Episode 182: Matthew #1—The who, what, why and when of the “first” Gospel.

Why is the Gospel of Matthew called a biography when it looks absolutely nothing like our modern biographies? What were the rules of writing an ancient life story and how did Matthew use this genre to communicate the story of the Messiah to his very unique audience at a very tumultuous time in history?

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

Welcome to my first episode in this new series on Matthew, which I am teaching in tandem with the Psalms because they truly do go great together as will become more obvious as we get deeper in.

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Just as we did with the Gospel of Mark, overwhelmingly believed to be the first written Gospel, we need to take some time to explore the author, what exactly they were writing, when they wrote it, and what purpose it served within the community where it originated. Mark is largely attributed to Peter’s companion John Mark, most famous for ditching Paul in Pamphylia and for being the cousin of Barnabus plus the reason for the splitting up of certainly the greatest missionary team in history. So, not likely an author that anyone would have made up, as his history is a bit sketchy. Mark was almost certainly written to a Roman audience and not a primarily Jewish audience because of his frequent usage of Latin loan words and his explanations of concepts unique to first-century Judaism that wouldn’t need explanation if the audience was Jewish. Mark was likely written sometime around 60 CE, give or take a few years. His intention was to declare Yeshua/Jesus as the fulfillment of “Jewish” prophecy in being the Yahweh-Warrior and Arm of the Lord prophesied in Deutero-Isaiah, and we covered that in a series as well–performing miracles, feedings, and healings for both Jews and Gentiles as a glimpse of the future Messianic Kingdom that was inaugurated at the Cross and Resurrection. I mention all of this because it will be important in understanding how Matthew is very different even though it uses over 90% of the material found in Mark—but adds a whole lot more and emphasizes the same material in different ways.

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 (affiliate link). 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.

Let’s look at the author of Matthew; the earliest church tradition identifies him as the apostle Matthew, certainly one of the more obscure apostles whom we certainly wouldn’t even think twice about without this Gospel and the fact that before conversion, he was a traitor to his people, being a tax collector for the Romans. Not in terms of going to ordinary Jews and collecting taxes like the Sheriff of Nottingham, but specifically collecting tolls from merchants in places like Capernaum among those who shipped fish throughout the area. Maybe it wasn’t that Matthew at all, but Papias claimed it was, and he was born only 30 years after the Resurrection, placing him within a stone’s throw of the events. Doubting him really serves no purpose. Eusebius claimed that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew (Aramaic) and translated, but experts tend to agree that it really doesn’t read as though it was. The current “ancient” copy of Hebrew Matthew dates to like the 14th century by the Ba’al Shem Tov, and there is no reason to suspect it was the product of a scribe copying an earlier document. Scholars tend to believe that it was translated from Catalan, which was derived from a manuscript in Provencal, which was itself based upon the Latin Vulgate. The Baal Shem Tov was a polemicist against Christianity in favor of Judaism, and it was in his best interest to translate the Catalan into Hebrew. But it is a very layered manuscript, showing the telltale signs of having gone through many translations. And, of course, the originals for the Vulgate translation were in Greek. Truth be told, all of our manuscripts of “Hebrew Matthew” are dated from the 15th through 17th century, and none claim ancient roots. There are only 28 manuscripts out there. So, there is no benefit in claiming these represent the originals, and we gain nothing—although more than a few people speaking outside their field of expertise have made a lot of money doing it. Nuff said.

As for the “what,” Matthew covers the same material as did Mark but in sometimes completely different ways and to highlight a very different story. For Mark, Yeshua was the Jewish Messiah who didn’t destroy the armies of the Gentiles but instead the armies of the demonic powers and principalities oppressing both Jew and Gentile. Yeshua combatted hunger, spiritual and physical deafness and blindness, sickness, physical and mental infirmities, demonic oppression, as well as the leadership of the Temple and the regions of Judea and Galilee (which were not united as one country and had entirely different power structures and political realities). The only thing they had in common was the presence of Jews and being ruled by the Roman Empire through vassals and governors. But the culture was incredibly different, and so were the accents. Matthew, on the other hand, is clearly a Jew who never feels the need to explain Jewish concepts because his audience already knows that information. Parchment is expensive, and this is a long Gospel as it is! Matthew’s Gospel is in the form of an ancient biography, so that’s what we will be talking about today. Ancient biographers didn’t play by our rules but according to their own cultural expectations for what it meant to properly communicate the life story of an important person. A fabulous book on this is Keener’s Christobiography (affiliate link)–not light reading, let me tell you.

Matthew is presenting the story of Yeshua in a way that proves He is the (1) Second Moses, (2) heir of the Davidic throne, the “Son of David” who is ruler over the Greater Kingdom of Heaven, (3) Israel’s definitive teacher, (4) the divinely conceived Son of God, (5) the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, (6) the one who is “greater than” the Temple, Jonah, Moses, etc. because He is the unique incarnation of the Son of God, (7) the true way of Judaism, as opposed to the Pharisees and the now defunct priesthood (if this was indeed written after the destruction of the Temple) and (8) the one who gathers the Nations into faith in Yahweh. Matthew puts Yeshua on such a high pedestal that it should be no shock that his last recorded words of Yeshua are that He has been given all authority in heaven and on earth and that we all need to obey all He commanded. Yes, that would include the Sermon on the Mount!

As for the when, that’s a bit more tricky. It wasn’t likely written before Mark, and anyone studying the transmission of ancient stories knows that they get longer and not shorter with time. There were no Reader’s Digest Abridged Versions of the Gospels. Matthew is most likely longer because he took the material gathered together by Mark (from Peter—things Matthew didn’t see because he wasn’t one of the inner circle “three”) and used that as a base to tell the story that best served his own community of Jewish Christians, but also a community inclusive of Gentile Christians. But the real question that scholars grapple with is whether it was written before or after the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem in 70 CE. There are good arguments for both, and so I am going to suggest a date after the destruction for a few reasons—but mostly because I believe the problem faced by Matthew’s community is a battle between his sect and the Pharisees for dominance of the hearts and minds of the Jewish people after the destruction of the Temple, when tempers were running high and intra-Jewish controversies and infighting were feverish, to say the least. At this point, the Sadducees were gone because without a Temple, the upper echelon of the priesthood was shattered and they were powerless. The Essenes/Qumran sectarians were always a small offshoot who mostly kept to themselves anyway and so were never very influential. The Pharisees had moved to Yavneh and other locations, setting up learning centers and trying to salvage the remains of Palestinian Judaism (Palestine being the name used by the Greeks from 500 BCE (derived from ancient Assyrian), which was used by Josephus and Philo and which was later made official during the second century by Rome—so not to be confused with referring to the modern Palestinian people).

