(My affiliate links for Amazon products are included in the post. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.)

Barr, Beth Allison The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

Bellis, Alice Ogden Helpmates, Harlots and Heroes: Women’s Stories in the Hebrew Bible

Berman, Joshua Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought

Bird, Michael Bourgeois Babes, Bossy Wives, and Bobby Haircuts: A Case for Gender Equality in Ministry (Fresh Perspectives on Women in Ministry)

Buckham, Richard Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels

Byrd, Aimee Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose

Chavalas, Mark Women in the Ancient Near East

Clark-Soles, Jamie Women in the Bible: Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church

Cleveland, Christena God is a Black Woman

Cohick, Lynn Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life

Davidson, Richard Flame of Yahweh: Sexuality in the Old Testament

Durgin, Celina The Biblical World of Gender: The Daily Lives of Ancient Women and Men

Epp, Eldon Jay Junia: The First Woman Apostle

Fleming, Bruce CE and Joy The Eden Book Series

Gafney, Wilda Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

Daughters of Miriam: Women Prophets in Ancient Israel

Giles, Kevin What the Bible Actually Teaches on Women

Grenz, Stanley Women in the Church: A Biblical Theology of Women in Ministry

Gupta, Nijay Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church

Hylen, Susan A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church

Finding Phoebe: What New Testament Women Were Really Like

Women in the New Testament World (Essentials of Biblical Studies)

Kateusz, Ally Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership

Keener, Craig Paul, Women, and Wives: Marriage and Women’s Ministry in the Letters of Paul

Matthews, Victor, et al. Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East

McGinn, Thomas Prostitution, Sexuality and the Law in Ancient Rome

Meyers, Carol Rediscovering Eve: Israelite Women in Context

Peeler, Amy Women and the Gender of God

Parker, Angela M If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I?: Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority

Payne, Philip Barton The Bible vs. Biblical Womanhood: How God’s Word Consistently Affirms Gender Equality

Man and Woman, One in Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Paul’s Letters

Why Can’t Women Do That?: Breaking Down the Reasons Churches Put Men in Charge

Pierce and Westfall Discovering Biblical Equality: Biblical, Theological, Cultural, and Practical Perspectives

Pitre, Brant Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary: Unveiling the Mother of the Messiah

Stackhouse, John J Partners in Christ: A Conservative Case for Egalitarianism

Stol, Marten Women in the Ancient Near East

Weems, Renita Just a Sister Away: Understanding the Timeless Connection Between Women of Today and Women in the Bible

Westfall, Cynthia Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle’s Vision for Men and Women in Christ

Williams, Terran How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

Winter, Bruce Roman Wives, Roman Widows: The Appearance of New Women and the Pauline Communities

After Paul Left Corinth: The Influence of Secular Ethics and Social Change

Bloggers

https://margmowczko.com/
https://www.1517.org/sections/chadbird

https://craigkeener.com/
https://carmenjoyimes.blogspot.com/

https://michaelfbird.substack.com/

https://ntwrightpage.com/

https://www.baslibrary.org/biblical-archaeology-review/21/4/1 (Joan Taylor)

https://prodigalthought.net/2012/04/11/ben-witherington-on-women-in-ministry/

https://www.cbeinternational.org/

https://bethfelkerjones.substack.com/

YouTube Playlists

(Women in ministry playlist) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvU1BZcPzoXlmZ7Mjrf0J7mMcRokKYFZ1

(Mike Davis Playlist challenging the subordination of women) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvU1BZcPzoXkgUjIbQkRLpk4a87rnIbwZ

Male Scholars who support women in ministry (many thanks go to Marg Mowczko for her list here)

Coming soon–list of prominent women scholars and theologians in Biblical Studies, apart from those mentioned in the book list. There are many but not all teach about women as a focus. And if I don’t go ahead and get this promised blog out I will definitely keep forgetting!

The post Women’s Biblical Studies Book List appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

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For families, I recommend the more child-friendly content that I will be putting out on Wednesday at contextforkids.podbean.com and contextforkids.com

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

Purim is next weekend, the celebration of the deliverance of the Jewish people throughout the Medo-Persian Empire (which was pretty much all of them at that point) from certain annihilation. Esther is a tale of honor, shame, pride, downfalls, foolishness, and wisdom. However, for me, it is about two women stuck in an impossible situation, how they handled it, and how much our own culture colors how we see them. One of only two books in the Bible which don’t mention God at all, it is nonetheless where we see Him working behind the scenes in delightfully deliberate and even hilarious ways. However, the stories of these two women aren’t funny at all, and reflect the throw-away status of women in the ancient world. Nonetheless, I see them as two women of dignity and honor who were doing the best they could despite the attempts of the men that surrounded them to use them for their own purposes. To one extent or another—for good or for evil. One thing that is often missed in reading Esther is that honor was a game men played, but it was a woman’s express job to avoid shame at all costs for not only her sake, but for the sake of her husband and family.

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. If you prefer written material, I have seven years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kid (affiliate link) and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

First of all, it is interesting how Veggie Tales handles this book of the Bible. Vashti is portrayed as a woman woken in the middle of the night to make a sandwich for her husband, which she refuses to do. King Xerxes kicks her out of the house and holds a beauty pageant for all the beautiful young women and the winner “gets” to be the Queen. I know that we can’t be that explicit with kids but wow—history hasn’t been so whitewashed since King George wanted Uriah’s ducky and even tried to kill him to get it. Or something like that—my kids will be 22 next month and I have to admit that it’s been a long time. I still know the words to every song however. The Biblical story, however, is entertaining in retrospect but in terms of honor/shame culture and the ancient Near Eastern historical realities, also a very disturbing one.

We begin the story with the tale of Vashti, who I believe has been unfairly vilified when placed in an impossible situation where she had to choose between the lesser of two shames. Either way, she was going to lose. Although this has been classically interpreted in some circles as a matter of a prideful wife refusing to submit to her husband, rabbinic and scholarly commentaries are more mixed in how they treat Vashti—with some praising and defending her virtue and others at least acknowledging the complexity of the situation, given that we are not given very much information about what exactly happened. Regardless of what happened, we have to admire her courage in refusing the King’s command. Perhaps, with the ongoing nature of the drunken festival, she underestimated the danger of his impulsivity when he was in the company of the men of the city and his own honor seemed to be threatened.

I always like to imagine how thrilling it would have been to visit the five-month Great Exhibition in 1851, organized by Prince Albert, and home to ten thousand exhibits of the greatest technological wonders of the time, as well as a display of the goods produced by the territories of the British Empire. We can imagine how amazing it would be—or, if you are a fellow Marvel fan, imagine the year-long Stark Expo. Events like these brought honor to whatever institution was in charge; in the case of Ahasuerus’ 180 day display of wealth, greatness and power, followed by a seven day feast for everyone within Susa where everyone from richest to poorest could eat and drink whatever and however much they wanted in the presence of the King, well, let’s just say that this was excessive. And it indebted everyone to him, great and small, and he would be celebrated for it. Which was the whole point.

Vashti, on the other hand, was sequestered within her own quarters and was giving a feast not for all the women of the Kingdom but for the women of the palace. As the wife of the King, she was somewhat sacred and inaccessible to the general public. She was incredibly beautiful but she belonged to the King alone and could only appear before him if he called for her, which limited her interaction with any save himself and the palace staff. This would have given her an air of mystery and elevated honor among his subjects. She wasn’t a concubine or a prostitute to be on display. Her body was sacred as the body of the Queen mother to the next generation needed to be. Therefore, she was jealously guarded and she couldn’t live her life as a normal woman could, nor could she follow the same social rules. She lived in a precarious situation where to be shamed meant her ruin and perhaps the ruin of her children as well.

In honor/shame societies, it was the job of a man to gain honor for himself and his family. As the king, one would think that he had nothing to prove but the book of Esther shows him to be rash, impulsive, and even naïve. Not to mention very hard to please. His wife Vashti, on the other hand, walked a razor’s edge trying to avoid anything that would bring shame to herself or to her husband. Her life depended on it in more ways than one. And so, after seven days of feasting and drinking heavily, when Ahasuerus sent his seven personal eunuchs to Vashti—she was faced with a terrible dilemma. The Bible says only that she was commanded to appear before the gathered people, all of them likely intoxicated, wearing her royal crown “because she was very beautiful to look at.” Esther Rabbah, compiled somewhere between 700-900 years ago, was a collection of midrash (what if stories) about the Book of Esther, filling in the blanks in order to expand upon the text and teach ethical and moral lessons. Judean in origin, it paints Vashti in a very positive light—as the more virtuous spouse by far. According to this legend, Vashti was commanded to appear in her crown and only in her crown before, literally, the entire city of Susa. Bear in mind that if this was the case and if any man even accidentally touched her, she would be not only shamed but also defiled. If this was the case then Vashti was in terrible danger that her husband would only come to fully grasp after he had sobered up. The Rabbis who penned the materials saw Vashti, therefore as a model of wifely virtue in refusing to dishonor either herself or her husband. The Babylonian Talmud, on the other hand, in tractate Megillah 12b, agree that the was commanded to come naked but described her as a wanton who actually wanted to do this but God inflicted her with curses of leprosy and growing a tail and whatever else to keep her from going. Dang. Harsh.

What exactly happened? We really don’t know much more than the fact that Vashti found herself in a Catch-22. There was no optimal answer to her dilemma. But we do know that she refused to go to him and display herself. This is something that she would have had drilled into her since infancy, the importance of avoiding shame at all costs. Surely when her husband came to his senses he would see her wisdom. And he did but by that time it was too late because, impulsively, while drunk and angry he allowed himself to be influenced to depose Vashti. And, they were all drunk and engorged at this point after seven days of this, so they were in no position to give wise advice either. Instead, they acted in their own best interest in order to make sure that their wives lived in mortal fear of saying no to them, no matter what. Women in the ancient world lived precarious lives where they could be destroyed and even murdered over an unsubstantiated accusation. And when men of one family wanted to shame another family, the easiest way in the world was through making a plausible accusation against the women of the family. If virtue couldn’t be proven, then the shamed woman often had to die in order to restore the honor of the family. In the case of Vashti, she wasn’t killed because there was no question of sexual impropriety and any children he had with her would need to have their own honor protected, but she herself was never to be seen by the King again. She would have been shut away for life. She was still sacred and no other man could touch her, marry her, whatever. She was less than a Queen, sort of a wife, and perhaps a mother. Welcome to the “privileged” life of women in the ancient world who didn’t have to go to war but had to live in a constant state of stress over their reputations and who did not have the power that men had to recover from being disgraced.

And because Vashti is out, a new Queen is needed. And so, a suggestion was made that no ancient Near Eastern king would ever object to (and too few men today, for that matter). “Hey, let’s have all the beautiful virgins in each of the 127 provinces (which would have included Judea) rounded up and put in a harem so they can be cleaned up and beautified and the King can try them out one by one until he finds one he likes.” No surprise, this suggestion made the King really happy and so they just went around and took all the beautiful girls from India to Cush. Among them was the “beautiful of form and figure” Hadassah, a descendant of the royal line of Saul whose ancestors had been exiled from Judah about a hundred years earlier. She was an orphan being raised by her cousin Mordecai. And the King’s people came and took her and placed her into the harem under the care of the harem eunuchs, particularly Hegai. She gained favor with him and he supplied her with all sorts of honors, including special food, seven female servants from the palace, and placed them in the best rooms of the harem. Although, presumably, she was taken during the third year of the reign of Ahasuerus, it wasn’t until the seventh year that she was presented to the King. Her age might have been a factor, or perhaps Hegai was protecting her. We just don’t know. But after four years of living like a queen, she had no trouble whatsoever impressing Ahasuerus and he made her queen instead of sending her to where the concubines lived.

Can we just stop and remark on how gross this is? The beauty treatments took a year and so that means that the King has been “trying out” potential queens for three years—perhaps a thousand women unless he took nights off. These women were trained and then used for one night only to be rejected as not good enough to be queen and then dumped into the quarters for the concubines and would never be permitted to be married to anyone else either. Remember that as with Vashti, women with whom the King had slept were considered somewhat sacred. Any man who would approach one would be guilty of not only shaming the king but also of treason and making an attempt to seize the throne. Which should sound familiar to those who have read the I Kings 1 and 2 account of King David’s virgin bed-warmer who he took on as a pseudo-wife when he was too old to keep himself warm. In David’s final days, his oldest surviving son Adonijah attempted to seize the throne with the support of Joab, the general of Israel’s armies, and Abiathar, the priest. However, Nathan the prophet and Zadok the priest found out and David made Solomon king instead—before his death. Although Solomon spared his life, later Adonijah attempted to gain Abishag, David’s bed-warmer, as his wife. Perhaps because she was a virgin, he thought he could get away with it but Solomon saw it as an attempt to gain the throne and he had his older brother executed.

The other time we see this is when Absalom revolted against his father David in 2 Kings 15 and once he had secured the palace in Jerusalem, he openly bedded his father’s concubines on the roof of the palace—furthering his claim to the kingship by taking what was only to be touched by a king. It wasn’t about sex so much as it was about taking his father’s honor away and thereby gaining it for himself. That’s how honor worked in the ancient world, if I shamed you and took away your honor, that honor would be added to mine. Even though, nowadays, I would probably just be seen as a jerk. But it still works in High School. Boy was I glad to get out of that place. Taking the king’s palace, taking the king’s throne, and taking the king’s concubines was the same as taking the kingship. And what David didn’t understand but the men fighting for him did is that Absalom had to die—there was no way of keeping him alive while maintaining David as king. And dang, these poor women. David never touched them again and they were kept hidden away for the rest of their lives. We would hope, as we would with all the concubines of Ahasuerus, that they had been lucky enough to get pregnant so that they could at least be mothers. The situation was bad but I would imagine that it would be far worse in that culture to be childless for life. It would certainly be a very lonely and somewhat meaningless existence as they would have limited options for how to spend their lives and probably the overwhelming majority were uneducated.

But Esther was not shamed by being resigned to the life of a concubine. Instead she was honored as Queen, whether she wanted that life or not. Remember that in today’s society, all of these women would be considered the victims of sexual trafficking and rape. Living in luxury doesn’t change that. And there are people who are very harsh on Esther for marrying a non-Jew but let’s take a step back and think about what Scripture commands. The Jews were only ever forbidden to intermarry with the Canaanites, the people of the land. She wasn’t forbidden to marry Ahasuerus and probably the reason Mordecai asked her to hide her identity was because if she displeased the king, he might take it out on her people. There were no checks and balances. If the king was angry, even his own wife couldn’t trust him. But socially, in the eyes of the community, Esther had been exalted not only to the role of queen but also as having a sacred status and the wife of the king. Whether she liked him or not, whether he was good looking or not, whether he was a good lover or not or had terrible breath or was unkind, he was her husband, by force, and all she could do for her own sake and for the sake of her people was to play the hand dealt to her. But it was no sin for her to be a concubine in that culture or according to Moses. It was a fact of life in those days. And there was no marriage ceremony for concubines, you were just taken to bed. Wives were contracted for legally between two families and had certain protections but life for concubines was far less secure—just look at what happened to poor Hagar! Really Abraham? Some bread and a skin of water? But I digress…

I am going to skip all the stuff about the men, might do a second part next week or maybe next year, but a time comes when Mordecai offends her husband’s right hand man, the wicked Agagite Haman. And Haman schemes and takes advantage of the King’s over-baked pride and manipulates him through a series of claims and actions into agreeing to a plan to commit genocide against the Jews in all 127 of the provinces. So, like everywhere that Jews were at that time. And they were going to make it worth everyone’s while to do it by allowing them to loot the homes and businesses of the Jews they slaughtered. And so, Ahasuerus, without fact checking Haman’s meme claims, effectively signs the death warrant on an entire people group. This guy is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but his right hand man is a whole lot more clever and conniving and takes advantage of the king’s weaknesses. Weaknesses that were used by his councilors against Vashti and weaknesses that were used to rob young virgins of the chance to get married and have families, and weaknesses that are now being exploited to extinguish the Jews—the historical enemies of the Amalekites. Saul, if you will remember, destroyed all of Amalek except for their king Agag—who Samuel killed later when he found out that Saul had spared him. I dunno, professional courtesy I suppose. Actually, having a vanquished king for a pet was quite popular in the ancient world. And you may protest that the Bible said that they were all slaughtered, but we see that sort of language a lot where they were “all” this or that but then we see later that it was a literary exaggeration. Which ancient authors used for effect and not to be deceptive. All that is to say, there is some history and really bad blood here.

Esther becomes the only person with any ability to fix this issue because of her relationship with the King but there is a problem—we know that virgins have been gathered again for the harem and that the King hasn’t called Esther into his presence for a month. It doesn’t take a genius to read the writing on the wall. Esther’s position is anything but secure, and this is a mere five years into their marriage. Had she failed to provide an heir? Did Ahasuerus consider wives somewhat disposable? Does he simply miss the good old days of bedding a new virgin whenever he wants? We can’t be sure, but Esther was on thin ice and she knew it. She also knew that she could not, for fear of her life, go to the King without being summoned. If he didn’t welcome her into his presence when he saw her, then she would be executed. But if she didn’t then she might end up being the only Jew left on earth. She was probably only about twenty years old, and this was a very scary thing. As it was, she hadn’t seen anyone from her family or her people in nine years! None of the girls who were taken ever saw their families again. I don’t know about you, but being wealthy and pampered for the rest of your life isn’t worth that unless you had an awful family!

But Esther decided to help her people, even though she was very scared. She knew that one way or another, something horrible was going to happen—but fortunately God had different plans. She and her servants and all of the Jews prayed and fasted for three days and on the third day, Esther went to see the King. He surprised her by being happy to see her and asked her what she wanted and promised to give her just about anything, and she invited him and the evil Haman over for a big feast. Haman was thrilled because when someone invites you to eat with them, they are treating you like an equal or at least like you aren’t pond scum. But eating with a person in the ancient world was the same thing as accepting them. This was a great honor for Haman and after the feast he went back home and bragged to everyone he knew. The next day, however, things started going very badly for Haman and his plans started to really fall apart. But that’s for another broadcast. But he was looking forward to a second feast that Esther had invited them both to, one where she promised her husband, the King, that she would tell him what she wanted.

Haman was shocked to find out that Queen Esther was a Jew, and that her cousin Mordecai had saved the life of the King before he ever came to court. The King was also shocked, and very angry. He stormed out and Haman was so desperate for forgiveness from Esther that he fell down close enough to touch her and when the king came back, he thought that Haman was raping her and trying to take his Kingdom! Now do you see why it was so important to understand the stories of Absalom and Adonijah? Haman was executed, and Esther was given everything that Haman had ever owned. Mordecai became the Prime Minister and together, the two of them came up with a plan to save the Jews—a plan that God blessed so completely that the Jews were able to kill all of their enemies. And because of the great deliverance of their people, they instituted the Feast of Purim and the Jews honor God’s miraculous deliverance of His people even today.

The post Episode 164: Purim 2023—Honor, Shame and Two Brave Queens appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

https://www.younityfitness.com/conferences

She’s already planning a bigger and better sequel because this one completely sold out and the attendees are already clamoring for another!

No transcript this week, just a ramble.

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The post Episode 148: Sisterhood, Unity, and Miracles: My Weekend at Surge Messianic Women’s Conference appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

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The period from Tishri 1 to Tishri 10, Rosh HaShanah (or Yom Teruah) to Yom HaKippurim (aka Yom Kippur), is identified with the Coronation/Enthronement of God as King as well as with righteous judgment and enactments of vindication and restoration. We see this nowhere so beautifully as in the Scriptural readings of Rosh HaShanah–the stories of the birth and life of Sarah’s only child in Gen 21 and 22, and in the Haftarah reading of barren Hannah’s cries to the Lord and subsequent deliverance from shame, oppression, and childlessness. Both of these rich histories contain God’s vindication of their honor, of Sarah’s in spite of Hagar’s pregnant contempt, and Hannah’s in the sight of her perennially fertile rival Peninnah in I Sam chapters 1 and 2.

These women and these particular children tell us the grand story of our King and how He works, not through those to whom the world would like to ascribe honor, but often in direct opposition to the world’s ideas about who is and is not blessed and worthy. And they aren’t the only barren woman in Scripture—we also have Rebekah, Rachel, Samson’s mom, Anna and Elizabeth. And these stories are featured in the readings that begin the new civil and agricultural year (even though the festival months begin in the spring—months and years are tried together in the Roman calendar but not in the Hebrew calendar)—anyway, these stories mark the beginning of the new year because that is how life works. At first, potential and future events are hidden away, only to take shape and grow into something larger than itself. Things like leaven, and mustard seeds, and prayers and babies and much, much more.

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. If you prefer written material, I have six years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

Full disclosure if you have never heard me speak of it before but I am a barren woman. Multiple reproductive birth defects all working together in such a way that I have been pregnant many times but never gave birth to a living child. So, this is very personal to me. Because of a tumor that I had removed this spring, now I am really, really barren because everything I need to make a baby is gone but as I am in my fifties, it was really well past time anyway and our wonderful, beloved sons are now adults and I am not wanting to begin again. But being barren myself, experiencing life in religious spheres is rather like living in one of Dante’s fictional levels of hell. People say insanely cruel things in ignorance – and sometimes even on purpose. I smile to myself now, however – all those years ago and even after the wonderful adoption of our now adult sons, while enduring those comments – I had a dream that my husband and I would have 100 children, none of them biological. I wondered how it could happen even up until about five years ago, and now I minister to children from all over the world through books and videos and my radio show. The world does not see as God sees. Being barren is not a measure of worth. Neither is fertility. And I know that will shock a lot of gals who were carefully indoctrinated to believe that having many children equals great favor and having none means that you have hidden sin in your life. The abortion clinics aren’t full because women with hidden unrepentant sin can’t get pregnant. Teen pregnancy doesn’t happen because fertility is only bestowed on the righteous and the ready. Pregnancy happens because a sperm meets an egg in a fallopian tube and then childbirth happens because everything after that was in good working order as well. That’s how God designed creation, to pretty much do what it needs to do without micromanagement.

