand of a host was to shame the host. It was to assert that the host hadn’t been generous enough. The guest behaved like a guest and not like the head of the household. Shaming a man in front of his whole family was tantamount to an act of war. Remember when Ham exposed the nakedness of his father and then told everyone about it (and there are serious debates as to exactly what that meant)? It was an act that undermined Noah’s position as head of the house. Ham was making a power grab. Fortunately, no one else went along with it.

So, the guest refuses the first offer of hospitality in order to protect his own honor from looking needy or vulnerable. And he cannot ask for anything which he has not specifically been given. His third responsibility is not to stay any longer than he is welcome and oftentimes that is negotiated beforehand in a subtle way. Lot, for example, offers only one night lodging and tells them that they are welcome to stay and then leave in the morning. The fourth responsibility of the guest is much the same as the host. As the host has granted the visitor temporary community membership, it means that he cannot harm nor attack the community or anyone with in it for the extent of his stay or for a while longer. The fifth responsibility is the imperative to give a lift of life to the host either through blessing or a promise—the three visitors promised Abraham a son by Sarah at the same time the following year. Lot was given the gift of the lives of his immediate family. Rahab was given her life and the lives of her family as well in Jericho.

It’s easy to see how important all of this would have been in the ancient world when even when there were inns, they were considered disreputable (at best) and downright dangerous at worst. Having a societal system in place throughout the ancient Near East provided a safety net for travelers, a way to receive knowledge of the outside world, and temporary protection (or permanent protection) from attack through the granting of temporary community membership. There were rules in place to keep hosts from being taken advantage of and also to protect innocent travelers from being interrogated and victimized and robbed. It’s only when we understand the absolute seriousness with which they upheld and depended on hospitality that we can really grasp why the sin of Sodom in the prophets is equated not with sexual sin but with a failure to be hospitable. The rape gangs of Sodom were merely symptoms of a much more grievous institutional sin, which I will talk about once I get to Genesis 19 with the kids and will not be sharing that with them. Really, it isn’t until the first century biblical writings that we see the interpretation of Sodom’s sin as sexual at all, reflecting different interpretations indifferent eras so it is much more appropriate for me to talk to them about Sodom in the way it was originally written. Both Genesis 18 and 19 concern the hospitality rules of the ancient Near East and learning it will help us see it elsewhere in Scripture. Next time, I am going to share different situations in Scripture with you to talk about what does and doesn’t count as hospitality—right offhand, I am planning on talking about Yael in Judges, Rahab in Joshua, David, Nabal, and Abigail in I Sam 25, Elisha and the widow, and a good deal of the book of Acts and the Gospels. Not everything is hospitality so it is important to know the difference.

Episode 185: Are we Modeling Good Fruit or Folly?

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This is a really sensitive and controversial subject today that I can’t talk to kids directly about so I am coming to you with instead—the question of whether we are discipling our kids into the Scriptural promises of the good spiritual fruit which comes along with trusting God and yielding to the Spirit, or whether we are succumbing to culture and teaching them the opposite. And it’s difficult because oftentimes church culture is incredibly worldly and especially when we have convinced ourselves that our church, our denomination, and/or our faith traditions are somehow immune. Am I just talking to myself here or are you getting uncomfortable too or are you just thinking about someone else’s faith walk? Personally, I am thinking about mine right now! As I should be! My kids didn’t always have the best example when it comes to faithfully doing what it takes to follow a very counter-cultural Messiah—as counter-cultural then as He is today. Actually, let’s be honest, my kids never had the best example except when I was reading directly from the red-letter words, in context. Speaking of which, I recently heard about this thing—a red letter only Bible where I guess it only has the words of Yeshua/Jesus? I went through a few pages of the Gospels, just for fun, and looked at some of what He was saying out of context and it wasn’t good. Having never actually read such a thing, and I am not interested in spending money or time to do so because we need all of the Gospels and not just edited versions, I may have it all wrong but still—it struck me as kinda funny but in an unfunny way. So, if one of you have read a red letter only Bible, please send me an email to enlighten me.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. However, everything changed about a month ago when the Lord told me in no uncertain terms that my days of teaching adults are over, so now this portion of my ministry is devoted to teaching adults how to teach kids by making sure that we are supporting their growth and faith in the Messiah instead of hijacking it. Which is super easy to do, by the way—hijacking it. I’ve done it, and you’ve done it. Let’s stop doing it and teach kids how to take Yeshua/Jesus seriously as the greater Moses, greater Temple, and greater Prophet whom Matthew tells us He is. So, from now on, this is a satellite ministry of Context for Kids, which has become my primary ministry. Lots for adults to learn still, but geared more toward discipleship and less toward context studies—but still very much contextual. I still have a ton of teachings for grownups at theancientbridge.com and on my YouTube channel, and I think that most of the listeners to Context for Kids are probably grownups anyway so you can catch me there as well if you enjoy crawling through Genesis at a snail’s pace. I also have curriculum books and all that jazz available on Amazon. All Scripture this week is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, unless I say otherwise.