Imagine a post-apocalyptic world (yes, I am aware I am using that word wrong, but everyone knows what I mean) where different factions are trying to shape the world around their unique way of thinking and doing things. I cannot stress enough how devastating the loss of Jerusalem and the Temple were to the Jews. Their identity was in tatters, and the future of the faith was anything but certain. It was the perfect time to make their case for who truly represented the authentic people of Israel and whose ways were more pleasing to God, whose ways would bring the nation that was so divided into sects that really hated one another with a vengeance—long before Yeshua was born—back together in worship and observance of the Torah. What did the nation need to do in order to merit the Messiah who would overthrow the Roman legions? As for the people, what do you hope for when the world is a shambles around you? Do you go with the Pharisees as they began their journey into the Rabbinic Judaism of the Middle Ages? Or do you follow the nutty believers in a crucified Rabbi who they actually believed rose from the dead? The infighting between the Jewish believers in Yeshua and the Jewish unbelievers had gotten Rome into such a state of irritation that Emperor Claudius expelled them all. Rome didn’t care for religious drama—after all, they were a “peaceful” people bringing peace and joy to all the world. *cough*

Of course, Christians made up about 20% of Jews in the Roman Empire in the first century, which is a lot. However, that left 80% who weren’t, and the Pharisees won both the day and the overall battle even to modern times. In addition to the Jews killed in the Temple revolt, about half as many were recorded as killed in 135 CE at the end of the Bar Kochba Revolt. Some estimates have the number of dead at as much as 1.7 million in all. I don’t think it was anywhere near that high, but I also don’t want to have anything to do with counting such things. The decrease in population is just staggering. People were desperate—how do you please God without a Temple in the ancient world? The Pharisees promoted Torah learning, prayer, and charity as equivalent to Temple observances. The Christians, on the other hand, promoted allegiance to a crucified Messiah. Let’s just say it was a hard sell in an honor/shame society.

And so, it would have been a time of polemics between Jews who did and did not ally themselves with Yeshua. It is no different than we see in ancient schools of Philosophy among the Greeks and Romans. Teachers would gather disciples, lay out standards of moral living through stories and proverbs, and do verbal battle against rival teachers to grow their own school and decrease the following and honor of other teachers and schools. Really, the Rabbi/disciple model we see within first century Judaism was very much inspired by the Greek model. Apart from all the shameful polemical name-calling (a lot of it would make you blush, I promise), it really was an effective system. If the Greeks and Romans were good at anything, it was organization and administration. The Jews actually benefitted greatly from it in some ways and not so much in others.

What do you do when two factions are battling for the hearts and minds of their own people? You promote your teacher, promote their teachings, promote their teaching abilities, promote their authority in all things pertaining to virtue and wisdom, lay out the way of life advocated by that teacher, increase their honor, and decry the other schools of thought. This was the way of the ancient world, including the Jewish world. It was how things were done. It was how John the Baptist did things and how Yeshua did things—not because it represents an ideal form of communication but because it was understood. We look back, and we base our political conversation on it—I mean, Thomas Jefferson’s campaign called John Adams a hermaphrodite. Like, dang. So harsh.

And so, Matthew wrote an ancient biography of Yeshua, doing all that and more. Now, biographies in the ancient world weren’t like the biographies out there today, which are often written about people who are still alive or recently died. In fact, that’s what makes Yeshua’s biography strange. Ancient Historians generally wrote about people long dead, who no one alive had ever had contact with. Easier and safer that way! Their biographies played fast and loose with the historical facts in order to tell a story about the person in question—but you shouldn’t mistake that for ancient biographies qualifying as fiction. People expected a story and not just boring facts and figures. Biographies, then and now, are always an act of interpreting someone else’s life. We don’t know what really happened behind closed doors or who said what and how it was said without it being recorded. And even if it is recorded, the different people in the room will have different vantage points and might perceive the same situation differently. And, in their own way, they might all be correct.

A lot of people get their panties into a bunch when multiple Gospels describe the same exact story in different ways—with a different number of people or changing the circumstances a bit. But that was not only normal but expected in the ancient world. There is no chance in heck that the Gospel writers would divert from the other accounts if there was even remotely a chance that they would be perceived to be untrustworthy. And notice that Rabbinic writings have zero problems with how the Gospels were written—because they did things the exact same way. All the ancient world wrote these types of texts with just enough creative license to tell the truth—which is sometimes easier if you aren’t bogged down with a need for scientific-level accuracy. Accuracy being important is part of our culture because of the Age of Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. And believe me, when you are combining chemicals, accuracy is absolutely important. I know this personally as a chemist. But for Mark to show Yeshua as a warrior, and for Matthew to show Yeshua as the greater Moses, and for Luke to write “an orderly account” of the life and ministry of Yeshua and for John to be utterly esoteric, they had to emphasize some aspects of the story and ignore others that didn’t contribute to that particular facet of the diamond. If I were to tell the story of my own life, I would first decide what I wanted to emphasize and then pick and choose material and decide how to present it to make my point. Otherwise, history is super boring for most people.

And remember, they didn’t consider this to be fiction. From Genesis through Revelation and from narratives to poetry to wisdom literature to biographies to letters to apocalyptic literature, God entered into our world through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in speaking to Israel; He did it through the various writers during their different historical periods and according to the literary constructs of the time (after all, how could they understand Him with no common ground for reference?), languages, legends, and understandings of things like science. Peter Enns calls this Incarnational Biblical Authority (affiliate link)—in that Yahweh inhabited our lives first and foremost through communicating with humans on their terms in ways they could understand. In the same way, Matthew presents Yeshua as God doing the exact same thing in entering the world in flesh (and specifically in the flesh of a Jewish male who was descended physically from a son of David and was adopted into the royal Davidic line). As such, He was perfectly situated to communicate to the very audience He would send out into the world. At the age of thirty, given the high death rate in Judea and Galilee, at thirty years of age, Yeshua was an elder in the community—giving Him voice and a measure of honor. He was a male, which meant that people in that culture would listen to Him. He spoke like a Biblical scholar, worked miracles, and performed exorcisms—which the people of that time and place were primed to see as proof of the legitimacy of His ministry. Both Jew and Gentile, actually. He was brilliant in verbal confrontations, a must in that culture. Were Yeshua to appear today, He would appear in somewhat different ways while saying the same thing with different words, but how different is anyone’s guess. Whatever form He would take would be based upon common modern shared experience and values. Yahweh enters into our world to communicate with us, and thank God He does not communicate with us according to where He is. What a nightmare that would be when we are less than toddlers compared to Him.

