Video link here.

Genesis 22 is hard for adults who aren’t willing to just say, “Okay, this is a picture of Messiah and God is always right, so I am not going to think very hard about this. Don’t make eye contact, just don’t make eye contact!” Seriously, for those who wrestle with the text as Jacob, Moses, and the prophets all wrestled with God, we all probably wish that it just wasn’t in the Bible at all. The story is horrifying, and we are unable to give definitive and comfortable answers for what happened and why. It isn’t nearly as clear in Hebrew as it can sometimes appear in English and it isn’t very clear in English as it is. Why did God do it—I mean, couldn’t He have tested Abraham another way? Was it a request or a command? Why didn’t Abraham say anything for three days? What was Isaac’s response? Or Sarah’s? What actually happened afterward? How much do we read into the text as opposed to what is really said? And how can we reconcile any of this with the witness of the character of God through His Son? We’ve been taught for too long to just say that it’s all really okay and not to ask questions but this chapter of the Bible literally begs us to ask questions and to be unsatisfied with pat answers and platitudes. And because kids are going to ask questions, we need to handle those questions honestly and respectfully. Maybe we weren’t allowed to ask the hard questions, but that’s not a good legacy to pass down the generations if we want the Bible to be our children’s ally instead of their enemy. All kids are going to somewhat deconstruct what they have believed and accepted at some point and we want them to know that asking questions is a good thing, and not a bad thing. That’s the firmest foundation we can give them—not shutting them down when they are struggling for a place to plant their feet. It’s a tragic thing that has been done to us that we ought not to pass on like fraternity hazing rituals.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. However, now I am exclusively working to teach and make disciples of kids over at Context for Kids, so this portion of my ministry is currently devoted to teaching adults how to teach kids by making sure that we are supporting their growth and faith in the Messiah. I want you to be able to answer their hard questions about the text instead of feeling like you have to blow them off. Kids are our full-blown brothers and sisters in Christ. Let’s stop sidelining them with cute stories designed to make the people in the Bible look like perfect heroes and instead teach kids how to take Yeshua/Jesus seriously as the only true hero of the Bible and the greater Moses, greater Temple, and greater Prophet whom Matthew tells us He is. I still have a ton of more advanced teachings for grownups at theancientbridge.com and on my YouTube channel. I also have curriculum books and all that jazz available on Amazon. All Scripture this week is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible.

Genesis 22 takes place sometime “after these things” in chapter 21—namely the sending away of Ishmael and the covenant ceremony between Abimelech and Abraham. How long after? Well, quite a bit later as we see that Isaac can talk, walk great distances, carry firewood, and ask disturbing questions about suspicious situations when necessary. So, I am going to go out on a limb here and say older than three. Call me crazy if you want but I am willing to die on this particular hill. Oh man, I guess that’s an inappropriate expression to use when talking about this particular chapter. At the upper end, Genesis 23 begins with the death of Sarah at the age of 127, making Isaac around or at least forty years old by the time he finally gets married to his cousin Rebekah. So, we could safely say anywhere from a teenager to his thirties. We really have no clear indication despite the mental pictures from movies and picture books always putting him not only on the younger side but also too white for a nomadic shepherd without literally bathing in Sunblock 5000 or living in dark caves in Europe like my ancestors.

Yahweh summons Abraham with what could be either a command or a request. It could read, “Take your son,” or “Please take your son…” and which one you assume really changes the interpretation so we are going to talk about both options. God is either telling or asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his “only son” whom Abraham “loves” as an olah—usually translated into English as something like a whole burnt offering as would later be performed in the Tabernacle and Temple in the morning and in the evening—at around 9am and 3pm. These morning and “evening” offerings were presented on behalf of the nation by the priests in order to cleanse the holy space of impurity and to let God get a good whiff of barbeque, which almost always puts me in a good mood. In this way, God is “approached” which is what the word korban means as literally to “draw near,” and is translated as the much-misunderstood

word sacrifice. This particular sacrifice, unlike most others, was completely given all over to God with the exception of what was inside the entrails because, yuck. Not okay. But other than all the poop, which got washed out of the intestines, the whole critter got burned except for the blood which was drained and applied to the altar. The offering wasn’t consecrated, meaning a legit sacrifice, until the blood was applied to the altar. Every ancient Near Eastern nation understood and practiced blood manipulation rituals and so this wouldn’t have seemed strange to their neighbors. Abraham is told to perform this olah somewhere in the mountains of the land of Moriah and so again, Abraham is being directed to journey with the understanding that he will indeed be shown the final destination. Just like in Gen 12 when Abraham got his initial marching orders, literally. In a way this operates as a bookend in Abraham’s faith wanderings. We could even call it another blind journey, although he has more information this time around.

What we don’t know is whether or not this was a request or a command. If it is a command, we wonder why Abraham wasn’t willing to plead with God over the life of Isaac when he freely did so on behalf of the people of Sodom. Isaac was clearly more worthy of the intervention, right? If it was a request, we wonder why he doesn’t just say, “Um, heck no. Am I being pranked? Lot, is that you throwing your voice? Not funny, man.” On the other hand, the two situations are very different as God merely mentioned his plans for Sodom to Abraham, inviting conversation, and this time it depends on Abraham’s actions bringing about the destruction of life. If Abraham is being commanded, then he has a really good track record of just following orders and falling way short only when left to his own best judgment as with Pharaoh and Abimelech. When that happens, Abraham takes an ‘every man for himself’ attitude and will lie to get out of potential trouble or to get what he wants. But that’s not what this is—God is telling Abraham exactly what to do and maybe Abraham thinks he has no choice in the matter. Despite the number of years Abraham has been a worshiper of Yahweh, he has no Bible to read or anyone else to confer with. The last maybe fifty years have been a real learning experience. How much is Yahweh like and unlike the gods of the Canaanites and the gods of his fathers in Babylonia? If it sounded instead like a request, Abraham could have been thinking any number of things—do you really say no even when a God asks super nicely? It’s hard for us to relate to understanding Yahweh apart from His personal revelation through Yeshua/Jesus. We are so totally spoiled to be living on this side of the Cross. We have seen God, or at least the disciples did, and we have their collective witness of how entirely different He was and is from the gods of the nations. Abraham didn’t have that and it seems clear that direct contact was the exception and not the rule. We benefit from his struggles and from seeing the consequences of his choices—which is why the author of II Timothy could rightly claim that all Scripture is useful and even when it only serves as a bad example. In the end, we don’t know if it was a command or a request but what we do know is shocking—Abraham seemingly says nothing for three whole days.

Yahweh is directing Abraham to sacrifice his “only” son whom he “loves,” but it has been clear all along that Abraham has more than one son and that other son, Ishmael, is very much loved and perhaps still even the favorite. He certainly was the favorite back in Genesis 17 when Abraham responded to the news of Sarah having a baby with an impassioned pleading for Ishmael to be his heir instead. In Genesis 21, Abraham is very upset “because of his son” who was about to be expelled and that son is Ishmael. In fact, when Abraham makes reference to his own son, that son has been Ishmael and not Isaac. So, is God acknowledging the replacement in Abraham’s heart of Isaac for Ishmael by calling him the only son whom Abraham loves or is He rather reminding Abraham that Isaac is his only heir and the one owed Abraham’s entire covenant loyalty? These words could go either way and are unsatisfyingly vague. It is my belief that we are being drawn into the turmoil of this entire situation with a narrative that gives us no easy answers to too many questions. But that’s how literature works, by skillfully evoking strong emotions that draw us into the truth of the text and sometimes that truth is upset and anguish instead of peace and safety. That’s why God didn’t simply have ancient authors write up the sort of bland histories we see as legitimate today. Instead, we are in the midst of a whirlwind of complicated possibilities and fears. Your kids still notice those things and that’s great. All too often, we have been taught to never admit such reactions to the Bible in our modernistic ideas about what the Bible should and should not be.

Right away, we are told that Elohim (as opposed to Yahweh) is only testing Abraham and so we are off the hook right away as far as fearing the worst. But we wonder why on earth the test is needful and why it has to be so incredibly cruel. But what exactly was the test? That’s what we aren’t clear on. Was it a test to see if Abraham would obey absolutely anything without question, or a test to see if Abraham trusted God enough to keep His promise somehow to give him descendants through Isaac, or a test to see if Abraham knew His character well enough to argue and protest (such as he did with the “far be it for you to do such a thing,” of Genesis 18), or if Abraham would jump at the chance to perhaps have Ishmael back as his heir. I know that last one is offensive but remember, this is a test of a man with a very complicated and heartbreaking family situation. We have no idea what we would have done in the place of Abraham and Sarah, we just wish we could think the very best of ourselves without being somewhat delusional. So yeah, I am hard on Abraham because the Bible is but I am also aware of my own tendency to be a huge mess.

