Episode 155: The Study Series—READING the Bible as it was meant to be HEARD 2

This week we will continue with the discussion of how Scripture was originally presented and experienced–orally as a relational conversation between God and mankind and as wisdom literature. We will look at how things began to change due to Persian and Greek influences and will segue into the ongoing controversy over the Apocryphal books and how an avoidance of and a loss of knowledge of Hebrew led to it.

(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.

Master book list can be found here and I will add to it as needed.

Last time, before the festivals, we were talking about how the Bible was originally meant to be heard as a community and it wasn’t until modern times that we developed any sort of notions that something which is written down is more authoritative than what was spoken. And I know that can really freak us out the first time we hear it but I tell you, whenever you read the Scriptures and say to yourself, “I really wish I understood the tone of what is being said here—is this voice angry or sad or wrathful or disappointed or calling our and pleading or what?” And I know this is the case because back when I was a really angry person, I read everything that could possibly be read in an angry tone just that way. And it reinforced my anger and my ideas about Yahweh just waiting to murder us all in the worst possible ways. As He has grown me toward patience, love, and gentleness—I now read the Bible much differently. But ancient audiences wouldn’t have had that problem. Ancient writings didn’t have to give emotional cues because they were spoken by people to whom these stories had happened and they knew the tone involved, and they passed it on through the generations. So, they didn’t struggle with the tone of voice of Moses or Yahweh or Abraham or David or the Prophets the way we might. Only a few specialists actually needed to be able to read and write and that was mostly in service of the writing of treaties and receipts and legal contracts. It was only probably during the Monarchy that anything other than the basics were committed to parchment/animal skins and those would only have been for the archives. They wouldn’t have been considered the authoritative copies because the written word was considered to be inferior to the oral legacy that came from Moses, Samuel, etc. This is why there are songs and poetry and chiasms and parallelisms and acrostics and repetitions and the like in Scripture—to aid memorization in an oral culture. Because tone is just as important as the words themselves, and words spoken in the wrong tone can be weaponized when they are meant to be peaceful, or vice versa.

And we abuse this a lot in modern times when we apply our own tones to what is written. When the Scriptures were finally and formally committed to scrolls, they were still (are still) in a form that was meant to be read and experienced aloud by people who knew the original tone. A terrific example is Isaiah 55:11 but we will start in verse 8 and continue to the end of the chapter:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways.” This is the Lord’s declaration. “For as heaven is higher than earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For just as rain and snow fall from heaven and do not return there without saturating the earth and making it germinate and sprout, and providing seed to sow and food to eat, so my word that comes from my mouth will not return to me empty, but it will accomplish what I please and will prosper in what I send it to do.” You will indeed go out with joy and be peacefully guided;
the mountains and the hills will break into singing before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands. Instead of the thornbush, a cypress will come up, and instead of the brier, a myrtle will come up; this will stand as a monument for the Lord, an everlasting sign that will not be destroyed.”

Now usually, I hear this partially quoted, or shall I say selectively quoted as, “the word that comes from my mouth will not return to me empty” whenever anyone wants to justify using Scripture outside of context as a bludgeon. The idea is that if we quote Scripture, no matter what tone we use, the syllables will work like some magic spell and will accomplish exactly what Yahweh desires—no matter how badly we twist it. But that interpretation would never fly in an oral culture. Context was important, tone of voice was important, intention in speaking was very important because Yahweh’s character, tone, and intention were all being represented and by doing evil to any of the above, we bring His Name to nothing. Taking His Name in vain. Speaking His words in a way that He didn’t speak and therefore changing them.

When we impose our modern ideas about authority on the Bible, we are being unfair to the text and actually judging Yahweh for how He chose to compassionately and sanely deliver the material to humans in that culture. If He gave it today, it would be incredibly different but that wouldn’t change the level of authority, or that we wouldn’t still find the text disagreeing with itself or saying things that we might find out are inaccurate later as we learn more. The Bible doesn’t need to be defended from scientists, it needs to be able to breathe and be what it was always meant to be. God’s self-revelation. Imposing post enlightenment prejudices and warping the text under the auspices of defending it. In context, Yahweh speaks of His thoughts—the intentionality of what He wants said, and His ways—how does He communicate with us? In context, this refers to Yahweh fulfilling His promises of the everlasting Covenant through Messiah. This is a joyful verse reminding the exiles that their redemption from Babylon is going to happen exactly as promised. It is called a declaration, a spoken announcement. And the word goes out of His mouth, not out of a pen.