And this is where we need to understand that the stories about Yeshua weren’t taken down by a scribe following Him around. In the ancient world, oral accounts were believed to be superior to written because (1) oral accounts could be expounded upon in a superior fashion to written notes, (2) they understood that tone is every bit as important as words, and (3) not much was really written down because it was largely impractical and literacy rates were extremely low until just recently. This means the Gospels were oral accounts until after the time of Paul and his letters. It was only when the Church had spread out so far and wide that certain people took to compiling the accounts of Yeshua that were being taught in the synagogues, private homes, open-air gatherings, and rented halls. These accounts were then copied for nearby congregations, and the best of them survived in the forms of the three synoptics plus John. As heresies began especially creeping into the ever-expanding Church, there was a need for formal accounts based on apostolic witness or at least those who were the safe keepers of the memories of the Apostles, many of whom were dead or elderly by the time the accounts were actually formally written down. The business of the Church, of course, was to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth in anticipation of the return of Christ. Likely, they originally believed (as it is clear that Paul and many others did) that the return would be very soon. In fact, every generation has looked at the Scriptures and believed the exact same thing. So, the need for written accounts that could be disseminated and largely controlled didn’t exist in the beginning—as we should expect and respect in an oral culture where everyone had terrific memories but very few could read. We are the opposite and have books so we don’t have to memorize everything.

Next time, I think we will focus on Matthew’s love of the phrase “the Kingdom of Heaven” and what it meant to Him and the story He wanted to tell about the Messiah to his largely Jewish, post-Temple audience and how and if it differs from Mark and Luke’s “Kingdom of God.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Women’s Biblical Studies Book List

Hey there! I decided to put out a topical list of books that I own/have read/want to read on the subject of women in the ancient Near Eastern world (ANE) and the first century Greco-Roman/Jewish world as well as serious works about women in ministry (along with one really entertaining one by Michael Bird!). More important scholarship than ever is being conducted both within and outside of the Biblical record and we know more each and every year. I will also be including in the list prominent feminist (meaning scholarship focused on presenting the Bible from a woman’s point of view), and womanist (black women’s POV) authors—some of which will actually be male scholars writing about women’s issues. My goal is to provide you all with a well-rounded list of alternatives to a lot of the propaganda out there, on one hand, and old ideas that have been struck down by historical research and new discoveries. Archaeology is constantly finding new bits of information and documentation that drastically change the landscape of what we think we know about women within the Biblical and extra-Biblical record.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chavalas, Mark Women in the Ancient Near East

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

Cleveland, Christena God is a Black Woman

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

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

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

Epp, Eldon Jay Junia: The First Woman Apostle

Fleming, Bruce CE and Joy The Eden Book Series

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

Daughters of Miriam: Women Prophets in Ancient Israel

Giles, Kevin What the Bible Actually Teaches on Women

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

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

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

Finding Phoebe: What New Testament Women Were Really Like

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

Kateusz, Ally Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership

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

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

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

Meyers, Carol Rediscovering Eve: Israelite Women in Context

Peeler, Amy Women and the Gender of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stol, Marten Women in the Ancient Near East

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Bloggers

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

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

https://michaelfbird.substack.com/

https://ntwrightpage.com/

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

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

https://www.cbeinternational.org/

https://bethfelkerjones.substack.com/

 

YouTube Playlists

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

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

 

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

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



Episode 171: The Study Series 16—The Torah, the Sermons and the Problem with Epistles

Okay, starting something new! I am now webcamming the recording process, which results in a slightly longer version of the teaching with a bit more nonsense than the radio show sometimes. You can catch that here.

We’re almost done with genre studies, I promise, so next week will be it. But this time, we have to look at the differences between the Sermons that Yeshua/Jesus delivered and the letters to specific congregations written by Paul, Peter, James, and others. When we read a letter (aka epistle) as though it is a simple sermon, it can lead to some really bad problems. Maybe most importantly, how are we supposed to read the “law codes” in the Bible?

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

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Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I usually teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. But not right now, right now I am doing a series about how to not waste your time with bad study practices, bad resources, and just the general confusion that I faced when I started studying the Bible and was trying to figure out what to do and whose books I should read. Bottom line, I read a lot of nonsense and spent a ton of money on it. I am going to give you some basics on how to avoid a lot of the pitfalls, save money, maximize your time and effort, and get the most out of what you are doing.

My master book list can be found on my website theancientbridge.com here and I will add to it as needed. Scripture this week comes from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible. We’re actually coming to the end of this series because next week we will talk about the Psalms and how they need to be treated and understood, and the week after that we will tackle the minefield of inerrancy. That’s a word that most people have an idea about and assume everyone else has the same definition when they absolutely don’t. I want to help you to have a conversation about it—a real conversation where everyone understands what everyone else is actually saying when they claim that the Bible is inerrant. Then we are going to do a month of Psalms and a month of Matthew and we will switch back and forth until we run out of one or the other. That will probably take me the rest of my life but as the Psalms are a reflection of our relationship with the divine and one another and the Gospel of Matthew is the story of Yeshua/Jesus as the greater Moses, I think they will mesh well together.

