Episode 184: The Gospel of Matthew #3—The ‘Greater Than’ Motif/Second Moses

A huge early theme of the Gospel of Matthew that carries throughout is the portrayal of Yeshua as the latter and greater Moses. In addition to this, He also declares Himself to be greater than the Temple and a whole lot of other sacred cows of the first century. This week, we will investigate these claims and find out why they are so important to Matthew’s particular audience.

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

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 7th 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.




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.)

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

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 140: Avoiding ”Torah Terrorism”–a beginner’s guide to not destroying your witness (and your family)

When I wrote The Bridge: Crossing Over into the Fulness of Covenant Life, it was for the purpose of bringing people together who didn’t understand one another. On one hand, we had the burgeoning “Torah movement” of Christians who were discovering the delights of the Sabbath and Festivals, and the benefits of eating cleaner and on the other hand we had their families who were taught that this was legalistic. And no one was really behaving themselves or really listening and so people got needlessly angry and when people are angry, they are very likely to believe the worst about one another. And so they did–and we all forgot that we were saved at the Cross and not when we came to a certain level of knowledge. I gave a talk like this a couple of months back to an online group and I am recreating it from my notes today. My notes will be in the transcript at www.theancientbridge.com but it will not be the usual full transcript.

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

So, this is a bit different–no full transcript, I went from these notes and added a lot more so you might want to catch the actual podcast this time around.

I want to mostly talk about the problems with a lot of the teachings and propaganda and mantras and paradigms within the HRM and MJ that I see causing problems