So, yeah, in mid-November the Lord broadsided me and told me to focus completely on teaching kids and equipping caregivers with no more focus on adults. I have known it was coming since 2015 but teaching adults was something I had to learn first because teaching what I teach to kids is much more difficult and the tightrope I have to walk is far more perilous. I would rather teach something wrong to a grownup than to a kid, you know? And I have to stay away from politics and sex, and anything that is going to cause division between children and their parents or undermine that relationship. I have to be doubly careful about the integrity of what I am teaching. And we all teach wrong things—that’s inevitable—but the way we teach things is even more important. Teaching adults, people can get away with a lot of nonsense and some appallingly bad behavior—even though we shouldn’t—but with kids we are laying the foundation for what behavior they will think is acceptable from the pulpit and what isn’t. That’s a scary responsibility. Really, kids became my priority over three years ago when I started the radio show for kids but now, they are the only show in town as far as I am concerned. I still teach and pay attention to you guys when I need to support what I am teaching the kids in ways that I can’t do personally—like teaching Sodom and Gomorrah when we get to Genesis 19 after the series I am teaching now on “Being like Jesus.” Honestly, kids need to have Yeshua (I always call Him Jesus when teaching kids so that everyone is clear who I am referring to—I am not interested in being confusing) as their foundational baseline because dang, those patriarchs and kings did some messed up stuff that the Bible doesn’t make any excuses for and neither should we. When we start with perfection, we can avoid a lot of the problems that come when parents and teachers believe that they have to call the bad stuff good. We have only one perfect example, just one. Not Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Moses, or anyone else. When we normalize the teachings of Yeshua, our own lives change and our kids see it. Okay? Okay.

Oh, and just FYI—I do not teach kids the way I teach you guys. I am not as direct, or confrontational with them or blunt like I have to be on topics like this—I break things down and we explore things slowly from the Bible and from the history of the ancient Near Eastern and first century worlds. I believe we can be confrontational when absolutely necessary while still being kind and gentle but firm and self-controlled. We’ll see how it goes this time. However, not with kids. I don’t find it productive or effective or edifying for them. And they deserve to be able to learn to think critically so that they have the ability to make up their own minds without manipulation or too much interference from a non-parent. So, that’s where my mind is about teaching adults vs teaching kids. Just FYI. That goes for my radio shows and my books.

Lots of sermons out there are directed at how we and our kids are worldly, right? And that’s not a bad thing. We should want our kids’ heroes to be people like Mister Rogers and the great saints of the past. People like Gladys Aylward and Cameron Townsend, but they often don’t even know who they are—everything is Taylor Swift and Beyonce and sports stars and actors and influencers and all that. Music and movies and sports are fine, don’t get me wrong as I really enjoy music and movies—but they aren’t our examples of how we should behave. They are cultural and not counter-cultural. And that’s just obvious—not telling you anything you don’t know. The church largely focuses on preaching against all that but is that the biggest problem facing the Body of Messiah? I really don’t think so. Yeshua didn’t really talk about that stuff, at all. And He could have spent time talking about stuff that would make what we deal with now look tame. When was the last time your kid saw someone nailed to a cross along the roadway? Or death matches in the arena? What He did talk about was the character of the believer and especially in the Sermon on the Mount. And before Matthew wrote his account, including the Sermon on the Mount, there were oral traditions of the teachings of the Messiah, passed around among the congregations and Paul must have known them well because his letters are very much obsessed with and focused on promoting the character instructions of Yeshua. In fact, get rid of Paul and you get rid of the hardest teachings in the entire Bible on what it means to love neighbor and enemy in real life. Yeshua spoke in sweeping generalities to a Jewish audience, but Paul confronts the day to day nonsense that believers were getting into with infighting and just generally being jerks.