So, we know that it is a test but we have no idea if Abraham knows it. The author of Hebrews interpreted this as Abraham simply believing the promise of descendants through Isaac and so, knowing it would be okay in the end, he went along with it knowing that it would all be okay in the end. It would certainly be a big step up from the decisions he made in Gen 12 and 21 where he sacrificed Sarah for his own life despite promises of children that wouldn’t be born if he was in any actual real danger of dying. I think we are all well acquainted with not trusting in things that are promised but cannot be seen and especially of trying to make things happen in our own power. Or maybe that’s just me, right?

But what Abraham does do, instead of protesting, is just as odd. We are very specifically told that Abraham gets up early the next morning (making this one-sided conversation with God either a dream or a nighttime vision) and does servant work—at his advanced age and despite his position of patriarch and a very wealthy man. First, he saddles his own donkey, then gets a couple of servants plus Isaac (whom the narrator calls his son), and then splits wood before setting off. This is very illogical and strange and seems to be the workings of a man who is currently not thinking straight. That’s my take on it. It’s like he is willing to go but is either scatterbrained about it or has too much on his mind to do things in an orderly manner or is stalling for time hoping that perhaps God will change His mind. Cut the wood, get the traveling companions on board, and then saddle up the donkey but cutting the wood last is just strange and for that matter, why cut the wood at the beginning instead of getting it closer to the destination? The land of Moriah was full of olive orchards in ancient times. Abraham would have known that. Again, we’re supposed to be off balance as we read this because things just aren’t okay. If we tell kids they are confused because this chapter really is confusing, we will be doing them a great service, as opposed to giving them easy answers that sweep the turmoil under the rug. That just makes them frustrated and leaves them feeling stupid for trusting us with their questions–you know, like we felt when we got shot down for asking such questions.

The trip takes three days on foot as such things are counted—it’s actually a two day trip but the phrase “on the third day” is often idiomatic for something threatening and ominous and/or suspenseful. On the third day, Dagon’s idol was completely ruined by the Ark of the Covenant having laid in the Temple over the course of three days and two nights. Christ lay in the tomb and rose “on the third day.” Jonah was ejected from the great fish after three days and three nights and his walk to Ninevah took three days. We see the term “on the third day” throughout the accounts of Jacob and his sons and at Mt Sinai. It very much reads as ominous background music like the Jaws theme. We know something is up, and it is not likely always a real marker of time any more than when we say, “Just the other day something happened.” Idioms are used for effect and not for accuracy. However, the journey to the land of Moriah from Beersheva really would have taken two full days of travel, putting their arrival sometime in the morning on the third day. As this is the first time we see this phrase in the Bible, we should pay attention to the context. And the context is creepy as heck because Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac. Imagine never having heard the story before. Imagine you don’t know the outcome. Imagine you haven’t grown bored with it from having heard it so many times. The story reads like a panic attack. Nothing is as it should be and everything is out of order.

Abraham looks up on the third day, two days since they have set off, and sees the mountain. Our hearts sink a little bit. I imagine most of us would be throwing up our breakfast if we had the ability to even eat anything. He tells the servants to stay with the donkey, takes Isaac (who is carrying the wood so he must have been a strong young man at the very least), and tells the servants they will return after they have worshiped. But he calls Isaac “the boy” using the Hebrew term na’ar, which is a legal term and not one of endearment. It refers to a male still under the authority of a superior—which could be either a father or a master. He doesn’t say, “Isaac and I” or “my son and I.” So far, he has only used the word son to refer to Ishmael in the Biblical account. Is he still disappointed? Is there resentment? There is certainly regret for how things ended with Ishmael. Abraham isn’t a fictional character or some sort of mindless, emotionless robot. Complicated situations engender complex emotions.

We do find out later in the Bible, in the account of David and the census, that the mountain in the Land of Moriah is Mt Zion on which is later located the Ark of the Covenant until the time of the construction of the first formal Temple by Solomon. We actually find this out in 2 Chron 3:1, and so it shouldn’t surprise us as we begin to see Messianic foreshadowing in this story. God calls for the sacrifice of the only beloved son on Mt Zion where Jerusalem will later be located. Isaac carries the wood for the sacrifice on his shoulder, and when asked is told that God will provide for the offering. I am not going to rehash that with you guys as this is common knowledge but I will talk to the kids about it as we go through it. I never assume they know stuff. That way, I won’t skip over anything important with them and the kids who do know it can get a review.

As they ascend the mountain, Isaac asks the obvious question, “Avi (my father),” and Abraham says, “Here I am b’nei (my son).” This is the first time we see Isaac referred to as son, and Isaac points out the elephant in the room—“we have everything we need, except the lamb for the whole burnt offering.” Abraham calls him b’nei again, my son, and promises that the Lord will be providing the lamb.” This of course, works either way as Isaac was a bonafide miracle born to a woman whose womb wasn’t only dead when she was young but even more so when she was elderly. Isaac was the son God Himself provided. What we cannot tell is the response of Isaac to this answer. Did he accept it or was he nervous? Certainly Abraham was anxious, who wouldn’t be even if they did believe that Yahweh could resurrect the boy? I don’t care how certain you are, or even if someone actually was looking forward to it for whatever reason, the tension would be suffocating. Abraham was a lot of things but we have no indication whatsoever that he was a murderer—far from it. He wasn’t even willing to stand quietly by and allow God to kill the citizens of the cities on the plain.

As they reach the top, Abraham builds an altar and almost certainly out of uncut stones found lying about. Israel is, if anything, full of stones. He arranged the wood on top and before we know it, Isaac is being tied up and is placed upon the altar. There is no way on earth that he could have fought back because there is no way that Abraham could hold his own against a strong, young man fighting for his life. Was Isaac that obedient? That terrified? Did Abraham assure Isaac that he would be raised from the dead? Was Isaac heartbroken that his father was willing to do this and too broken to resist? We just don’t know and perhaps our only three clues are, after God stops Abraham from offering Isaac up, that Isaac doesn’t return with his father to the servants, Sarah is no longer living with Abraham when she dies, Isaac is living far from his father in the tent of Sarah when Abraham’s servant brings him a wife, and Yahweh is described by Jacob as the God of Abraham but the Fear of Isaac, twice, in Gen 31. In addition, Abraham takes another wife and has many sons but there is zero interaction recorded between father and son until the funeral which is attended by both Ishmael and Isaac and boy howdy, I wonder what stories they were able to swap. Either experience would send all of us into a lifetime of intense therapy, right?

But I jumped ahead. Abraham, somehow, is raising his knife to sacrifice Isaac when he is stopped by the angel of the Lord who says, “Okay, Abraham, geez, cut it out. No, don’t cut anything—don’t lay a finger on that boy. I know now that you are willing to do anything for me, even kill your only son.” Notice the change in language from the original request—where Isaac was called not only “your only son” but also “your beloved son.” What was the test? Was it to simply see if Abraham would do whatever God asks or to see if Abraham really knew the character of God or if he actually loved his son as more than an heir or who he loved more, God or Isaac? Or Ishmael or Isaac? I wonder if there was more than one way to pass this test or if this test didn’t have so much a right or wrong answer but was designed to see what kind of man Abraham was or what kind of God Abraham imagined he served. We aren’t really clued in. We are only told what the test revealed. And Abraham definitely is described as obedient throughout the rest of the Bible. But, you know, Moses was more described as knowing Yahweh intimately and he was regularly challenging God on stuff. I mean, like from their very first encounter at the burning bush all the way until he was about to die and pleading to enter into the Land. I don’t believe it is unfair to Abraham to suggest that this is why it was said of Moses that God spoke with him face to face as one does with their friend. To be honest, their relationships were very different and with good  reason. Moses was simply more intimate with God than Abraham was, because the history of his people with Yahweh was longer than fifty years and had already spanned many generations. Abraham was chosen, absolutely, but he was the beginning—the first in line, so to speak. He had to learn the hard way what later generations could take for granted. He had to learn that Yahweh doesn’t ask for the sacrifice of sons as some of the other gods did.