Do yourself a favor and I guarantee you that you won’t regret it. Begin at the beginning and look at how interactive the Scriptures are, verbally, between Yahweh and man. Learn to read critically and with the understanding that people heard Scripture, learned Scripture, experienced Scripture, and interpreted Scripture, as a community—as wisdom literature that was meant to be the beginnings of an eternal conversation between Yahweh and His people. If it wasn’t a conversation, then all we would have is the Sinai Covenant stored in the Ark because we wouldn’t need to know anything except that Yahweh had freed the slaves from Egypt and was now demanding absolute subjection and obedience or else. That’s how it worked in other cultures. You didn’t deserve a relationship and so there wasn’t one—you were created to be slaves by gods who didn’t want to grow and fetch their own dinners. The prophets were sent, verbally. In fact, it was so odd to write things down that Jeremiah had to be instructed to do it after twenty-three years of ministry. And there are reasons for that which aren’t important right now. Yeshua/Jesus came relationally and verbally to a people who were still predominantly illiterate as the Logos—not the written word but the spoken word of Yahweh and His last appearance in Revelation is still that spoken word. John the Revelator looks for the Lion of Judah and instead finds a slaughtered Lamb, who appears at the end of days in a robe drenched in His own blood before the battle even begins and who fights with a sword coming out of His mouth, His words, instead of in His hand, to slaughter. Yahweh and Yeshua conquer through testimony, shedding the “blood” of powers and principalities, unlike the Beast kingdoms that conquer and shed the blood of people through oppression, greed, and violence.

And because they were delivered orally to the people and not with “pen and paper” to scholars and scientists and philosophers, the Hebrew Scriptures talk about things that were normative at the time—patriarchy, slavery, polygyny, genocide, the concept of gods needing to be cared for in Temples where there was an overlap between Heaven and Earth, the belief in a flat earth surrounded by the seas of chaos, filled with sea monsters, the selling of daughters, and what we would now rightly call war crimes. Some of these (the harmless ones like bad science) are spoken of as the background and context of the culture, and others that involve prejudice, discrimination, and oppression have severe limits placed upon them. The reason is because a relationship has to start somewhere, with where both parties are at. A textbook or a modern history book is not a conversation, not verbal, it is dictation of facts and figures and equations and step by step instructions. And so that’s what we like. We prefer to be told exactly what to think and feel and believe and do—it makes us feel smart, good, and safe. No trust required if we just have a checklist to follow. But something like that wouldn’t have met their needs at all. They needed real time guidance and not a list of impossible commands. Torah is easy not because it wasn’t difficult for them to make the changes but because it was written to create a wise people who saw beyond the verbal guidance into what a perfect future might increasingly look like as they circumcised their hearts and followed and clung to Yahweh. Wisdom literature was the way of the ancient world in the form of proverbs and situational guidance—guidance that might say one thing here and the exact opposite there because wisdom can’t be legislated. What is wise in one situation is folly in another. Of course, the best example is, do we answer a fool according to his folly or not? Proverbs 26 says yes we should, and then no we shouldn’t. Wisdom depends. Wisdom cares about intent and context and darnit, it’s complicated. It’s why wisdom isn’t something we are born with but something learned and gifted to us by Yahweh. Wisdom doesn’t set us free from Yahweh, like the Torah can when used as a checklist, but obligates us to cling to Him for guidance in every situation every single moment of every single day for the rest of our lives. Legalism exalts our intellect but wisdom leaves us subjected to the source.

Yahweh set the bare basics of wise behavior under Moses at Sinai. Moses added to that as they were about to enter into the Land because wisdom in the wilderness looks different from wisdom in the Land dealing with other peoples. The Prophets really upped the game when they made very specific demands concerning justice and righteousness toward the most vulnerable. Yeshua demanded we be satisfied with nothing short of perfection (which requires humility and cleaving to Him for life, always striving to be more like Him) and Paul dealt with that situation in the various congregations, where He had to give differing advice based upon the surrounding culture and the struggles that were unique to each area.