That isn’t to say that God doesn’t make miracles. If you know our story then you know that I would never say that but, more often than not, infertile women do not conceive without a great deal of medical help and barren women—usually medical science hasn’t advanced far enough to help with that either. It’s lovely when God helps but it isn’t lovely when people assume that the only thing women have to offer the world is having babies and being moms. We were fortunate enough to adopt twins, who are now adults, but not everyone gets to do that for any number of reasons. Fortunately, women (like men), are vital to the Kingdom and to the community of believers regardless of whether or not they have birthed and/or raised kids. It’s one thing that people do, have kids, and not the whole beginning and end of existence. It doesn’t determine blessedness, righteousness, or worth. It is not a reliable indicator of anything except a biological system functioning or malfunctioning.

Not everything is as it appears to be when it comes to blessings and curses. Not only don’t we see them consistently on display in otherwise righteous figures, we oftentimes see a lack of blessing lamented and complained about in the Psalms. We will often see something that says, “Oh Yahweh, your people are so blessed and the righteous never have any problems” and then a few Psalms later, we see, “Oh Yahweh, why do the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer lack?” Evidently, the Psalmists aren’t practicing their prosperity Gospel affirmations effectively enough or tithing to the right ministry (okay, that was sarcasm). In religious circles, women who have children (and especially many children) often take it for granted that it is some automatic badge of God’s favor; yet what percentage of fertile women were mentioned in the Bible (associated with their children) by name, and how many barren women are called to our attention? Do we hear about the righteousness of David’s mother, do we even know her name despite all the boys in that house? No. We do, however, all know the name of the woman who would be vindicated through the birth of the prophet who anointed David as king. Was it not barren Rachel’s son Joseph, and not Reuben, who saved his people?

Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Samson’s mother (pretty sure her name was withheld to protect her virtue because dang, that boy..), Hannah, and Elizabeth – all were barren. These were women who are remembered and who gave birth after all hope was lost, and not to normal kids, but instead to amazing men of God (or who were at least used by God–Samson, but that boy…). Only David’s wife Michael, out of all the women in Scripture, was cursed with barrenness after mocking her husband and it might be because he would never sleep with her again after her public shaming of him–-whereas we see that Jezebel never had need of a fertility doctor, or Athaliah for that matter and she killed all of her children! There are some really great and some truly messed up women in Scripture—just like with men! Of course, in those days, they didn’t know about male infertility and so we are left to wonder about Isaac, Samson’s dad, and Zechariah—who weren’t mentioned as having kids with anyone else either. You just never know. Not that it matters because in those days (and in modern times) the shame fell upon the childless woman because even today, despite the availability of medical knowledge and especially in religious circles, the woman is still assumed to be the one with the problem—and we usually are because our systems have way more than can go wrong with them. Men literally have one thing to do and as long as their swimmies are healthy enough, it isn’t like they are providing life support for another human being for nine months.

But in religious circles, we tend to want to find visible ways of proving how righteous we are—and fertility is just an easy way of doing that. I have seen this guy on Facebook who brags that his blog gets a million hits a month and yet I never see him getting any likes. But are a million hits important? What if they are all pings from spammers? I know a lot of mine are on my blog, which is why I removed the app that tracks such things. I got a comment this morning that was in Russian with suspicious-looking links and I am dead on sure that they weren’t telling me how much they like my blog! Is a wealth of whatever commodity really a reliable sign of God’s favor when so many truly evil people are swimming in cash, stuff, good looks, athletic ability and children? The Psalmists tell us that the appearance of blessings isn’t always about God’s favor. After all, the sun and rain are given to the righteous and unrighteous alike. We definitely need to stop using God and exploiting our having stuff in order to look favored and, believe me, I have done it but now it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If you have kids and you are poor but I am rich and barren—who gets to claim God’s favor? Is there like a hierarchy of stuff? Is that even our job or is it presumptuous and self-serving? Yeshua was clear in the exhortation never to exalt ourselves or, by extension, to humble others (because that’s why we do that, right?). Added to that, what was a blessing in an ancient agricultural society filled with clan warfare isn’t nearly as much of a blessing when you need to have a big enough car and car seats and just everything you need to legally raise kids in today’s world. It works out if you have a tv show but not so much if you are a regular person. In the end, I imagine the best course of action is to have your children, to be happy about how many you have, and to not look down on anyone else. You aren’t all that and a bag of chips and neither am I. Unless you are a Mormon, you won’t be graded at the end for how many children you gave birth to. And if you live in Idaho or Utah, you are possibly chuckling right now. But if you are a Mormon woman from Utah or Idaho and you are barren, you aren’t laughing at all because it is a cause for terrible stress.

To drive the point home that more is not always desirable and that worldly standards of honor are relative and sometimes deceptive, take a look at the end of the Scripture reading in the portions about the birth of Isaac. In Genesis 22, we see the fecundity (a fancy word that means a lotta babies were birthed by his women) of Abraham’s brother Nahor in league with his wife and concubine. Together they had twelve sons, only one being notable, but not for the usual reasons that a son is wanted to be counted as notable. One of the sons became the father of the Matriarch Rebekah. From Abraham sprang many great nations from relatively few, and from his brother Nahor came a granddaughter who would become Israel’s (aka Jacob’s) mother. I am confident that, given a choice, he and his wife would rather have given birth to a son who would be noted for more than siring a girl – times being what they were. And Laban, again, that boy would be shameful in any culture for practicing betrayal against a member of his own clan.

Is this to say that barren women are somehow superior to the fertile? –Certainly not, that would be silly. But I am saying that the actions of our King tell us that we cannot judge the value of a woman by whether or not she bears children young–or even at all. In fact, Yahweh is the author and creator of the honor reversal. He often favors the younger son over the first born, He sometimes chooses the barren over the fertile—He’s just like that. He does not see as we see. He doesn’t seem to value what we value and external appearances don’t dazzle Him or He would have chosen David’s older brother Eliab—he was evidently quite impressive. So much so that even the Prophet Samuel was chomping at the bit wanting to anoint him. But instead, Yahweh chose the overlooked child who wasn’t deemed important enough to come to the feast. And this story isn’t unique. God judges by different standards—we’re easily mislead by material blessings and so we often miss the heart of the matter.

So we have Leah and we have Rachel—who was blessed? Both of them were—just differently. And both could also count themselves cursed. Which is worse—to be unloved or to be childless? It all depends on which one of those applies to you. To Leah, all the children in the world meant less than the fact that she was unloved. To Rachel, all of Jacob’s love was empty because of the shame she had over being childless and therefore seen, in ancient Near Eastern culture, as being less than a wife and less than a woman. Leah had all the external honor as a matriarch but no regard from her husband. Rachel had no honor but her husband’s devotion. I doubt anyone would rush to trade places with either one of them. And, of course, this is just a rehashing of the story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar and a preview of Hannah, Elkanah and Peninnah, this week’s Torah and Haftarah readings. The picture painted through these carefully chosen Scripture readings is larger than simply childbearing—it’s about the fruit that a woman bears and the vindication that comes as a result of it. We will all be judged and will be rewarded according to what we produce, by the King who has written all our actions in His Book of Remembrance, which the Jewish people believe is opened every year on Yom Teruah/Rosh Hashanah. That fruit can be generated in youth, for certain, but age is no barrier–sometimes the best first fruit comes from a presumably barren and shameful tree.

A fertile woman might bear ten wretched children (just ask Haman’s poor wife), and a noble woman may produce only one, or none – as in the case of the prophetess Anna who was day by day at the Temple (Luke 2:36-38). Who would call her faithless? Truth is, we want to look blessed but God chooses us to be a blessing instead. And don’t get me wrong, bearing your husband a lot of children (well, sons and not daughters, anyway) was how you primarily blessed your husband in those days because they provided free labor as well as a small military force when raiders would come through your territory. Things being what they were, you were making your husband look like quite the stud. But sometimes, Yahweh’s goal was to bless the world instead—and so Sarah had one child. And Rebekah had two, having only one pregnancy, but only one was chosen. Rachel had two but died while giving birth to the second. We have no indication that Samson had any siblings. Hannah went on to have sons and daughters after Samuel. Anna had no children and Elizabeth, I imagine, had only John. There is no one story here about women and what they do and what they contribute to the metanarrative, the overarching story of salvation. And many stories of women aren’t about their status as mothers at all. Not Huldah. Not Abigail. Not Deborah. Not Yael.

It is the desire of our flesh to look at whatever we have, whether it be a lot of kids, money, worldly success, popularity, etc., as a sign of God’s favor (or a lack thereof). The truest sign of God’s favor, however, is to be found in the good fruit He allows and inspires and alters us to produce–starting on the inside. Think about the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control)—none of it is genuine if it is only external even though it will manifest in what we do if it is genuine. But fruit is about choices, not about things we have no choice about. And without Him, there is no acceptable fruit. Sarah was probably barren for over 70 years, Rebekah for 40 years, and so on and so on. I am sure they tried, but unlike the other women around them, they could not just place their faith in their flesh to produce that fruit. Make no mistake–finding out that we cannot place our faith in the flesh is a positive thing that few people in this life truly realize or learn to appreciate. We have been called to the same kind of life – we can’t just go through the motions in our flesh and call it good, no matter how amazing the result looks from the outside. To produce something excellent, we must see ourselves as barren trees in need of that divine intervention. And everyone is barren in different ways when we come into this walk. Yeshua doesn’t call us to follow Him because we are like producing what the Kingdom needs and, like, he’s some sort of college recruiter looking at us for our skills. We have no skills that are worth recruiting! Not any that are of any use to Him as is because the Kingdom is so counter-cultural that sometimes what looks like a blessing is a curse and what looks like a curse is a blessing!

These women had to live by faith, and not by flesh – and they showed us the way. They had to wait on God’s timing and pruning to produce, not just ordinary fruit, but exceptional fruit.  It is a model for every one of us, male and female; to produce something that is mature and good takes time and, generally, a lot of anguish. It won’t happen just because we want it to, or when we want it – impatient flesh is how you get an Ishmael or the forgotten children of Peninnah, not an Isaac or a Samuel.

But I do have a question that is very important to ask—what was the value of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah and Elizabeth while they were “ladies in waiting’—waiting to be moms? Were they worthless, were they without meaning or identification? How are single and childless women treated in religious circles? Really, we know much more about Sarah before she became a mother. Ninety years went by and she was the matriarch of a nomadic people group for decades before she gave birth to Isaac. She likely walked most of the way from Ur to Canaan, as did all of them, traveling at the speed of the slowest of the livestock who needed to forage as they went. She ran the tent of Abraham and managed her servants, probably cared for the sick and filled more than her fair share of water jugs or skins over the years. She was a very important person in the clan and would have had a great many responsibilities, even with the shame of childlessness hanging over her and even the pregnant slave girls looking at her as though there was something inherently wrong with her, that she must be cursed. Read Job if you want a look into what people assumed about anyone who was viewed as afflicted or cursed—they felt you got whatever you had coming to you.

But Sarah was a heroine long before she had her miracle baby. She followed her husband’s claiming to hear God wherever he went and far from the safety of home and clan into enemy territory. When her husband asked her to lie, even though it put her in grave danger, she went along with it not once but twice. She maintained her virtue when forcibly taken into not one but two harems. Sarah was no wimp. Sarah was beautiful, yes, but it would have taken a lot more than beauty to keep Abraham loyal to her in a day and age where a man without heirs was a man cursed and in danger in his old age. No man of those times would simply be swayed by beauty. And even though Abraham repeatedly put Sarah at risk to save his own skin (I mean, he was still an ancient near eastern kind of guy in many ways), she must have really been something. When Sarah advised Abraham on family policy, even Yahweh took her side. Sarah’s womb might have been barren but Sarah herself certainly was fruitful in every way that mattered.

Proverbs 31 gives us interesting insight into the value and measure of a woman of valor. It’s interesting what is and is not mentioned:

An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life. She seeks wool and flax, and works with willing hands. She is like the ships of the merchant; she brings her food from afar. She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and portions for her maidens. She considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard. She dresses herself with strength and makes her arms strong. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. Her lamp does not go out at night. She puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle. She opens her hand to the poor and reaches out her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet.  She makes bed coverings for herself; her clothing is fine linen and purple. Her husband is known in the gates when he sits among the elders of the land. She makes linen garments and sells them; she delivers sashes to the merchant. Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: “Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.” Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates. (ESV)

As Elizabeth Bennet said of the woman described by the arrogant Caroline Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, “I never saw such a woman, she would surely be a fearsome thing to behold.” And we look at this list describing the activities of an upper-class Jewish matriarch and we are suitably astounded at her level of accomplishment. She is busy, busy, busy on behalf of her household, her husband, and the community. Seemingly, no one escapes her notice and no one is beneath being worthy of her efforts. Interestingly enough, her hands are really focused on and the one thing that is never said about her is that she has given birth to a whole passel of children. That her children rise up and call her blessed comes across as more of an afterthought at the end of a laundry list of activities—nothing is even said as to whether she came by these children through childbirth, marriage or adoption. They are merely called “hers” and I think we can draw a great deal of wisdom from this portrait. She is a wife, yes, she is a mother, yes, but that is such a small part of who she is to so many.

The Proverbs 31 woman is trustworthy. She is kind, and a benefit to herself and others. She adds to people’s lives and is not a drain as we would imagine from a spoiled, wealthy stereotype. She is industrious, not leaving the work to others while she lives in pampered luxury. She does the food shopping for her household and makes sure that everyone, from the greatest to the least, has enough to eat. No one escapes her notice or her provision. She has enough business acumen to know what considerations go into buying a field and then she does it. She also has enough agricultural knowledge to plant a vineyard—no small feat. She hasn’t grown too weak and dainty from living the good life—her arms are strong enough to handle whatever task requires her attention. She knows how to turn a profit from the work of her hands. She’s an excellent planner, and so the household doesn’t have to worry about running low on oil or other supplies. She makes what she can and buys what she has to. She is generous to the poor and doesn’t hide from the needy. No one in her household is cold or shoeless in the winter. Her household doesn’t go without because she is standing in the gap making sure that needs are met. She is so diligent and hard-working that her husband has the leisure to sit in the city gates with the elders. She weaves and she sells the garments. She is strong, dignified, wise and kind. She is a blessing to everyone around her. Everyone praises her, and not for her beauty or for producing sons but because of who she is and what she does. And what she does, she does because she loves Yahweh. She is to be praised because of who she is and she is to receive the credit and the profit from her labors.

Did you ever notice that the Proverbs 31 woman’s looks are never described? In fact, she laughs at getting older. No mention of giving birth or producing sons either. The Hebrew Bible is ordered in one of two ways, with Ruth coming either after Song of Songs or after Proverbs. In the Christian tradition, Ruth comes after Judges and before Samuel, as more of a Chronological book. But in the Hebrew tradition, Ruth is instead associated with wisdom literature. I do prefer the placement of Ruth right after Proverbs 31. Proverbs 31 is the unrealistic ideal if we look at it as a list of things every wife has to do in order to be excellent. I don’t even have the money to buy a field nor the expertise to make my own linen. Ruth perhaps became that Proverbs 31 woman, being that she married rich Boaz, but her excellence was recognized and honored long before. Ruth, as far as we know, had one child—Obed, who famously sired Jesse the father of King David. But when we look at Ruth, we are not thinking about David. Ruth stands on her own. Ruth was childless when her husband died, presumably young, and when she risked life and limb to follow her mother in law Naomi back to the land of Israel, she was giving up her people, her ways, her everything in order to care for a woman who could offer her nothing in return.

Ruth certainly owed Naomi nothing. Naomi was a vulnerable widow in a foreign land and she was returning home to no prospects. We know from later in the book that their land had been sold and needed to be redeemed. So, there was no hope of going back and homesteading—they would be squatters on someone else’s land, living off of the charity and gleanings of others. So, in terms of quality of life, Ruth was walking into the opposite situation of the Proverbs 31 woman—not only wasn’t she wealthy, not only didn’t she had maidservants, not only wasn’t she dressed in scarlet and purple, not only could she not afford to laugh at the future, she didn’t even have a husband or child. But, where it counted, she was that Proverbs 31 woman—at least what that woman would look like if she wasn’t so prosperous. Her household was Naomi, and in caring for Naomi she did whatever was necessary. She worked her butt off, not making linen garments and sashes, but doing the back-breaking work of gleaning, wearing long robes in the hot sun from morning to night. And she did that work through the barley and wheat harvesting seasons. Yes, Boaz made it easier for her—but it was never easy. And when she left her country and her kin, she had no such delusions that she wouldn’t be slaving away for life, just barely living above starvation level.

Who should we honor more? Ruth or the Proverbs 31 woman? Or maybe Sarah? Really wrong question. The important thing about these and countless women—some written about but the overwhelming majority never written about anywhere and long since forgotten—is that they did what they could with what they had and they did these things with valor. Husband or not. Children or not. Money or not. A woman is truly blessed when she is a blessing and not when she has the means to buy fields and plant vineyards and hire servants. So, I look at all these women and despite what was going on in their lives and despite what judgment they faced because of their circumstances, they were all amazing. If you were to rewrite Proverbs 31 about your own life, what would it look like? Years ago, I wrote this and maybe it will change the way you look at yourself and the women around you, or look at your wife or mom or sister. But first—this is how I used to read it back when I loathed this gal with a passion:

She gets up bright and chipper every morning and makes breakfast for everyone. Her children rise up without complaint and thank her for the wake-up call, they are perfectly behaved and all straight-A students. She dresses them in the finest fashions, and she never has a hair out of place. She is beautiful, with no unwanted fat, and she never ages. She gets pregnant when she wants to, without problems or miscarriages, and she is a perfect lover for her husband because she never tires. She provides her family with tasty, gourmet dishes. She has her own home-based business, despite homeschooling her perfect brood. Her husband loves to show her off because she is still so smokin’ hot. She is smart, and witty and always knows the right thing to say and do. Her children never fight, they love and respect her too much for that. She tirelessly does charity work because her family is so well-functioning they hardly need her at all. Her children become doctors and lawyers.

One day, as I was reading through the Scriptures again and grumbling at my literary adversary, God impressed upon me that she was never called beautiful and almost nothing of what I wrote could be found in there. I had performed a shamelessly ruthless bit of eisegesis—reading an agenda into the text. So, I revisited Proverbs 31 and rewrote it for the more modern woman:

Her husband trusts her–she is not a trophy or arm candy.  She is an asset to his life and greatly valued.  She treats him well and cares for him.  She purchases what is needed and from her purchases provides for the entire family.  She makes sure they are fed, and takes care of their employees as well, not mistreating them.  She is recognized as smart enough to make independent financial decisions for the family, and does not squander the benefits of it.  She makes sure her family is clothed and clean.  She ensures that they have warm clothes for the winter months, and she sees to it that her house repairs and bills are not neglected so that the family will not suffer in the cold.  She never embarrasses her husband, nor does she drive him to poverty with frivolous spending–leaving him free to do the things he needs to do.  She uses her skills for those who have need of them–whether they need food made, or to be clothed, their house cleaned during times of illness, a shoulder to cry on, or lips to offer prayers.  She is such a blessing to people that they don’t notice how she looks, they notice who she is.  She studies the Word of God and it seasons her speech.  She doesn’t neglect to keep track of her household, the finances, and the needs of her family.  She doesn’t let them lack so that she can be lazy all the time–they have clean clothes, food to eat and shelter. Her husband and children call her blessed and they appreciate her (adding this:  even though the kids might say otherwise when they get angry).  Loveliness can sway a man’s heart into an unsuitable match, prettiness can lead to vanity, and youth withers.  Find a woman who fears God–don’t hold her back or deny her credit for what she accomplishes.  Let people judge her by who she is and what she does.

So, are you married, or single? Do you have a dozen kids, or one, or none, or did you adopt? Are you the breadwinner or the stay at home parent? Are you starting out or are you retired? Are you an empty-nester or are you raising your grandkids or are you a foster parent? Really, I could have written a hundred different variations on this and the activities might be different but the character would look the same in every single one. Because an excellent woman is an excellent woman. Some excellent women are married and others are single. Some excellent women are barren and others are fertile. Some excellent women have PhDs and some have GEDs and some are illiterate. Some excellent women are in wheelchairs or are bedridden and others care for those who are bedridden. Some excellent women do charity work, others support charity work, and some receive charity. One thing for sure is that all excellent women share character traits with the Proverbs 31 woman even if their activities have little in common.