Wrapping the story up, Abraham is shown a ram caught in a thicket by its horns, which he uses as a substitute for Isaac. He calls the place Yahweh Yireh, which is often translated the Lord will provide but it literally means the Lord will see. And we see a later editorial note which claims, “so today it is said, “it will be provided on the Lord’s Mountain.” Obviously neither Abraham nor Moses wrote that, but it was added later as context for those who were familiar with Mt Zion. Notice that the focus here is on God’s provision (seeing) and not on Abraham’s obedience. The angel of the Lord, at this point, affirms every promise previously spoken to Abraham, giving us an almost final bookend to the story of Abraham’s journeys. And so it shouldn’t surprise us that we hear about Abraham settling in Beer-sheva, far from Sarah in Hebron, and without Isaac. With no real explanation given as to what happened. Rabbinic literature and Hellenistic literature give us quite a few theories because there is nothing like a good “what if” story when we aren’t given any closure.  We get a short family update as to Nahor, the brother of Abraham, and his offspring—including Rebekah, whom we will see again soon. And this ends Torah Portion Lech Lecha on a note that is both a relief and yet very sad while looking forward to the next generation.

The post Episode 194: The Akeida—Genesis 22 for Grownups appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

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The post The Great Cosmic Resets of Yom Kippur and Sukkot appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

Welcome to the fall festivals! If this is your first year, then let me apologize in advance for all the drama people will want to unload on you about what they think is important when the Bible gives us very little to actually go on as far as how to celebrate and even what to call the first of them. Maybe you’ve even gotten caught up in the “red alert rapture” and end of the world predictions that happen every single year without fail and without fulfillment. But, rest assured, the people who made those predictions (like the guy who called for the destruction of America last year and admitted to heading up into the Appalachians to watch the destruction) will either pretend like it never happened or will find some way to spiritualize “what God said” in order to save themselves from admitting that they are false prophets. And they will wash, rinse and repeat next year, having learned nothing. And so they never deal with the fall out and people like me are left to talk folks down from the ledge.

In fact, I lived in the California Central Valley during the Harold Camping brouhaha where he convinced a ton of people that the rapture would happen back in 2011. Folks sold everything they had and gave the money away and drove around with huge back window stickers heralding the end of the world on their cars. They lost everything because they put their faith in a compelling preacher. I imagine that many even lost their faith entirely because they had placed it in a fortune teller instead of in the Messiah. So, this time of year can be particularly treacherous for new believers and for those who feel like they can know the future and therefore maintain some illusion of control and hey, that used to be me too. But Tishri 1 isn’t about any of that—nor is it about whether you call it Yom Teruah (which means the day of blowing, blasting, loud noise, etc specifically related to the sound of the shofar aka an animal horn) or Rosh Hashannah, meaning the “head of the year” because both are legitimate descriptions but neither are specifically named as are Yom Kippur and Sukkot. More about those in part two and three of this series.

Whereas Passover month marks the beginning of the festival years and the start of the months, the fall festivals mark the beginning of the new agricultural year, which is every bit as important when you are living in an agrarian culture. Tishri is the month when the harvest is in, land was returned to the original owners in the Jubilee, debt slaves were released, and things just flat out changed based on which of the seven years one just entered into. That all happens in Tishri and so it is, as the Bible calls it “the turn of the year” or the “end of the year” (Ex 23:16). Tishri is the great yearly agricultural reset where the year both begins and ends. As I go through this series, I will do a lot of explaining why this month was the most important of the year to those who were in need of rest and why the celebration really lasted most of an entire month both at home and in Jerusalem. As Aviv or Nisan represented the yearly celebration of their national reset—the Exodus—Tishri is the month of the Kingly decrees of release, provision, abundance, remission, manumission (the freeing of slaves), and rest. And I will explain all those as we come to them.

Tishri is the month when the King makes all things new again and the blasting of the shofar (teruah) marks the beginning of the new year (rosh hashannah). So the next time someone wants to argue about which one is right, you can assure them that both are correct but they are more correct together than separated.

If everything was about to change, in a good way, in your lives then it would be an appropriate time to herald the event. So, when the first sliver of the new moon was sighted (see Mishnah Tractate Rosh Hashannah beginning in chapter one), the witnesses were gathered at the Temple and they were quizzed as to what they saw and when by the priests, who then would verify the testimony and call for the blowing of the shofar from the Temple Mount to inform all that the new year had arrived and that the day was a High Sabbath of no work except cooking up a celebration feast at home. This wasn’t a festival day spent in Jerusalem unless you lived very close by—no one was required to be there until the first day of the eight day festival of Sukkot.

There are theories—ones that I used to teach as fact—about coronations being held on this day but the evidence isn’t as rock solid as I once believed. That’s the importance of looking at modern scholarship and not just stuff that is seventy years old. We do learn more and more all the time through archaeology and such and old theories can be overturned and old facts can be thrown into doubt. Given that the Bible itself doesn’t make this plain, it comes as a firm “maybe” and not as a hard fact.

What I can tell you is that the claim that the first of Tishri, being a day that cannot be entirely known beforehand due to the need to sight a moon phase, is somehow what Yeshua/Jesus was referring to when He talked about the day and hour that no one knows but the Father (Matt 24:36, Mark 13:32, Luke 12:46) is pure conjecture. There is no record either in or outside the Bible making that claim in any ancient text. Not the first testament or the second testament, not in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the apocryphal or pseudepigraphic or extra-Biblical wisdom literature, not in the church fathers, Philo, Josephus or in the Talmud. Anyone who presents it as though it is proven and obvious or “everyone knew it was referring to that” are doing so without a shred of proof. I used to do that and I cannot apologize enough—it was back when I wrongly thought I could believe people who said they had proof when they had none. It can be argued, but that’s all. We must be honest about there being absolutely no primary evidence of the claim.

But frankly, we don’t need that day to be the date of Yeshua’s return as King (and who knows, maybe it will be) to have this day be incredibly important on a cosmic level—meaning that it effects the world both in the seen on this side of the “veil” and also on the other side of the veil that we cannot see but is only visible to God, angels, and demons. The two realities are entirely connected even if it is only obvious to them and not to us.

Jewish wisdom says that this is the day that the books are opened and all people are subject to judgment that will occur over the ten days between Tishri 1 and Yom Kippur, when people’s fates for the next year are sealed. If that is true then boy howdy, that is a matter of great cosmic significance and all the world hangs in the balance every year during these ten days, called the “days of awe.” Not to be confused with the bringing of a new baby, kitten, or puppy into the house, which is called, the “days of awwww” and lasts a lot longer than ten days.

What we do know is that the month of Tishri marks the end of the ingathering of the harvest and the beginning of the planting season. The Gezer calendar, found in 1908, written in either paleo-Hebrew or Phoenician and dated to around the tenth century BCE, lays out the agricultural calendar and translates roughly as:

Two months gathering (Tishri, Cheshvan)—September/October—Beginning of the Agricultural and Civil year and the three fall festivals

Two months planting (Kislev, Tevet)—November/December–Hannukah

Two months late sowing (Shvat, Adar)—January/February—New Year for trees–Purim

One month cutting flax (Nisan)—March–Passover

One month reaping barley (Iyar)—April–Counting of the Omer

One month reaping and measuring grain (Sivan)—May–Shavuot/Pentecost

Two months pruning (Tammuz, Av)—June/July—Tisha B’Av—dry summer months of “weeping for Tammuz”

One month summer fruit (Elul)—August—forty days of Repentance ending with Yom Kippur

Abij [ah]  (the scribe who wrote this)

For a culture who lived and died according to the agricultural success of the year, I cannot emphasize enough how important the month of Tishri was for the nation. This was the time when all the hard work either resulted in success or failure and their storage rooms were either full or they weren’t. It was a time of relief and celebration and as the Land was their inheritance from God, all the credit went to Him—or should have. But the land of Canaan was home to many other gods, or so they believed. When it didn’t rain, they sometimes cried out to Ba’al the storm god, or to the shepherd god Tammuz to return from where he was imprisoned in the underworld by his wife Ishtar for half the year, or to Dagon the grain god. It is easy to casually worship Yahweh when things are going well, but as we saw in the Exodus account, a little hardship and/or uncertainty has people crying out to the regional gods of the land or building golden calves. Sometimes Yahweh would test them with a bad harvest to see where their hearts truly were and sometimes the bad harvests were a reflection of their covenant unfaithfulness. Really it was no different than how Yahweh tested them in the wilderness in order to get them to learn to trust Him and cry out to Him instead of complaining to Moses. The truth is that we hate not being in control and will generally do anything to circumvent the need to simply trust Him. This hasn’t really changed!