Get rid of the Sermon on the Mount and Paul, and Judaism and Christianity both get a whole lot easier to live out—and since Constantine brought the military into the faith—that’s exactly what started to happen. Did you know that the early church took the Sermon on the Mount and the commands to be peacemakers and meek and loving toward enemies very seriously? This while they were being thrown to the lions in the arena! If anyone ever had a reason to not take Yeshua’s hardest commands seriously, it was definitely them. But their witness brought down normative paganism in the Roman Empire. It’s crazy and upside-down but no one can argue with the success. Paul spent a lot of time giving individualized instructions to the different congregations he founded throughout the Roman Empire based upon what was and was not respectable within the different cultures. Obviously, Rome, Ephesus, Jerusalem, Corinth, and Antioch are all going to have very different local laws, ideals, and traditions even though they were all under the umbrella of the Roman Empire. In some places, women weren’t even allowed to be educated. In others, the majority of the population was enslaved or retired military and their families. Imperial Cult was celebrated zealously in one city but was more of an afterthought in others. So, they had to be taught to be counter-cultural within the culture. It was a tricky situation—to be respectable in all the right ways but to be very different where the culture was oppressive and antichrist.

The difference, and this is where we can most help our kids, was in the character they were commanded to have on display at all times. Their character was not to have a shred of worldliness, and character, of course, is about our mental and moral qualities. It’s not only about how we think but about how what we think (or claim to think) manifests in what we are actually doing. Men of the Roman Empire were expected to be adulterers while women could be executed for it. But when it came to ground zero and Yeshua was speaking to His fellow Jews, He told the men quite plainly that they couldn’t exalt themselves over the gentile men whose perceived masculinity was enhanced by being sexually aggressive—when they were looking at women lustfully or divorcing their wives over frivolities in order to marry some other woman. He was saying that it is all the same thing as what the Roman men were legally doing in broad daylight. Yeshua was saying, frankly, that lust isn’t inevitable and that when we view one another truly as human beings, brothers and sisters of the same Father in Heaven, that we will not degrade each other with lustful and dehumanizing thoughts. In fact, it should be difficult (if not impossible) when we see others as siblings. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, by the way, that was the jist of the philosophical virtue of self-control—controlling oneself sexually. Obviously, despite many philosophers valuing that virtue, others didn’t and the general public—not so much.

Meekness and humility were also very counter-cultural and still very much are. First century honor/shame culture prized and rewarded aggression in males—whether that be verbal, physical, or sexual aggression and Judaism wasn’t that much different from the rest of the world in that. Men engaged in aggressive verbal wars to see who would come out on top and who would sink to the bottom. This was normal life, but Yeshua made certain to stress the absolute worldliness of gaining honor in such a way, and that the way of the Kingdom of Heaven rewards the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers and that it is the peacemakers and not the bullies who are the sons of God. Again, the audience would have been flipping out because Yeshua was telling them that the female virtues were also supposed to be the male virtues. Yeshua was telling them not to practice Greco-Roman and ancient Near Eastern modes of masculinity. He told them that the Kingdom of Heaven was so completely different than what they believed they needed to be, that their entire lives needed to be turned upside down. And this should have been very obvious after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple when God didn’t reward the Zealot rebellion—which was worldly in every way you can imagine; if you haven’t read what the first century Jewish historian Josephus had to say about how the Zealots made the Romans look like saints, you should.

As I said before, the early church practically used the Sermon on the Mount as the handbook for acceptable behavior until, all of a sudden, they were no longer a persecuted minority and had an army at their beck and call. That’s what happens to everyone, right? It’s the way of this world and its kingdoms, which is why it is very hard for the church to be countercultural in all but the most glaringly obvious ways. Sure, we do a good job of teaching our kids not to twerk or to do drugs but those are just symptomatic of larger issues—we aren’t teaching them to be Kingdom people because it isn’t safe or culturally masculine. But that’s why we have always been taught to take up our crosses and follow Him—because His way isn’t safe in the here and now. His way requires courage and transformation away from what brings honor in the world. The way of the Kingdom isn’t power and hierarchies and wealth and worldly honor but oftentimes the exact opposite. I want to look at Galatians 5. I mean, look, I could teach on this for years and not exhaust it but I really don’t want to do that here. You guys can connect the dots. What I want is to set the stage for teaching kids what the Bible tells us about actually being like Jesus—what it really means to be disciples and what Galatians 5 tells us we will become as we let go of the world and take hold of the Spirit. People rarely read more than just verses 22-23 because what comes before is just painful to our worldly desires for artificial set-apartness and self-righteousness and safety. I don’t like it any more than you do so let’s just get it over with, starting in verse 16:

I say, then, walk by the Spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is against the Spirit, and the Spirit desires what is against the flesh; these are opposed to each other, so that you don’t do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar. I am warning you about these things—as I warned you before—that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. (Gal 5:16-26, CSB)

So, what’s “obvious” here in the works of the flesh? Are they really obvious? I see a lot of that stuff masquerading as ministry on social media and from the pulpit. Our carnal minds are actually drawn to the people who are doing a lot of these things and because of that, we make excuses for the others too. But if you belong to political party A and would roast alive a person from political party B who did such and such, but you excuse it in your candidate and from the pulpit then we have to ask exactly how un-obvious these terrible things have become. Let’s look at the works of the flesh that are actually now celebrated from the pulpit and in our political, public, and private lives that we turn a blind eye to when we are enjoying it.

Idolatry—politics is probably our worst example here in America and something I never discuss with kids. I have watched people excuse behavior that actors in Hollywood would get cancelled over—if the politician is good for their issues. And it’s frankly worse in the church than outside it. And whatever we excuse, our kids are listening and watching and internalizing. If we can exalt a politician who is not only committing the works of the flesh but bragging about it, we will never be able to wrestle our own children out of endorsing and copying the same behavior that they see us admiring. What’s our political legacy? Who is it okay to destroy as long as the economy is good and our issues are being promoted? Do we have credibility with our kids when we turn a blind eye in the name of politics and promote commandment-breakers and bullies as bastions of masculinity to be emulated? And worse, the cult of personality within our churches and exacerbated by social media where the worst behaving people in ministry draw the biggest crowds and get to write books telling men and women how to be men and women—for the purpose of attracting the world into the faith by being more like the worldliness of another era, not less. And when these people fall into adultery or financial crimes or whatever, we defend them because the “message” feeds our flesh. Is that okay? Does that line up with anything Yeshua ever taught?

Hatred—that’s like the drug of choice in the church. We are specifically commanded not to hate in the Sermon on the Mount. And it is specifically modeled for us that we are to bless and forgive. But nowadays, if you are grieving and concerned for Palestinian children (which any feeling human being is when they take time to think about it calmly), you are accused of hating the Jews. How can love for Jews manifest as hatred for children, when 50% of the population of Gaza was born after the last free election in 2006? It can’t. We can and should and must love both, okay? When does love for the innocent on one side mean hatred for another side unless that is the general state of our hearts? Did loving and forgiving those who killed Yeshua mean that He endorsed their governments? We treat hatred as though it is a right and a virtue when one of the fruits of the Spirit is specifically a promise that as we yield to and mature in the Spirit that our love will grow and overpower and defeat our casual hatred. Hatred compromises us, it is one of the underlying themes of the Gospels. Sometimes I wonder if, when Yeshua commanded His followers to love their enemies, if someone accused Him of hating the Jews. That’s a flesh response. That’s what we do these days. It’s natural but not representative of a cruciform life or mature fruit. It’s worldly to hate and to preach and support hate.

Strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy—some of the most popular preachers out there have all of these on open display under the auspices of being zealous and speaking the truth in love. People who thrive on being angry and promoting anger even over the smallest things, who cannot tolerate any form of disagreement, who label everyone who is not in lockstep as other, dangerous, heretic, enemy, stupid, etc. Leaders who do not make disciples of Yeshua but of themselves—openly ambitious instead of humble and meekly serving. Cutting down anyone who seems threatening, creating factions and envious of the influence of others over the people around them. Teachers who would rather make up an answer to a question than to send the questioner to another teacher. Gosh, I have received some terrible made-up answers from people who simply didn’t know how to admit that they haven’t studied such and such. The creation of these hierarchies where we lord authority over one another the way Yeshua warned the pagan gentiles did (which was actually a challenge lobbed directly at the politically powerful Sadducean priesthood). No wonder such things go hand in hand with sexual and financial abuse in the congregations.

How about violence? Oh, we bristle with fear when we read the Sermon on the Mount and immediately say, “But what if?” instead of saying, “Lord, I am listening. My flesh is crawling and I don’t like it but I am listening.” How do we teach our children to take Messiah seriously when the first thing we say after each verse of the Sermon on the Mount is, “Yeah, but, He can’t mean that because that’s dangerous and hard and scary.” That’s the Beast Kingdom in us, in all of us, and we teach it to our kids because it has been drilled into us. That Jesus couldn’t possibly mean for us to actually be in danger—like the church usually has been throughout history whenever it isn’t backed by political power and an army. That’s anti-Christ because when we say things to countermand Yeshua, or use the Constitution to negate Him, or “common sense” to sweep away His commands—we are doing exactly what the persecuted church never has done because they never could.