I will tell you that we women are our own worst enemies. We compete over nonsense. We judge over nothing. We create cliques and judge other women based on choices as though they were moral issues. We judge over family size, schooling, breastfeeding, vaccinations, scheduling and co-sleeping and really just peeing on our own territory and dismissing anyone who does things differently as though we are the gold standard of parenting. You want to know why women feel defeated? In judging one another we lay the heaviest judgment upon ourselves. Yeshua/Jesus told us that whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted and it is true. When one woman tears down another woman over choices that simply represent different parenting styles and different realities of life, when women form “yay me!” groups exalting this or that choice and condemning anyone who feels differently, when we lose our compassion in a subconscious effort to exalt our own choices because we are terrified that we are doing it wrong and everyone who is different terrifies us—we end up dissatisfied and discouraged. We end up that way because we are divided. Think about it—think about how many women would kill to have our decisions to make and how we fight and posture and shred one another as though there is only one true way to do everything—our way. I don’t see the Proverbs 31 woman being mentioned as being anything except a blessing and supportive of others—a resource.

In July, a woman just tore me to pieces because I wasn’t anti-vaccination enough for her. I am only against those vaccinations that are actually cultured off aborted fetal tissue. That’s where I personally draw the line but I allow everyone to make their own choices without condemnation. I got accused of being genocidal, supporting evil, and not being fit to teach children. Not like I’d discuss that with kids but I see a lot of that sort of petty judgment.  A Proverbs 31 mindset is one where we are blessings and not dictators. Where we can look at the same set of circumstances and come to different decisions without being immoral monsters. Where we can love and support one another and be—humble. And then we won’t need to exalt ourselves and our opinions anymore because we won’t need that sort of artificial validation.

The post Episode 126: Rosh HaShanah and the Barren Woman appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

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Polygamy, multiple spouses, or more accurately polygyny, multiple wives, can be a hot topic among people new to reading the Hebrew Scriptures. And there is this unfortunate tendency with people who do not read deeply into the text—or into what the first century writings and particularly Yeshua/Jesus has to say about it—to somehow prop up multiple wives as some sort of Biblical ideal. So, today we are going to delve deeply into what Scripture does and does not say about multiple wives (because nothing is said about multiple husbands as it was illegal in the ancient world in almost all cultures). Is this portrayed positively, as some claim, or negatively? What were the historical-cultural reasons for polygyny in the ancient Near East and elsewhere? What do demographics and Genesis 2 and 3 teach us about original intent? What does Yeshua teach us about original intent? What do we see typified in polygynous families in the Bible? How does Leviticus talk about this phenomenon? Lots to cover today.

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. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

Oddly enough, I am going to begin at the end—with the words of Yeshua and Paul. And then we will go back to the beginning. I am of the belief that our Messiah is the absolute and ultimate interpreter of the Hebrew Scriptures and that everyone else is just giving interesting opinions. So there. In Mark 10, which we covered not so long ago, Yeshua is talking about divorce and the “allowances” of Moses. And it’s truly difficult to understand Torah without also understanding the concept of allowances—it’s how a lot of people in the Hebrew Roots Movement get themselves into trouble when they focus so much on the Torah and not on some of Yeshua’s clarifications about it. When Yeshua is asked if a man should be able to divorce his wife, Yeshua doesn’t give them permission. They are asking what they are allowed to do and Yeshua takes them back to the beginning to show them what they are supposed to do. He tells them point blank that Moses, far from commanding divorce, made an allowance because of their hardness of heart. And there is a huge difference between the two. This is why a legalistic reading of the law will often lead us into unrighteousness, if we are only looking at it in order to see what we can get away with doing to other people. Which is exactly what men were doing during the first century. The House of Hillel Pharisees had a ruling that they enjoyed living by called “any-cause divorce” and instead of only being allowed to divorce their wives for gross indecency, as dictated in Torah, they had expanded that to include the burning of meals and just plain old getting older. In fact, they would even punish wives they could not afford to divorce (hence having to return their dowry because they hadn’t committed adultery, which forfeited it) by taking a second, younger wife. The Essenes had fits over them doing both this and marrying their nieces because that wasn’t specifically mentioned as being forbidden in Leviticus 18. You see what people do when they search the Scriptures for what they are allowed to do to other people?

But in Yeshua’s answer to their question, he smacks them down hard for polygyny—when we know the first century context and who His audience was and what they were doing: ⁵ And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. ⁶ But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ⁷ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife,  ⁸ and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. ⁹ What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (ESV)

One wife. They are no longer two but one—not three, but one. The word for man is the generic Greek word meaning human. If it was just referring to men, as the Pharisees were when they asked the question, He could have responded with andri, which is where we get the name Andrew. But, Yeshua didn’t go there, He used the generic Greek for human. No human, neither male nor female, is to come between a married couple. To do so is adultery. And so, right here, Yeshua is very slyly calling the Pharisees onto the carpet for polygyny being a form of adultery. It simply was not that way in the beginning and that is always where Yeshua sends us in order to find out what God wants from us and especially in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. So often, He says something like, “You have heard it was said to those of old…” referring to the Torah commandments, but then He will jump in with, “but I say to you…” and sometimes He is flat out saying that the commandments are nice but they were made to contain or limit sin—not to define a righteous life. We all know that slavery is evil now, post-Cross, even though it took us a long time to get there—and even though most of that slavery might have been debt slaves, it wasn’t all that way and you could beat a slave to death and go unpunished just as long as they didn’t die within two days “because they are your property” (Ex 21:20-21) We know that forcibly taking war-brides is evil (Deut 21:10-14), because we live in a post-Cross world. Moses made allowances. Yeshua outright says so. And Yeshua calls us to a much higher standard of justice and righteousness than Moses ever could have.

What about the epistles? In I Timothy 3, overseers and deacons are both commanded to be the husband of only one wife and in Titus 1, elders are held to the exact same standard. So, obviously when Paul was setting up new congregations, he was banning polygynists from leadership. A huge reason is because they were commanded to have orderly households and, as we will see throughout Scripture, that is not the case when there is more than one wife in the home, and especially children of more than one wife. Polygynists aren’t really celebrated in Scripture—at least not for that. Their home lives are a mess and oftentimes they themselves are objectionable and portrayed badly for other reasons. Let’s just go through them:

Lamech, the great-great grandson of Cain, a murderer and the first person in Scripture to be described as having more than one wife. He was quite the piece of work, claiming that anyone who tried to kill him for killing the young man who had only wounded him, was going to get it bad—seventy-seven fold. Lamech depended on God’s protection of Cain in order to justify this. Lamech is the first person in Scripture who is really described as being just an all around bad dude. Very entitled in every aspect of his life that we know about and feeling as though the rules obviously didn’t apply to him and that he could kill people over slights without penalty.

Our second polygynist is debatable—it’s Abraham. And a lot of this material you can find more fleshed out in my book Context for Adults: Sexuality, Social Identity and Kinship Relations in the Bible. Hagar, being a concubine, wasn’t a full on wife. This is terrible but in the ancient world, women were seen as incubators. The man deposits his seed in the fertile soil of the wife and nine months later, voila! Mini-me for daddy. But the idea of a woman having an egg? And that the baby was genetically hers as well? That really wouldn’t have made sense to them. No, the baby was the father’s property as it grew from his seed and no matter how fond Abraham was of Sarah, and he must have loved her very much for sticking with her in a world where a woman needed to produce within two years or be discarded as damaged goods, he would have seen his kids as just mini versions of himself. Sarah and Hagar were just incubators in the birthing process. The Bible doesn’t teach science, so it speaks in those terms when we know what to look for. Which was why the whole “seed of the woman” thing in Genesis 3 didn’t make an ounce of sense to them. Women, they thought, didn’t have seed. Only men. Of course, we know differently. But Sarah was within her rights in the ancient Near Eastern world to present her husband with a surrogate “incubator” for his baby, and that’s why the child would be “hers” because it was only her husband’s child anyway, as far as they believed. Didn’t matter where it came out of. So, she had the legal right to force Hagar into this situation (which would have been a step up socially for her anyway) and Abraham wanted a son so it wasn’t like he was going to refuse her. Sarah needed a son just as badly as did Abraham, someone to care for her once Abraham died. So, was Abraham a polygynist? No, not really. He only ever had, in his eyes, one wife at a time plus an incubator on the side. And I know this sounds offensive and it is offensive but this is contextually how they would have looked at the situation. But, even though there weren’t two wives, Hagar was behaving as though she was a wife and we all know how horribly this worked out when she began acting as Sarah’s rival instead of as her slave. There is nothing even suggesting that Abraham was treating her as a second wife, however, carrying the heir to the clan was a big huge deal and it made Hagar somewhat of a celebrity in the group. Of course, we all know what happened, the family ended up splintered apart and Hagar and Ishmael were cast out and almost died. I mean, really Abraham? A water skin and some bread? So not cool there, dude. And the two families were at odds throughout the Scriptures. Not a good starting point.

Fortunately, all this drama skipped a generation and we were instead treated to the problem of having favorite children, which is also a recurring problem theme. But Jacob—he didn’t go into life wanting more than one wife but was tricked into it and it was a disaster. His brother, Esau, on the other hand, married multiple women on purpose—women who made his mother’s life a living hell. Jacob, of course, only wanted Rachel but her father played a game with ancient Near Eastern inheritance rights and probably tricked Jacob into marrying Leah so that he could be disinherited. You see, Laban doesn’t seem to have any sons when Jacob shows up, only the girls. Because of this, Laban might have been in the market for an endogamous adoption—the adoption of another clan member as a son/son-in-law. Marrying him to Rachel gave Laban a male heir—but later in the story we see Laban suddenly having sons. So, something had changed over the course of the 21 years Jacob remained with Laban where we see no sons and then all of a sudden he has sons old enough to be working with the flocks. There is a law on the books, and I talk about this in my book, where a stipulation of son-in-law inheritance rights would be invalidated if the son in law took a second wife. And we actually see Laban make reference to this during their very last meeting when he forbids Jacob to take any wives other than his daughters. So, if Laban had sons during that initial seven years of Jacob working for him, then if he could force Jacob into a polygynist situation, Jacob would not inherit—only Laban’s biological sons would inherit. So, Laban makes the switch, Jacob consummates the marriage, and then is forced by his love for Rachel to become a polygamist when all he initially wanted was Rachel. He loses the inheritance and Laban gets what he wants.

Of course, Bilhah and Zilpah were added not as wives but as concubines due to barenness (in the case of Rachel) and secondary infertility (in the case of Leah) and both wives were within their rights to demand more children. And, of course, Jacob doesn’t seem to complain about it. In Rabbinic legends, he liked Bilhah so much that after Rachel’s death, she became his preferred sleeping partner—which is why they claim Reuben slept with her, so Jacob couldn’t anymore. But the wording is very precise and Bilhah and Zilpah are not ever referred to as the wives of Jacob, when the wives are singled out and addressed, but just as women. And when Bilhah and Zilpah have children, they belong to Rachel and Leah. If they were wives, then the children would be credited to them. And yes, it is a step up from just being a slave but it is a far cry from the respect a wife would be due within the clan.

What is the immediate fruit of these unions, I mean, besides a whole mess of kids? Strife between the sisters as love turns to a bitter rivalry—Leah even accusing Rachel of stealing her husband. When Joseph goes making trouble for his brothers, he singles out the children of Bilhah and Zilpah, so evidently there is a hierarchy that even the kids are painfully aware of and you know how kids are. In addition, the children of Rachel are given a super-priority and favoritism over the others—even the firstborn. As a result, hatred grows amongst all of the brothers and Joseph is betrayed and sold into slavery in Egypt. Just as in the problems with Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, this is all directly attributable to multiple women being forced into a rivalry situation. Perhaps this is why Joseph only had one wife!

During the time of the Judges, we have Gideon, who had seventy sons and “many wives”—well, with that many kids, one would certainly hope for more than one wife. He also had a concubine who bore him a son, and that son, Abimelech, killed all of his brothers so that he could rule over the residents of Shechem himself. And we’re going to see this theme repeated again, with the sons of David. Sons of different mothers in the Bible tend not to be terribly loyal to one another. In the ancient Near Eastern world, the closest bond is not between husband and wife or father and son but between mother and son, followed by brother and sister. Which makes a lot of this make a whole lot more sense. Oftentimes, these guys were actually striving with one another for their mother’s honor. Rivalry is all about undermining your opponent and trying to come out on top. Like with Leah and Rachel and the dialogues whenever a new baby would or wouldn’t be born.

Let’s look at what the Bible says about that rivalry issue—Lev 18:18 “And you shall not take a woman as a rival wife to her sister, uncovering her nakedness while her sister is still alive.” And I Sam 1:6 “There was a certain man of Ramathaim-zophim of the hill country of Ephraim whose name was Elkanah the son of Jeroham, son of Elihu, son of Tohu, son of Zuph, an Ephrathite. ² He had two wives. The name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other, Peninnah. And Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children. ³ Now this man used to go up year by year from his city to worship and to sacrifice to the Lord of hosts at Shiloh, where the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were priests of the Lord. ⁴ On the day when Elkanah sacrificed, he would give portions to Peninnah his wife and to all her sons and daughters. ⁵ But to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her, though the Lord had closed her womb. ⁶ And her rival used to provoke her grievously to irritate her, because the Lord had closed her womb. ⁷ So it went on year by year. As often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she used to provoke her. Therefore, Hannah wept and would not eat. ⁸ And Elkanah, her husband, said to her, “Hannah, why do you weep? And why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?”

Can I just go and say, “Most clueless man of all time?” No, honey, you aren’t better than ten sons. Geez, what kind of an idiot are you? I have this other woman of yours tormenting me but hey, I am married to you which makes it all so thrilling and happy. As Bugs Bunny would say, “What a maroon!” But, look at Leviticus 18:18—Moses is flat out saying that multiple wives are rivals. Hey, just like multiple husbands would be. There’s a reason that’s always illegal in patriarchal cultures—because men are jealous just like women are, and it isn’t any less of a problem. Here’s the thing, if Moses is acknowledging that multiple wives are rivals, what should that communicate to us? The word rival is not a positive one—no one should have a rival in their own home. It is cruel and dehumanizing. A woman with a rival is a woman who can have no peace—just like a man would feel the same way. And the saddest example of this is between Rachel and Leah, sisters whose relationship should never have been broken by rivalry. Let’s look at this heartbreaking story in Gen 29 and 30:

³¹ When the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. ³² And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben, for she said, “Because the Lord has looked upon my affliction; for now my husband will love me.” ³³ She conceived again and bore a son, and said, “Because the Lord has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also.” And she called his name Simeon. ³⁴ Again she conceived and bore a son, and said, “Now this time my husband will be attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.” Therefore his name was called Levi. ³⁵ And she conceived again and bore a son, and said, “This time I will praise the Lord.” Therefore she called his name Judah. Then she ceased bearing.

Let’s stop right here. Geez, four sons and with every son she is like begging and hoping for her husband’s regard, but instead he prefers her sister. It says here that she is hated—which must have been what it felt like, to know how she had been used as part of a ruse and can you even begin to imagine her agony—and her rival, the other woman, was her own sister. Legendary materials say that they were twins, but at the very least Rachel was her younger sister. This situation is a nightmare for Leah who obviously gives up on Jacob loving her before the birth of Judah, and it isn’t a picnic for Rachel either, because although Rachel is a rival for Jacob’s actual affection, Leah has given birth to four sons—making Rachel nothing in the eyes of other women and insecure in her marriage.

30 When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister. She said to Jacob, “Give me children, or I shall die!” ² Jacob’s anger was kindled against Rachel, and he said, “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?” ³ Then she said, “Here is my servant Bilhah; go in to her, so that she may give birth on my behalf, that even I may have children through her.” ⁴ So she gave him her servant Bilhah as a wife, and Jacob went in to her. ⁵ And Bilhah conceived and bore Jacob a son. ⁶ Then Rachel said, “God has judged me, and has also heard my voice and given me a son.” Therefore she called his name Dan. ⁷ Rachel’s servant Bilhah conceived again and bore Jacob a second son. ⁸ Then Rachel said, “With mighty wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister and have prevailed.” So she called his name Naphtali.

Now, being a barren woman myself, I know what it is to feel like I am going to die without a child. I even told God that in January of 2000 after I lost our third baby. And I meant it. And Jacob here, is really not the most sympathetic figure in the Bible—on so many levels. Rachel, desperate as Sarah ever was, gives Jacob her young, probably about thirteen or fourteen years old, handmaid and when Bilhah gives birth, Rachel’s words really reveal the oppressive and adversarial nature of having to deal with other wives. “God has judged me”…and the unspoken thing is that the judgment would be with regard to this rivalry with her sister, she feels vindicated now. And with the birth of Napthali, she speaks of wrestling with her sister. This is a horrifying indictment on polygyny, if even the closest of women can have their loving relationship destroyed over it. This is not how either family or marriage should be, for anyone.

⁹ When Leah saw that she had ceased bearing children, she took her servant Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife. ¹⁰ Then Leah’s servant Zilpah bore Jacob a son. ¹¹ And Leah said, “Good fortune has come!” so she called his name Gad. ¹² Leah’s servant Zilpah bore Jacob a second son. ¹³ And Leah said, “Happy am I! For women have called me happy.” So she called his name Asher. ¹⁴ In the days of wheat harvest Reuben went and found mandrakes in the field and brought them to his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, “Please give me some of your son’s mandrakes.” ¹⁵ But she said to her, “Is it a small matter that you have taken away my husband? Would you take away my son’s mandrakes also?” Rachel said, “Then he may lie with you tonight in exchange for your son’s mandrakes.” ¹⁶ When Jacob came from the field in the evening, Leah went out to meet him and said, “You must come in to me, for I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.” So he lay with her that night. ¹⁷ And God listened to Leah, and she conceived and bore Jacob a fifth son. ¹⁸ Leah said, “God has given me my wages because I gave my servant to my husband.” So she called his name Issachar.

Geez. Come on! How humiliating to have to barter with your rival in order to sleep with your own husband. And none of this is Leah’s fault. She was a pawn in a ruthless patriarchal culture and her father used her in order to rob Jacob. This is just wrong. When we look at men and women in the beginning and the harmony and the one on one nature of the relationship, this is just tragic.

¹⁹ And Leah conceived again, and she bore Jacob a sixth son. ²⁰ Then Leah said, “God has endowed me with a good endowment; now my husband will honor me, because I have borne him six sons.” So she called his name Zebulun. ²¹ Afterward she bore a daughter and called her name Dinah.

But six sons and a daughter mean little to Jacob, who still does not regard her and seemingly never will.

²² Then God remembered Rachel, and God listened to her and opened her womb. ²³ She conceived and bore a son and said, “God has taken away my reproach.” ²⁴ And she called his name Joseph, saying, “May the Lord add to me another son!”

So, even having the births through Bilhah was not enough to cause Rachel not to feel this shame and rivalry. Look, when you have a rival, no amount of victory is enough. Rivals are there to be conquered and defeated, not to be fought with endlessly.

But surely, even though things were a mess for Sarah and Hagar, and Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and his clan, and Hannah and her family—surely things got better with the monarchy. I mean, David is like one of the stars of the Bible. Surely he could handle polygyny like a champ with no infighting. Actually, with him it was even worse. And he wasn’t tricked into it like Jacob was. David took multiple wives for various reasons—political alliances and lust being among them. And really, you have four overt reasons for polygyny in the Bible (other than being tricked, we aren’t going to count a unique situation):

• the need for heirs because people without heirs were in deep doo doo in the ancient world. Without a younger generation, you were vulnerable in every way. As you grew older, there was no one to protect you from the elements, care for the land and livestock, or defend you if you were attacked by marauders or your slaves rebelled. Even worse than all that was the idea of having your body go unburied and ending up as dust beneath the feet of others. This was seriously terrifying for ancient people and we have no indication from the Bible that they had any concept of eternal life at this early date. Even David didn’t. For ancient people, the only immortality was through being remembered, which is why Absalom built a memorial for himself. Obviously, none of these are any sort of concern in modern times.
• Political alliances—this was the main reason why kings gathered wives. To shore up political alliances with neighboring countries. These were princesses bred for this duty and the race was always on to produce the first heir, or maybe the favorite heir, so that they could be queen mother. Apart from the wealth, it was a kind of a miserable sort of life spent scheming and competing for affection. Saul, David and Solomon all took political wives. Solomon’s very first wife allied Israel with Egypt because she was the daughter of Pharaoh. Rehoboam, Solomon’s heir—his mother was an Ammonite.
• Lust—Bathsheba was the one wife of David whom we know was the victim of lust. The text in Hebrew and in historical context is clear that she was innocent and that David was the aggressor and that he even raped her—which is why she was likened to a little defenseless ewe lamb in Nathan’s parable. The problem with power is that it makes even good men drunk with it and likely, when he had her seized and brought over to his palace, she couldn’t conceive of getting out of there alive if she said no to him. He held all the cards. And since he murdered her husband to cover everything up, maybe she would be right to just be happy to get out of there alive. Power changed David, and not for the better. And Solomon with his thousand wives and concubines. There weren’t enough countries to be allied with to justify that many alliances and he sure didn’t need that many heirs.
• Patriarchal authority/honor—patriarchy breeds self-indulgence. It just does. A man feels more like a man if he has more of what makes a man feel like a man—and women are always at the top of that list. Even if it isn’t about lust, it is about possessions, authority and power over others and no one is easier to wield authority over in the ancient world than women. A man who could gather beautiful and well-positioned women around him would be granted a lot of honor for doing so and honor/reputation was everything in that world.

In the modern world, we see the latter two reasons for plural marriages. Plus one other—but that one other tends to get blended in with lust and patriarchy, and that is religion. Where I live, we have what are called “black Mormons” and they are Mormons who practice polygyny even though the church outlawed it so that Utah could become a state back in 1896. Polygyny is still very much a thing here, but don’t think of Sister Wives or Big Love. That’s fictional. Yes, reality shows like Sister Wives are largely fictional and I actually have a friend who knows that family personally. But let’s get back to the Biblical record—and this time we will talk about David’s family.