So, let’s start out with the basics this week. A sermon, like the Sermon on the Mount, is generally given in public and has to do with teaching right behavior or expounding on Scripture in such a way that it directs the life and understanding of the audience. A sermon, at its heart, is guidance. A sermon can be angry, concerned, compassionate, a warning, or encouraging. The Bible is full of sermons not only from Jesus, Paul, and James but also Moses and the Prophets. In fact, Deuteronomy is the absolute, undisputed longest sermon in the entire Bible. Nothing else even comes close. Moses, before his death, delivers his “swan song” (for lack of a better term). It’s his last chance to tell Israel what they will need to know in his absence. All the warnings, encouragement, reality checks, and last-minute wisdom he can muster up. It’s almost like the telling-off one gets for stepping on the lawn of a grumpy, elderly man. Okay, not that bad. Moses wasn’t just venting—it was given for the purpose of attempting to save the nation (he had all but founded) from the sins that he knew were coming in the future once they were fat, happy, wealthy, and comfortable. He knew that they would forget the Lord because they had done so repeatedly even with the Tabernacle and the cloud of smoke/fire in their midst for forty years. If that wasn’t a deterrent, then what on earth would be?

Moses didn’t direct his sermon to a small group but to an entire nation. Yeshua preached to large groups, even groups of thousands, but they had chosen to hear Him whereas Moses spoke to absolutely everyone, from youngest to eldest. The content of their preaching was also very different—no “thus saith the Lord” with Yeshua, who instead preached His sermons by His own authority. Moses spoke the oracles of God as a mediator and not as a source, as Yeshua did. Moses spoke mainly in terms of wisdom sayings, attempting to teach the people basic principles of right-ruling within the ancient Near Eastern setting in which they lived. Moses’s guidance was far from exhaustive and covered very little as far as the variety of situations people found themselves in. Yeshua, on the other hand, raised the bar exponentially and yet, He was talking to an audience who were not part of the New Creation existence and so His words must have seemed very “pie in the sky.” Paul, Peter, James, and the others, when they wrote sermons, it was to an entirely different audience who did have the Torah increasingly written on their hearts. How we read their sermons changes based on whom they preached to, when, and why. Sermons aren’t just given in a vacuum, they come from a place of need. Moses spoke to a once mixed multitude who, over the course of forty years in the wilderness, had become a more uniform and cohesive people than they had been at first where former outsiders had undoubtedly intermarried with the children of Israel. The prophets gave sermons on the necessity of repentance in the face of gross national idolatry as they were warned of imminent exile from the Land if the people failed to respond properly. Yeshua spoke to an oppressed population living in their own land but under the rule of the last in a series of pagan empires. Unlike the well and miraculously-fed audience of Moses, and the far too comfortable audience of the prophets, Yeshua preached to a downtrodden, defeated, impoverished, and hungry excuse for a people group. Paul, Peter, James, and the others preached to groups of Jews, Gentiles, and mixtures of the two. Sometimes the material was generic and suitable to be read to absolutely anyone and at other times it was directed only toward certain groups or people going through certain things and who were in need of guidance. Certainly, advice to former pagans is going to look a lot different than advice to those who were born into observant Jewish families, and diaspora groups would have different concerns from Jerusalem-based congregations. Differences in audience can often illuminate the meaning of what has been written. For example, I will say entirely different things when teaching adults than I would when teaching children—not always but often. Knowing whether you are listening to Character in Context or Context for Kids will change the way you hear or read what I am saying. The advice I give to kids and adults is different because of differences in life experience and circumstances. Same exact things with the Sermons and Correspondences in the Bible.

The message of Romans concerning the “weak and the strong” changes radically depending on whether you assign strength and/or weakness to the Roman Jews or the Roman Gentiles. It is important to know that the letter to the Galatians was written to Gentile converts, and that Corinth was a Roman Colony and not Greek. Although the message of the fruit of the spirit and the works of the flesh work exactly the same way no matter who you are, what are we to do with instructions telling people not to keep honoring special days? And what sense do some of the instructions Moses gave in the wilderness even make outside of the culture of the ancient Near East or within a non-Temple centric society?

Sermons tend to be far more applicable to generic or mixed audiences than the correspondence we find in epistles and by correspondence I mean the portions of the writings (especially of Paul) which seem to come out of nowhere and counteract things he has ruled in other letters. It would seem, from reading what he writes about women that one day he is all gung-ho about allowing women to lead without restrictions in the congregations, and then all of a sudden in Ephesus they can’t even ask questions. If we fail to recognize the parts of Paul’s writings that are likely answers to specific questions he has been asked by specific congregations dealing with unique troubles, and we attempt to read the entire epistle as a generic, face-value sermon, we do get into all sorts of problems with consistency. But, you know, that’s what happens when we read someone else’s mail! Here’s an example I have used a lot in the past to illustrate this problem:

Dear Sam,

Well it was great hearing from you again, and I can’t wait until we can come visit!  Seems like forever since we were in Liverpool, and the chips we had at that place downtown were just THE BEST!  I was so shocked to hear about Charlie in prison!  But then, not really much of a surprise once I thought about it – he was always awkward around the kids, wasn’t he?  Maybe he can get things turned around for the better.  Give me his address so I can send him a Bible, will you please?  We are praying for him. As for Violet, I agree that she should not be teaching men like that!  Let the men do it.  It would be entirely inappropriate for Violet to be a part of anything like that.  Her heart is in the right place, but she would be better off with the women and children.

Best Regards, Your brother Paul

Now honestly, I want your first impressions. Question #1: what country is Sam from, and what sort of food is Paul referring to? Question #2: what can you discern of Charlie’s character, and his past and present situation? Question #3: why doesn’t Paul approve of Violet teaching men? The answer to all three should be – “I have no idea, there is not enough information given.”  Now it would be easier if we had the letter that this was a response to.

Dear Paul,

How are ya’ll doing in Chicago?  Everyone here in Texas sure misses you–and Trudy down at the deli says she has a bag of those Takis all put aside for you. She still laughs about how much you loved them, like you’d never seen a Mexican chip before! You are not going to believe this, but remember Charlie the youth group leader? Well, come to find out–he hated it and was only in it to please his parents. So Greg got him started in prison ministry and he loves it! He has started a Bible drive and everything. I think he is going to make a big difference there! Here is the issue though, and I want your honest opinion. His sister Violet, well, you know what a heart of gold she has, and I never met anyone so trusting. Well, she wants to go in there teaching right alongside him. I’m against it because she’s always falling for some sob story and getting herself into deep trouble.  Now, if it were Pat, their mom, that would be one thing–that sister is tough as nails, but I think Violet is absolutely the worst possible candidate for men’s prison ministry. And this isn’t a white-collar facility, these are violent felons!  She has been offered a chance to teach at the local women’s shelter, which I think she would be great at, with her compassion–but for some reason she is always wanting to save guys who end up walking all over her.  I know she takes your advice really seriously, so can you please put in a good word?  