Some of the last recorded words of Yeshua by Matthew are that we are to go into the world, teaching people to do everything He commanded. There are five teaching blocks in that Gospel and the first and foundational one is the Sermon on the Mount. That’s the manifesto of the Kingdom of Heaven in the New Creation age. That’s the narrow path. That’s the meat we move on to after we learn to digest the milk of the basic commandments. That’s the upside-down way we are called to live and be different and when we do, we prosper spiritually. But it requires a lot of trust. It’s hard and everything in us screams against it. It’s never been any different for any generation—none of us like it. We want to be safely enmeshed in some sort of artificial 1950’s John Wayne type masculinity where we can trust in big, strong, white dudes to protect us while trying to avoid being forcibly kissed and even spanked instead of trusting in God despite His requiring us to live in a meeker way that exposes us like a huge raw wound floating in a cesspool of infection.

Now, I don’t teach the kids anything like that. I just teach them about Jesus and what love, joy, peace, patience, etc. looks like and I allow Him and parents to do the rest. They are still children and don’t need to unlearn all the stuff we need to unlearn. I don’t want them to turn against the adults in their lives or to feel unsafe in their homes. They aren’t the ones choosing what to listen to from the pulpit or from politicians or whatever. They still see some things very clearly and while we have come to force ourselves to see as good and normal, they are still very pliable and teachable. That’s why we are supposed to be more like them and why the Kingdom belongs to them and not to us. But they are walking away from the faith and from our politics—because neither are modeling Messianic character for them. And I can say that regardless of denomination or political party. Our walks have to be in line with the teachings of the Messiah and not something we have to make excuses for being the opposite of. Remember, Yeshua could have called down ten thousand legions of angels but all He ever did was to flip over some tables and chairs once, and to herd critters off the Temple Mount. That’s self-control. And then He died for all those people involved. We can’t ever forget that. That’s radical, and not worldly.

So, over the last few on Context for Kids, we covered self-control and what Jesus did compared to what He could have done and last week, it’s mercy/gentleness in the parable of the ungrateful servant. Yesterday I recorded a program on faithfulness—which is more complicated than it sounds. I won’t, of course, be talking to them about rogue preachers or politicians. Jesus is enough. He really is. They can spot the counterfeit as long as we don’t try to pass it off as the real thing. Frankly, the reason we see so many church abuse situations is because we have learned from our parents to accept abuse and bad behavior from “anointed” people and we have been passing it down to the generations that follow us.

Episode 180: Help Me C4K! My Kids Need to Learn about Circumcision!

Or maybe you think they don’t need to learn about Circumcision. Fair enough, but I can’t teach them anything about Genesis 17 and the foundation of the Land Grant Covenant without dealing with it. Neither of us can teach them about the important Scriptural meta-narrative of the circumcision of the heart that they will need to understand in order to live as disciples in the New Creation life we want for them. I will also be talking frankly about the importance of being open and honest with our kids about body parts and sex because if we can’t do that, then they won’t have adequate guides in us for learning the Bible. And when they do have questions, they will find someone else. In addition, I also talk about the importance of calling things what they are, without shame, and how it prevents sexual abuse.

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Hey there, and now for something completely different. When I began teaching the kids Genesis in October 2020, I knew the day would come when I would have to decide how to handle some truly risqué and even horrifying sexual material with the kids. Since I don’t really look good in an ankle bracelet, my solution is to teach parents the background material, which will allow me to be deliberate and cautious with how I handle the material for kids–skipping over what I need to skip over. I wrote a book called Context for Adults: Sexuality, Social Identity and Kinship Relations in the Bible (affiliate link) where I covered some of this sort of material for the sake of parents hopefully being able to answer the hard questions as they came up. But something I didn’t talk about, because there is nothing horrible about it, is the circumcision commandment that I can’t teach Genesis 17 without talking about. If you are anything like me, then this isn’t a big deal and you don’t mind talking about it (I suppose it’s the scientist in me) but I know that a lot of you parents were raised not only to be very ashamed of your sexuality (I think that’s just my generation in general had that problem) but to not call things by their names, which can be very damaging to a person’s ability to communicate sexual assault and even just normal medical problems—no matter what age they are. Folks, they are just body parts like anything else and talking about them like they are normal helps, and doesn’t hinder, us in keeping our kids safe from harm and discouraging premarital relations. Euphemisms can be very dangerous and destructive in our modern society and we need to get it through our skulls that Bible kids weren’t sheltered.