David had eight wives and of course we already discussed the tragedy with Bathsheba. The children that came from these eight marriages were treacherous with one another. Amnon, David’s firstborn, raped his half-sister Tamar. Tamar’s brother Absalom, when David refused to do anything about it, killed Amnon and was banished. When Absalom returned, the bitterness was still so terrible that he launched a coup against his father which resulted in his death. When David was close to death, his son Adonijah seized the throne and declared himself king—despite the throne being promised to Solomon. Solomon spared his life only to have him executed later because Adonijah was trying to secure a backdoor to the throne by trying to marry David’s last wife, who was still a virgin. By marrying one of David’s wives, he would have a claim to the throne. And so, all these children of different mothers—there was no affection there but only rivalry and we have seen it too many times for it not to be a serious pattern of the bad fruit that comes from plural marriages.

And I am not saying that people who do this are evil. I am saying that the fruit is bad. So many times, Yeshua would just point His audience back to the beginning. There is a reason why the male/female population is about 50/50 and it isn’t because Yahweh wants some men to have a ton of wives and the rest to have none. Would Yahweh really want some men to have absolutely no heirs? Well, that’s what ends up happening within these plural marriage communities. The only way to make it work is to have a lot of single men or to expel them from the community, which does often happen. Look at the FLDS community run by Warren Jeffs, and that’s not the only community out there.

This is never portrayed in Scripture as a righteous or beneficial way of life. The word rival gets used—and that isn’t a dig at women for being too sensitive. It’s just a fact. Yeshua called the men who do this adulterers. The early congregations barred these men from leadership. And so, why does this happen? When I read the materials put out by these groups or individuals that promote this, they make a big deal about saying this isn’t about sex. But what is it about? It certainly isn’t about there being no male or female in Christ, because there are definite dividing lines. Women are not granted the right to have more than one husband and the reasons given are ludicrous. “Oh,” people say, “You won’t know who the father is.” Why does that matter anymore? Get a DNA test. Easy peasy. But no, there is always a double standard. Now, in the ancient world, no man anywhere would tolerate rivals which is why adultery was considered to be a crime committed against another man, and not against a man’s wife. In other words, if say, my husband and I were alive three thousand years ago and he had relations with the neighbor’s wife, they wouldn’t be sinning against me but against her husband because I had no authority over his body—which brings me to another bit of Scripture often overlooked in all of this. Two, actually—in Mark 10:11, Yeshua shocked his audience by pointing out that, yes Virginia, a man really can commit adultery with his wife as the victim—he is committing adultery not just against another man but against his own wife. This seems obvious to us but it was anything but obvious within that patriarchal culture where women truly were treated as though they were less than fully human. Like I said before, walking incubators. But what’s that other verse I was talking about? Here we go—I Cor 7

Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. Likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does.

Although this Scripture is misused to make women feel as though they are sex slaves and that if they don’t give in to their husband’s every whim, he’s going to stray, it couldn’t be further from the truth. And by the way, if you guys don’t want us to see you as weak—then don’t pull this stuff. We know that single guys are expected to be celibate, as are divorced and widowed men. They don’t all go out raping women and committing fornication just because their every desire isn’t being met so you husbands, seriously, put on your big girl panties (well, not literally) and understand that your wife isn’t a sex slave and sometimes she doesn’t want to or can’t and that’s okay. Her body doesn’t just belong to you. Your body also belongs to her and thus you have to hold back when she needs a break. You’ll live. And also—if you can let yourself go and get older and go without makeup and jewelry, so can we.

But this Scripture is what I call the “Leah” scripture. Oh if only Jacob’s body had only belonged to her! If only Jacob only had his own one wife! If only Leah could have called Jacob her own husband but she couldn’t because he was also her sister’s husband. If Leah had been properly given authority over Jacob’s body then all twelve tribes would have come from her and Rachel could have married someone else and Rachel and Leah could have loved one another as sisters—and they could have both just hated their snake of a father instead without the rivalry. Polygyny makes this impossible—and so does polyandry, plural husbands. And no thanks, one is enough!

Yahweh is the God of love, dignity, justice and righteousness. Polygyny is something men did in the ancient world, not something that was part of God’s original design. Adam and Eve, not Adam and Betty and Veronica. No one deserves to go through life with a rival. No man and no woman. We were each of us created to be loved and respected and cherished. We were each of us created to be enough for someone else. For one someone else. With no rivalries among children constantly jockeying for position. Moses made allowances for hardness of heart but we aren’t supposed to have hardened hearts.

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Changes in religious beliefs tend to happen over time, but when they do not—when they instead happen suddenly, we will find a catalyst of some sort. Obviously, a personal encounter with Yeshua/Jesus on the way to persecute believers in Damascus in the case of Paul. When I got saved it was because Yahweh was just invading my every waking moment with His presence for like four long, grueling days and forcing me to deal with Him and, when I wanted to become a Jew, He directed me to Jesus instead. Abraham was directly called by Yahweh out of the paganism of his family. Genesis 6 says that Noah found favor with Yahweh and only some time later was he called a righteous man. And that is how it is with us, right? We have no righteousness of our own and we are often a hot mess when Yahweh determines to have our allegiance. Take it from me personally, He doesn’t much care to take no for an answer. We often desire to make the case that Yahweh calls otherwise righteous people but that doesn’t seem to be the general pattern of Scripture. He calls us in spite of ourselves. And that understanding is very important.

There are also religious changes that occur as we grow. Often, we will start out legalistic and zealous—not really knowing much of anything but making up for it by being really passionate about things that we regret in time. As we develop in relationship with Yahweh, our zeal for doctrines transforms into a passionate love for Yahweh and others, which sometimes puts us into opposition with our previously held views. This is how wisdom works—we begin as fools and get wiser, and then we get foolish about a new understanding, and hopefully gain some wisdom, and then keep doing it and hopefully our foolishness gets milder and briefer as we grow. Some folks do seem to only get worse.

Another cause of radical change comes about within the Hebrew Roots Movement and Messianic Judaism when someone gets taken in by anti missionary propaganda. And what do I mean by an anti-missionary? I mean former believers who used to be quite sold out for Yeshua, and I even know of one college professor who teaches textual criticism who makes a lot more money now turning people away from Jesus. But these were people who were, by all outward appearance, true believers with compelling testimonies and the works to go along with it who, for whatever reason, listened to someone who gave them reasons not to believe and they forgot everything they knew experientially and tossed our Lord to the curb in order to become traditional Jews. And the interesting thing is what happens in the aftermath of this and how it is related to gender, of all things.

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. If you prefer written material, I have six years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

This happens during two times of the year—when the anti-missionaries go hunting. And I am not talking about the Jewish anti-missionaries. I have yet to see them care about converting Gentiles away from Jesus—it isn’t on their agenda. I am talking about the former believers in Yeshua—those from the Hebrew Roots Movement and Messianic Judaism who have fallen away and become, really, useful pawns in all of this toward the larger goal of preserving Torah for the Jews only and to eliminate the witness of Yeshua-followers keeping the feast and kosher and all of that. But the wrecking of our faith isn’t the goal, it’s the return of Jews to traditional Judaism that is their goal. Former HRMs and MJs are just useful to them, but they never really seem to be accepted in any real way, into the flock, unless they become full blown conservative Jews.

So, in my personal experience, it happens like this. And if you want to listen to my testimony on this from a couple of years ago, I will link that to the transcript in my blog. Regardless of gender, it goes like this—someone gets to them and they deny. But they won’t come out and announce it like they did when they got saved in the first place—that’s the first red flag for anyone thinking that this is a genuine God-driven correction in belief. Instead, they begin with the talking points—quoting certain scriptures out of their Scriptural and historical context knowing that the body in its current state is influenced too strongly by memory verses and will not bother to do the hard work of learning what the verses meant to the original audience. Taken as secluded islands, they indeed make it sound like Yeshua couldn’t possibly be the Messiah, and the people reading them each day as they go by on the newsfeed or in casual conversation—well, a seed is planted. And a bunch of seeds get planted and all of a sudden people are paying so much attention to their manipulated doubts that they can’t even begin to think straight anymore. Frustration and fear set in. Because the person doing it hasn’t been honest about their intentions, the listener’s/reader’s guard was never up and they went in unprepared. It’s very much like the seduction of a virgin who, before she knows it, is being violated. People deserve to know what we are striving to teach and impart. If it is of God, we can be honest about it.

I am reminded that Yahweh, through the prophets and Yeshua, only taught in parables in order to obscure and prevent conversion, not in order to trick anyone into it. Allegiance, which is what our covenant relationship is primarily based on—whether Sinai or the Cross or both—requires informed consent. When Yahweh was overpowering me with His presence before my conversion, He came at me impressing upon me exactly what He wanted from me. He didn’t want a casual acceptance of His existence—I had known He was real for over a decade at that point. That was never in question. The question was—was I willing to be loyal to Him and accept Him as God on His terms? And He made it very clear to me that His terms included Jesus as my Master and I needed to believe Him. This wasn’t anything I had sought out—quite the contrary. This was unwelcome and unwanted but there wasn’t an ounce of deception involved. He knew what He was demanding from me and so did I—which is why I fought so hard. It’s really very funny now, in retrospect. Like, I thought I could do better on my own.

And by the time these people are in full-fledged crisis, they often are too emotionally wounded with embarrassment at having missed all of this “scriptural evidence” that they had been deceived to be reasoned with. I see this a lot. On a lot of issues. The whole fictional Two Babylons and Fossilized Customs propaganda sounded so outrageous and convincing that no one thinks anyone would have the audacity to make it up so no one does the research to fact check it. Except I did, by accident, and I was horrified at how much my life had been manipulated by absolute nonsense claims that had no archaeological or mythological backing whatsoever. I had been duped by deception and manipulated into false outrage that left me absolutely vulnerable to believe a whole lot more nonsense—just as long as it was telling me that a certain crowd was absolutely deceived about everything. Thankfully, I started studying. But most people can’t, or don’t know how to, or don’t have the time or money or even the desire to do it themselves.

And I am talking about this now because we are in the Dire straits, from the 17th of Tammuz to the 9th of Av when things heat up spiritually and people get nutty and the anti-missionaries get feisty and people start falling away.

But what happens to people after they fall away and how is it very gender-driven? Well, at first the same thing happens to both groups—embarrassment drives them to seek out relief in being right and being part of the religion that they believe rescued them from being “idolaters.” So, they tend to convert, either whole hog or half-heartedly, to Judaism. Men are more likely to convert to conservative forms of Judaism and women to liberal forms (sometimes after being more conservative for a while and not finding it at all to their liking). It often has to do with whether the women are married and if their husbands have also denied. But their personalities change, often radically. I have seen incredibly patient and loving women become monsters. And they don’t see it. They believe they are the same. They don’t see the contempt and the anger. They just feel that they have been freed from deception and are on a crusade—at least those who are open and honest about their new beliefs. Some go a long time before admitting falling away. I wonder if they are told that they need to be secretive so that they won’t be persecuted but then are trained to indoctrinate others quietly and casually. Because they like all do the same thing and once you’ve seen it happen, it becomes obvious—what, is there like some sort of training manual? Inquiring minds want to know.

What happens to them after they deny, as I said, often has a lot more to do with gender than anything else. You’ve got to fill that space where the Holy Spirit once was and so what that looks like, what will satisfy that, is going to be different from person to person. Men generally respond by retreating into tradition, which makes more conservative and orthodox expressions of Judaism attractive for them. As men, the system favors them more than it does women coming into it from the outside. They have new identities that are very male-affirming, prayers where they thank God that they were not born women, cultural markers like tzitzit, and like thousands of years’ worth of new traditions to feel part of—which is also going to come into play with how women handle this ongoing transition but we will talk about that later. Men making this change get a lot more support and respect than women do and when they dive into the Torah and the Talmud, they find very little there that demeans them as males and a whole lot propping up their egos.

Now out from under the really hard, take no prisoners on your inner life, teachings of Yeshua, they are not required to forgive pre-emptively—which is a real sticking point of contention between many Jews and Christians. Turning the other cheek—gone. Blessing those who curse and persecute you—poof! And they can be replaced with rituals and tradition, which are a lot easier than the hard work of heart reform. And they allow for a lot more pride to foster. Because, frankly, when people haven’t been raised within the culture of Judaism, what they do with it is often really off base and off-track. How do I put this…well, when you aren’t raised within the mindset of Judaism (or anything, really) you see all the forms but not the function and you miss the spirit of it. And so, people who deny Yeshua and “become Jews” are often Jews in name only—because that was what they were left with when they denied Yeshua. They weren’t pagans on the outskirts who were drawn to Judaism because they saw something in it that was excellent—no, it became their default decision after rejecting the back of the book. And this works out for men a lot more successfully than it does for women. And if you think this is just me, no my Jewish friends notice it too—that Judaism as a default position to being Hebrew Roots or Messianic (unless you start out Jewish) is a recipe for disaster and especially for women.

Judaism isn’t just a religion, it’s a culture. It isn’t anything like following Yeshua, in some ways. Judaism looks pretty much the same regardless of what culture to find it in. But following Yeshua can look very different here in the States than it does in Africa or Asia. And I think that’s a positive thing, personally. All nations, peoples and tongues worshipping before the throne—that’s what it looks like. Different cultures, different music—but, one Master and one Lord. But, when people who have known salvation, when they deny Yeshua and become Jews only because they see that the Bible is truth and see it as their only alternative—that’s not the same thing as choosing to become Jewish. That’s treating Judaism like some sort of consolation prize. And for couples to are attracted to that way of life, they can find enjoyment in it, okay? But for single men, there can be real problems and for single women it can be even worse. Single men, unless they want to go full blown conversion, which a lot do not want to do, they just want to play at Judaism, find themselves second-class citizens. You know, something that does not exist in the followers of Yeshua—or at least it shouldn’t. We are told—no male or female, slave or free, Jew or Gentile. And hopefully we believe that. Hopefully we also act like it is true. Not everyone does, obviously.

But those who lodge themselves halfway between what it looks like to follow Yeshua and full-blown Judaism, they end up as people without any kind of home. Except with one another and that is why I feel they make such an attempt to recruit others. People who already felt lonely in the HRM or as Messianics and who are needing identity—having given up identity in Messiah—tend to become more so. They now believe that Yeshua-followers are idolaters so they can’t go back and worship with them, the online personalities associated with their newfound beliefs generally are angry and spend a lot of their time insulting Yeshua-followers—and of course, they stop calling Him Yeshua, they use Jesus now. Which is a second red flag. People who spent so much time online harping on the name Jesus now only want to use Jesus—why can’t they bear to say the name Yeshua? That should really concern anyone wanting to consider what it is they are talking about. If they can’t be honest anymore, okay? If they can’t use the name they know is correct? Why is that? Good question. Are they actively lying, or being insulting, or can they just not bear to say His Name anymore now that they have denied and betrayed Him?

And so, you get people on the fringes—wanting to be Jews but not really wanting to be Jews. They want to call themselves Jews but really they just want what is left over from the Bible after they take Yeshua out of it, it’s something to cling to. And some actively avoid the Bible after that and immerse themselves in Talmudic, and Midrashic teachings. So much so that they get into trouble there too—not understanding how Jews use these. I have seen people not understand the first thing about how to use the legendary materials and go off the deep end, not understanding when they have massively diverted from Scripture and thinking that somehow this is commentary that draws only from the text instead of “what if” stories—which is how Jews understand them. They start getting treated as divinely inspired. I had this guy come on my wall back in February, after the whole Stewart-Allen Clark fiasco back last winter, when we were talking about the double standards for men and women and were talking about Bathsheba and how the text describes her as innocent and only David as guilty, and he comes on with both guns blazing talking about how she was perfumed and wearing jewelry and all prepared to seduce him. Is that in the text? No, not even close. But the problem was that he had so immersed himself in Midrashic literature that he had lost touch with the text. Instead of reading it as a “what if” story, he was presuming that anything written by the rabbis is divinely inspired or at least not departing from the text.

But, someone correct me if I am wrong, that is not how anyone raised within Judaism views all of this. They inject these “what-if” stories in order to teach concepts, not to replace the Biblical text. And it’s misunderstandings like this that make non-Jews, in general, a poor fit for conversion. Same with a lot of the traditions and rituals of Orthodox Jewish life. They aren’t things to be tacked on to a pre-existing life, they are cultural and to try and understand them otherwise just courts disaster.

And, like I said, men do better with this than women do because when you are not raised in this, as a man there is less objectionable material than there is for a woman. Much of the Rabbinic commentary comes out of the Middle Ages, in which women (in both Judaism and Christianity) were blamed for much of the evils of humanity and for being just flat out objectionable in general. Now, the Scriptures do not support this—but it was the times and they were what they were. That’s why it is important to never read any sort of commentary or any sort of literature in a vacuum. You need to know when it was written, who wrote it, where they lived, how they lived, what genre it represents, what the historical situation at the time was, how they looked at such literature, opposing viewpoints because Judaism has never been monolithic, etc. But there is this crazy idea out there that the only thing that ancient Jews were capable of writing was Scripture. No sir, they wrote some brilliant fiction and lots of it. They also wrote a lot of commentary on their times, tying Scripture to prophetic fulfillment in their own lives. They wrote wisdom sayings, apologetics, histories, polemic, apocalypses, personal letters, etc. All of these have to be read differently—same with all the different genres in the Bible. We should not read an epistle like a Gospel, or like a wisdom saying, or like love poetry, or like an apocalypse. In the same vein, we should not read a parable like a history! People do it though, and they get themselves and others into some trouble when they do.

So, where am I going with this? This affects how men and women react when confronted with this sort of literature. And it affects whether or not they are going to actually convert to Judaism or turn away into something else entirely. For men, Judaism provides camaraderie and a lot of structure that can be very appealing amidst the insanity and chaos of modern society. It can be very comforting to belong to something that is thousands of years old—although modern Judaism is really as much or more shaped by medieval thinking that Mosaic. And by this, I am talking about a very heavy reliance on Maimonides, or the RAMBAM, who lived and wrote almost exclusively during the late 12^th century and really he is the most respected commentator on Scripture, period. No one else holds a candle to him—with the exception of Chabad leaders within that sect.

Judaism is not all that challenging to men as long as they like structure. As the Bible was written within a patriarchal culture where women were considered to be inferiors, and Moses’s allowances (which Yeshua makes reference to not really approving of) very much prop up that sort of culture. He doesn’t outlaw polygyny even though he owns that co-wives are rivals and not “sister-wives”. He doesn’t allow women to divorce men, only men to divorce women.  Adultery is written of as a crime against another man, either husband, father or betrothed and not a crime against one’s own wife. Whereas an adulterous woman was sinning against her husband. Daughters could be sold as wives/slaves. Women taken in the aftermath of battle, if virgins, were to be forced into slavery and marriage, depending on the whim of her captors. Otherwise, they were killed. A foreign woman who was not a virgin was without value. So, men are presented with a historical situation that was recorded and sometimes this gets treated as if it was God’s will for this to be normative, or universal forever, instead of the reality of the ancient Near Eastern culture that Yahweh was invading and intervening in—to begin to show His people another way. Truly, the Sinitic Covenant was much better for women than anything else in the region. The laws of the surrounding areas were terrifying. Sinai was the starting line, not the finish line.

And so, when men come in to Torah from the outside and when they have thrown off the interpretations of Yeshua, who tells men accustomed to patriarchy that He instead expects them to be meek, loving, forgiving, non-retaliatory, non-violent, to forgo abusive language and trickery and even hidden hatred and lust that doesn’t get acted on; when He tells men that divorcing their wives for anything other than her unfaithfulness makes them adulterers and that polygyny does as well (I will show where He makes this claim next week)—well, devoid of Yeshua and apart from having been raised as a Jew, I have seen this become a recipe for disaster for the wife and kids, who were not really shown to have much respect or even a place at the table when it comes to the kids, in the ancient world that the Bible tells its stories in the midst of. Remember that the Bible tells us what was going on and not always what should have been going on. Patriarchs lied, cheated and swindled without any value judgments assigned to their actions. They are just recorded along with whatever consequences happened, if any. The untrained observer, unfamiliar with the ancient Near Eastern context, is left to imagine a God who has none or little love for women.

Traditional Jewish men pray this prayer in the morning, ““Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe who has not created me a woman.” And although modern apologists insist that it merely means a gratitude that men are obligated to keep more commandments, anyone who has spent any time in the medieval traditions knows darned well that is not what they meant. In fact, authors going back to ben Sira in the second century BCE have insanely vile things to say about women, in keeping with the surrounding culture. Of course, as I often teach, when we look at the trajectory of Scriptures, we see God’s people moving from things like misogyny and slavery being normal and accepted (again, we will talk about that next week) to the same things being incredibly distasteful. No believers today, I don’t think, would argue for chattel slavery of the kind we see in Exodus 23, where you can beat your slave to death as long as they live longer than a day because, after all, they are your property (obviously an allowance of Moses because we know that slaves are fully human and no human is to be reduced to property status)—no one would argue that slavery is okay simply because Moses never forbade it. Moses himself likely was very much at home with the idea of women being inferior, slavery being okay, and men only being accountable to other men but women and children being accountable to men and certainly not the other way around.