But if the nation was doing well, and they were being blessed with abundant harvests and were crediting God for it, then Tishri was the day that the shofar would be blown a hundred times (this is my job in the family because I am the one who learned how to make the darned thing sound like it wasn’t just rhino flatulence) and the new year was ushered in and the harvest and the goodness of the Land were celebrated. This was the day that the King was celebrated for His faithfulness, provision, and abundance. It was Yahweh’s day, truly, when He alone got the credit and the people were able to begin to solemnly prepare their hearts for the next Great Cosmic Reset of Yom Kippur.

The post Episode 191: Tishri 1 and the Great Cosmic Kingship Reset appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

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Genesis 21 isn’t the actual beginning of the story of the dysfunctionality of the family of Abraham, but it’s where we really start seeing the ongoing strain caused by how Abraham and Sarah have decided to do things, as well as the recurring theme of parental favoritism—which we will see through the time of David as a big problem, and there is just a lot of ancient Near Eastern context as far as the laws behind what they are doing and why.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. However, now I am exclusively working to teach and make disciples of kids over at Context for Kids, so this portion of my ministry is currently devoted to teaching adults how to teach kids by making sure that we are supporting their growth and faith in the Messiah. I want you to be able to answer their hard questions about the text instead of feeling like you have to blow them off. Kids are our full-blown brothers and sisters in Christ. Let’s stop sidelining them with cute stories designed to make the people in the Bible look like perfect heroes and instead teach kids how to take Yeshua/Jesus seriously as the only true hero of the Bible and the greater Moses, greater Temple, and greater Prophet whom Matthew tells us He is. I still have a ton of more advanced teachings for grownups at theancientbridge.com and on my YouTube channel. I also have curriculum books and all that jazz available on Amazon. All Scripture this week is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible.

We have three stories going on here in chapter 21—first of all, Sarah finally gets pregnant and has a baby in an account that is shockingly short considering we’ve all been waiting for this birth since the end of chapter 11! Next, we have the puzzling account of Sarah sending away Hagar and Ishmael with like nothing but a skin of water and enough maggoty bread to last three stinking days—oh wait, that’s The Two Towers. Finally, we have part two of Abraham’s dealings with King Abimelech of the Philistines, who realizes that although Abraham cannot be trusted, he is indeed favored by his God. Thank goodness there is nothing in here that young kids can’t hear as in the last two chapters, but I won’t be teaching it at kid level today. We have to talk about ancient Near Eastern law codes and what they reveal to us about Sarah’s rights and expectations under ANE law as well as Hagar’s rights. Remember, Torah is not yet given and so any law we find in the Torah cannot be automatically understood as being self-evident to Abraham and Sarah. Indeed, much of Genesis was quite baffling until the discoveries over the last 150 to 200 years of the various law codes from the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hittites. A terrific book I recommend on this is Martha Roth’s Law Collections from Babylonia and Asia Minor (affiliate link). I read it from cover to cover about ten years ago and it is just so good. Many “aha!” moments for sure. And after you read Hittite law, you will know why Isaac and Rebekah were so miserable with Esau’s wives. Gotta say that you shouldn’t have to write a special law telling people not to bite off other folks’ noses, okay?

Right off the bat, we have God remembering Sarah who then gets pregnant with Isaac and gives birth. In like two sentences. BOOM. But ancient Near Eastern writings (or first century for that matter) aren’t always in order and will often be grouped by topic. If you have ever read Jeremiah, then you know it is like being a companion of Doctor Who going backward and forwards as specified by the names of the kings being addressed. Also, the Gospels are notoriously grouped so as to bring together parables or events in order to make a point. The point of ancient writings was to relate truth to the audience, not accuracy. They are entirely different things sometimes. Modern histories operate by different rules that would have bored the Biblical authors to death and back. We cannot impose our sensibilities and standards backward onto them and judge them for not measuring up to the rules we made up during and after the Enlightenment. We gotta let the Bible be the Bible, which was written for our benefit but not to us or by us or in our language or style or anything. Doesn’t mean that we can’t learn to be God’s image-bearers but it does make the context very confusing at times. Let’s look at the account of Sarah’s long-awaited pregnancy:

The Lord came to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised. Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the appointed time God had told him

Why did I point out that the Bible isn’t always telling stories in order? Well, because Sarah might or might not have been pregnant already when Abimelech took her. If not then we have an extremely narrow window for their moving everyone and everything south from Hebron to Beersheba, Sarah being taken, and Abimelech and his household suffering from some sort of something that was keeping all of them from having babies, and then Sarah being released. That’s a lot needing to happen within a paltry three months, give or take a few months as the promise was that Sarah would be a mom “about this time” next year. And I have my reasons for believing that she might well already be pregnant. I mean, this was a miracle, right? But we know from Genesis 17 that Abraham wasn’t rejoicing over the prospect of Sarah having a son who would displace Ishmael, whom he loves and wants for his heir. Sarah heard the promise and legally, Abraham couldn’t deny her conjugal relations. We’ve already seen the rift between them after the pregnancy of Hagar and as, after chapter 22, we find that they have been living apart—with Isaac living with Sarah to the north and Abraham living where Hagar will move to in this chapter. Things aren’t good between them, and they haven’t been for all of Ishmael’s life I imagine. We can’t blame or scorn Abraham for loving Ishmael, who is blameless in all the drama. They have thirteen years of history before Sarah ever falls pregnant. And each generation of his family through Joseph repeats the same traumatic story of favored children and the resulting fractures to the respective families. But, I digress—the Lord has fulfilled His promise and Sarah bears a son.

 Abraham named his son who was born to him—the one Sarah bore to him—Isaac. When his son Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him, as God had commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.

We have this strange three-fold construction here linking Abraham and Isaac, which reads oddly but it isn’t really that crazy when we look through the Bible and see repetition during significant events. Abraham names Isaac, kinda, because God had specifically told Abraham that would be his name. God has named both of Abraham’s sons personally. Isaac, of course, is tied to the word that can mean laughter or mocking or play depending on the context. And we have this odd threefold declaration of his name. Isaac was born to Sarah, Isaac was circumcised at eight days old, and Isaac was born when Abraham was a hundred years old—making Sarah ninety. But Isaac is sort of like furniture on a set—he is the object of the actions of God and his parents. Nothing about him being special or anything, which is rather odd. All this waiting and we just get this brief birth announcement where he still doesn’t seem to be very important and, in fact, Isaac never gets much attention in the Bible compared to Abraham and Jacob. He’s like this strange blip in the story—the focus of a lot of action while really doing nothing of merit himself. His birth is a miracle, the very first birth miracle in the Bible out of seven (Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samson, Samuel, John the Baptist, and Jesus) but Isaac’s birth is also a disappointment because the lead in has been so dramatic. He is the only one of the three patriarchs who doesn’t have his name changed later. When God names you, it’s correct the first time. And I do want to mention that right now we have the fulfillment of every promise of God that would occur during the life of Abraham.

Sarah said, “God has made me laugh, and everyone who hears will laugh with me.” She also said, “Who would have told Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne a son for him in his old age.”

The interpretation on this is controversial because it isn’t clear whether Sarah is complaining that people will laugh at her (in her admittedly ridiculous situation—I mean, it would be a viral video now of her nursing a baby and people would be crying “fake news!”) or if she is laughing with joy. It can actually go either way but I find myself wondering about the timing of their move from Hebron to Beersheba when Sarah is supposed to be getting pregnant at any time. Did Mamre believe that Sarah was Abraham’s unmarried sister too? If so, after all those years of them being allies, it would have been hard to explain why Sarah was pregnant and I am not just talking about her age! It would have been quite a scandal. Perhaps they had to get out of there to avoid the admission of having misled an ally. It wouldn’t have been out of character for Abraham—after all, when he met Mamre he was just another strange man who might take Sarah, right?

The child grew and was weaned, and Abraham held a great feast on the day Isaac was weaned.

So, at this point, Isaac is probably three and he has passed the critical first phase of life toward survivability. Infant mortality was incredibly high in the ancient world. I know during the time of Jesus/Yeshua that a third of babies in the Land were dead before they were a year old. So, they were nursed as long as possible and then when they were about three or so they were weaned and then it was the time for celebration and not before. It should be cause for celebration and if Abraham failed to do this then he would be dishonoring Sarah and his own house. This had to happen regardless of his personal feelings about Ishmael being permanently replaced as per ANE law which gave precedence to any child of the wife or senior wife. Hagar was still a slave and therefore not a full wife but a concubine. Likely he had no relations with her after she became pregnant. But we have to remember that Abraham has failed to protect Sarah twice at this point, from being taken by other men. And Hagar’s son is now likely sixteen or seventeen years old, the age at which a person was likely to go on to live a full life and especially if they were male and didn’t have to face the dangers of childbirth.