Thanks. – Sam

Now be honest. You probably thought or at least strongly suspected that Sam was from Britain, they were talking about french fries, that Charlie was in jail for child molestation, that the Bible was for his salvation, and that Paul was saying women shouldn’t teach men at all, but instead should stick to teaching women and children.  That’s because my fictitious Paul had no obligation to write detailed accounts of what questions he was answering – after all, he was writing to the person who asked the questions in the first place.   You filled in the blanks logically with details from your sphere of reference, just like we all naturally are inclined to do.  (And yes, there is a Liverpool in Texas). If that response letter had been taught in church by itself, what sort of doctrine could be built around it?  And just think of poor Charlie’s reputation, way worse than Thomas’.

Anyway, we have to be very careful with the epistles because they were sometimes sermons and were at other times letters and generally they were both at the same time. No one alive today was part of the original audience and as John Walton always says, the Bible was written for our benefit but it wasn’t written specifically with ourselves, our culture, or our modern rules of communication in mind. Nor should it have been as it would have died out as a needlessly ineffective and confusing book that wouldn’t have made sense to anyone until after the Enlightenment. The beauty of the Bible is that it said what it needed to say to the original audience and that is why it survived and not only that, but why it has changed the world.

One more thing I want to talk about, and this is a bit controversial but it is also gaining more and more scholarly acceptance in both Jewish and Christian circles. Namely, what do we make of the Torah? I am not talking about the narratives, of course, but the sections that most would call legal. For a law code, if we are going to be honest, it is utterly inadequate because it just doesn’t cover a lot of situations and there really isn’t a lot of clear guidance in it for specific problems or crimes. This is why the Talmud happened, in recognition of this fact. The Talmud is made up of two parts, produced at different points in time. The Mishna, compiled by 200 CE, contains the legal rulings of the Sanhedrin (the Supreme Court of Israel). It is reflective of case law, which is the law of the land based on former rulings. It’s a “this is how we do it based on such and such a case, like “Brown vs the Board of Education” which set the standard that considers State sponsored segregation to be a direct violation of the 14th amendment, which guarantees all citizens equal protections under the law. But, if we wanted to read what the different justices had to say and how they came to their conclusion, and what arguments are and are not considered authoritative, then we would look at the transcripts of the deliberations—and that is a good way to look at the second half of the Talmud, the Gemara, which was compiled by 600 CE. And this is why you find messed up stuff in the Gemara which never saw the light of day as far as practice goes—stuff like the one Rabbi who was shot down for saying that it is only sex between adult males that is forbidden by Lev 18:22 and that pedophilia is okay. No one agreed with him, but it is included in there as shot down just in case someone tries to make that argument again!

When the Greeks took over Galilee, Samaria, and Judea, they brought some really good things with them. The Rabbi/disciple relationship comes straight out of the Philosopher/disciple phenomena of ancient Greece. The way they used law codes instead of wisdom literature to guide judges, ensuring (or supposed to) fairer rulings than when things are simply left up to individual judges. Our own law codes come from the Greek system. And so do the rulings we see in the Talmud. Once a society becomes large enough and complicated enough, wisdom codes tend to become very problematic—and that’s what the instructions of the Torah represent wisdom codes. The “law codes” of Hammurabi, Lipit-Ishtar, the Hittites, and the surrounding ancient Near Eastern nations generally relied on wisdom sayings instead of law codes. Rulers would write of the decisions made during their reign that reflected righteousness and justice and those sayings were more guidelines and really not always hard and fast rules. I mean, even Yahweh breaks those guidelines on a regular basis because wisdom is situational and it cannot be legislated. Is all stick collecting prohibited on the Sabbath—no, wisdom understands that people have different reasons and different motivations. Doing it because you are trying to get ahead on the week’s work is entirely different from having a child suddenly take sick and needing to keep a blazing fire going to keep the child alive. Heck, everyone would be gathering sticks in that situation! I sure would!

Firstborn laws are routinely disregarded by God, who chooses whom He wants and when He wants. Boaz was able to marry Ruth because the ban on Moabites was a wisdom ruling and not a legal ruling—and David was only able to become King for that same reason. Wisdom rulings are about principles. In principle, the Israelites shouldn’t have intermarried with the Moabites, but in practice, sometimes it is the right thing to do. Speeding laws, on the other hand, do not recognize circumstances when it is okay to go 80mph in a school zone. And we are all okay with that, right? Was the sexual prohibition list of Lev 18 a legally binding and complete list of sex crimes one shouldn’t commit? Absolutely not, and many cults have exploited the lack of mention of children so as to say that sex with a child isn’t forbidden. A law code would have been amended to deal with that but a wisdom code tells us that sex outside of heterosexual marriage is forbidden and all the examples are just driving that concept home. No one should have ever gone looking for exceptions.

The presence of polygyny (multiple wives) is acknowledged as a reality and controlled but never legislated as good or even okay. The wisdom of Torah as a whole shows polygyny to be a hot mess and not an ideal. But if we are misusing Torah as a law code, we are free to do whatever isn’t expressly prohibited as long as we can argue that it wouldn’t bother us if it happened to us. Which is nothing but a hypothetical argument of convenience. Wisdom demands more of us, and so the wisdom codes of Torah were written down for the benefit of those who had proven themselves worthy and capable of judging their neighbors. The wisdom codes of the Torah didn’t lock the judges in (usually) but gave them principles from which to derive situational wisdom. That’s what we see with Solomon, as he asked for wisdom and not a comprehensive understanding of all the do’s and don’ts. Law codes don’t allow wisdom. Juries aren’t supposed to allow themselves to be compromised by extenuating circumstances. The way we view laws in the modern world, therefore, doesn’t represent the world of the Torah at all. A fantastic book on this is John Walton’s The Lost World of Torah (affiliate link). A community can run according to wisdom rulings as long as the judges are impartial and honest and merciful to all parties involved. But a nation can’t. That’s why we had some states absolutely outlawing slavery from the start (Vermont) and other states created for the express purpose of being slave states (Missouri). It’s why hate crimes had to be made federal crimes so that local law enforcement could no longer prosecute or legally ignore lynchings according to their own sensibilities. The Emmet Till lynching is a good example of why that sort of law was needed and long overdue because, without it, a community can decide that murder is okay as long as everyone approves but that whistling at a white woman is grounds for state-sanctioned mob violence.