Yahweh deals with us where we are. Not just people groups but with us as individuals. And although most men these days and especially men who became believers later in life, are disgusted by misogyny and prejudice—it is more palatable to men who were brought up in churches that promoted it. And it takes a long time for Yahweh to work that out of people, okay? I mean, even after 22 years He has cultural stuff and paradigms that He is dealing with in me too—so I don’t take it personally when a man won’t listen to me teach or thinks I should be quiet. I am not forcing myself on him or arguing with him—what good would it do? I am not his God and he doesn’t answer to me. I don’t hate him or think he is an idiot. I recognize that what we have been taught to accept goes really deep. I trust God to work it out, if He so desires. I actually don’t think it is the most important issue out there anyway.

So, I think letting go of Yeshua and Paul and Peter and James and all that, it just makes it easier and can be somewhat of a relief because the demands of the Sermon on the Mount just never let up. We will never reach perfection. Our righteousness must exceed that of the people who know and outwardly observe the law the best. That isn’t a game we can ever win through our own efforts or feel justifiably prideful about. Or is that just me? And maybe that’s why so many of these guys just get so abusive and destructive and can’t even talk about Yeshua or those who follow Him without all the mocking and insults. Because, the Scriptures are clear—the more we truly walk with Him, the less of that we will end up doing and the more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, trusting, gentle, and self-controlled we will become. I mean, when I look at these anti-missionaries who are plaguing the Hebrew Roots crowd, I don’t see real Jews. Real Jews don’t spend much time thinking about Yeshua at all, much less having a vendetta of going after Him, real Jews have a life. So, Messianic Jews of course are the exception because they think about Yeshua as much as we do, obviously!

So, I mean, that’s the male identified religion that men who have denied Yeshua glom onto. They go for the more patriarchal modes of thought and doctrines and disciplines. But what about women? Well, that generally doesn’t work for women as well and especially women who are used to being a lot more liberated. Women tend to read the Bible a whole, whole lot more than men do. Women are more religious than men in general. We just are—maybe it’s because we have more time on our hands! Maybe it’s because traditionally we have had to cleave to God more than men have felt they need to. I am sure there are lots of reasons. Some traditions of Judaism just flat out acknowledge that women are more spiritual than men. That doesn’t mean better or superior, just that we are different. I believe in the beginning we were created as flip sides of the same coin in order to perfectly balance one another out as equals. My husband and I see one another as equals and we yield to one another according to our strengths. My husband doesn’t need the upper hand. He doesn’t need or want to rule over anyone or to have that kind of authority. He needs an equal, not an underling. He thinks that life would be quite lonely without an equal.

But women, because we are more inclined to read the Bible and supplementary materials for ourselves—women tend to get pretty unhappy pretty quickly with Judaism without Yeshua as the final interpreter of the Torah. A lot of what He did to include women in His ministry, and Paul’s words about there being no male or female or slave or free in Christ (meaning no hierarchy) and the detailed lists of female apostles, deacons and such—well, for most modern women, they find they have lost too much to be happy in Judaism. Added to that, another big problem. It doesn’t take them very long to start applying the same criticisms to the Hebrew Scriptures that the anti-missionaries applied to the first century writings. And because they aren’t looking at the Bible as wisdom literature written within a historical reality, they begin to pick it apart. They notice the rulings that are now untempered by the wisdom of Yeshua. The allowances of Moses are no more to be considered allowances from Moses due to hardness of heart but the very eternal dictates and will of Yahweh as normative forever. They encounter not a God who was intervening in a patriarchal nightmare for their benefit, but one who is not much unlike all of the pagan gods of the past—determined to love men and keep women subservient and even abused and used. That culture only looked good to women who were comparing it to the reality of the rest of the pre-Cross world. And it was better, but Torah never made anything perfect. Torah contained and limited sin until the coming of the Messiah. That’s why Paul calls it our tutor and it is good for that purpose but we needed the death and resurrection of Yeshua to set us free from bondage and so that our hearts could be circumcised and God’s intentions written on our hearts—His intentions of no oppression, hierarchies, hatred, all the nasty works of the flesh in Galatians 5.

So, what are women to do? I believe that they begin to long for that love they had from the Bridegroom—but they now believe the entire Bible is a farce. And yet, they generally have enough memory of things they can’t explain without God and so they go one of two ways or one way and then another. From what I see, most women go looking for what I call a more female-identified religion. Where traditional Judaism provides that male-identification, it doesn’t do well for women who were not raised in that culture to accept it as normative. They see it instead as restrictive and even devaluing—and this is what I see from the outside and watching conversations of those who have gone this route. They want to feel good and valued and they don’t see what traditional Judaism offers as being satisfying and they are rejecting the Bible anyway. So, our culture has a lot of women pulling into neo-paganism, wicca, crystals, laws of attraction (not the kind in physics textbooks but something where people who don’t understand Quantum physics, which I got a really high grade in, made some really bad connections based on not having a baseline understanding of how it works), shamanism, magic-driven naturopathy (no, I am not calling all naturopathic medicine pagan, but you’ve possibly seen it when it crosses the line into being more like magic), etc.. and it is all very female identified, goddess centered. Whereas Yahweh is spirit but metaphorically identified as male in Scripture, they can instead trade all that in for a fully-realized female nature goddess whom they can trust to not be traditionally male which, as I myself can attest to, can be very scary. I know men hate the phrase toxic masculinity, but traditional forms of masculinity can be extremely toxic. Just check out the honor/shame dynamics of Yeshua’s day, boy howdy. To be a healthy man is one thing, and a good thing, but historically, very few women would want to go back in time even a hundred years to where there was no such legal thing as marital rape or spousal abuse or even child abuse—it was just the patriarch’s right and during ancient times, he had the right to kill anyone under his roof with impunity. Thank God for Yeshua and the cross and how He changed society and what it means to be a man.

But, back to the women who are seeking to get what they had back—some of them really buy into to the whole neo-pagan lifestyle and the reason it is palatable is because it has nothing in common with ancient paganism. No one from ancient Babylon or Egypt or Greece or any of those places would look at what is being done and would recognize anything. That’s because neo-paganism is entirely a creation of the last two hundred years based on romantic literature, which was originally written to appeal to a more female audience anyway. And romance literature isn’t based on historical truths because they weren’t big on archaeology, but instead on author’s ideas about what a world with magic and magical creatures might have been like. I know a lot of people, personally, from before I was a believer, who live very happily within that system. It affirms them as valuable, gives them a bit of a feeling like they can have some control over the chaos of their world, connects them to the spiritual side of life, and makes absolutely no ethical demands of them. But it also doesn’t really offer any sort of true substance.

Because of this, women who were formerly followers of Yeshua often only find it entertaining until they run out of new and exciting things to learn and do. Then the buzz wears off—and this happens a lot. People follow the knowledge train and take it as far as they can, never being able to be satisfied by it because no knowledge is never enough. And when it crashes at the end of the line, they find themselves empty and oftentimes atheists. And angry. Angry at religion. Angry at people who are still believers. Unable to see what they have lost because they are so determined that all it ever was, was one big deception. And the anti-missionaries who messed them up in the first place? They’ve moved on to their next target. They aren’t there to be spiritual advisors. They were there to recruit and to destroy faith. Mission accomplished.

And this identification religion, it can be a huge problem in more ways than just with these extreme cases. Wanting something to give you an identity other than the one we have been granted in Messiah as disciples, which is a huge honor based on who we were before, right? I know it is for me. But when we seek anything for ourselves apart from that core identity—when we feel we need to change our names, and pretend to be Jews, or to speak Heblish just because who we are doesn’t feel special or relevant enough—that’s a trap. Two of my favorite Bible characters really have no lines. Apollos and Junia. Both named after pagan gods. And both apostles, male and female. And these were incredibly common names in the Greco-Roman world. You would think that if anyone would change their names, these two would, as they travelled around and no one can even say their names without invoking a false god. But them going around with those names and preaching Yahweh and Yeshua, it was like the biggest disrespect to Apollo and Juno imaginable. Every time they spoke, it was like the false gods themselves were rolling over and prostrating themselves before the King of kings and Lord of lords.

Same with us. When Tyler Rosenquist, in light of who I used to be and do and say and believe, goes around proclaiming Yeshua and the word of God? Well, it means something because of my former identity, not in spite of it. God wins. Satan loses.

The post Episode 117: Gender-Identified Religion and the Anti-Missionary Menace appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

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Shavuot, or you might call it Pentecost, is coming up and it is traditional to study the Book of Ruth. Why is that? Because Ruth takes place largely during the barley and wheat harvest that mark the time between Passover and the Feast of Weeks, aka Shavuot. And Ruth introduces a mystery into the Scriptural account of King David. Namely, how can the descendant of a Moabite be not only the King of Israel, but also God’s own choice for Israel’s King? As we will see, this is strictly forbidden in the Mosaic Law and this indeed poses a problem for legalists who see all of the laws as black and white, set in stone decrees. If we view the law is immovable, then we must reject David, but if we see the law as wisdom guidelines and even, as Yeshua/Jesus Himself said, allowances made because of hardness of heart—then the beauty of the story of Ruth opens up for us like a rose and the debate subsides as we see that Yahweh truly is the same yesterday, today and forever.

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. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible which my friend Matt Nappier plugged me into and I am enjoying, but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want.

First of all, I want to talk about Moab. According to Genesis 19, the Moabites and Ammonites came about because of incestuous relations between Lot and his two daughters and if you have ever wondered how such a thing could have happened in the first place, and why those girls would have considered it their duty, I wrote about it in my curriculum book, Context for Adults: Sexuality, Social Identity and Kinship Relations in the Bible. But anyway, these are the reported origins of both Moab and Ammon, Israel’s neighbors to the east and close kin—much like the Edomites of Mt Seir. All of these descend from Terah, Abraham’s father. So, were the Moabites and Ammonites cursed because of their origins? No, of course not. In fact, God blessed them and gave them their own inheritance—a land inheritance that Israel was not permitted to encroach upon or take away. The problem with the Moabites and Ammonites came up when Israel was completing their forty years of wandering in the wilderness and were trying to access the Promised Land from the east, requiring them to travel through the nations bordering Canaan. We see this described in the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy.

Now, Yahweh had absolutely forbidden the children of Israel to lay a finger on either the Moabites or the Ammonites, but He did give them a victory against the Amorites, and against Bashan, and against the Negev. This was because, again, of Yahweh’s covenant with Abraham, Lot’s uncle. But the Moabites were terrified of Israel—maybe they didn’t get the memo that the Israelites weren’t allowed to mess with them. And hence we get to the very famous encounter with Balaam, a pagan who for some strange reason could speak to and hear from Yahweh. I guess he had his satellite dish tuned correctly. And he was famous for this, so Balak, the king of Moab, hired Balaam to curse Israel. And the whole account is a complete disaster for Moab, and for a lot of cattle and for all those people who had to build all those altars on the spot to sacrifice them on. Yahweh, of course, uses Balaam to bless Israel instead of curse them. Multiple times even, making the entire story very comical.

However, the sequel is anything but comical. Balaam wasn’t permitted to curse Israel, however, he did figure out a way to advise Moab into creating a set of circumstances where the men of Israel would bring curses onto themselves instead. So, instead of providing hospitality to the children of Israel on their way through to the promised Land, the Moabites instead showed the men of Israel disastrous hospitality by throwing a huge cultic feast where the men ended up deciding to eat meat sacrificed to the Moabite gods, and either engaging in cultic prostitution and therefore joining themselves to the ba’alim of the Moabites or intermarrying. I have heard good arguments for both and both do count as prostitution in terms of idolatry. One bold young couple actually entered the camp of Israel, perhaps for more privacy, and Phineas speared them through when caught in the act. That day, twenty-four thousand were reported to have died of the plague that was unleashed against Israel and all of the leaders of Israel who were involved with this idolatry were killed as well.

But what would this have looked like from Moab’s point of view. In my opinion based on ancient Near Eastern culture, I don’t believe they had ill intent. Certainly, Balaam’s advice almost certainly had ill intent but then maybe not. Balaam could actually have been giving what any pagan would consider to be good advice when faced with a threat from a more numerous people and their regional deity. Namely, “If you can’t beat them, join them—and/or get them to join you.”

You see, the Moabites would not have been able to even remotely imagine a god who was jealous and exclusive. That sort of thing just didn’t happen in the ancient world. All of the gods needed to be served and worshiped or the cosmic functions that hey took care of would fall into ruin. The sun wouldn’t come up, the rain wouldn’t fall, the crops wouldn’t grow, etc. They didn’t live in the sort of world where their sun god was demanding exclusive worship. Even the sun god needed the grain god served or else he wouldn’t get fed from the grain god’s bounty. This was a completely interrelated system, even parasitic and symbiotic in some ways. The humans needed the gods but the gods needed the humans even more—as we see in the Atrahasis epic where Enlil decides to destroy all humanity with a flood and if it wasn’t for one human being hidden away and saved, the gods would have all starved for lack of sacrifices. Oops!

And so, I suspect that when the Moabites found themselves unable to destroy their enemies, that Balaam suggested an alliance instead—one brought about through alliances by marriage. And this was not unheard of in the ancient world. Marital alliances have been the way of peace between tribes and kingdoms, I imagine, since just about the beginning. As soon as two groups worship the same gods and are bound together in community by marriage and kinship, fighting tends to end. This is why ancient kings generally took so many wives—they were largely political alliances. So, looking at this from Balak’s point of view, they cannot hope to do anything to harm Israel, but they might just be able to become one with Israel. What Moab wouldn’t have known is that Yahweh doesn’t operate like they believe their gods do. He is the only God and there can be no others. So, when the Moabites held a cultic feast and undoubtedly had their young virgin daughters dancing—some of the men of Israel ended up attending. Marriages were seemingly arranged and consummated, and that required the approval of the patriarchs—hence we see that there were elders and leaders involved and they were actually the first to be punished. Young men didn’t just marry without their fathers’ approval. And what Moab would have seen as two countries uniting by marriage, Yahweh saw as treachery and rebellion, idolatry and sexual immorality. It really is important to see these things from Moab’s point of view. What they were doing was entirely logical and I doubt if their intentions were nefarious because they just wouldn’t have understood Yahweh’s scruples about His people not worshiping anyone else. It was so contrary to everything they believed and understood about the way the world of the gods worked that it might as well have been written in modern English and presented to them on a floppy disk. I hope you guys all know what a floppy disk is.

So, I believe that Balaam’s advice went like this: “if you can’t curse them, then join them. Throw a big party, invite them over and allow them to meet your daughters. Give your daughters to their sons and they will give their daughters to marry your sons. They are blessed, after all. Your gods will be their gods and their God will be yours.” But, regardless of how the Moabites saw their own actions, or how Balaam saw them, Yahweh saw the effects and affected a covenant lawsuit against the children of Israel—legally taking action for their covenant violation by way of a plague. In order to keep this from happening again, Moses enacted this added legislation against the Moabites and Ammonites in Deuteronomy:

³ No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the Lord’s assembly; none of their descendants, even to the tenth generation, may ever enter the Lord’s assembly. ⁴ This is because they did not meet you with food and water on the journey after you came out of Egypt, and because Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram-naharaim was hired to curse you. ⁵ Yet the Lord your God would not listen to Balaam, but he turned the curse into a blessing for you because the Lord your God loves you. ⁶ Never pursue their welfare or prosperity as long as you live. (Deut 23:3-6)

The specific charges lodged against Moab and Ammon are severe in the ancient world. The implication is that either Israel asked for hospitality and did not receive it, or that it simply was never offered at all even though the people groups shared close kinship ties. And yet, if that was their only crime, it would be a different story as we see in Moses’s follow-up regulations:

⁷ Do not despise an Edomite, because he is your brother. Do not despise an Egyptian, because you were a resident alien in his land. ⁸ The children born to them in the third generation may enter the Lord’s assembly. (Deut 23:7-8)

Edom flat out refused them passage and even refused them food and water in exchange for money. But when Moab decided to curse what Yahweh has blessed, that was a direct act against Yahweh Himself and so Moab was forever barred from being a part of the assembly of Israel, the ekklesia, aka the qahal. It was an act of rebellion and a personal affront. Therefore, Moses barred them from joining the assembly. And yes, I said Moses. The reason I said Moses is because of something Yeshua says about a regulation in the next chapter—namely, in Moses’s statements about divorce. In Mark 10, Yeshua calls Moses’s statements about allowing divorce to be an “allowance because of the hardness of your hearts” and then calls his audience back to Genesis 2 and what God actually wanted. Men were dealing unfaithfully and treacherously with their wives because they took an allowance and were exploiting it for all they could get and that is the problem with allowances. Allowances set our minds in the direction of “what can I justify or get away with based upon what is written down?” And that’s just what we do. We would rather read the Bible to see what we can get away with than to look into God’s creational purposes for our lives. You see it a lot with polygyny proponents, “Well, it isn’t outlawed anywhere in the Torah…” and that is true but every time it is mentioned in the Scripture there are negative connotations and/or consequences.

Moses allows slavery as well and yet our creational purposes in Genesis 1 give us a mandate to rule over Creation wisely, not over one another. But pro-slavery people, again, take an allowance and mistake it for permission and even approval. Yeshua, on the other hand, in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere—He destroys the allowances. He calls us back to that sin-free creational intent. He never makes any sort of allowances. That’s why people detest the Sermon on the Mount, it’s a painful reminder to those of us who like to live our lives on the edge–pushing that envelope based on what some part of Scripture allow–that we are headed in the wrong direction. But that’s the consequence of the Sinai covenant not being written on our hearts and why Jeremiah promised a vast improvement. According to Jeremiah 31, not only would we have commandments in writing, but we would have them in and on our hearts, and as our hearts are changed, our stomach for allowances disappears.

So, when reading Moses, we cannot forget that he made allowances and Yeshua was clear in stating that Moses made those allowances, not Yahweh. Yahweh didn’t institute human kingship, or slavery, or divorce or any other kind of oppression—because in the beginning they didn’t exist. In the beginning, no one was abusing anyone else and so no allowances were necessary. It all comes from a wrong way of looking at the Torah, one which Yeshua tried to correct. Just because Moses made an allowance doesn’t mean that it is God’s intention for our lives. If we view allowances in this light then they will lead us in the wrong direction. Moses had to deal with reality and place limits on human depravity, but he never eradicated it—in a way, he just funneled it and controlled the spread. Even today, most debates about the commandments don’t seem to relate to creational intent but instead to conversations about what we can and cannot get away with according to the written rules and very little is said about, “What would the love, mercy and patience of God that we see from the beginning to the end of Scriptures do?”

And so, back to Ruth, we have Moses placing an all-time prohibition on Moabites ever entering the assembly of Israel. Does this really represent the heart of God, that an entire people group be beyond salvation and redemption? To answer that, we must read the book of Ruth, which, as I mentioned before, is traditionally read by Jewish families for the Festival of Shavuot. That it also happens to be the day that the Holy Spirit fell upon the followers of Yeshua gathered at the Temple (aka the House) in full view of Jews and Gentile proselytes from “every nation under heaven”, the story is particularly important to understand. Is anyone truly barred, by nationality, from inclusion in the Kingdom of Heaven? The Jews of the first century certainly thought so, and in Luke 4, Yeshua was in danger of being tossed off of a cliff for even suggesting that Yahweh was intervening in history on behalf of the Gentiles. And it was probably a full ten years before Peter was ready to receive that vision about Gentiles being made clean in Acts 10.

Yahweh is all about forgiveness and redemption, even to the point where we have to admit that He looks like an enabler from a human point of reference. And so, when we look at the “Sinai and beyond” portion of the Torah as often dealing with allowances and not original creation intent, it makes what happened with Ruth, and David’s kingship, make a whole lot more sense. The prohibition on Moabites becomes more of a guideline for a certain kind of inclusion rather than an eternal truth, just as no one would countenance soldiers forcibly taking POW women as brides or POWs as slaves in modern Christian society—despite Moses allowing it. Again, as Yeshua said, Moses’s allowances vs God’s creational intent—it makes all the difference in the world when studying how Yeshua is the embodiment of Yahweh’s character and love in the flesh.

Ruth begins during the time of the Judges. And the interesting thing about Ruth is that the book appears in different locations in the Christian and Hebrew Bibles—coming up either between Judges and I Samuel or right after Proverbs. Both of these placements tell an important story. In between Judges and I Samuel, we have the chronological history of Israel and specifically the line of David. When included after Proverbs, you have Ruth beginning right on the heels of Proverbs 31, detailing the excellent woman whom we would all have to agree describes Ruth to a “t”. She is the woman of valor, the woman of virtue. She is kind and self-sacrificing, humble and industrious, loyal and generous. There is hardly a positive adjective we could come up with that she would fail to measure up to. And she was born a Moabite, which is where we find her (in Moab) at the beginning of this book. Famine has hit Israel and notably in the area of Bethlehem, and so the family of Elimelech emigrates from  Israel to Moab, on the other side of the Dead Sea. Interestingly, they are welcomed. They were allowed to enter the “fields of Moab and settle there” and the boys married two of the daughters of Moab: Orpah and Ruth. Tragically, all three of the men of the house die, leaving Ruth, Orpah, and their mother-in-law Naomi widowed and vulnerable. Ruth and Orpah, however, have options. They are still young and can marry again so Naomi desires to send them back home to their families so they can get on with their lives, while she returns to Israel, where the famine is now over. But the girls love their mother-in-law and refuse to leave—and this is not a normal state of affairs. After all, both marriages proved to be unfruitful as far as offspring and, in general, women were not treated remarkably well in their husbands’ homes and especially not when there were no heirs produced. Naomi must have been a remarkably kind woman, and the rest of the story backs this up. Finally, Naomi convinces Orpah to go back home but Ruth covenants herself to Naomi by famously saying, and I will include the oath form by translating Lord back to Yahweh,

“Don’t plead with me to abandon you or to return and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May Yahweh punish me, and do so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.” (Ruth 1:16-17)

Ruth has invoked the name of Yahweh in an oath to do the following things: (1) to go with Naomi, (2) to live with Naomi, (3) to become adopted by Naomi, (4) to devote herself to Yahweh alone, (5) until her death. This is no small oath in a culture where family is everything—as all ancient cultures were. Likely, Ruth could have easily snagged another husband among her own people. At the very least, she was certainly better off in Moab among her kin than as a stranger in a strange land with no prospects whatsoever and presumably no way to feed herself, much less her mother-in-law.