 But Sarah saw the son mocking—the one Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham. So she said to Abraham, “Drive out this slave with her son, for the son of this slave will not be a coheir with my son Isaac!”

Different translations render this as laughing, playing, mocking or scoffing. This had to be an incredibly tense situation as Ishmael had been raised for thirteen years with the understanding that he was not only the only heir of his father, but the only possible heir. We can scarcely imagine how his life changed at the birth of Isaac and now that Isaac has survived the prime infant mortality zone of 0-3 years and a feast is being thrown to celebrate that, there had to be bitterness over this helpless intruder who was supplanting him because of a social technicality. Now he is simply the second son of Abraham, despite being older, with a slave for a mother. And Sarah was having none of it, undoubtedly still unhappy about Hagar’s rebellion and all of those years watching Abraham love and raise Hagar’s son. She doesn’t even call Ishmael Abraham’s son but the son of this slave. I can’t overemphasize the shame of being childless in the ancient world. And, although we can rightly look upon it as cruel, ANE law (specifically the law code of Lipit-Ishtar) gave Sarah the right to send Hagar away in return for her freedom. Abraham had conceded long since that Hagar belonged to Sarah to do with as she pleased, back in chapter 16.

Let’s look at section 25 of the code: If a man married his wife and she bore him children and those children are living, and a slave also bore children for her master but the father granted freedom to the slave and her children, the children of the slave shall not divide the estate with the children of their former master.

But let’s look at this from Sarah’s point of view—remember this is a mess of her own making but it is still a mess that needs a resolution. Any parent would look at this and think, “can’t Isaac just get the double portion and leave a third to Ishmael? They would both be wealthy and well cared for.” What can we imagine going through Sarah’s mind? She is ninety-three-ish at this point and has no idea when she (or her 103 year old husband) might die. Can she trust Abraham to make Isaac his heir? Can she trust Abraham to protect Isaac from Ishmael—a toddler from a near grown man? Does she believe that Abraham’s love for Ishmael gives him a blind spot as to the potential danger? Can she imagine a scenario where Ishmael might take revenge on Isaac for Sarah’s abuse of Hagar?

Things aren’t okay here and so for the second time, Sarah is going to assert her legal rights. The first time was when she gave Hagar (whom she has never called by name) to Abraham as a surrogate so that Sarah could have children. That was her legal right under the laws of the land as Hagar was her property and Abraham couldn’t legally deny Sarah children. Now, Sarah is asserting her right to manumit her slave girl, to release her from slavery and send her away. Abraham was in a real pickle according to the laws they were raised with. This was their normal, their context. It was an insanely cruel world—which is why God was starting to change it with just one family. But it is going to be ugly and the consequences long-lasting, as we will clearly see throughout Genesis. Most importantly, I want you to notice the phrase “drive out” which we also see with the expulsion of Adam from the Garden and it is how Cain refers to God’s punishment, barring him from working the ground. This is our third exile story, which is a big theme in the Bible.

This was very distressing to Abraham because of his son. But God said to Abraham, “Do not be distressed about the boy and about your slave. Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her, because your offspring will be traced through Isaac, and I will also make a nation of the slave’s son because he is your offspring.”

Displeasing? Ya think? Notice it doesn’t say sons but just son in the singular. When it comes to Abraham and Isaac, it is generally Sarah and God who refer to Isaac as Abraham’s son but when it is coming from Abraham, the word son is more likely to be used with Ishmael. No shock there, an ancient Near Eastern man isn’t going to have any sort of relationship with a three-year-old but Ishmael is practically a man. They have history. Abraham desperately loves Ishmael, and so he should. Whenever Yahweh speaks to Abraham about Ishmael from now on, he calls him the boy but calls Isaac Abraham’s son and especially in chapter 22 when we look at the Akeida, the binding of Isaac. The situation they forced upon Hagar, even though it was technically more honorable in the ANE to be a concubine instead of simply a slave, had created such a complex mess that it appears all the relationships within the family have suffered. Did Abraham resent Isaac, and Sarah too? Did he still desire his heir to be Ishmael? One thing for sure—he didn’t want to send his son away. Indeed, it would have been heartless if he had wanted to do so.

But God had to give Abraham a reality check. No matter how Abraham felt about it, Isaac would be his heir. Isaac was God’s choice. Period. Oddly enough, despite always calling Hagar by her first name (and the only one to do so), when speaking to Abraham he calls her what Abraham called her in chapter 16, the slave woman. Was it a sort of rebuke? Like, what do you care about this woman—you don’t even call her by her name and yet you love her son? Serious disconnect here—and yet, that was the world they lived in. There is a distancing between Abraham and Ishmael that God has been trying to get Abraham to accept since Gen 17. Why did God tell Abraham to do whatever Sarah says? Did He also see Ishmael as a potential danger toward Isaac? Would God be unable to bless Ishmael if he remained in the vicinity of Sarah and Isaac? There is so much bitterness and rancor at this point that it’s hard to imagine Jerry Springer not jumping up and down with glee at the thought of having them all on his show, right? I suppose the one thing we can say is that this is too awful to continue and even though Sarah created this problem through ANE law codes, she also had to be the winner in this situation because God had chosen her to be the mother of Isaac in order to show His power over life and death.

Early in the morning Abraham got up, took bread and a waterskin, put them on Hagar’s shoulders, and sent her and the boy away. She left and wandered in the Wilderness of Beer-sheba. 

Is there anyone who isn’t bothered by this? Bread and a skin of water? They are living close by the border of Egypt in the northern Negev. Couldn’t he have sent her with a camel and a donkey and personal servants and money? We keep hearing how rich Abraham is so a little generosity might be nice here. However, everything belonged to Isaac as heir and God had told Abraham to listen to Sarah. Sarah might have been angry at Ishmael dishonoring her son, or scared at real or imagined danger, or simply feeling powerful now that Isaac was weaned, which put her in the position to make demands on behalf of God’s chosen heir for Abraham. I want to give her the benefit of the doubt here, but this is just plain ugly and there is no clear-cut good guy in all of this. So much goes unsaid, but that’s why in the Hellenistic Era books like Jubilees and Enoch and the Testaments of the Patriarchs were written as popular fiction to fill in the blanks of these accounts with “what if” stories. I personally believe that Abraham would have sent Ishmael away with a lot more if he was left to his own devices. But God knew Sarah’s heart in this matter and used it to work a miracle for Ishmael and another visitation for Hagar. Sarah wasn’t getting the last word in the fate of “the slave woman and her son.” Ishmael wouldn’t directly inherit from Abraham but he would be blessed because he was Abraham’s son—as God had promised Hagar all the way back when she was pregnant and on the run from Sarah’s anger. God saw to justice for Ishmael personally. But again, Hagar gets lost in the wilderness on her way back to Egypt. Evidently, she has my lack of an inner GPS.

When the water in the skin was gone, she left the boy under one of the bushes and went and sat at a distance, about a bowshot away, for she said, “I can’t bear to watch the boy die!” While she sat at a distance, she wept loudly. God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What’s wrong, Hagar? Don’t be afraid, for God has heard the boy crying from the place where he is. Get up, help the boy up, and grasp his hand, for I will make him a great nation.” Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well. So she went and filled the waterskin and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy, and he grew; he settled in the wilderness and became an archer. He settled in the Wilderness of Paran, and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.

Again, this is so relatable. Regardless of what Hagar has done over the last sixteen years—and we don’t know for sure. I mean, maybe she has been teaching Ishmael to hate Isaac and Sarah, who knows? Lost with her son in the wilderness, far from any settlements, with no water. It’s hot during the day and cold at night. She helps him to lay down under a bush for shelter and then she walks off a distance because she just can’t bear to see her son die. She begins to lament, loudly. But it is the voice of Ishmael that God hears—why? It’s a mystery. Last time, God heard and responded to the cries of Hagar but this time, he is responding to the boy. I believe it is on account of Abraham. Had Abraham taught Ishmael to pray and call on the name of the Lord? I would certainly hope so. Ishmael had been circumcised three or four years earlier and so he was a part of God’s covenant with the household of Abraham even if Abraham’s land covenant descendants wouldn’t come through Ishmael. Ishmael, unlike Moab, Ammon and Esau, wasn’t given land by Yahweh. He lived as a wanderer in the wilderness and we will see that some of his descendants became caravan traders dealing in merchandise (including slaves) to Egypt. But land isn’t the only blessing available from God.