This is why the greatest two commandments aren’t “Do not murder” and “Do not—whatever” and instead are the commands to love God and neighbor. Because when we are honest, wisdom doesn’t allow us to harm a neighbor and therefore pretty much covers everything and anything oppressive and cruel and unfair. It is only when we decide to treat the Torah like a modern comprehensive law code that we look to it to see how we can and cannot legally get away with violating the command to love others. But in the first century, as we see from the teachings of Yeshua, that’s exactly what they were doing. The Hillel Pharisees were endorsing “divorce your wife for any cause” while the Shammaite Pharisees were sticking to the wisdom of the code and saying, “Dudes, it’s obvious that it is only allowed for major transgression.” The Pharisees were marrying their nieces because there was no specific prohibition, which is super gross, and the Qumran community was outraged over it. So, when we read the Sermon on the Mount (coming full circle here), Yeshua was directly contradicting an interpretation of the Torah that is focused on using it to see what you can get away with. He took the wisdom of Torah to a whole other level that, frankly, the original audience couldn’t have dealt with. I mean, they had enough problems with the very few that they were given in the first place. Heck, they had problems with just the ten commandments.

Yeshua commanded that we be guided by wisdom, love of neighbor, and love of God and so His sermons weren’t just commentary on Torah, they were a restoration of Torah to the category of wisdom literature where to do certain things allowed by Torah loopholes becomes unthinkable. Why would any man who loves his wife give her a rival and her children rivals and divide family resources? It becomes a non-option. Why would someone sin against their neighbor and then go apologize to God about it and think that’s enough? Why would a person governed by love and self-sacrifice consider it okay to look at other people as sexual objects, and especially when we know how many men and women involved in the porn industry are trafficked and abused? Who would come up with a complicated set of rules for when it is okay to break an oath? And where is the wisdom or shalom (peace and wholeness) in a world where revenge is the norm and there is no forgiveness? Jesus is the fulfillment of the Torah not because He struck it down but because He brought it back to its beginnings as wisdom—and living by wisdom is a lot harder than living by a law code. Living by wisdom is more restrictive and requires mature character. This is why we actually prefer law codes and have tried to force Torah into that sort of box.

Next week, we are going to talk about the Psalms and the categories that help us read them as intended. See you then.



Episode 166: The Study Series 12—The Speaker, Audience and Context of Verses

If you have ever sent me a question asking me about such and such, I will almost always ask you for the book, chapter and verse. Not because I don’t know my Bible, but because I respect it enough not to lean on the Holy Spirit to teach me something out of context. Who a section of Scripture is addressed to is just important as who the speaker is, what situation is being addressed, the genre type, and what the historical reality is. When we don’t know these things, we can turn the Bible into a cherry-picker’s idea of paradise where anything can mean whatever we want it to mean.

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Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I usually teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. But not right now, right now I am doing a series about how to not waste your time with bad study practices, bad resources, and just the general confusion that I faced when I started studying the Bible and was trying to figure out what to do and whose books I should read. Bottom line, I read a lot of nonsense and spent a ton of money on it. I am going to give you some basics on how to avoid a lot of the pitfalls, save money, maximize your time and effort, and get the most out of what you are doing. Master book list can be found here and I will add to it as needed.

Something that happens to me (and every Bible teacher, I imagine) is that people will describe a verse to me and ask me what it means. Now sometimes I will have a decent idea about what verse they are talking about and other times I am pretty sure that they are combining a couple verses into one or citing one of those verses that you see repeated verbatim or almost verbatim in a number of different settings. Regardless of the situation, I ask them to find the verse for me and to give me the chapter and verse so that I can (hopefully) give them some insight on what it means or at least what my take on it is based on the context. If I get really lucky, it will be in a section of Scripture that I have taught because that means I have read lots and lots of books about it by various scholars and theologians. If I am clueless about it—like Ezekiel’s wheels, I will just admit ignorance and try to point them to someone who likely has a better answer than I do or to a scholar whom I respect who has written a book or three on it. But when I am personally studying out a verse, I start from the shallow end of the pool before diving into the deep end.

The first thing that I make sure I know when I am given book, chapter, and verse is the time period and location in which the book was written or written about. Esther, for example, takes place in the fifth century BCE, under the dominion of the Medo-Persian Empire, situated within the citadel of Susa—none of it takes place in Israel and no one in the book has ever even been to Israel. The laws of the Land are Persian and not from Torah, but like ancient Israel, the culture is focused on honor/shame dynamics and people identify as parts of a larger clan, community, and nationality and not at all as individuals. Some characters are Jews and others are not. And so who is talking is just as important to the context of any verse as who the audience is. Is there a timeline? Is there a crisis? Who are the major players in terms of people and nations and controversies?  Those are the kinds of questions we ask when the book is in narrative, or story, form.

What about the Psalms and various songs of the Bible? We have to ask entirely different questions. Do we know who the Psalm in question is attributed to and what time period i.e.. post-Exodus as in the case of the songs of Moses and Miriam, the time of the Judges as in the case of Deborah, or the various psalms that could be from David, Asaph, or the people of the exile. Is it a song of triumph, or a lament, or an enthronement psalm, (aka coronation psalm), is it one of the psalms the Levites would sing daily at the Temple, or the pilgrims would sing on their way up to Jerusalem, or one penned specifically for a festival? And there are many prayers in the Bible—who spoke them and why? What specific situation were they geared toward? Does it represent a prayer that can be used universally or does it only mean something within a very specific situation?

Wisdom literature has to be read entirely differently than any of the above because it speaks of extremes and what should be true, speaking in absolutes that they and we know are unreasonable. Yes, the son of a righteous man should never be begging for bread but we also know that it is indeed the case in regions of terrible warfare and persecution and it is during those times when the righteous are the most likely to suffer. Check out Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (affiliate link). He talks about his time in the Concentration Camps and how it was the most righteous who died because they would give away their bread and who would volunteer to work in place of the sick and who wouldn’t hide in the back or in the middle of the group when dangerous work assignments were being given. The prosperity Gospel doesn’t work very well when you are truly self-sacrificing. Wisdom literature is about extremes and it teaches concepts designed to impart general wisdom—what should happen when everything goes as it should. How about parables and allegories? They are teaching stories designed to get people thinking outside of the box. And apocalypses, the literature of the oppressed, telling them that God wins in the end through clever uses of well-known cultural and biblical symbols.