Really quick here, I want to talk about widows. Two kinds of widows—provisional widows and true widows. A true widow is a woman who has no husband and no sons and has no prospects for that to ever change. This is Naomi. She is the absolute epitome of everything that Yahweh is talking about when He refers to vulnerable widows. She has no prospects and she cannot have more children and even if she could, they could not care for her. Orpah and Ruth, on the other hand, are also bereft of both husband and sons but they are young and have immediate prospects for remarriage in a time when many women died young and men needed new wives to parent their existing children. If Ruth had stayed behind, she would have been remarried likely very quickly. It was mercy and love that compelled Naomi to send the girls home to their families. However, as a foreigner coming into a strange land, and a widow, with no father to protect her—Ruth in some ways becomes the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. She becomes the poor, widow, orphan and foreigner all wrapped up  into one and yet she takes it upon herself to become the provider for her mother-in-law. This is beyond exceptional in the pre-Cross world.

Of course, as we see in chapter 2, Ruth worked extremely hard over the course of the almost two months between Passover and Shavuot gleaning not only barley but also wheat from the fields of Boaz, a man who was close kin to Naomi’s deceased husband. She finds favor in his eyes and he makes sure that she receives enough for both of them to eat, and that she goes unmolested by the harvesters. Boaz places Ruth under his protection and later marries her. She becomes the mother of Obed, whose son, Jesse, becomes the father of King David. And so, David is only the third generation removed from being pure Moabite. If we look at Moses’s words as being set in stone, then we have a terrible problem. However, if we see them as a guideline that was put into place in order to forbid and discourage marriage to foreigners by assuring that their offspring would never be accepted into the congregation (presumably under the assumption that they would be raised by a mother who was still a heathen), then we don’t really have a problem at all. And within a community-focused culture, a dyadic social entity, the idea of your child not being accepted into the congregation was something rather akin to the practice of shunning. Family honor would be adversely affected the child would be unmarriageable, etc. That’s what we get by going the route of this being more of an “allowance” sort of ruling. But what if we don’t go that route? What if we set the words of Moses in stone? How can we justify this? How, in fact, could God justify His choice of David as King (I know, He doesn’t have to but let’s talk about this anyway)?

Moab was being punished for two crimes. The first was a lack of hospitality—they refused to feed their brothers and sisters when they were entering into their inheritance. The second was leading the men of Israel (and no small number of leaders and elders) into idolatry and sexual sin with foreign women. I call this teaching, “Ruth and the Reverse of the Curse” and with good reason because that is exactly what all of her actions amounted to. Ruth, in her treatment of Naomi the Israelite widow, went above and beyond to provide food when her ancestors failed to do so, and far from being a heathen woman “leading Israelite men astray” she dedicated herself wholly to Yahweh and became the matriarch of a faithful line of Israelites. For a while, anyway, but the failings of the Davidic line are never blamed on Ruth—quite the opposite.

This idea that anyone is beyond redemption simply because of bloodline (or guaranteed redemption because of bloodline) certainly finds its death in the ministry of both John the Baptist and Yeshua. But really, we can really find the roots for the overturning of Moses’s banning of Moabites and their descendants from the Assembly in the account of Yahweh’s own words and decisions right after the flood.

“When the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, he said to himself, “I will never again curse the ground because of human beings, even though the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth onward. And I will never again strike down every living thing as I have done.  As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night will not cease.” (Gen 8:21-22)

Yahweh looked at humanity after the flood—what is left of it—and he saw a man who, although righteous as compared to his generation, never bothered to plead with Yahweh for mercy as did Abraham, who had issues with alcohol and anger, despite being obedient enough to save his own life. He saw Noah’s offspring, also, as incredibly flawed. In short, Yahweh saw us for what we are—filled with evil inclinations from the youngest age and He made a commitment to stick with us, endure us, and to save us despite ourselves. This is utterly remarkable. Noah found grace; he didn’t earn it. Same with us. And so, as long as we have God’s revealed character throughout Scripture to trust in, there is no person, no genealogical line, beyond salvation. Not Moab, not anyone. As John said, “for God so loved the world…” and not just some bloodlines. People have always found grace with God because that’s just what He is about. Yahweh isn’t a legalist which is why the Scriptures are full of seeming contradictions. We want to hedge Him in but He refuses to allow us to do it. People are wicked, but…God is good.

Ruth shows us that laws were not put in place to bar the gates to salvation, but instead for greater purposes than we sometimes want to imagine. We love to look at the Bible and see black and white but the only black and white is the black ink on white paper. We want black and white because with black and white there is no need to trust God or to know His character particularly well. We can say, “He approves of this and doesn’t approve of this, no exceptions, He doesn’t care about extenuating circumstances or about what we do and do not know. He is more interested in legalistic obedience than about our thinking about what love requires.” But in reality, and Yeshua showed us this, truly walking with God oftentimes involves choosing between commandments, as Yeshua pointed out on a number of occasions. Am I going to refrain from working on the Sabbath or am I going to save this animal from the ditch, or this other man from drowning? Which of these honors God, which shows that we trust Him to be the embodiment of love and wisdom, and which one portrays Him more as a lifeless computer only able to accept and reject input based on programming? Trust is really hard, we would rather think of Him just giving us rules that we have to follow. That’s easy. That’s why so many people just love religion, so that they can follow the black and white rules and consequences to themselves and others be damned.

Reminds me of a documentary I was watching with my mom on Tuesday called Heavens Gate: Cult of Cults. And, of course, I had heard of this cult and I think we all have but I had no idea that these people lived this way for 22 years before killing themselves. And the rules, oh my great googly moogly. They were trying to earn elevation into a new sort of manifestation of reality. But the rules denied reality and without the New Creation renewal that we have in Christ, there was just no way that it was going to work. It was incredibly tragic. But, believers can do this too—just in different ways but it amounts to the same thing. The entire concept of earning favor is so intoxicating and puts us into the driver’s seat. But it leads to attitudes like allowing such and such person to drown and an animal to needlessly suffer and to an entire people group being barred from joining the people of God if taken too far. We have to allow for mercy and sanity or we will create conditions under which we ourselves are only saved in our imaginations. It’s like when people pretend to have it all together but are falling apart in private—that’s us trying to earn God’s favor. It’s an illusion.

You know, in the end, Ruth is a person who exemplifies the Biblical truth that no one is saved or damned based on their country or culture of origin. Rahab is another. Yahweh neither owes damnation or salvation to anyone based upon the circumstances of their birth because that would be unjust. Is Yahweh loyal to Abraham? Yes, absolutely. Does that create hard and fast rules for what Yahweh can and cannot do with individuals? Absolutely not! He is God and so He does what is right—and what is right often looks counterintuitive to us because, as He pointed out after the flood, our hearts are inclined toward evil from our youth. We have our prejudices for and against others based on all sorts of things.  In short, we are not suitable advisors for what is right and wrong, just and unjust when it really comes down to it.

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10 And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them. ² And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” ³ He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” ⁴ They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.” ⁵ And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. ⁶ But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ⁷ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, ⁸ and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. ⁹ What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” ¹⁰ And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. ¹¹ And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, ¹² and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” ¹³ And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. ¹⁴ But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. ¹⁵ Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” ¹⁶ And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them.

Let’s talk about the patriarchal Jewish culture of the first century and beyond—well beyond. In fact, what you will find in the Talmud would shock you, and Josephus, and the apocryphal writings. Whereas the Bible is incredibly egalitarian concerning women, compared to ancient Near Eastern culture, and especially in the Gospels and Epistles—meaning it recognized the inherent humanity of women  in a world where women were considered property (as were children). Genesis two and three, in the Eden account, recognize that in the beginning woman was created to be man’s equal partner but that the consequence of the fall would be that He would rule over her—nowhere is man commanded to rule over her—the text clearly states that it is a consequence of their knowing good and evil, aka being able to decide for themselves what is right and wrong. At the end of Genesis three, we see the first fractured relationship between husband and wife and in Genesis four, between brothers. In the tale of Lamech, we see the beginnings of polygyny, clan warfare and feuding, but it all started with the rupture of the first and primary human relationship of husband and wife. They were no longer allies but trapped in a cycle of longing and conflict. She would naturally long for life as it was, with intact familial relationships (and she would never have it) and he would exert dominance over her. No wonder with such strife that things went so haywire in the very next generation!  I have taught about this previously but we’re going to come at it via a slightly different angle because it reads differently in Matthew. The writer of Matthew was concerned with Yeshua/Jesus as the ultimate teacher/law interpreter of Israel, the new and greater Moses, whereas the Gospel of Mark is concerned with Yeshua as the Yahweh Warrior, fighting against the dominion of the enemy—and what was the first thing the enemy successfully attacked? The man and the woman through appealing to their desire to decide for themselves what was right or wrong and that will enter heavily into this week’s controversy dialogue.

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. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that teaches them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. A list of my resources can be found attached to the transcript for Part two of this series at theancientbridge.com.

10 And he left there and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him again. And again, as was his custom, he taught them.

Now this is interesting. No one really knows for sure how long a time period went by between the Transfiguration at the beginning of chapter nine and the beginning of chapter ten. Was the transfiguration near Sukkot? Was that the reference to the setting up of the Tabernacles for Moses and Elijah? It’s a popular idea in some circles but I am not really buying it. I think there is this natural tendency to make the Gospels more Jewish which is unnecessary—they are completely Jewish. Ask any Jewish scholar and they will tell you that the Gospels and Epistles are all sectarian Jewish writings. I think that, in an attempt to really hammer home the fact that Yeshua is Jewish, people just grasp at any straw but when we focus on trying to do that, we often miss what is actually there. Classic example is how no one in the HR or MJ circles actually seem to want to talk about anything in Mark seven except for “what is the definition of food” and I get it, I’ve been there, but that’s not what Yeshua was saying. We miss that when we come in with an outside agenda. But anyway, it is spring now—Yeshua was probably holed up somewhere for the winter months teaching His disciples as time was running out and they needed to understand. So now they have ventured south—last week we had them in Jericho healing the blind man and they will not return to Galilee until after the Resurrection. We’re going to be real heavy on the controversy dialogues for a lot of weeks here. And, before we go here, I want to just say this. This is a touchy subject for a lot of folks. I am not going to go into the nightmare stories of what does and does not justify divorce. Yeshua is going to do here what He does and what He needed to do—bring people back to God’s purposes and intentions and away from the very wicked mindset that plagued those times and even our times. Not what we feel is justified sometimes or what we can get away with (which is what the Pharisees were doing) but what does God want for us—what did He want in the beginning. So, no defensiveness—we should be able to talk about this without people taking sides and saying, “But…but…” okay? This is like my fourth major teaching on this—I even wrote a chapter on it in my book Sexuality, Social Identity and Kinship Relations in the Bible. I don’t feel that it is the unforgivable sin and I don’t see anywhere that God feels that way either—but the situation Yeshua is addressing here is very wicked indeed, by anyone’s standards.

² And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 

Seems like a straightforward question, right? Um, no, this is not only a trap but a potentially deadly one. Remember where we are?–“Beyond the Jordan.” Who rules this area? Herod Antipas. Why was John the Baptist beheaded? Because he made Herod Antipas’s sister-in-law/wife angry by preaching against their incestuous marriage. She unilaterally divorced her husband Herod Philip (not the one who ruled in the North) and married his half-brother after becoming enamored of him during a visit to Rome. Unilateral divorces weren’t at all shocking, of course, as long as the man initiated it—but she was a woman and this was incest. In more ways than one—her being the half cousin of both husbands. Anyway, no one was happy about the murder of John the Baptist—he was universally loved and considered to be a righteous man according to Josephus, but they had to be hoping that they could get rid of Yeshua via the same controversy.

And yet, this is more nuanced that just the situation with Herod Antipas and his sister-in-law/wife. The Hillelite Pharisees were practicing a terrible form of oppression against their wives and this was one of their main points of contention with the Shammaites. As we see in tractate Gittin, it was their practice to divorce their wife for any reason whatsoever. Over a burnt meal, and Akiva even said if they found someone prettier—which, you know, spelled doom for every woman. Whereas the law only gave them permission if the wife was found guilty of indecency, the Hillelites could maintain a tyrannical form of control over their wives, who had better not be displeasing or they would be out on the street. In a time and culture where the women were unemployable and uneducated, this could result in financial ruin, starvation, and always dishonored the woman. Plus, and this will sound strange to anyone from my generation—the children were the legal property not of the wife but of the husband. She loses everything in one fell swoop. She is given her ketubah money agreed to in the marriage contract (unless she is actually guilty of adultery) and must go. But, this was a patriarchal society where marriage and feelings toward woman did not show any signs of being influenced by the Torah. The Pharisees were the kings of the loophole and this is one of the areas where the Essenes/Qumran sect really raked them over the coals—for divorce and for polygyny. They were criticized for being not only obsessed with wealth but also pleasure seekers. Yeshua is actually going to tackle both of these (divorce and polygyny) if we know what to look for.

And I am going to point out something—questions about divorce are always traps. No one asks this seeking information. They are always ready to spring if you don’t give the answer they want to hear. Ask me how I know!! But these guys are asking, “Is it lawful..” and here’s the problem with he question as phrased—it’s asking about legal precedents. “Do men have the right to divorce their wives?” But Yeshua is going to bring it back to Genesis two and Lev 19:18, where all questions about marriage should find their roots. This is always a question about legitimacy and not about legal grounds. People want to hear they are justified.

³ He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 

Notice the question. “What did Moses command you?” And it’s a trick question because there is no commandment to divorce. It is neither a positive or negative commandment, as opposed to, say, the incest laws or sacrificial or dietary laws. There is no, “Thou shalt divorce your wife, if…” And they know it—you can tell by their response, which is defensive. By phrasing the question the way He did, Yeshua puts them as the ones needing to defend themselves.

⁴ They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.”

You can almost hear them. “Moses lets us do it!!! He said we could write her a get and send her packing!” And I am sure they were genuine in their interpretation of Deut 24: “When a man takes a wife and marries her, if then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house…” but, you know, a man who is justified because his wife has truly been indecent isn’t going be engaging in public questions and debates, he’d just going to either forgive and keep her or say, “Good riddance.” But they know they are trapped—there is no commandment here and they know it, they say “allowed.” An allowance, of course, if an escape hatch out of a bad situation. An allowance recognizes that things are not as they should be for whatever reason.

⁵ And Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. 

And BOOM! Notice that Yeshua makes no claims that this commandment came from God’s heart toward His people. Yeshua specifically says that Moses wrote it. Let’s go back and read it again to be very clear on it, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment…” and the next verse says, in effect, “But God…” So, they are in a really bad spot right now. In the best of situations, divorce is allowed because of hardness of heart and what does that even mean in this case? Hardness of heart in the case of “indecency” in marriage boils down to two things—betrayal on one side and unforgiveness on the other.  Of course, what I have not mentioned here is that male unfaithfulness wasn’t considered adultery but a crime against another man’s property rights—either spouse, betrothed or father. Women during this era were not treated as fully human with rights to consider their husbands to be cheating skunks if they visited prostitutes or took a second wife, but men would consider themselves wronged in the extreme if their wives stepped out and of course, taking a second husband was unthinkable. The Essenes rightly took the Hillelites to task over this and Yeshua does it here as well.

⁶ But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ⁷ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, ⁸ and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. 

According to Yeshua in other Scriptures, who wrote the Torah? Moses did. The Torah is even called “Moses” in shorthand, like “According to Moses…such and such.” And so, it could be argued that this was written by Moses and this was therefore the actual command of Moses because this is lifted from Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 with a slight bit of commentary thrown in. From the beginning, meaning God’s perfect intention and created state in the beginning before the fall, God made human beings male and female. That’s Genesis one. Genesis two goes right after Adam has his epiphany about Eve not being like one of the animals to be named and have dominion exercised over but of the same bone and flesh, the ezer k’negdo, an equal helper, an ally, a counterpart. And it is odd, the way it is stated because in Hebrew culture, a woman joined the man’s family, he never left his family—and the wife really had no standing until the birth of their first son. She was always lesser in status to his mother and unmarried sisters within the family. Really a wife gained her status through her male children and it was among them that she found companionship and loyalty. Marriage in Biblical times was what it was—a mess. It was not what God intended, with a man leaving the family of his birth emotionally and cleaving to his wife. In effect, he would cleave to her sexually to produce heirs and for pleasure, but man and wife were rarely much more than strangers in the ancient world. They were one-flesh sexually but otherwise, the man’s loyalties remained with his mother and father. Remember, the Bible records how things were but not always how they were intended to be. Marriage was and is a fallen relationship, as was/is parenting as we see in Genesis three and four. But Yeshua says that God demands a higher standard amongst His people—men and woman cleave to one another in a relationship of absolute love, vulnerability and trust. They become true allies, equals and partners—one another’s ezer k’negdo—and in that case, indecency and divorce and such would become unthinkable.

And Yeshua speaks here of two becoming one flesh—not three or four or five. There was no harem in the Garden—that was not the righteous intention or command. Lamech was the first polygynist, having two wives, but he was also the first recorded person to vow vengeance on anyone who would lay a finger on him. I have been teaching Genesis to the kids on my radio show and in my studies right now into Gen 4, one of the scholars I am reading made a good point—Torah doesn’t outright outlaw polygamy but the polygamous families portrayed are never happy or without severe drama and it is always associated with problems. Again, a hardness of heart issue. Look at the fruit in Scripture.  I want to give you a blurb from B. Yevamot 63b that talks about how they felt it was best to deal with a displeasing wife: Raba further stated: A bad wife, the amount of whose kethubah is large, [should be given] a rival at her side; as people say, ‘By her partner rather than by a thorn’. So, punish a wife who displeases you, whom you cannot afford to divorce (or don’t want to part with the money) with a second wife. It’s disgusting—like, you know, the problem is automatically her. Certainly, it couldn’t possibly be that a guy with that attitude would be the problem. It’s heartless. It’s the epitome of being hard-hearted. He’s an adulterer for doing it.

⁹ What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Make no mistake, Yeshua just told these guys that man is not lord of the marriage, where he can come and go as he pleases. God is lord of the marriage and man has no right to wrong his wife and call it good based on a technicality of how they read Deuteronomy 24. Yeshua is flat out telling them that their focus is upside down. It isn’t, “Can I divorce my wife.” It’s, “What are we getting wrong that we are even thinking about this and especially under our “any-cause divorce” rules.” In Matthew, while talking about divorce, the disciples flat out say that if a man can’t unilaterally divorce his wife then it is better not to get married. Speaking as a representative for womankind throughout the centuries, if that is their attitude then we are better off without them. You see, they saw marriage as an institution existing for the benefit and purposes of the man and when the man saw something that he thought of as more beneficial—even for purely sexual reasons like finding someone prettier or taking a second wife—they popped the escape hatch and never gave their wives a second glance. Tractate Gittin, dealing with divorces, is just very brutal. Women had no recourse. Divorce could come without warning and their fates were subject to a husband’s whims. But He is laying the divorce squarely on their own heads and calling them transgressors, which they are. It was horribly oppressive. A happily married woman, or so she assumed, could lose her husband in an hour and her children and everything. If she failed to find another husband before her ketubah money ran out then she would be destitute. And we ladies all know that there is always someone younger and prettier on the horizon—marriage is an act of absolute trust. Yeshua is stating that God has joined them with their wives and they should be loathe to divorce them. It is a last resort when the marriage covenant is shattered, not a matter of convenience.

In effect, here we have the bottom line—if the marriage is holy—no adultery, no destruction of the covenant by either partner, no indecency, no actual abuse, then divorce is unsanctioned by God.

¹⁰ And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 

We’ve talked about this before—when you respect someone, you never ask them questions in public for fear of shaming them and causing them to lose face. Matthew, as I mentioned before, gives the details of their shameful objection/question but Mark is more concerned with restoring Eden and the Second Exodus that is underway out of sin and death and this was a huge sin issue during those days and for a long time afterward. But the congregations of Messiah adopted a no divorce, no unfaithfulness, no betrayal attitude that set them apart not only from the Hillelite Pharisees (and by extension most of the Jews during that time, because people look for excuses to do what they want and they rarely go with the rulings that deny them a hot young new chick) but also the larger Greco-Roman world. I mean, if you read works like Sirach, aka Ecclesiasticus, and Josephus and the Talmud, it doesn’t speak kindly of women or in any sort of egalitarian manner. They were property. So were children. Men didn’t experience loss. That was for lesser beings like women and children. Look at Yeshua, on the other hand—He had women followers, women could sit at His feet and learn from Him, the first witnesses to the resurrection were women, 20% of those named by Paul as leaders in the early church were women—including apostles, teachers, prophets, and deacons. Women were expected to prophesy and contribute in the early congregations, they were benefactors, etc… unheard of in the ancient world. Although, we catch glimpses of it in Miriam, Deborah, Yael, and Huldah.