Now, my kids were taught the unfiltered Torah portions once they hit the age of eleven—and I would have done it earlier if I had been teaching it to them earlier than that. It isn’t like they are editing them in the Synagogue. The Bible is an insanely violent and sexual book—in all the wrong ways—and believe me, you want your kids exploring this material with someone they can trust and not opening up the Bible in private one day and coming across this stuff without a lot of hand holding and guidance. Last time I taught one of these was after Utah schools decided to ban a ton of books under the banner of protecting kids from inappropriate knowledge of sex. Well, the day it happened, I was like, “Oh man, what are the Christians and Mormons going to say when the first book to go is the Bible because I know that wasn’t their intent!” And wouldn’t you know it, BAM, that’s exactly what happened and how can anyone even defend having material like that in the School library when stuff that is so much milder has been tossed out? The Bible talks about whacked stuff when it comes to sex, no matter how hard we might try to hide it.

So anyway, being able to talk to our kids about the embarrassing stuff we wish wasn’t even in the Bible is a whole lot easier when we can talk about the stuff that was never supposed to be embarrassing—like the topic of Genesis 17, the circumcision aspect of Abram’s Covenant. Something so important and central to the identity of Israel’s men that Abram’s name is formally changed to Abraham right before the commandment is given. Talking about this isn’t optional and as long as we are able to talk to our kids in healthy ways about all of our body parts, male and female, this really isn’t going to be a problem for them or for us. Let me give you an example from my own life.

When my twins were five, they came to me—super serious—and asked me how babies get inside the mommies. In my family, this was a genuine mystery because they had zero experience with pregnancy and babies being born as I was always capable of getting pregnant but never making it past the first few months of pregnancy. Of course, when they went to friends’ houses, it was an entirely different situation and now they were very curious. So, they asked me; I answered in the most age-appropriate way I could think of, “Well, the daddies put them in there, of course.” They looked at each other and were satisfied with my answer. For three whole years. At the age of eight, they still vividly remembered the conversation as though it had happened the day before and they came to me and asked—super serious— “How do the daddies put the babies in the mommies.” To tell you the truth, I was quite impressed that the conversation was so vivid in their memories and that they were coming to me (hopefully) first. Parents, you need to know that when your kids can ask the question, if you don’t tell them the truth then someone else will. Someone you can’t control. I asked them—super serious— “Once you know you can never ‘not know’ again—are you sure you want to know?” They assured me that they were and so I told them, using all the names of all the body parts. When I was done, they walked away, huddling together and whispering as twins are wont to do. Three weeks later, they returned and asked a very unexpected question, “We’re adopted, right?”

Well, I was floored. “Of course, you are adopted, you guys have known Mamma Stephanie and the whole story since you were babies.” I couldn’t have been more confused about where things were going with this, lemme tell ya. But the look on their faces was one of pure relief. “We just knew you would never do something like that with Dad…” and they walked away happily until they turned eleven and somehow it dawned on them that I wasn’t actually a virgin. And I can tell you that my sons, twenty-two years old, still come to me with the tough and embarrassing questions—a fact for which I am grateful. I still talk to them about sex, and they are willing to have those conversations as I teach them how to be good husbands to happy wives instead of selfish idiots. And moms, their dads aren’t the ones who can tell them what it is like to be a woman and how to care for us and about us in ways that are meaningful inside and outside the bedroom—that’s all on us. Too many marriage books have been written from the very narrow perspective of what a man wants and expects from a woman. If we want blessed daughters-in-law and the best possible chance at happy marriages for our sons and intact homes for our grandbabies, we have to be there to speak for them. It’s never too late to have a healthy relationship with our kids where they know they can trust us with whatever is going on in their lives. No, they will never tell us everything but it is important for them to know that they can. The more embarrassed we are, the more curious they will be. But boys who know about the struggles their wives might have before they are married aren’t going to act like spoiled, selfish brats on their wedding night if their wives are too exhausted, scared, or intimidated to have sex. Or if they have a medical condition that makes sex impossible without medical intervention. Do not allow their only information about sex to come from other men—not even their dads.