Although God hears the voice of Ishmael, He speaks to Hagar again, calling her by name. He tells her to get the boy up because he has a blessed future and will become a nation—the same promise she received in Gen 16. For the second time, God provides a well for her—making up for the lack of supply received from Abraham. They remained in the wilderness, with Ishmael as a hunter and Hagar got for him an Egyptian wife. And that’s almost the last we hear of him. We will get his genealogy later and he will return for the burial of Abraham. I will put out a second part about Abraham and Abimelech and Phicol, part two. In a week or so.

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A lot of folks like to look at Gen 20 as Gen 12 part 2 but there is a lot more going on, and not going on, here—than there was in the brief account of Pharoah, Sarah, and Abram. As I was not yet doing these adult supplements when I taught the kids that portion of the Bible, this will be a double dose of Abram (and Abraham) and his problem with habitual lying whenever he feels endangered in certain ways, and how it puts others at risk. As such, there are a wealth of lessons here for kids because we have all been there, right? Scared to death and out pop the lies to get ourselves out of trouble. Oh, just me? Uh huh. Right. These two chapters teach us the difference between, “oops I was scared and I lied” and “I have a policy of always telling this lie wherever I go because other people don’t fear the Lord.” Anyone can panic but not everyone has a plan in place to lie that gets in the way of their trusting God and His promises—which can’t be fulfilled if Abraham truly needs to fear for his life. And because Abraham is an established liar, we see in Gen 12, 20, and 21 that his reputation for deceit follows him around and even we readers find ourselves wondering if his other claims are true. Is Sarah really Abraham’s half-sister or was this just another lie designed to help him save face with a foreign king? Let’s look at the context and the text to see what it does and doesn’t say and how this all fits together with ancient Near Eastern legal codes. That way, when kids ask you the hard questions, you won’t have to blow them off with easy answers. Let’s read the Bible the way it was written—unapologetically showing everyone’s warts and designed to make God and God alone the hero of the entire text.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. However, now I am exclusively working to teach and disciple kids and their educators, so this portion of my ministry is currently devoted to teaching adults how to teach kids by making sure that we are supporting their growth and faith in the Messiah instead of hijacking it and to also able to answer their hard questions about the text instead of blowing them off. Kids are our full-blown brothers and sisters in Christ. Let’s stop sidelining them with cute stories designed to make the people in the Bible look like perfect heroes and instead teach kids how to take Yeshua/Jesus seriously as the only true hero of the Bible and the greater Moses, greater Temple, and greater Prophet whom Matthew tells us He is. So, from now on, this is a satellite ministry of Context for Kids, which has become my primary ministry. Lots for adults to learn still, focused on equipping adults to equip kids and also to teach people new to context studies. I still have a ton of more advanced teachings for grownups at theancientbridge.com and on my YouTube channel, and I think that most of the listeners to Context for Kids are probably grownups anyway so you can catch me there as well if you enjoy crawling through Genesis at a snail’s pace. I also have curriculum books and all that jazz available on Amazon. All Scripture this week is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, unless I say otherwise.

So, at the end of Genesis 12, Abram and Sarai travel to Egypt because of a terrible famine in Canaan. They and their livestock end up down in Egypt which is almost always abundantly fertile and even famously so during the days of the Roman Empire where Egypt was known as the breadbasket of the world—only not in English. Something in Latin or Greek instead. Abram tells his beautiful sixty-five-year-old wife Sarai to do him the favor of telling everyone that she is his unmarried sister so they won’t be tempted to kill him when they take her for themselves. And yes, this is worrisome. The taking and even raping of Sarai is the expected outcome but, as Abram explains, at least it will go well for him if and when it happens. How romantic, right? And that’s exactly what happens. Sarai is taken into Pharaoh’s house and Abram is paid handsomely with money and critters and slaves as a bride price. As her purported brother, he owns her and will therefore profit off of her marriage. This is just life as normal in the ancient Near East and as I tell the kids, this is the world God decided to change and this is just one of many reasons why.

Some unspecified time later, God lays down the law with Pharaoh. But before that, He strikes down the household of Pharoah with plagues (sound familiar?). Somehow or another, God communicates to Pharaoh the reason for the plagues—he has taken another man’s wife. Although this is actually normal on real crime podcasts and 20/20 and all that, all over the ancient Near East (from Egypt to Babylon) this was considered a very great sin. It wasn’t just adultery, as we would see it, but theft of property because women weren’t allowed to control their own sexuality. It was very much a taboo—which is why it was more common for a husband to be killed before taking his now widow. That, I suppose, was okay in the eyes of some. Hey, every culture has strange rules! But as soon as Pharaoh learns what he has done, he gives her back and exiles them from Egypt. But Abram leaves far richer than he was when he entered the country. And this sounds like it was a quick thing but let’s take another look. There was enough time for multiple plagues to be inflicted on Pharaoh and his household and we aren’t ever told what they are. God unleashes chaos upon the Egyptian elites in a way totally at odds with his later treatment of the household of Abimelech the Philistine king, which was incredibly merciful even though Abimelech’s sin appears to be the greater of the two. We’ll come back to this later because it will be important to understanding both stories and how they are the same yet also very different.

Twenty-four years later, Abraham and Sarah (now both renamed by God), have moved from Hebron to their new base of operations in the Southern Levant near the Egyptian border—yes, Egypt again even though it isn’t explicitly mentioned. Here they encounter a king named Abimelech whose name means “my father is king” and this may be a patronym or a throne name for the dynasty. A patronym is something very familiar to us—like bar Jonah would be “son of Jonah” or bat Jonah would be “daughter of Jonah” in Aramaic, the Hebrew-ish Semitic language spoken by the Jews during and after the exile. Names common today would be Fitzpatrick (son of Patrick) or Ivanoff (meaning “of Ivan”) and also last names like Peterson, MacDonald and that sort of thing. They all go back to an ancestor and not to a person’s father anymore like it would have in Bible times. So, maybe Abimelech means son of Melek (my father is Melek) or maybe it is a name that all the kings of the Philistines there used because it more likely means “my father is king.” We aren’t used to throne names anymore because the only well-known monarchs in the western world now—Elizabeth and Charles—broke that tradition and used their real names. Queen Victoria’s real name was Alexandrina, for example. Elizabeth’s dad was actually an Albert before he became George VI. Augustus Caesar’s real name was Gaius Octavian.

But when they travel to Gerar and Abimelech takes Sarah, there is no mention of a payment to Abraham. It really seems as though Abimelech simply seizes her, not because she is beautiful because this claim isn’t made again and she is now eighty-nine years old, but perhaps to force an alliance with an affluent and powerful man in Canaan or, less likely, as a ransom situation enacted against a rich foreigner. Abraham assured Abimelech that she was his sister and he had her taken and brought to him. No negotiations. No bride-price. No nothing. This isn’t like the first situation where there are plagues and yet, God handles this very severely anyway. We find out later that no one in his household can have any babies for some reason—and that somehow God has rendered Abimelech unable to sexually approach Sarah. So, it is likely that all the men were rendered impotent. Now, I was always taught that this was so that no one could question the parentage of Isaac and although this is undeniably true, there is something else not being said that reflects back on Genesis 12. Movies and storybooks present this idea that Sarah was undefiled by Pharaoh but that is simply wishful thinking. We really don’t know. There is nothing in Genesis 12 to suggest that throughout the plagues, Pharaoh was unable to approach the incredibly beautiful Sarai. Nothing at all is said and there is also no mention of vindication of her honor. Pharaoh is explicit in saying, “I took her as my wife” and that more than implies a consummation of the marriage. Sarah was sold by her husband for an exorbitant fee and it was only through God’s intervention that she was released. In fact, when we look at the third parallel situation in Gen 26, a future ruler named Abimelech almost falls into the same trap when Isaac lies about the identity of Rachel. Abimelech rebukes him, saying, “one of us could have easily slept with your wife, and you would have brought guilt upon us.” Abimelech was alarmed and frightened because, as I have mentioned previously, adultery—intentional or not—was considered a great sin by all of the ancient Near Eastern world. No wonder Pharaoh was furious and especially if he had slept with her, as would be normal and expected. There were no protests of Pharoah to God or to Abraham that he was innocent of the crime of adultery, only anger that he had been led into this situation by Abram’s deception.