  1. One of the most important things is that people largely don’t read the Bible correctly—we look at what was happening in the Biblical accounts and see things as ideals instead of descriptions. But the Bible, and I was reading Sandra Richter’s The Epic of Eden the other day and she made the point that I absolutely agree with—the Bible isn’t endorsing or canonizing Hebrew or Jewish culture or any other culture. The Bible is critiquing all human culture and shows how God is leading us out of our own worldly kingdoms into His Kingdom. Biblical heroes are also often monsters. They do terrible things. We were never meant to make excuses for them—when we see bad behavior the Bible, being a wisdom text, is inviting and even demanding that we engage viscerally with the story. We aren’t supposed to read it and be unmoved. Sometimes we will be thrilled and at other times we will be utterly disgusted. We will have questions about things that outrage us with no answers given. According to Yeshua, Moses even gave laws that were basically allowances for evil—slavery, and patriarchy, and alternatives to wartime rape. And it’s okay to react to that and even grapple with it as Jacob grappled with the angel of the Lord. If we aren’t struggling with the text then we aren’t really reading it as it was written to its ancient Near Eastern audience. When people coming to Torah aren’t taught that–that Torah is wisdom literature designed to promote critical righteous thinking and to serve as really a training manual for Israel’s judges, it gets misused as a very black and white list of do’s and don’ts with no discernment allowed for when to make exceptions, when to place one instruction before another, when one even invalidates another. Obviously now we see that chattel slavery, which Moses allowed, goes specifically against the commandments to love neighbor and foreigner both. We keep pushing the envelope of love, and we look back with gratitude that the world has come so far from the brutality of the ancient Near Eastern world of Abraham, Moses, and David that a lot of these laws were very avant-garde when they were given in terms of protecting women and children and foreigners and the vulnerable, now horrify us because the Cross has changed how we view everything.
  2. Everyone who has given their allegiance to Yahweh through His Son, no matter what name they call Him by, is our brother and sister. Period. Salvation is about allegiance, not about how much Torah we think is still in play.
  3. If you wouldn’t be willing to die on a cross for someone, don’t be too keen to overturn their tables. Or engage in polemic with them—ie name-calling—because it meant something in those times that it doesn’t mean now. And overturning tables was a prophetic act that only applied to the Messiah, just FYI. When we do it, it’s usually just bad behavior.
  4. Don’t forget your salvation—it’s easy when gaining knowledge (and not yet knowing how to figure out if it is true or not because Torah peeps dish out just as much nonsense as mainstream Christians, if not more) to forget what we know. And what we know is the very real experience of the New Creation, the very real changes in our lives, after we made that decision for Jesus. Although a lot of people scream and shout about not being saved by Torah, their words and actions are the opposite.
  5. No one keeps Torah, some people just keep a few more commandments than other people. And Christians aren’t lawless, they keep more than half (58%) of what can currently be observed (42%). Your average “TO” keeps maybe 8% more. And, sadly, the mainstream Christians who are keeping that 58% are more likely to be keeping the weightier matters of the law than TO peeps. These are mantras—TO and lawless, which don’t apply to anyone. I have found that once people are aware of it, the gulf between us really radically decreases. The Hebrew Scriptures have multiple words for sin—and different levels. The lowest is chattat, meaning an oopsie. You had no idea you were sinning and it wasn’t on purpose, you aren’t in rebellion. The worst is pesha, high-handed rebellion, spit in God’s face while you are purposefully doing something He really hates, like oppressing people. I’ll talk about this more later but God really does differentiate through the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. All sins are not created equal.
  6. Don’t get prideful about the easy stuff, like resting on the Sabbath and throwing the right parties, and eating cleaner. That’s why those aren’t included in the Matthew 25 separation of the Sheep and the Goats but caring for the vulnerable is the only criteria mentioned.
  7. It is important to keep in mind what an image-bearer is and is not. An image-bearer is quite literally a representative of God’s character on earth—the language used actually makes us out to be the equivalent of ANE idols, tselem, which were supposed to be indwelt by the spirit of the deity it represented. The people saw the idol and they were supposed to remember that god or goddess. It’s the things we do in public that show people God’s character, right rulings, justice, righteousness, and generosity. Speaking of fruit—we have to be careful about zeal. Because holy and unholy zeal are juxtaposed in Galatians 5. When we make the grave mistake (and I think almost everyone does it) of neglecting the NT and focusing on the Torah, we can become dreadfully unbalanced and even violent in our speech, actions, and in our faces. And people can’t see the love we are to have for one another because it has been replaced by anger, and anger can grow the wrong kind of zeal. 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.
  8. The three-year tree requirement (lesson from the fruit tree). Learn, study, and keep your mouth shut. People who have recently made major shifts lack the understanding to rightly divide the new information they are getting. Being a Berean cannot be accomplished by listening to YouTube videos and just taking people’s word for things—if the Bereans had just taken Paul’s word for everything, they wouldn’t have bothered studying.
  9. Anger at the church compromises our discernment and judgment. They aren’t wrong about everything and, in fact, they are right about most things. You know, we are blinded to what we are blinded about. God opens eyes. Folks get ridiculously frustrated just because they preach and people don’t believe them. It doesn’t work that way. One, we have to have credibility with the people we are talking to (or they will be stupid to just take our word for everything) and also, they have to be receptive when we do it, plus, we can’t be behaving like unloving jerks. Speaking the truth in love—it isn’t done with a club or a machete. Pro 28:9 Anyone who turns his ear away from hearing the law—even his prayer is detestable.–>this one gets abused a lot. Hardly anyone would turn their ear from hearing Torah—the only question is how much has a person been conditioned to believe is still in play. This isn’t about rebellion, it’s about blindness and goodness knows we are all blind.
  10. Hebrew is not a unique language—it is very similar to many other languages of that region in antiquity. The idea of “returning to a pure tongue” is Rabbinic and much later than Biblical times. Also, Paleo-Hebrew isn’t a secret language, it’s a font like Times New Roman. This whole idea about the pictographs having meaning was created within the last hundred years because it took archaeologists a while to even figure out that it was Hebrew after they first found it in 1870 and at first they believed it was Phoenician. But the pictures were typical of the early origins of language and represented sounds and not concepts. This means that there are no ancient documents describing any such language, as the font went out of use in the 5th century BCE when the Aramaic language came to be used.