Anyway, so Genesis 17 is founded upon the bedrock of the ritual of circumcision that was introduced to Abram when he was eighty-nine years old and Ishmael was thirteen. But Abram wasn’t ignorant of it, it was not an unknown practice in the ancient world and especially among the priesthood of the nations of the ancient Near East. In fact, we have knowledge of circumcision among the priests in Egypt and I have to imagine that when Joseph successfully interpreted Pharaoh’s dream, one of the reasons he was immediately trusted to undertake the grain storage project and given the daughter of a priest in marriage is because when they were bathing and shaving him from head to toe, they discovered he was circumcised. In their eyes, he came to them as a priest of the Most High—one of the many gods in their shared world that they might have knowledge of. I once had a preacher claim that Joseph could prove his identity to his brothers by showing them his circumcision but there would have been nothing strange about that as he was a priest in Egypt himself, one who hears and speaks for the gods. If he had whipped out his penis to show them his circumcision, they would have been likely alarmed that he was about to sexually assault them (to shame them) as in the tale of Seth and Horus, not that he was proving his identity. People come up with some truly oddball ideas when they don’t know the context of the ancient world.

And if you are disturbed by the word penis, I want to ask why? The Bible certainly doesn’t shy away from the word or the concept. Foreskin is used five times in this chapter and if your kids can’t understand the idea of circumcision, which is mentioned ten times in this chapter, then there is no way for them to relate to the utterly foundational concept of the circumcision of the heart to the metanarrative of the Bible. And that knowledge cannot be skipped over. In fact, circumcision gets mentioned more in the New Testament than in the old. Hamstringing our kids by not teaching them about a surgical procedure because we don’t like to mention the body part involved is ludicrous—and all of y’all who have kids know what a penis is and what it is used for, okay? If you can make use of it, or even wipe it clean or have one go off in your face while changing a diaper, then saying it should be a piece of cake. It’s a body part and nothing to be ashamed of. I tell you one thing for sure, little boys don’t start out being bashful about it. I resorted to telling my kids that mine froze and snapped off when I was little to get them to stop trying to escape out the door when it was snowing. Okay, I didn’t have to but it was funny. We all laugh about it now. Normalize the sacredness and lack of shame about body parts. As a matter of fact, a female relative of mine—when she was growing up, her family was so nonchalant about the whole thing that when she married, she was not only a virgin but today enjoys an incredible sex life because she wasn’t saddled with shame or fear over it. But, back to talking about circumcision.

So, Abram would have known about the circumcision of priests—you know, I imagine men are always going to talk about something like that and glad it isn’t them—but the circumcision of all the regular, everyday males of a household was just unprecedented. I mean, slaves as well. What the heck? Yahweh was setting apart everyone associated with Abram. Yahweh was beginning the process of making the camp holy, or kadosh. This meant that Abram’s camp would begin to be different from the rest of the ancient Near Eastern world. One thing we do know specifically about the Canaanites, Abram’s nearest neighbors, is that they didn’t practice either child or adult circumcision—in fact, they are routinely referred to as “uncircumcised” throughout the Torah and there has been nothing unearthed through archaeology making any references to the followers of El or Ba’al being circumcised even as priests. The Egyptians, however, even show the circumcision process of adult males in their artwork. The tomb of Ankhmahor is called the “doctor’s tomb” because the walls are carved with sometimes graphic depictions of medical procedures. The most famous of these is of a circumcision, about five hundred years before the life of Abraham. I am including the link to a video of the relief in the transcript. It’s super cool.

Circumcision in the household of Abram was a sign and symbol of the Covenant to give Abram and his descendants the Land—hence the reason why Abram was renamed Abraham right before the commandment to circumcise was given. Abraham was given a new identity, and the command to circumcise everyone bound to his household, in preparation for his offspring becoming a nation of priests. The command to circumcise was even for Ishmael, despite God not finding him an acceptable heir. Likely this had nothing to do with Ishmael but with the circumstances of his existing at all, which we talked about in our last special episode. Yahweh would be honoring both Hagar and her son Ishmael, and they would be the source of many great nations and kings after Hagar acquired an Egyptian wife for him.