This time, however, God protects Sarah and didn’t allow her to be violated. And we may hate the possibility that she was raped by Pharaoh, but this is the Bible and not Disneyland. This was a harsh, cruel world where the women weren’t treated as humans but as property—except by God who even called Hagar by her name when no one else would, and who called a woman to judge Israel as a prophet, etc. There’s a reason why God had to make changes. And it had to start with changing Abraham first and foremost.

Back to Abimelek and his dilemma. God comes to him in a dream after some time of sexual impotence throughout his household, and tells him he is a dead man because of Sarah. He’s committed the great sin of wife stealing—and the only reason he isn’t dead yet is because he didn’t know. But the text does seem pretty clear that he strong-armed his way into this “marriage” with Sarah. He took her—or at least he sent his men to do so. He had the power to bypass the social contractual niceties and so he did. Possessing Abraham’s sister would gain him an important ally in a land where they were definitely in the minority, as the Philistine nation wouldn’t formally move en masse to the land of Canaan until the 12^th century BCE. At most, Abimelek was “king” or big man on campus of an outpost, small colony, or a trading hub. And God did have mercy on him and didn’t allow Sarah to be violated because of Abraham’s lies. God’s promises now specifically include Sarah as the mother through whom He will raise up a covenant people. For Abraham to still be doing this nonsense now that a child was promised to both of them is shocking. And it is supposed to be.

Pharaoh, I believe, is actually plagued because he was having sexual relations with Sarai but Abimelech is only guilty of the lesser crime of kidnapping another man’s wife. Pharoah actually entered into this innocently, but the crime was greater. Abimelech was a kidnapper, but nothing more than that was allowed to happen because of the imminent conception of Isaac. And I suppose the real miracle here is that Sarah was willing to have relations with Abraham after this. These days, we would be telling her to file charges against them both and finding a good lawyer. I mean, these are major crimes when we stop to think about it. When we just read through these chapters like they are ordinary, we have to remember that if we were reading this in the newspaper we would be outraged and appalled. Perhaps that is the tragedy of living in a world where we have lost the ability to treat the Bible like a historical narrative about people who often went through hell on the way to bringing forth the Messiah.

Well, Abimelek was furious and called together all of his councilors and they were terrified too because this was something that just wasn’t done and they were terrified that their whole people would be punished. Of course, in our eyes, Abimelek wasn’t at all a righteous dude in that he did kidnap Sarah and forced her into marriage but at the time, he was just doing what he had the right to do in his own land to foreigners. When we later see the laws given at Sinai and then outside the promised land in Deuteronomy, there are specific regulations about how foreigners are to be treated by God’s people but at this point, that was far in the future. So, we have might makes right and all that nonsense. It was the way the world thought pre-cross. As such, Abimelech could claim a clear conscience in that he hadn’t been aware that he was about to commit adultery. God tells Abimelech to give her back to Abraham because he is a prophet and that he will pray for the restoration of potency to Abimelech’s household. Abraham, despite his deception, is the legally wronged party in an attempted adulterous act and he must be appeased. As a prophet, he is an intercessor and his prayers for Abimelech will be heard—no matter how messed up it seems to us. We like to believe that God wouldn’t ever answer the prayers of someone who would lie like that, but there we go. Abraham isn’t perfect, just chosen. He’s part of the plan to rescue humanity and no matter whom God picked, there were going to be serious issues. Abraham was raised in Ur of Babylonia, and that was his context. Apart from late-date Rabbinic legends that have him learning from Shem, we have no reason to believe he wasn’t every bit as much an idol worshiper as his father Terah—as we learn in Joshua 24:2. He was raised normalizing ancient Near Eastern laws of conduct, as we saw in chapter 16 and we will see again in chapter 21 when Sarah asserts her ANE rights of manumission to get rid of Hagar and Ishmael. He had a long way to go to get here—not excusing him, just pointing out the reality of where Abram started out and Abraham ended up at the end of chapter 22. The story of Abraham is a journey and usually not a pretty one.

Abimelech, however, would have seen nothing strange about a deity who favors certain people and protects them “just because.” The gods he knew were fickle and petty and unpredictable and he was likely just relieved that this one had an exit strategy in place for him. So, after meeting with his council, Abimelech took Sarah back to Abraham and let him have her and gave him an earful about his sins against the Philistine people who were suffering because of his lies. And here’s where the story gets weird and frustrating because Abraham just starts making excuses for his behavior that are much worse than just apologizing—which men in honor/shame cultures weren’t really big on doing.  He freely admits to having a pre-existing plan while travelling to pass Sarah off as his sister because “you dudes are all heathens who don’t fear God.” Which is ironic since Abimelech obviously does fear God a lot ever since God spoke to him. But then, we have this mystery because Abraham is claiming that Sarah really is his half-sister—a detail that we don’t find in the original genealogy given to us in chapter 11. Is Abraham being honest here or is it just another lie? We absolutely have no idea. We weren’t told that Terah had more than one wife and whether Abraham’s mother had died before he turned ten, and maybe Terah married Sarah’s mother. Or if he had multiple wives at the same time. This statement is incredibly puzzling because with Abraham’s track record in this particular area, we have no way of knowing if he is telling the truth or lying. What we do know for sure is that Abimelech doesn’t trust him—that will become more apparent in chapter 21.

Abimelech now does what he should have done in the first place instead of kidnapping Sarah—he pays Abraham the equivalent of a high bride-price to appease him, and then he additionally pays Abraham a thousand pieces of silver. That’s 25 lbs. of silver. As he hands over the money, this is the gist of what he says to Sarah, “Look, I am giving “your brother” this money. This is your vindication that absolutely nothing happened between us and you haven’t been defiled.” Abimelech even allows Abraham to settle wherever he wants in the land of the Philistines. Abimelech is in a pickle—he has to do everything he can to make Abraham happy, whether he trusts him or not or likes him or hates him. If Abraham doesn’t pray for them, they will never have children and they will die off. That was a fate worse than death in the ancient world.

I want you to see some parallels between Abimelech and Sarah and the Philistines and the Ark of God in I Sam 5. The sinful priests Hophni and Phineas foolishly and presumptuously took the Ark of the Covenant into battle against the Philistines and God wasn’t about to go along with them to fight. So, the Philistines captured the ark and placed it in the Temple of Dagon, their grain god. Yes, I know about the fish god stories but from archaeology we know a lot about the worship of Dagan and he was a grain god, which makes sense when they later place the Ark out in a grainfield hoping that Dagan would be stronger there and he wasn’t. So, we have this “kidnapping” of the Ark and bringing it into the royal sanctuary of Dagan just as Sarah was taken into the royal residence of Abimelech. Abimelech and his house suffers from impotence, so he is rendered ineffective. Dagan falls twice and loses his arms and head, and was thus rendered ineffective. The Ark is finally returned to the people of Israel along with golden rats and tumors as tribute, and critters, on a wagon as an act of national repentance. Sarah is returned along with money, slaves, and critters as an act of community repentance.

Abraham responds by praying for Abimelech and his people so that they will be able to have children again—and we learn that not only was Abimelech himself afflicted but so were the women of his household. There is a recurring message here that consequences of the sins of men fall heavily on the women in their lives.  But then, in Exodus 34 when Yahweh tells Moses that He visits the sin of those who hate Him to the third or fourth generation, we shouldn’t understand this as future generations being doomed but instead a commentary on the reality that they were living in a time when each household contained three or four generations living as a unit. What fell upon one would harm the entire house. This isn’t God being vindictive but simply a directive to people that when they sin grievously against God, actually hating Him (which meant working against Him), the people in their lives will all suffer because of it. Anyone who has grown up in a house of abuse, addiction, or whatever, understands that it’s never just one person suffering—everyone does. This is what we see in the houses of Pharoah and Abimelech—and David. Excepting with David, the sword never leaves his house throughout the generations, leaving His house needing to be renewed and the curse undone through Yeshua/Jesus at the Cross.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Episode 188: Stuff I Can’t Teach Kids about Sodom and Gomorrah appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Episode 187: Hospitality or not? Rahab, Yael, Abigail, and Lydia in Context appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Episode 186: Hospitality, Family, and Travel in the Days of Sodom appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Episode 185: Are we Modeling Good Fruit or Folly? appeared first on The Ancient Bridge.

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Throughout the Gospel of Matthew, we see Yeshua/Jesus telling His audience that “something greater than this or that” is here. He outright claims to be greater than the Temple, Jonah, and Solomon. Through parables and teachings, He also makes it clear that He is greater than Moses, any interpretation of the Torah apart from His own, the Sabbath, sacrifices, paying Temple taxes, and King David. But, by far, the most obvious of these is the ongoing comparison to Moses—from his birth story to His role as a teacher far greater than Moses, who only prophesied about Yeshua but failed to enter into the Land because of his sin and rebellion. I will just be glossing over most of these as I will cover them in depth when I get to them in the series, but I want you to get a feel for what Matthew is saying here because it will be important from the very beginning.