  11. Calendars and Names. I think there are five or six “Biblical calendars” out there. I know a guy who has actually preached all of them and has condemned as damned and stupid those on any other calendar than the one he is on right now. First, he was on Rabbinic, and then first-sliver, this is about ten years ago and he beat people to death with it. Then some folks preached dark moon conjunction to him and he was all over that and yelling at people. Then lunar Sabbath. Then the Jubilees calendar and now he is teaching Enoch calendar—and he isn’t the slightest bit humbled by how many times he has been “wrong.” He always thinks “Now I have got it!” And he is far from alone. Same thing with Names. I don’t even know how many names our floating along out there. And then there are people who will tell you that if you don’t say the Name exactly right, your prayers won’t be heard—but that’s right out of ancient magic beliefs, the idea that if you say the Name, just so, that you can control the god or goddess or demon and they have to hear and obey you. I have even heard it taught that if you are using Jesus that any miracles you receive are from the devil and not from God!
  12. A lot of what is taught by the HRM and MJ is simply not true but is passionately held to as though it is Scripture and I have taught some of it myself. Hislop, genetic hierarchies, etc. patriarchy, Hebraic vs Greek vs ANE. C&E. Marriages in crisis because not honoring vows to love them when they haven’t changed. And so we get all these memes filled with urban legends, lies, and outright propaganda from nonsense books and teachings that get aimed at Christians over Christmas and Easter that aren’t founded in one iota of archaeological evidence. But people made a lot of money writing books that weren’t researched or documented or footnoted, and sometimes when there are footnotes, they just refer to other books with no footnotes. There’s a reason why the people who really seriously study don’t teach this sort of thing. And why so many ministries have quietly removed these teachings from their repertoire.
  13. Pagan vs cultural. This is a biggie. There is a huge difference between something being idolatrous—which is actually bowing down to and serving another god, on purpose, and giving that god credit for the works of Yahweh—and something being simply cultural. Perfumed oil was placed on the head and feet of idols. It was also done to Yeshua—does that endorse paganism. The Egyptian tree of life was the acacia—does this mean that the paneling in the Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant was pagan? For that matter, the Egyptians also had a portable shrine that looked a lot like the Ark. The ancient world also served their gods with sacrifices, unleavened bread, and hymn singing. Why were they also done for Yahweh? Because they are cultural ways of honoring the divine. It’s what you do with them that decides whether or not they are idolatrous.
  14. Fake names—hurting and angering the Jewish community by pretending to be Jewish and behaving badly online and putting them in danger of being hated even more. There is nothing to be gained in denying who we were when we came to faith and putting on what amounts to airs. And it is a real point of contention with other Christians, who see it as ridiculous and cultish. Our identity is in Christ—if Apollos and Junia, of all people, didn’t change their names when they were named after a false god and goddess respectively, then why do we feel like we need to do it? We can have no greater identity than we have in Messiah. Took me a lot of years to learn that I wasn’t a second-class citizen and I even wrote a book about it, King, Kingdom Citizen.
  15. Don’t call people unclean as an insult—we all have corpse impurity. And all it meant was that you couldn’t go within a certain distance of the Temple or a city. And unclean animals are only unclean as corpses and for food. We can ride them, have them as pets, and we can have pigs on the farm to deal with the trash and all that. Everything is clean for something or another. Clean just means in its proper place or proper state.
  16. Bad scholarship. If you can’t ask questions then don’t listen to someone. If they won’t give you their sources then what they are telling you cannot be credited as truth. Just because something shocked you or gave you a warm feeling doesn’t make it correct—we’ve all been misled by our emotions and our body’s reactions to those emotions. It’s rarely the Holy Spirit endorsing something we hear.
  17. Genealogies and pointless arguments—Titus 3:9 But avoid foolish debates, genealogies, quarrels, and disputes about the law, because they are unprofitable and worthless. 10 Reject a divisive person after a first and second warning.
  18. Truth is that we need to be looking out for people more than we do. In congregations it is easier—we mustn’t dare be so afraid of confrontation that we are unwilling to have a pretty short leash on the people who are new. We need to remove this false idea that they are expected to produce ministerial fruit right away and that is very counter to how churches are traditionally run. You know, we love those new people because they are so excited and energetic, but they are also generally foolish. Not foolish meaning stupid but lacking wisdom and perspective. The OT definition of a fool is someone who doesn’t understand their place—and the place of a new student isn’t to go out trying to teach the world and that causes so many problems with people coming out of mainstream churches and into more of an awareness of Torah

 




Episode 118: Is Polygamy/Polygyny Really a Biblical Thing?

This is a real controversial topic within some fringe Torah groups and I was asked to address it from a Biblical/historical perspective. Last week, I talked about male and female-identified religion and the dangers—and this is a big draw for some men. So, we’re going to look at what the Bible does and does not say about it. Is it ever spoken of in a positive way? What is the fruit? What restrictions did Yeshua/Jesus put on marriage and what did Paul have to say about polygynists in leadership?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Episode 117: Gender-Identified Religion and the Anti-Missionary Menace

Hey all! The Dire Straits is upon us—that three-week period before the 9th of Av when like all heck breaks lose spiritually. We’re starting out the next few weeks with a break before diving into Mark 13 and 14, and I am going to cover three (at least) topics that people have been requesting I discuss. This week I want to talk about those pesky people who used to be believers before denying Yeshua/Jesus and then become stealth missionaries for the other side, actively manipulating people by presenting the Bible out of context for the sole purpose of slowly converting people away from our Messiah. I will use that as a segue into the problem of male and female identified religions—which is where people who go this path will often end up. Men and couples into more male-identified modes of religious life and women into neo-paganism. After watching this happen for the last eight years, there is a definite trend and I want to talk about how and why it happens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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