All this is to reinforce the reality of the situation that all relationship begins somewhere, with the very basics. What some cultures do well, others fail at abominably and so the words of Yahweh might have sounded very different if they were originally spoken to the Incas or the Zulu, or the Mongols or the First Nations people living here in the Americas. Wisdom always looks like a step forward toward perfection—not like the endgame out of the blue. Wisdom is not wise if it is not compassionate, if it doesn’t recognize our limitations and paradigms and doesn’t work with us step by step as we mature. Wisdom isn’t teaching Russian lit and Calculus to Kindergartners, but ABC’s and 123’s perhaps in the hope that one day they will be able to conquer the hard stuff. Torah was the beginning of the conversation. Yeshua was the perfection of the conversation, and the Spirit is the internalization of that conversation in eternal relationship. We have never been abandoned to the first steps but are spurred on to perfection. Isn’t that just the very definition of receiving living waters from Yeshua through the Spirit? That we aren’t abandoned at Sinai, or at the border to the Promised Land on the far side of the Jordan, or in Babylon, or even at the Cross? Wisdom knows that we are lost without ongoing guidance and without that goal of being fully human, bearing the image of Yahweh as revealed in the Son.

All that is to put Torah into perspective and to further explain why they placed absolute authority in the spoken word and weren’t the slightest bit impressed for a very long time with the written form. Now, I do believe that the scribes who finally committed it to writing were indeed inspired by Yahweh so that it wouldn’t all be lost forever in exile, but these written accounts were still for the purpose of continuing the oral communication of Yahweh’s revelation to Israel. The written still served the oral authority and not the other way around. It truly makes sense because we cannot entirely trust a word without tonality and I get people on social media all the time assuming a tone that isn’t there and twisting what I say into something entirely different because of those assumptions.

Now in the time between the exile and the time of Yeshua in the first century, something really new came onto the scene—Hellenism. Greek thought and modes of expression came into vogue but even before that, the Persian influence also influenced how the Jewish people thought and communicated ideas and understood the Bible. They traded the idolatry of the henotheism they practiced throughout their history—this idea that Yahweh could and should be worshiped alongside other gods just as long as He was at the top of the heap—for angelology, where those gods and goddesses who once did things like open the windows of heaven to make it rain, or monitored storehouses of snow and frost and lightening, were now replaced by subordinate angels. Step in the right direction, but still not totally kosher. Hellenistic modes of thought that were heavy on law codes (as opposed to wisdom literature meant to guide elders and judges toward more and more righteous communities) influenced the Pharisees so that they began to view Torah in a more Greek way, resulting in Torah becoming more of a hard and fast Law code, which of course needed to be supplemented by more and more legislation to make up for the fact that a whole lot of situations aren’t even remotely covered (which they would if it had been meant to be used that way).

And so, we have factions springing up in response to or against this or that cultural influence. There was the ultra-conservative Qumran sect, who made the ultra-Orthodox Jews of today look positively liberal, the Pharisees who sought to bring their ideas about Torah observance to the common people, and the Sadducees whose corruption can likely be traced to the fact that they were unwilling to see anything except the vagaries of the Torah as authoritative, and didn’t fear any sort of judgment for whatever they did in the meantime. It wasn’t that they didn’t accept the prophets and all that, it’s just that the prophets aren’t really important when you see what they are saying as all for past generations, and not pertaining to their shameless abuse and oppression of their fellow Jews. So, we have the writings of the Qumran covenanters with the restrictively legalistic documents showing us how they lived (if you can call that living) and the hatred and contempt this sort of life inspired toward not only Gentiles but also their fellow Jews who weren’t in lockstep. Although the Pharisees never wrote down their rulings from these days, we have the writings of Josephus, Philo, and the Gospels in the first century and the Mishnah and then the Gemara hundreds of years later that illuminate some of what we see in the Bible. The Sadducees we only know about second hand because they came out the losers of history after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE.