Remember from last time, Matthew is a polemical text making the case to post-Temple Jews of why they should follow Yeshua instead of the Pharisees, who were growing in power after the destruction of the Temple and the subsequent ruin of the Sadducean high priestly family. Pharisaic Judaism was morphing into the Rabbinic Judaism of the Middle Ages but it wasn’t there yet, not by a long shot. Matthew is making the case that it is Yeshua who represents true Judaism, as opposed to the more mainstream Pharisees who (by and large) didn’t accept Yeshua as the long-awaited Messiah and therefore the only true teacher and arbiter of the will of God. In fact, during the second century, led by Rabbi Akiva (a former Gentile), they would side with Shimon bar Kochba in his temporarily successful rebellion against Rome, which disastrously led to the permanent expulsion of the Jews until the 7^th century.  But when Matthew was written, this was all in the future and the battle was on for which sect within Judaism would come out on top. Matthew obviously wanted the victor to be Yeshua so he had to make sure to make a strong case for it. To accomplish this for his Jewish audience of Jews evangelizing other Jews and proselytes, he had to make a clear case that Yeshua is greater than anyone in the Torah and also greater than the Torah, as Paul had also written decades earlier. In Galatians 2:21 and Romans 8, Paul explains that Torah was weakened by the sin of the hearers and unable to save or render a person truly righteous within. Although Yeshua was likely considered to be the living law, as were all ancient kings, that is a reflection of His unique position as the arbiter of justice and instruction in righteousness and not a way to make Him simply co-equal with the Torah, the five books of Moses or even the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures.

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 years’ worth of blogs 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. I also have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for adults and kids. You can find the links for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com, and transcripts 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 is from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible, unless I say otherwise.

Let’s look at the collection of “greater than” verses as well as where Yeshua implicitly claims authority over and on all things held sacred by the Jewish world:

I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. (Matt 12:6)

The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at Jonah’s preaching; and look—something greater than Jonah is here. (Matt 12:41)

The queen of the south will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and look—something greater than Solomon is here. (Matt 12:42)

For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. (Matt 12:8)

While the Pharisees were together, Jesus questioned them, “What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They replied, “David’s.” He asked them, “How is it then that David, inspired by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’: The Lord declared to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet’?  “If David calls him ‘Lord,’ how, then, can he be his son?” (Matt 22:41-45)

“You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, Do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you… ²⁷ “You have heard that it was said, Do not commit adultery. But I tell you… “It was also said, Whoever divorces his wife must give her a written notice of divorce. But I tell you… “Again, you have heard that it was said to our ancestors, You must not break your oath, but you must keep your oaths to the Lord. But I tell you… “You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I tell you… “(Matt 5:21-38, edited)

As Kevin said in Home Alone, I have to say to those who claim that Yeshua never claimed to be anything other than a normal human being, “You guys give up, or are you hungry for more?” Greater than Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived but who tore the Kingdom apart with forced labor to build palaces for his bevy of booty call beauties. Greater than Moses, who gave the law but made allowances for human hard-heartedness (Mark 10). Greater than the Temple, which was supposed to be inhabited by the presence of God but had been abandoned since the days of Ezekiel before the Babylonian conquest—even though God commanded Haggai and Zerubbabel to rebuild it and continue with the offerings. Greater than Jonah who preached to the Gentiles but out of a wrathful and bitter heart, wanting them to perish and afraid that God would have mercy if he obeyed. Greater than the Sabbath because He understands that Sabbath is a gift so that men and women could rest and not something burdensome that people need to be paranoid about breaking. Greater than David because, well, you know but also because David himself recognized that Messiah was his Lord. Greater than the Torah, because He can do what the Torah never could—allow for perfection through the circumcision of the heart. Torah still allowed the evils of the world while lessening them, according to Yeshua, but Yeshua made allowances for perfection and provided the only way to the New Creation life. Torah prophesied about Yeshua, and so it serves Him and not the other way around. We obey it as a starting place but Yeshua beckons us to strive for perfection and not be satisfied with treating the commandments like an inclusive “to do” list or to search them to see what we can get away with while still claiming to be “Torah Observant.”

Let me just say this—many people would rather be Torah observant (or at least pretend to be because so much of it is land, cultural, and Temple based that it is impossible) than to follow the Messiah because it is a heck of a lot easier. You can still do some nasty, selfish, and evil things to other people and claim to be obedient, but Yeshua strips away all our pretensions with the Sermon on the Mount and we are so aghast that we come up with reasons why He wasn’t really serious about putting us in danger. Folks, until the time of Constantine, the church took it seriously. But with a standing army comes less trust, more fear, and the desire to conquer, dominate and convert by force. The teachings of Yeshua were often pushed aside in favor of using examples from the OT out of context to justify war for pretty much any reason to the point that, today, we pick and choose our wars based on financial motives and other worldly concerns and call it good while referring to ourselves as a Christian nation. Last month, I saw people calling for the deaths of innocent Palestinians and even children to avenge what their terrorist political leadership has done. But if we are going to follow Yeshua, we need to pray for and bless our enemies and if we are to do that for actual enemies, we should do even more for those who are suffering right now because they were born into an impoverished terrorist state. They could be us, under different circumstances. Condemn evil. Condemn violence. But be careful not to become the types of people who would want a people group slaughtered wholesale just because their leadership wants to do that to Israel. As in the Bible, it was the leadership responsible for the death of the Messiah and not the regular folks. We are all products of environments that we never chose for ourselves.

But the good news is that Yeshua came, promoting Himself as greater than everything and everyone on earth. Greater than the wisdom and wealth of Solomon. Yeshua is greater than the prophet Jonah, who ran away from God’s will instead of diligently carrying His own Cross toward a terrible death. Yeshua is greater than the Temple, which had become a source of false security and national pride. Yeshua was the presence of God, without priestly mediation and go-betweens, with no buffer between Himself and humanity. Blessings flowed from Him as they were supposed to flow from the Temple, but no longer were due to corrupt leadership. Yeshua was greater than David, who became the sort of ancient Near Eastern king whom Samuel had warned the Israelites about. Yeshua was greater than Moses, putting Himself over and above Moses with the “but I say to you” statements after speaking the words of Moses. Sometimes He kept the traditions of His day and at other times, he utterly ignored them.

But before that, we have His origin story which is purposefully tied to Moses. A miraculous birth, unlike Moses, but followed by persecution from a modern-day Pharaoh in Herod who also killed Jewish baby boys. Journeys to and from Egypt to escape danger. Following the Spirit for forty days of temptation in the wilderness echoing the forty years of Moses following the Spirit in the wilderness where Israel was tempted and failed. A mountaintop sermon delivering the law of the Kingdom of Heaven. The division of Matthew into five sections echoing the five books of Moses. Yeshua is going to not only be compared to Moses but also to Israel. Yeshua will succeed in everything Israel failed. Yeshua will be the perfect Son of God—not the stiff-necked generation in the wilderness. This is the story Matthew is telling, post 70 CE when the nation is having to face another Temple destroyed due to what the Talmud later described as “gratuitous hatred” among the factionalized Jews (Yoma 9b). Follow Yeshua, who got it right, endured to death like the prophets of old, resisted temptation, and who was vindicated by God as the first raised permanently from the dead and who has been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Live in this radical way He showed us to live because doing things the Pharisaic way didn’t stop our Temple from being destroyed, our people slaughtered, and our nation scattered.

It is time for new leadership—true leadership. That’s the story Matthew is telling. Yeshua is the greater Israel, the greater Son, who did everything right and was killed for it by the leadership—and some of those leaders were Pharisees. Even if they didn’t cause the problem, they did nothing to stop it when the Sanhedrin met to consider the recommendation of the High Priest’s informal hearing the night before. Matthew didn’t even include Yeshua’s request that they be forgiven because they didn’t know what they were doing because to do so would weaken his argument. Yes, there is forgiveness for all who repent but Matthew was portraying the Pharisaic influence as to be avoided and not as forgiven.
Those are the things I want us to notice as we are going through this Gospel. Everything in it is designed to show Matthew’s fellow Jews, living either in or in close proximity to the Land, the way forward for true Judaism, the way of the Kingdom of Heaven, at their cultural crossroads after the destruction of the Temple.

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