¹¹ And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her,

I call this the “Thou shalt not have the upper hand,” commandment. This was shocking, as I alluded to before. Men in honor/shame societies were expected to be aggressive—physically, verbally, politically, professionally, and sexually. If you asked a man of that era, or even up until modern times in the Western world, it was expected for a man to behave in a manly fashion and manly meant everything that Yeshua stood against—revenge, domination, the lording of authority, ambition, sexual promiscuity, etc. Getting honor/reputation at all costs no matter who pays the price. They didn’t hear this the way we read it now because we live in a culture where, duh, or course it’s adultery when a man cheats on his wife but as I mentioned before—in that world you weren’t sinning against your wife by cheating or by taking another wife or through frivolous divorce and remarriage oy through taking a second wife. You were, however, sinning against the man who was her husband, betrothed, or father. That woman belonged to someone. She had no rights to expect faithfulness from her husband. Do you think that David’s wives were thrilled that he kept marrying more women? Leah and Rachel’s relationship was shattered, and there were accusations between them, according to Scripture. Leah accused Rachel of taking her husband! Rachel wanted sons in order to triumph over her sister. Neither one had any say in Laban’s or Jacob’s plans. No one cared. But here, Yeshua says that if a man divorces his wife and takes another wife, he is actually guilty of something he didn’t think he could possibly even be guilty of! After all, he wasn’t violating another man’s property, he observed all the legalities. She came home one day to a get, a divorce decree, or one was delivered to her along with her money and orders to vacate the premises immediately and leave her children behind. In the eyes of these Pharisees, all the legalities were observed and so Yahweh had to give His stamp of approval. I call it the difference between being a moralist and a legalist. Any child of an alcoholic who would look down on a cocaine or marijuana user can relate to this. Oh wait, you guys mostly don’t live in Idaho—it is still illegal here, so stick with me. You can be an alcoholic and feel good about yourself because you aren’t breaking the law, but people who use illegal drugs are criminals and so you are better than they are—even though you are just as impaired and damaging your kids just as much. I mean, if your kid needs to go to the hospital and they can’t depend on you because they are high—it doesn’t matter to them if it is because of booze, weed or coke. But to a legalist, it matters. Legal is okay, no matter how messed up the conclusions are—like here with the “any cause” Hillelite divorces. But Yeshua says that the man who does this is sinning against his wife, not against another man. This was revolutionary. Yeshua has, in effect, legally elevated the wronged wife to the status of any other man.

¹² and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

And, of course, because Yeshua always presents women and men on equal footing—sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. But there is more here because He is actually broaching the possibility that a woman can even do this. During this era, only rich and powerful women—like Herodias—could do something so scandalous. They would need to be independently wealthy. Although, the Pharisees did have a loophole—a woman was permitted to make her husband miserable in order to secure his divorcing her. I doubt it happened often unless a woman had other prospects or unless she was already miserable. Very few women would be stupid enough to do this if the husband was violent. Again, the brokenness here is heartbreaking. Yeshua is egalitarian but He doesn’t favor women over men. He favors the oppressed and vulnerable over those who oppress and are in charge. In this case, the men had all the power. I wonder what He would say today, how much would be the same and how much would be different.

I want to add one more thing—what was the purpose of the get, the divorce decree? It served the purpose of allowing the woman to marry again. According to Josephus in Antiquities 15.529, women were being forbidden to remarry unless they had not only the divorce decree but also their ex-husband’s permission. So, if he’s like, “Well, I don’t want her but I don’t want anyone else to have her either,” then she is stuck for life. In the ancient world, men often had that kind of absolute ownership over women for life. The get allowed by Moses was proof positive that she was divorced and eligible to take another husband—so she could not be accused of having two husbands at the same time. He couldn’t come back and say, “Whoa, there, I don’t know what she told you but this is my wife and you’ve wronged me.” It could be very dangerous—could result in not only the woman’s death but also in clan warfare. Again, hard-heartedness.

¹³ And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. 

Let’s talk about children, whose legal status was dwarfed even by that of women. And, I need to point out that if the disciples were the age most scholars think they were, they were barely what we would call adults anyway.  Anyway, as though Yeshua had never taught them before about their ambition problems and their super-secret cool kid club mentality and “whoever exalts himself will be humbled” and all that jazz, here they are abusing their (supposed) authority yet again. Children, by definition the least of these until just recently historically, are being rebuked and shooed away as though they are beneath Yeshua’s notice but, again, the disciples will find themselves publicly rebuked, in front of these children and their parents.

¹⁴ But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. 

“Do not hinder them”—this is the same language we saw with their hindering, being stumbling blocks, to that exorcist. They were flat out told that hindering people—if they did it, it would be better to have a large millstone tied around their neck and dumped into the Sea of Galilee, which is super deep. They are behaving, again, like they are the doorkeepers to the Kingdom of Heaven and if they don’t allow you in, for whatever reason, you don’t get in. They will actually let the rich young man come right on in. They allow the Pharisees and Scribes to come. They allow the synagogue leader. Who do they shoo away? The blind and the children. Reminds me of a situation in James:

2 My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. ² For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, ³ and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “You sit here in a good place,” while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there,” or, “Sit down at my feet,” ⁴ have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? ⁵ Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him? ⁶ But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and the ones who drag you into court? ⁷ Are they not the ones who blaspheme the honorable name by which you were called?

Yeshua repeatedly warns them that those who are great in the Kingdom are generally not those who are great in this life. He is forever having to deal with their ambitions and their expectations of worldly glory. As they near Jerusalem, it has to be becoming more and more disheartening for Him that they still don’t get that His followers after the resurrection will largely be the very people the disciples are despising.

¹⁵ Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” 

People often make this about needing to be innocent but no one in the ancient world had any illusions about children being inherently innocent. What children do have over us is a willingness to just accept a gift without question or suspicion. It’s why it is so easy to take advantage of kids—offer them something and, oftentimes even if they have been trained to say no, they will still accept it. When the disciples see the blind beggar or the child or the woman, they see someone with nothing to offer their idea of the Kingdom but Yeshua simply sees people who will accept it gladly knowing that they have nothing to offer. What the disciples see as a liability, Yeshua sees from the vantage point of His upside-down Gospel. He sees people who will come in with absolute loyalty, knowing they haven’t earned it because they have nothing in that culture to earn it with. They will come in without pride—as opposed to the disciples who are still seeing their future in terms of eschatological glory yet in terms of worldly rewards of power and prestige. They don’t see the reality of servanthood, persecution, deprivation, suffering and death in their future. They still see themselves as people of prestige, who are insiders with the clout to accept and exclude as per their cultural prejudices. And Yeshua warns them, again, that unless they receive the Kingdom as people who can see it as an unmerited gift, they won’t be able to enter in at all.

¹⁶ And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Yeshua takes the children in His arms and pays attention to them. He blesses them. He actually lays hands on them just like he would an adult and treats them like fully realized human beings. Yeshua sees equal worth in all human beings—a theme we see in Paul. No Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female—and we could add, no child or adult. Yeshua is no respecter of persons in that He sees the person, and not the labels or the gender or social status.

I want to say something here before we close out. I am really disturbed at the propensity for people to read the hard commands of Yeshua and to go to the Torah and the prophets looking for a loophole and why He didn’t really mean it. Yeshua, right here, is overturning a really messed up interpretation of the Torah. And that’s the problem with Torah—it isn’t internal, it is external. External ordinances will always be toyed with for good or for bad to satisfy our agendas. But Yeshua, according to Hebrews, is the final revelation of God. If He says something, I would rather take Him too seriously than to dare to proof-text Him. For those of you who don’t know what proof-texting means, it is searching the Bible for verses that will support our position while ignoring context and also ignoring the verses which don’t support our position. There are times when we can look for the context of what He is saying and that is fine but we should never outright negate His words just because they are hard. His Kingdom is not like this world and so we should be very fearful of elevating any revelation through any mere human above His words.

Anyway, next week we are going to talk about the rich young ruler, who has zero issues slipping past the disciples and we will talk about that pesky urban legend of the camel going through the “eye of the needle” gate.

The post Episode 105: Mark Part 45—Divorce and Oppression appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

When people are subjected to unjust treatment, in whatever way, and it has gone on systematically all their lives (and by “systematic” I mean that there is a culture, i.e. governmental, social, socio-economic, and/or religious structures backing it up so that it is hard to escape from) and they are finally given a chance to vent, it can be ugly. And yet, that ugliness is there because of frustration and anger and heartache and a feeling of hopelessness and wanting things to be different (read Psalm 137!)—but when a future difference is contingent upon the actions of another person and how they feel about you and how their beliefs dictate that they treat you and even how God wants you to be seen and treated, all those things can turn easily to rage. Rage is a response to institutional injustice—a form of injustice where we just accept the illogical as logical and even internalize it because it is all we have ever known.

When the #metoo movement began, a lot of women started coming forward who never would have before. Because we couldn’t. I know all too well what happens when an 80’s-era high school teacher gets reported for repeatedly molesting a student. Unless someone saw it or it met certain standards, the accusations were swept under the rug and the accuser subjected to ostracism. But pedophiles aren’t generally sloppy enough to allow that to happen and they are generally such charming people that the non-victims rally around them protectively. Within the Churches, even Ravi Zacharias has his rabid supporters, as does Andrew Savage, who are still victim-blaming–despite independent investigations confirming assault and wrongdoing on behalf of the ministry staff.

Closer attention is now finally being paid, within Christian communities, to certain books aimed at men and their “needs”—books that subjugate their wives’ humanity in order to fashion them into becoming the focus of their husbands’ sins. It’s “okay” for them to lust, they “can’t help it”—just look better than everyone else so they will lust after you. It’s “okay” for them to be covetous of having a trophy wife, just make sure you meet the criteria. It’s “okay” for them to be shallow and want to show off a beautiful wife, it’s your job to be beautiful no matter how hard you work and no matter how many children you’ve had and menopause be damned, just spent another hour a day on the treadmill and eat next to nothing as your hormones betray you. Be willing to do whatever it is he saw when he was looking at porn, no matter how depraved and demeaning, no matter how violated you feel while doing it, and he will stop if you are submissive enough. It’s the way to keep him from divorcing you, they say, the way to keep him from cheating on you. It’s an unjust burden that no woman was ever meant to carry—being held responsible for the church-sanctioned sins of her man. But it’s an institutional problem within society. That preacher didn’t make up this attitude, He was just dumb enough to express it and post it on YouTube.

So much for “no male and female” in Christ—they can lust and covet and be prideful and let themselves go but we are required, in some “Christian” thought, to be the focus of their character flaws—and even encourage and feed said flaws. We are expected to enable sin while dealing with and eliminating our own. Imagine a husband being told to get a second and third job to satisfy our “need” to shop and wear expensive clothes! It’s no different in terms of being ludicrous and ridiculous.

These are good things to finally be able to discuss but not all I want to talk about.

I want to talk about racism. I want to talk about the kind of anger that all those women (and quite a few men) were venting on that post, howling in their frustration over the trap that man had his wife in, and the trap so many of us have been in over the years in one way or another—physically, psychologically and sexually. There were two people who came on playing the shame game and trying to passive-aggressively shut down the conversation. A lot of people don’t want to hear the anger. And I see the same thing in conversations about racial injustice. Although we whites would prefer to talk about how much better things are now than they were, as Christians we can never be satisfied until they are good. Women have it better now too, but things aren’t good as long as these sorts of mindsets exist (ones we can be divorced over and must live in fear because of).

We have this cruel thing we do, and I see it on social media. They (our black brothers and sisters) talk about the pain and shame of slavery. Some white person reminds them that slavery is over and that my ancestors, the Irish (grandma was full-blooded and dad is 75% Irish and we’ve been in this country since well before the Revolutionary War), were slaves too and brutalized. But if they escaped, could you look at their face and tell? Would you look at me right now and do you wonder if I am the descendant of slaves? Have my ancestors been denied the vote or judged to be 3/5 of a human being? Were we ever barred from living in whatever neighborhood we could afford over the last century? Have any of us been lynched lately? No, of course not—there are even parades where people can pretend to be “one of us.” So, please stop using my ancestors to shut down the conversation. I mean, that was hundreds of years ago and the consequences erased long ago. We look like y’all so you couldn’t do anything to us anyway.

Black Americans will say, “Black Lives Matter” and whites will counter with “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” or, my personal favorite, “Unborn Lives Matter” as an intentional slap on the face of the entire black community about the high rate of abortion, as though all black Americans support abortion and do not mourn deeply over it. Hey, police lives are important to me—my kid is going to be a cop; it’s been all he has wanted since he was two and in 18 months, he is headed for the Academy. But it’s just an attempt to, again, shut down the conversation that things are wrong—something my future cop son and I discuss a lot. Black Lives Matter, Black Pride, Black is Beautiful—unlike the corresponding White Pride and White is Beautiful, they have never meant “only black lives matter” or legally enforced racial purity or supremacism. Instead, they mean, “Why is this still happening in a nation that claims to be Christian?” How about, “Why don’t you love and respect me?” These mantras mean, “I am tired of being ashamed and treated differently because of my skin color.” They warn, “I am not going to apologize because I am fearfully and wonderfully made and God Himself is going to ask you what your problem was with that!!” They inform us of the truth, “We are tired of our sons being pulled over and detained for things that no white person would be pulled over for, much less detained unless he was a known criminal.” But we want to tell them that things are better than they used to be and we are scared to death of how uncomfortable and unprofitable it might be for us to fix this. The truth is, that the price of not fixing it is even more expensive and just as devastating to our collective souls as allowing slavery to historically continue so long in the first place.

We do other things too. We make excuses for whites using the n-word by pointing out that blacks use it too—even though we all know full well it doesn’t mean the same thing when we say it. But we don’t want to talk about how horrifying it is that black children still hear those kinds of words from white adults, that they have to deal with the sort of fear that must induce, so we deflect and side-step. But those of us who were brutally bullied and rejected as children—we can manage a glimpse. Can we stand by and allow it? Can we say, “I survived it and so will they?” Is mere survival what we actually want for black children? Or black adults–are they expected to just have thicker skins than whites need? And, if we believe that, are we any different than the overt racists? Is shrugging any different than personally speaking those words? I tell you the truth, that racism is a heart issue that runs deeper than we know. That we can find it on both sides is irrelevant to our need to fix it within ourselves. There is no place for such lukewarmness toward suffering in the life of any believer–when someone made in the image of God is made to suffer, He suffers.

One of the most horrible things we do is point out that the slums and the ghettos aren’t so bad because “the best and the brightest escape all the time—therefore, it’s all about hard work.” I am not okay with a system that only the “best and the brightest” can escape. And what does that even mean? Does it mean we hold to a hierarchy of worth based on intellectual aptitude? “Smart people can escape, so it’s okay. They don’t deserve to be there”—that’s the unspoken truth of that attitude, as though some people do deserve it. Anything that the least of these cannot escape from is not okay, and as believers how on earth can we even promote this sort of thinking? Are we really going to be counted among the sheep or will we be found among the goats?

And people of color have to just bite on their tongues and take it because when they bring it up, we bring them right back down. But this is a conversation that needs to happen. There are changes that we need to make—and I have no idea how to do it. But if we don’t try then we might just find ourselves on the left with the goats, chewing on cans. The Gospel isn’t the Gospel at all if the only lives it changes are our own. Christianity isn’t a white European religion. The first three major centers (besides Jerusalem) were Syria, Rome and Alexandria, in Egypt. Christianity was thriving all over North Africa and it produced brilliant minds like Tertullian and Athanasius but it isn’t an African religion either. It belongs to the world. Every color. Every language. Every culture and cultural expression. And we have to mourn over injustice and hunger and thirst for change that will bring justice every bit as much as we mourn over sin and hunger and thirst for holy behavior in general. One without the other is a false picture of the Gospel of the Kingdom. And in “Christian nations” we can’t turn a blind eye or shut down uncomfortable conversations. We have to talk about what is wrong. Cancel culture wouldn’t exist if we were all willing to talk about it and move toward resolution together, as a team and not as adversaries. Cancel culture is our own fault for being unwilling to listen without being dismissive. People do what they feel they can when all avenues for reasonable action are shut down. I am not saying it is right, but I am saying that maybe that’s the only option we’ve allowed. You can’t blame the balloon for succumbing to the eleventh slow leak when you’ve plugged the other ten with your available fingers. The yearning for dignity and justice and relief will find an outlet.

I started out with the incident from back in February, and how outraged and humiliated we all were as women. Ladies, remember how you felt. And when our black brothers and sisters cry out in that same frustrated, angry and outraged voice over the things in their lives that we don’t allow them to talk about—we have to suppress that instinct to sweep it all under the carpet. Everyone knows the problems go deep and they are not going away until we begin to come together as believers, as members of the same family, and deal with it. Remember how much you want people to listen when it is you. As human beings, they want and feel the exact same things and they deserve acknowledgment and redress of wrongs just as much as we do.

Things aren’t right for women until they are right for black women too, and for their sons and husbands, brothers and fathers. And if we as Christians aren’t leading those conversations and striving toward reconciliation of all people, male and female, and all colors and creeds—well, we will find ourselves at odds with the very Kingdom we claim to serve. We’re all going to be equal and equal in dignity in the world to come, so what are we waiting for? The time has come for equality now—not as a future hope but a recognition of the spiritual reality that we already are all equal to God.

Book recommendations:

McCaulley, Esau Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

Bantu, Vince L A Multitude of All Peoples: Engaging Ancient Christianity’s Global Identity

Tisby, Jemar The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

The post Conversations that Christians Must Have–#MeToo and #BLM appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

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Transcript:

²⁴ And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden. ²⁵ But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet. ²⁶ Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. ²⁷ And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” ²⁸ But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” ²⁹ And he said to her, “For this statement you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.” ³⁰ And she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.

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. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com

All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. A list of my resources can be found attached to the transcript for Part two of this series at theancientbridge.com.

On a positive note, 2020 is over. So, let’s celebrate by talking about the second cringiest thing Yeshua/Jesus ever said. We can all agree, I would think, that the “eating my flesh and drinking my blood” remark in John 6:53 has to be the most disturbing out of context and it certainly drove people away when He said it. But this—oh my gosh, comparing this desperate woman’s little girl to a dog. Yikes and a half. Yeshua sure doesn’t like to stay in anyone’s boxes. In fact, and I am going to recommend a non-Gospel of Mark related book here, I just finished reading Too Good to Be False by Tom Gilson. Just came out about four months ago and dang. He makes this point. No one would have made up anyone like this as a fictional character. I mean, besides being perfect and showing no character growth over the course of the Gospels, learning nothing, not changing, never making a mistake—you know, the things that make people boring to read about—He said these things that no one would make up because they just drive people away. Like, you know, writing to a mixed but mostly Gentile audience in Rome and calling an upper-class pagan girl a dog. Not really endearing or helping his cause here, okay? And He says these awkward things that would get me either unfriended or surrounded by the worst sorts of blowhards but when He says it—well, it works. It’s crazy. Anyway, get the book. Very awesome.

And, I am not going to make nice about this or make excuses. We’re going to talk about this in all its ugly glory and talk about what might have been going on. We have to let Yeshua be Yeshua. Sometimes He had to say some really hard things and sometimes, like this, we can’t be entirely sure why but we can explore the history to try and come up with an educated guess. What we do know is that this wasn’t made up because no one would make this up. What I am not going to do is tell you that this was playful banter because to speak that way to a woman, any woman, would have been extraordinarily inappropriate. I mean, beyond conversing with the Samaritan woman-level inappropriate. They weren’t buddies. This wasn’t a lighthearted encounter. This was serious business and we can’t haul this conversation into modern times with modern rules of male-female interaction. We have to treat this like a conversation between a first-century Jewish man and a heathen woman from one of the classic enemies of Israel, and still an oppressor of Israel at the time this happened. There is a whole lot more here than meets the eye so let’s look at it without flinching, okay?

Let’s call this “the woman with the issue of blood and Jairus’s daughter” part two because it’s the same sort of thing only outside of eretz Israel. We’ve had a woman in crisis, a rich man’s daughter in crisis (dead even) and now we have a Gentile woman’s daughter in crisis. Stories about dealing with women in the ancient world like this were not the norm and Yeshua is very egalitarian in His dealings with women. They can follow Him, learn from Him instead of existing to serve men, His named financial supporters are all women, it was women (and one man) who were there with Him at His crucifixion, and it was women who were the first witnesses to the resurrection. In the early church, like 20% of those named by Paul as leaders within the congregations were women: Junia the apostle, Priscilla the teacher, Phoebe the deacon and benefactor, etc. But it all started here in the ministry of Yeshua in how approachable He was and in how differently He treated women—even going so far as to eviscerate the liberal divorce laws of the first century that oppressed women terribly. So, if we were going off of the example of the rest of His dealings with women, we would be expecting warmth and kindness. We would be dead wrong. Alright, starting in chapter seven:

²⁴ And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden. 

From where? We don’t know. He and His disciples were somewhere in the Galilee and all of a sudden He is here, alone, north of Israel up in the region of Tyre and Sidon which is most famous for being the birthplace of the infamous Jezebel, whose spirit, I hear, is responsible every time a woman gets uppity and allows a man to hear her teach. So, just be warned, guys, I am trouble. Just kidding, kinda, but I have to laugh that when men act like Jezebel they get a total pass whereas whenever a woman does stuff that men don’t approve of it’s because of Jezebel. Oh, just wait until we get to the book of Revelation, I might burst some bubbles. But, as I said, He’s alone or at least His disciples get zero mention until chapter eight. But in chapter eight He is still in Gentile territory and it says He calls His disciples to Him so either they are gone here and meet up with Him later or they are here now and go unmentioned.