Circumcision was one of the nine covenant signs between Yahweh and His people: (1) the rainbow (Gen 9), (2) circumcision (Gen 17), (3) removal of the leaven for the Passover and the week of Unleavened Bread (Ex 13:3-10), (4) the dedication of the firstborn—people and animals (Ex 13:15-17), (5) the Sabbath (Ex 31:13-17), (6) the destruction of the bronze censors at the Tabernacle after the revolt against Aaron by Korah and his buddies (Num 16), (7) Aaron’s rod sprouting in the wilderness after the challenge by the heads of the other tribes of Israel (Num 17), (8) the memorial stones that Joshua set up in the Land of Israel (Joshua 8), and (9) the commandments as a sign on the back of the hand and on the forehead (Deut 6:8). These specific signs were given as proof of God’s choices. God chose to save humanity instead of destroying it, witnessed by the rainbow. Abraham’s offspring were chosen to be a special nation, but only through Isaac and Jacob (even though all his descendants were circumcised). The children of Jacob were chosen to be freed from bondage in Egypt in such a way that they left without time for their dough to rise. They and those who joined them at Sinai were chosen and given the covenant and the Sabbath, the dedication of their firstborn, and the commandments to make them wise. Aaron and his descendants were chosen for the priesthood and given the sole responsibility of the service of the Tabernacle and the tithes. The children of Israel were given the Land of Canaan. Each one of these choices was backed up by signs—and especially when we see how Yahweh defended His choice of Aaron as High Priest.

But the first major sign of God doing a new thing in the earth to bring forth the Messiah was the circumcision not just of the children, but of the people of Abraham. Abraham would have understood that he was being made into a nation of priests through the miracle of a child born to Sarah, his wife. What we do not know for sure is why people started doing this in the first place, long before Abraham was born. Was it about purity or just plain old status? We don’t know and can only guess. But it really doesn’t matter because by the time God gave it as a special sign to His people, it meant something very concrete, very holy. It meant that a man was set apart as a priest. It did not mean that every man of Israel was an actual functioning priest, but it was symbolic of the fact that every man and every woman descended from Abraham was of priestly lineage and therefore their prayers could be heard without mediation from the time they were children. If you listened to the Yom Kippur prayers this week along with me, you likely heard this very thing stated. It gave them a status in life higher than all the nations around them—much like the wearing of tassels which were a symbol of wealth and status among the other nations. I was thrilled to death when I went to the St Louis Museum of Art, and I saw a relief from the Palace of Assurbanipal II with a winged divine figure wearing tassels that went down almost to the danged floor. I about wept. So cool. Yahweh did everything He could to extend dignity to His people and the whole “be holy because I am holy” was a message to the nation that He gave them dignity because without it they couldn’t be His representatives in the world. They weren’t all that and a bag of chips, they were chosen to represent all that and a bag of chips. Same goes for us, folks.

All this goes to say is that the Bible isn’t the least bit shy about our bodies or about reproduction and dang some of the rhetoric in the prophets is profoundly disturbing (I’m talking to you, Ezekiel, with your X-rated chapter 23!). The Bible presupposes that the people reading it and hearing about it are acutely aware of sex and how and why it happens. Not only were they an agricultural society, but there is no real privacy for a married couple from the kids in tents or houses that small, okay? The neighbors knew everyone’s business. Really, this bashfulness is very much a modern European phenomenon (but most certainly not from the French) and it has never truly served us well but has perpetuated inappropriate shame, mystery, and confusion. How can we say that something is both sacred and shameful? This shame hampers our Bible studies and prevents us from raising children who can talk about their bodies and not be inappropriately ashamed if someone violates them. Let’s make sure we aren’t protecting kids from concepts that were actually given to protect them when we are as open about it as the Bible is. Call things what they are and then you won’t have to edit out things like circumcision, a basic medical procedure that shouldn’t be embarrassing to anyone. Kids who have someone in the immediate family they can talk to about anything are safer than those who only have non-family members who they talk to about anything. You will not hear about sexual abuse from a child whom you have instructed, through shame, to be so humiliated to talk about their bodies that they can’t work through the confusion of molestation feeling bad and being psychologically damaging but also sometimes feeling pleasurable. They need to know what is natural, feeling pleasure, versus what is unnatural, being used by an adult or another child. This knowledge isn’t giving them over to the ‘liberal establishment” but it will protect them from abuse.

As parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and human beings, we have a sacred obligation to protect children but only parents can give them the knowledge they need to be empowered against abuse and realize that they haven’t done anything wrong when faced with a situation where they are going to lack the wisdom and physical ability to say no. We rightly call this rape, when there is a power differential between two people that is being abused. Think of David using his guards to haul Bathsheba from her required mikvah into his palace while having no male protection at home. Think of Amnon along with his young teenage sister Tamar (hopefully she was a teenager but she might have been younger). Think of what the men of Sodom were doing in overwhelming and overpowering foreign visitors. Think of what the Benjamites were doing to their fellow Israelites by using the same tactics. If we see it as rape today because there was no ability to consent because there was no ability to say no, then it was rape then as well.

Anyway, if this is something you need help teaching your kids about, check out my teaching on holiness, circumcision, and signs in the Bible over on my Context for Kids channel this week.