But what I want to touch upon very briefly, and I have a good book recommendation for this, Know How We Got Our Bible (affiliate link) by Ryan Reeves, who is a terrific Church Historian and I will also include the link to both that book and to his YouTube channel in the transcript. I have been following him for some years now and he always has interesting tidbits to share. But what I want to talk about is the Apocrypha, which is made up of extra-biblical Jewish literature produced during this time period in the form of apocalypses (like Enoch), wisdom literature (like Ecclesiasticus/Sirach) and other fictional morality writings like Tobit and Judith. And I also want to talk about Jasher because that falls under an entirely different category. So, Jews began writing about the Bible, not only in the commentaries we find from Qumran, but also in sectarian documents like Jubilees where an alternate calendar was proposed (and I have a broadcast on that specifically), and history like I Maccabees, etc. These were never part of the Jewish canon, not ever. Didn’t happen. Josephus doesn’t include them when he talks about it at the turn of the second century. The early church fathers don’t mention them—not the ones to the south, east or west. It actually isn’t until much later, fourth century as I recall, when the separation between Christianity and Judaism had gotten out of hand, that these “apocryphal books” began to be quoted and seen as part and parcel of the Hebrew Bible! Part of the problem is that without an interest in Hebrew and original languages and history, they look to the untrained eye like they actually are Scripture. And this caused some really bad problems in the medieval church when they wouldn’t get included in certain translations and collections. The reason, besides the inability to read the Hebrew Scriptures as they existed at that time, was the popularity of the Septuagint which, along with the official translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, also came to include the apocryphal books as well. What isn’t widely known is that the Septuagint isn’t one document but a collection of translations of various Hebrew documents over time gathered together with some documents about the Bible which were originally written in Greek as well. The problem was actually discovered by Origen in the late second century when he moved to Caesarea and learned from the Jewish community there that the apocryphal books, although valued, were not considered inspired in the least—creating quite the conundrum.

But it was Jerome, in the late fourth century, who really stirred the pot. He sought to learn Hebrew so that he could read all of the Bible in the original languages, but that was easier said than done. It had come to the point that the Hebrew language, horror of horrors, was considered to be dangerous for Christians. However, Jerome knew a Jew who was a follower of Yeshua and he learned Hebrew and came to absolutely love it. Around 390, disillusioned with working with translations of translations, he went to Bethlehem and worked with an actual Jewish scholar who had to train him in secret. And this led to Jerome realizing that, although he had already translated Judith and Tobit for his Latin Bible, they weren’t actually part of the Hebrew canon and when he announced that the Apocrypha was only in their Greek Bibles due to a misunderstanding, all hell broke loose. People hate change and they don’t like to find out they were wrong. People like to feel smart and resent anything that threatens their credibility. So, despite the fact that Jerome’s translation was based on older manuscripts than the Masoretic texts that our current Bibles are based on now (at least 500 years older), it really didn’t catch on and once it did, people added the Apocrypha back in anyway. Giving the illusion that Jerome and all the early church fathers endorsed those works as inspired and canonical! And people still fight about it today and come up with all sorts of conspiracy theories about those books being “hidden” and “deleted”. History is often less interesting than our imaginations.

And real quick here I am going to touch upon another book that has been, in very modern times, promoted as ancient and as Scripture when it is neither. Namely, what is misleadingly called the book of Jasher. Sefer haYashar, the book of the upright or correct method, is medieval midrash written somewhere between a thousand and five hundred years ago. A very popular form of Jewish literature at the time, it presents what if stories that function as morality lessons. What it bears no resemblance to is any sort of ancient Hebraic text either in form, function, genre, language, etc. It refers to geographic locations in modern day Europe and I believe that only some Mormons consider it authentic, despite the fact that it doesn’t even remotely line up with Jewish thought over the millennia on the subject of Nimrod or just about anything else, because it does look very much like it was used by Joseph Smith in his own writings. Yes, that’s where the idea of holy underwear comes from—Nimrod’s magical medieval panties. I hadn’t really meant to go here this week but I needed the bridge between how the Hebrew Scriptures would have been heard and how the Greek Scriptures would have been heard. Same but different.

Next week, I will talk about the Greco-Roman mindset and context of the Gospels and Epistles, and the week after that we’ll begin to talk about Hebraic thought vs Greek thought, as well as rhetoric, genre, and other writing styles that greatly impact how we should read certain parts of the Bible. If we read it as all the same kind of literature (which many people do), we will misuse the text so that it will no longer represent the intention of the authority. See you next week!