We do know that He is well-known in Tyre, a coastal city, and Sidon because in Mark 3:8 people have come from that region to hear Him preach and they followed Him around. So, the buzz would have proceeded Him. Again, He is likely escaping the region because it still hasn’t been long since Herod Antipas killed John the Baptist and we see Him only staying any place long enough to preach, heal and leave before there is trouble. He has a lot of ground to cover in a short time and He cannot afford to be killed anywhere else except Jerusalem and even then, it must be on the Passover. He knew what He was doing and what would happen, but it had to happen in fulfillment of prophecy or He would be nothing except a brash, young fool. And I use young lightly because thirty was the life expectancy during the first-century Roman occupation. Half of the people didn’t make it past that so Yeshua was becoming an elder at this point.

But, Sidon and prophets are a famous pair, Biblically. Let’s look at I Kings 17:

8 Then the word of the Lord came to him, 9 “Arise, go to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and dwell there. Behold, I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” 10 So he arose and went to Zarephath. And when he came to the gate of the city, behold, a widow was there gathering sticks. And he called to her and said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, that I may drink.” 11 And as she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.” 12 And she said, “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a jug. And now I am gathering a couple of sticks that I may go in and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it and die.” 13 And Elijah said to her, “Do not fear; go and do as you have said. But first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterward make something for yourself and your son. 14 For thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘The jar of flour shall not be spent, and the jug of oil shall not be empty, until the day that the Lord sends rain upon the earth.’ ” 15 And she went and did as Elijah said. And she and he and her household ate for many days. 16 The jar of flour was not spent, neither did the jug of oil become empty, according to the word of the Lord that he spoke by Elijah.

Later, Elijah raises the son of this same woman. And she is a Tsidonian, just like Jezebel. But this poor woman is barely hanging on in the midst of a famine. As we will see, she is entirely different from the woman Yeshua meets up with. But, this story of the woman from Zarephath was about bread. So were the last two stories—the handwashing debate was all about eating bread with unwashed hands while the very next teaching was about how bread eaten with unwashed hands cannot defile you. This story is also about bread. The pattern is very important. Elijah ate with a non-Israelite woman. Yeshua set the precedent that made it possible to be in contact with Gentiles and preach the Gospel to them.

So, He goes into a house, presumably the house of a Jew living in the area (we don’t know) and hoping to hide and rest—as He often did when pressed by the crowds—but it is no use, word gets around and He gets a desperate visitor. It’s always the same story no matter where He goes, right?

²⁵ But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet. 

The word for little daughter is thygatrion, just the same as with the little daughter of Jairus who was twelve years old. She falls at his feet—same wording as with Jairus, the correct posture that one would assume when asking for benefaction from someone more powerful. By benefaction, I am talking about the reality in a society where you can’t just go to the store and get whatever you want or to the bank for a loan if you are a nobody. That’s not how it worked. If you needed something, you had to go to the person who could provide it to you. You became their client and they were your benefactor. They gave to you, freely, but it was a give and take relationship. People in the ancient world didn’t usually take without giving something back unless they were beggars. It was shameful to be an endless glutton using up someone else’s resources without doing whatever it is you could do for them. So anyway, all that is to explain why she was at His feet. She was recognizing Him as someone whose resources were greater than her own—not wealth wise, but in terms of what He could uniquely provide that she could get nowhere else, namely deliverance for her young daughter. So, she isn’t recognizing Him as divine here—likely she wouldn’t quite know what to make of Him as miracle workers were not entirely unknown nor would she see Him as the Messiah because she was not a Jew.

²⁶ Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 

And before I forget, we are meant to contrast her reaction to Him with that of the Pharisees and their scribes who would witness His miracles and be utterly unmoved, in fact, they would ignore and challenge and try to undermine Him in response. She was a Syrophonecian, and that word is a Latin loan-word—another indication that the author was a Roman, even if he was also a Jew because we keep getting these words that are just glaringly foreign. Now, Josephus had some words about these people—calling them “our bitterest enemies” in Against Apion 1.70. Compared to the Galilean Jews to the south, they were very well off financially. They were considered to be oppressors because they were well fed on the food that came from Galilean farms while the Galileans themselves were barely subsiding between taxes and tithes. Malnutrition was a terrible problem, as was the loss of family farms due to the heavy tax burdens imposed by King Herod and the Temple establishment, the family of Annas (father in law of Caiaphas) who was very rich indeed. In a very real sense, the Syrophonecians were seen as thieves, stealing bread from the mouths of Jewish children. And here we have an oppressor, a wealthy Gentile woman, begging a Galilean miracle-worker to save her daughter.

What have we seen so far? We’ve watched Yeshua scandalize the Pharisees and the Scribes from Jerusalem by eating with sinners, touching lepers, not rebuking the woman with the issue of blood, and refusing to wash his hands before eating bread. All eyes, if His disciples were there, would be on Him to see how He would respond to this woman who was begging his patronage.

²⁷ And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” 

It must have come across as a hard slap. Her daughter, who was eating well at the expense of starving Galilean children, should have no expectation of receiving what rightfully belongs to the Jews first. She’s pretty much being told to get in line, be put on hold—indefinitely. And it’s hard because we see a child and Yeshua is talking about oppressors, the powerful, and yet calling them lowly dogs. Yeshua is demanding that the oppressor acknowledge that what she is asking for does not belong to her any more than the food they are taking from Galilean tables. And more than that, He says it isn’t worth interrupting His mission to throw her a bone, so to speak. The Syrophoenicians looked down on the Jews and had for many centuries. In effect, they undoubtedly saw them as little better than dogs, impoverished and slaving away to try and scrape out a living. But Yeshua is saying, “I need you to understand that the God whom I represent, He sees them as His primary people on this planet. He is their God first and foremost. If you want something from Him, you have to acknowledge His primary attention as being on feeding them His bread. You don’t have any special rights on His attention no matter how things look in the physical world.” I believe with my whole heart that this is what she understood Him to be saying. Let me read it again so you see all the parts to this:

²⁷ And he said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” 

So, how will she respond? I mean, that’s the $24,000 question. Pretty sure I would get totally uppity about it and guilt trip Him about my innocent daughter. Well off women, potentially wealthy Roman citizens, don’t take kindly to being mouthed off to by the rabble, miracle worker or not. He had just assaulted her honor rating in her own community. He had shamed her. This was nothing to be laughed off. And yet, this woman would have understood the concept of regional deities who were concerned with caring for a specific population group on their own land. But, she would also assume that the God of the Jews was under the feet of the Roman gods because the Jews were a conquered people. What would she do? Would she acknowledge Yahweh as being greater than? Would she acknowledge Yahweh as being concerned with the people that her own people were oppressing and eating at the expense of?

²⁸ But she answered him, “Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

Wow. This woman reminds me of Abigail, David’s wife. Such wisdom and humility. He degraded her publicly, and she acknowledges that He is right in everything. Yes, she answers. She calls Him kyrios, a title of profound respect. She is accepting the demotion in honor and reputation and humbly accepting a position beneath Him where what He says goes. She doesn’t deny that her people have prospered at the expense of the Galilean Jews, she doesn’t deny that it makes them oppressors and sinners—dogs. But she does more than that—she honors Him by her next statement. “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” What exactly does this mean?

“I am not asking you for the children’s bread, just a few crumbs that they will never miss.” How about putting it this way, “I have heard what you can do and this is nothing for you. It won’t take a moment. I am not asking for a seat at the table. I am not claiming that I deserve to be there, but what I ask will take no effort from you and it will cost you nothing. I am not asking for a lot of your power and authority, just the smallest bit will save my daughter. I don’t deserve this, I am just asking for your pity.” Now that’s faith. And it’s humility and a mother’s truest kind of love in that society when she could have stood on principle and stomped off and unleashed her family on him for assaulting their group reputation. This was a woman with two things—absolute belief that what she had heard about Him was true and a willingness to endure anything, even public shaming, to save her daughter. May we all be found even a fraction as faithful and wise.

It’s funny, how the disciples are fighting over who is the greatest while this woman is willing to be debased in order to save her child. And the Pharisees and the Scribes from Jerusalem are trying so hard to shame Him and undermine Him. And we have the woman with the issue of blood on the outskirts of society, the synagogue leader falling at his feet, and this Gentile woman all doing whatever it takes to get what they know only He can deliver. So, what will Yeshua do?

²⁹ And he said to her, “For this statement you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.” 

So, things we can notice here—unlike the woman with the issue of blood, He does not call her daughter. Why? Covenant reasons. The woman with the issue of blood was a Jew and therefore a member of the Covenant community who had been excluded from community life for twelve years. This is an entirely different situation as she is not a member of the Covenant community, despite calling Him kyrios, meaning Lord or Master, take your pick. She approached a miracle worker but she wasn’t converting. I have mentioned this before but there is this excellent analogy that someone made between being a customer of Christ and a disciple and I have searched in vain. I believe it is Richard Wurmbrand but it might be Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

It goes this way—there are different relationships we can have with Yeshua. The first is the most common, the relationship of being a customer—as though He is a tailor making us a suit of clothes to cover our nakedness. Customers are in the relationship for what they can get out of it. Yeshua isn’t their master and King, He’s just their supplier. They want eternal life and forgiveness. They have never or rarely ask themselves what they owe in return. Then you have disciples, who are in it for what they can do for the Kingdom. They are first and foremost servants with the hope of eternal life but it does not drive them to serve. Love drives them to serve. Allegiance drives them to serve. This woman had great faith in a miracle worker but she wasn’t a follower, we never hear from her again. Unfortunately, most of those whom Yeshua met on His travels were no different and they proved it by being conspicuously absent at the Cross despite His good works on their behalf. That being said, not like she could have followed him anyway and she would not have understood His role as Messiah—not like His disciples understood it either. This event—we can chalk it up as a sign and a wonder and a foretaste of the things to come when the Gospel would go out from Jerusalem—even though it would take another ten years and quite the radical vision.

But this episode—it is applicable in ways we might not want to think of in the US. People ask all the time, “Why don’t we see the miracles here that they saw in the first-century church?” To which I respond, “We do, but only in third world countries where the Gospel is spreading and people are very poor.” And then I get asked, “Why?” And I would respond, “Because they are worthy of the bread while we deserve only crumbs.” We’re getting our goodies already, and we’ve chosen comfort and prosperity over the spirit.

And Americans don’t like to hear that because, after all, we send aid everywhere and sponsor a child here and there and give to relief efforts when we feel guilty or need the tax break. But what else do we do? We have closets full of cheap clothing produced by what amounts to slave labor in Asian countries. We are gluttons while others are starving. We complain about being poor while wasting time on our smartphones. We are the Syrophonecian women of the world, living large while others pay the price. Yeah, we’re generous, in a way in that we give a bit out of our surplus but Yeshua never gave anyone credit for that—He honored the widow’s mite. The truth is that giving is even worse in the “Torah Observant” community than in the mainstream church because people have benefitted themselves of a technicality—we’re supposedly only supposed to give out of our agricultural harvest. Well, that giving out of agriculture fed the poor and the Levites and the priests. Do we honestly think that we are off the hook for feeding people now because of that legalistic loophole? We are supposed to keep the commandments in spirit and in truth. It is not the spirit of the tithe to allow people to go hungry simply because we aren’t farmers. And so, in Africa and Asia, where they lack medical care and basic sustenance in some areas, they get the bread. They are sitting as children at God’s table and the African and Asian Churches are growing by leaps because of it. And every now and then, God blesses us with some crumbs. And we have to own this and repent of it. It’s incredibly serious business. We are an oppressor nation in our consumerism—which was exactly what the problem with Babylon was. Which reminds me of something I wrote almost four years ago, and it is scary how far things have progressed. But we have some extra time, so I am going to insert this here about how dangerous comfort really is.

You know, we see from Scriptures that Babylon is not entirely bad. Before entering exile, the Jews were not monotheistic–they were henotheistic–worshiping many gods but acknowledging Adonai as the head of the pantheon, the top god. King David even had a teraphim in his bedroom that Michal placed in their bed to distract the soldiers (I Sam 19). It began after the death of Joshua and wasn’t because they wanted to insult God–it’s just an indication that we all read the Scriptures through our unique cultural context and assumptions. The entire world was non-exclusively polytheistic (meaning the multiple gods they served were not jealous)–henotheism was a step up from that, not having any gods BEFORE Adonai, just beneath Him. They saw Him as jealous, but not that jealous. We see that this was unacceptable to Adonai and the prophets repeatedly warned the people, and yet we see Adonai’s patience. They really were trying to do what was right, but they weren’t quite understanding. Every other pantheon had greater and lesser gods who controlled different cosmic functions–polytheism was just an indication that no one thought one god could do it all alone. Sometimes they had more gods and sometimes very few, who were worshiped alongside Adonai–until the exile.

Exile changed Judaism forever; it was a major correction. The Jews were engulfed into a truly polytheistic society and, because of this, they were allowed great religious freedom to worship Adonai. Horrified by what life was truly like in a society bereft of the One True God, they chose to worship Him exclusively, becoming enormously concerned with what the Scriptures said about acceptable worship, and that worship has remained exclusive to this day.

The original idea behind a vaccine is this: being infected with a controllable measure of a virus at a certain stage in its life cycle and being able to suffer through it and overcome it naturally, builds the immune system to give immunity. The body learns what the disease looks like and learns how to deal with it. The early vaccines did that incredibly well. (Not an invitation to talk about vaccines, only the Bible). That was Babylon–God’s vaccine against idolatry. The Jews got a snootful of the real thing and the true lack of freedom that people have within it to be led by and obey God’s laws. As a result, the Judaism that emerged from Babylon was hyper anti-idolatrous. This hypersensitivity was a direct lead up to the Maccabean revolt–the Jews were wanting to die before going the path of betraying God ever again. A great many did die–they allowed themselves to be slaughtered instead of fighting on the Sabbath, they endured torture rather than eat idol meat (although this part is likely a late legend), the mothers illegally circumcised their male babies only to die with them hung around their own necks.

Why was the command given, “Come out of her my people?”(Jer 51:41). Well, they had been sent to Babylon against their will – Nebuchadnezzar, a brutal and idolatrous man, was used as God’s own tool–His servant (Jer 27:6). But Nebuchadnezzar had gone too far; he had been too brutal, he enjoyed his job. God often uses the unrighteous to discipline His people, but woe to the man who enjoys doing it, who inflicts too much punishment and shows not enough mercy and refuses to give God His due respect afterward. When the discipline is done, what happens to the people who went too far? Who relished slaughtering the apple of God’s eye? They have to be judged themselves! And they were–by Cyrus the Great, who destroyed Nebuchadnezzar’s line. The Jews were warned to flee out of the way of the coming destruction–not from idolatry. Babylon was an incredibly comfortable place, the commercial center of the world–and they had religious freedom. There were some bumps along the way where kings were manipulated into actions that put the Jews in jeopardy, but all in all, the Jews were safe and cozy there, they were prosperous and influential–it was hard to contemplate leaving and in fact, at that point, they had nowhere to go, really, but this was a call to get ready to go. They were subjects of the Babylonian empire with no homeland of their own to legally return to yet–but that would change.

Cyrus II, the “Great” would change that, and they would be able to leave in the last half of the sixth century BCE, able to go back to a very hazardous Israel to rebuild the Temple and the walls of Jerusalem. Those who did, faced hardship and death, a total loss of comfort and the status they had in the Empire. It was somewhat like the prospect of those who leave America and make Aliyah today. Israel is good, it is the Land of my King and always will be, but those who go are leaving a very safe and very easy way of life here in order to go to a place where living is expensive, jobs are hard to get unless you speak Hebrew as well as a native-born, and the threat of being murdered by terrorists is very real.

Still, the call to “Come out of her” is spiritually always before us, not just the Jews. Are we willing to leave our ease and comfort to go where God is leading us, away from what we have always known? Following God is always difficult–it rarely takes us over well-tread paths, it is not comfortable, it comes at great cost to ourselves, and sometimes it is not safe. And yet, where is God? Is God calling us to live well-fed in our city, suburban, or country homes, pleased with ourselves and our safe religious lives, or does he call us to turn our eyes away from all that ease when the time comes?

The Jews who did not “Come out of her,” who refused to go rebuild Jerusalem in 530 BCE, ended up being faced with slaughter at the hands of Haman around fifty years later during the rule of Cyrus’ grandson Xerxes I. It was only after this genocidal attempt that many more Jews made Aliyah under Artaxerxes – the king mentioned in the chronicles of Ezra and Nehemiah.

Sadly, it became popular within Christianity, during the Protestant/Catholic wars, to mischaracterize this call to “Come out of her” as a clarion call against “Babylonian” idolatry, but this isn’t the context–in fact, Babylon’s idolatry barely gets a mention in the entire chapter; when it does, it is in relation to their being shamed as part of God’s overall vengeance. Furthermore, when the danger of idolatry is mentioned in the Bible, it is in connection with Egypt, Canaan, and Jeroboam. Babylon, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly referenced in respect to commerce, military might, and the luxury provided by the two. God didn’t send Israel into exile to introduce them to idolatry, but to cure them of it and make them sick of it before they could rebuild the Temple as commanded in Haggai 1.

God gave Nebuchadnezzar the authority to subdue the people as well as the nations of the Earth, but he misused his power and was unspeakably cruel, as were his descendants. He amassed tremendous wealth–Babylon was probably the greatest commercial giant of the ancient world. Hence the head of the statue in his dream was made of solid gold. The wealth of the world was centered in Babylon, it was the merchant’s equivalent of Mecca–and the whole world was drunk off of the luxury and profits–not the religion. After all, Babylon was simply one of a great many heathen nations–not unique in the ancient world. They were all entirely idolatrous, every single nation, and so Babylon was not unique in that way. Babylon’s uniqueness lay in her military prowess and especially in her commercial dominance.

Babylon was sent to punish God’s people and went overboard. Babylon destroyed the filth that had overtaken God’s Temple and His city Jerusalem and went overboard. Once the seventy years of wrath were completed, God had achieved His vengeance, as Jeremiah 51 clearly shows. Babylon dishonored God in every way, instead of honoring Him as they should–and when Nabonidus took the sacred Temple vessels and placed them into the hands of heathens to drink to the honor of the gods of silver and gold, that was the final straw. Jer 51:24 gives the final sentence against Babylon:

“I will repay Babylon and all the inhabitants of Chaldea before your very eyes for all the evil that they have done in Zion, declares the Lord.”

God’s honor was tied up in Zion–it still is. That’s why all the nations still fight over Jerusalem, why every nation seeks out a place for their god there. Islam, for example, sets up mosques over the holy ground of any other religious site they destroy–to shame defeated gods and, by extension, the people who worship them. Since the end of World War II and even long before, Zionists have been crying out “Come out of her my people” because they see now what too many Jews of Babylon did not understand: If the Jews had all returned to Israel in the time of the initial decree of Cyrus, then no one would have been able to harm them or subjugate them. There were enough Jews in the world at that point that their sheer numbers would have overwhelmed the Samaritans, they could have rebuilt the walls and Temple quickly, and they could have avoided much of the bloodshed under the later Seleucids.

“Come out of her my people.” It is a statement of reality–you can generally only be persecuted when you live in small pockets around the world–like the 1% of the pre-WWII German population whose passports were taken easily and whose voting rights and jobs were taken just as effortlessly. Of course, superior weaponry can change that–as we saw in Apartheid South-Africa where the minority terrorized the majority. In general, however, it holds true. As Gandhi taught the Indian people, there is strength in numbers, enough strength to drive out the oppressors.

“Come out of her my people.” Before WWII, in 1933, there were approximately 15.3 million Jews in the world, after WWII there were roughly 9 million Jews in the world, with just over half living in the Americas. In 2014, there were 13.9 million Jews worldwide–6.1 million of those living in Israel and 5.7 million living in America.

That’s right–there are fewer Jews now than there were in 1933, and anti-Semitism is rising again. I don’t blame them for not wanting to leave America, but I am increasingly wondering if they are supposed to go. We are the new commercial giant giving them religious freedom, we have made it comfortable to stay when they belong to the Land and the Land belongs to them. They need each other, the Land and the Jews. The Land of my King is good, so good, but too much of it lies undefended because God’s people have been spread out too thin in other nations. Too many Jews live undefended as well because they are spread out too thin among the nations. I am torn, I want them here because I love them and they bring blessings, but a growing part of me wants them to go home, because increasingly I feel a tug at my heart that they should be home in Israel–even though this is also their home. I fear for the days when this will not be their home anymore, may it never happen–when we will have to hide them and feed them and care for them at the cost of our own lives and the lives of our children. Already I see them being increasingly slandered among some cultish fringe leaders–but how long before the cultish fringe becomes the mainstream? Hitler was fringe once, and so was Stalin–fringe but charismatic. Hates burns brighter and brighter until the fuel runs out and it fizzles–our modern Google society has too much fictitious kindling out there right now to ignite the hatred of people who are quick to believe whatever fuels their contempt–as though people with webpages are automatically credible as long as what they say either outrages or appeals to us. People who don’t want to believe they can be deceived are easily distracted and fooled when told that someone else has already lied to them. In their offense they become easy pickings for con men and women.

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