What was the original language? Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek? What cultural influences do we have to take a look at—Egyptian, Canaanite, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek (Hellenistic), or Roman? How have concepts and the language changed from one part of the Bible to another? Are they under their own rulership, or slaves, or in exile, or under foreign rule at home? Is the writing attributed to a prophet, a king, a judge, a patriarch, a historian, a priest, or an apostle? Was the original audience Hebrew or Gentile or a mixture of both? Do we know the city, and the history of the city, and the time period, and what their laws were? Is there archaeology to help us understand what is being expressed? And you might think, “Geez Louise, all I asked is what ‘His word never comes back void’ means”! And all that might seem impossible to be able to balance all that information out, but the truth is that once you have studied for a long time, all that info is kinda either tucked into your brain somewhere or you at least know where to find it without much trouble. I am not saying that you always need all of that for everything, but when you are wondering about the meaning of a confusing verse, it all really helps a lot. All that being said, no one needs to be a rocket scientist to understand that one of Paul’s most common messages in the epistles/private or public letters is, “Stop acting like jerks, you’re making Jesus look bad.”

And of course, despite BibleGateway (which I use a lot) giving you one verse before and one verse after as “verse in context” that really doesn’t cut it. Most memory verses, in my experience, don’t mean what they seem to mean outside of their context. Let’s look at some really abused verses, just for fun, because this is a pet peeve of mine:

“Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged. For you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others, and you will be measured by the same measure you use. Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the beam of wood in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the splinter out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a beam of wood in your own eye? Hypocrite! First take the beam of wood out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye.” (Matt 7:1-5 CSB)

Now, I started with a softball verse—the speaker is Yeshua/Jesus. The audience is all of the people who followed Him in the wilderness and were present for the Sermon on the Mount. They were Jews living in the Galilee, an agrarian culture north of Judea and the city of Jerusalem and out of reach of the Temple hierarchy. They were under the rule of Herod Antipas, one of the sons of Herod the Great, a puppet ruler under the thumb of Rome. I could go on but the truth is that none of that is really all that useful for this particular verse, “Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged.” Remember last week when we talked about how to and not to use a Concordance? Well, today we are going to look up the word judge and see what it looks like in Greek. Okay wow, I stopped my counting at twelve different root words for different kinds of judging and judgement. And these words can mean anything from condemnation to simple discernment of the difference between good and evil. The form of judging in this verse refers to actual condemnation, making a final sort of judgment. What this is most certainly not doing is telling us that we aren’t to discern between what is good and what is evil. You can’t condemn a child molester to eternal damnation but you can absolutely condemn the crime. Only Yahweh can condemn, the rest of us are just either guessing or indulging in wishful thinking. We do not have any idea who is beyond salvation or redemption. We just don’t. We aren’t judges and so we don’t get to condemn. Evil acts we can condemn, absolutely—to which the rest of the context of this section of Scripture attests. How can we remove the log from our own eye if we cannot discern between good and evil in our own lives, and how can we then help a brother or sister with the spec in their own eye, again, if we cannot make a judgment between what is righteousness and what is transgression? So, we are absolutely required to discern and grow in discernment (and this isn’t some magical spiritual gift where everything we are offended by is something to condemn as evil but comes from wisdom that we gain through experience and time and tempered by love and mercy) but we are put firmly in our place as to the penalty for encroaching upon the right of God to judge mankind—namely, our own condemnation.

Let’s look at Jeremiah 10 because people ignore context on this a lot. The last one was about language but this one is about all types of context, so it is a lot more fun. Not only do we have to know related passages of Scripture written about the same exact time period, but we have to know about extra-biblical Babylonian literature and how idolatry did and didn’t work among Israel’s ancient Near Eastern neighbors. Without that, we are pretty much doomed to haul the first four verses into the 21st century when they belong back in the 6th century BCE.

“Do not learn the way of the nations or be terrified by signs in the heavens, although the nations are terrified by them, for the customs of the peoples are worthless. Someone cuts down a tree from the forest; it is worked by the hands of a craftsman with a chisel. He decorates it with silver and gold. It is fastened with hammer and nails, so it won’t totter.”

(Now, this is where people who abuse the context of these verses always cut off their quotes because, if they go any further, it becomes obvious that they are misrepresenting Scripture. But the context we have so far is to not learn the ways of the nations, which in Scripture is always concerning oppression, idolatry, and immorality, usually sexual. At this point, those who want to make it sound like Christmas Trees go back to the ancient world instead of a few hundred years stop quoting and just leave it there. But what is the context here? Jeremiah is a priest and a prophet who was the same age as King Josiah, and he was tasked with preaching repentance to the people of Judah, one last warning before they would be conquered and exiled east to Babylonia. They were committing all of the aforementioned sins and even carrying them out within the Temple precincts, as we learn in Ezekiel 8, another important chapter to be well acquainted with in interpreting these verses. They are also holding Judean debt slaves beyond the sixth year, in violation of Torah, and indulging in all kinds of sexual sins.)

“Like scarecrows in a cucumber patch, their idols cannot speak. They must be carried because they cannot walk. Do not fear them for they can do no harm—and they cannot do any good.”

(Scarecrows are obviously referring to something that is shaped in humanoid form and when we see references to not being able to speak, walk, see, or hear, we need to be very familiar with Psalm 115:4-8 “Their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears but cannot hear, noses, but cannot smell. They have hands but cannot feel, feet, but cannot walk. They cannot make a sound with their throats. Those who make them are just like them, as are all who trust in them.” And this is a theme that pops up a lot with the deafness and blindness that has caused Israel to become dull and unable to hear Yahweh or His Messiah. These verses and concepts are a mockery of pagans treating idols as if they are any help at all, and serving them as though they are inhabited by the essences of real gods and goddesses. But what they are doing is useless because what they serve is useless. BTW, I can’t recommend Beale’s We Become What We Worship and Lints’ Identity and Idolatry (affiliate links) enough for learning this language and these concepts.)

Lord, there is no one like you. You are great; your name is great in power. Who should not fear you, King of the nations? It is what you deserve. For among all the wise people of the nations and among all their kingdoms, there is no one like you.

(Suddenly, Jeremiah begins to exalt Yahweh and contrast Him to the idols that have made the nations blind, mute, lame and deaf. This is very common to idol polemics—writings that mock idolatry through exaggeration and even misrepresentation. But Jeremiah proclaims that Yahweh and Yahweh alone is worthy of the worship and attention of even the nations.)

They are both stupid and foolish, instructed by worthless idols made of wood! Beaten silver is brought from Tarshish and gold from Uphaz. The work of a craftsman and of a goldsmith’s hands is clothed in blue and purple, all the work of skilled artisans. But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God and eternal King.

(Again, back to the Psalm 115 theme—being instructed by what is worthless has made them stupid and foolish. And in these verses, as well as in verses 1-5 of Jer 10, we go back to the instructions for the making of an idol for a city Temple, one of the big ones like Marduk. Not only do we see this process echoed in Isaiah 44, but also practically word for word in the Babylonian Erra Epic where Marduk commands a new idol built for himself out of sacred wood, in the hands of his favorite artisan, how gold and silver are hammered into thin plates and applied over the wood. Then it is dressed in royal garments as though it is a king. Jeremiah would have been familiar with this process because the elites of Jerusalem, where he lived and preached, were doing it.)

The earth quakes at his wrath, and the nations cannot endure his fury. You are to say this to them: “The gods that did not make the heavens and the earth will perish from the earth and from under these heavens.” He made the earth by his power, established the world by his wisdom, and spread out the heavens by his understanding. When he thunders, the waters in the heavens are in turmoil, and he causes the clouds to rise from the ends of the earth. He makes lightning for the rain and brings the wind from his storehouses. Everyone is stupid and ignorant. Every goldsmith is put to shame by his carved image, for his cast images are a lie; there is no breath in them. They are worthless, a work to be mocked. At the time of their punishment they will be destroyed. Jacob’s Portion is not like these because he is the one who formed all things. Israel is the tribe of his inheritance; the Lord of Armies is his name.” (Jer 10:2-16 CSB)

(And again, Yahweh is described as being supreme and the idols absolutely powerless. When it refers to the “gods that didn’t make the heavens and the earth”, he is stating the universal belief that the gods, instead of being outside the system and in control of it as creator like Yahweh, were absolutely every bit as subject to fate as humans were. The gods were at the mercy of the universe because they weren’t the makers. True, they had important jobs that would result in disaster if they weren’t done, but they were like railroad engineers—driving the train while having no control over the weather, or damage to the track, or a blockage to the rails. They could die. Yahweh cannot. He is not subject to fate because He is not at the mercy of the universe. Of course, that was the remarkable thing about His taking human form in the person of Yeshua, that He did largely submit Himself to all of the things that can harm and kill us.)

I want to do another one, again in Jeremiah 51:45, “Come out of her, my people! Run for your lives! Run from the fierce anger of the Lord.” It is echoed in Rev 18:4. The context of both of these sections of Scripture are often overlooked by those who wish to appropriate these verses to make the Babylon to be fled whatever it is they want it to be. But what did it mean to the original audience? Yahweh is speaking here through Jeremiah, giving a preemptive warning at that time to the people who have been exiled to Babylon. Jeremiah was left behind with the poor of the Land, and he has written a letter telling the exiles to be ready to leave when the time comes to judge Babylon and He makes a way for them to go home. And this is important because when Cyrus comes to judge Babylon, the Jews are permitted to return to Jerusalem but only a remnant returns. Why? Because Babylon is so very comfortable and safe and Jerusalem and Judah are neither. Plus, they are very far away. Somewhere between a two-to-three-month journey, and a dangerous journey due to wild animals and robbers. But Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and later Roman comfort is built through bloodshed, oppression, slavery, immorality of all sorts, and theft. Yahweh knew the temptation would be great, but He was commanding them to return to their inheritance to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple; to worship Him at the Temple He would be commanding Haggai and Zerubbabel to rebuild. In Rev 18, we see almost the exact same situation. Rome is to be judged, and those who have become rich in league with Rome are partners in the slavery, taxation, theft, oppression, and bloodshed that have made Rome “great.” Rome was the new Babylon not because of idolatry because the whole danged world was idolatrous, but because of how they came by their wealth and power—in ways parallel to Babylon. People in places like Laodicea had gotten wealthy because they were in bed with Rome, whereas the poor Galileans and Judeans were being trampled and robbed in order to feed the citizens or Rome—often at the expense of everyone else in the empire starving to death. This context is extremely specific.

And there are people who will claim it applies to churches in general for this or that reason and although it could be applied to any church hierarchy which abuses its members and gets rich while doing it—and the people being abused and those watching it happen should definitely get out of there, it can’t be used to tell everyone to leave every church. It is just not in keeping with the historical context. I have heard it used to try and get people to stop taking their meds, often with disastrous results, or out of the cities and into the boonies where they claim to be living off the grid but still have wifi. But refusing to ally ourselves with an oppressive system, the Beast system, isn’t the same thing as leaving the cities and abandoning the lost there, or refusing to minister to people in churches, or any number of other ways that people attempt to stretch this verse to suit their own agendas.

Context is important. If we can make Scripture mean whatever we want then it means nothing. Knowing the speaker and the audience and the history and the language is important. Knowing the politics and sociology and anthropology is important. Knowing what the archaeology reveals is important. And no, if you are simply using Scripture to become more radically loving and to press on to good fruit then you don’t really need any of that. But, if you want to be able to guard yourself against nonsense teachings and if you want to teach the Bible and be responsible with what you are saying it means without mangling it, it is important to study as much as you are able to and to be honest and humble about what you don’t know. Any of you who have ever asked me questions can attest to the fact that if I don’t know, I will admit it and I won’t try to pretend otherwise. We must be humble in how we approach and treat the text.



Episode 164: Purim 2023—Honor, Shame and Two Brave Queens

The book of Esther is a thrilling story to read about and yet we rarely look into what this would have been like to live through for the two very brave and virtuous (yes, both of them) Queens who had to walk a knife edge within the world of honor/shame dynamics where a shamed woman could easily wind up a dead woman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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