Lord Came to Me,” What Do They Mean?

Hard

Sayings

of the

Bible

Walter C. Kaiser Jr.

Peter H. Davids

F.F. Bruce

Manfred T. Brauch

InterVarsity Press

Downers Grove, Illinois

Bruce and Manfred T. Brauch. This one-volume edition comprises five separate volumes from the Hard Sayings series, all reedited for this volume, along with new material created exclusively for this edition: The Hard Sayings of Jesus, copyright 1983 by F. F. Bruce, and reprinted here with permission of Edward England Books and Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., England; Hard Sayings of the Old Testament, copyright 1988 by Walter C. Kaiser Jr.; Hard Sayings of Paul, copyright 1989 by Manfred T. Brauch; More Hard Sayings of the New Testament, copyright 1991 by Peter H. Davids; More Hard Sayings of the Old Testament, copyright 1992 by Walter C. Kaiser Jr.

60515.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship® , a student movement active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept., InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the HOLY

ISBN 0-8308-1423-X

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hard sayings of the bible/Walter C. Kaiser, Jr … [et al.].

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN 0-8308-1423-X

1. Bible-Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible-Evidences, authority, etc. I. Kaiser, Walter C.

BS511.2.H36 1996

220.6-dc20 96-28488

CIP

Publisher’s Preface

How to Use This Book

General Introduction

1 How Do We Know Who Wrote the Bible?

2 Can We Believe in Bible Miracles?

3 Why Does God Seem So Angry in the Old Testament & Loving in the New?

4 Why Don’t Bible Genealogies Always Match Up?

5 Aren’t Many Old Testament Numbers Wrong?

6 Do the Dates of the Old Testament Kings Fit Secular History?

7 Does Archaeology Support Bible History?

8 When the Prophets Say, “The Word of the Lord Came to Me,” What Do They Mean?

9 Are Old Testament Prophecies Really Accurate?

10 Why Doesn’t the New Testament Always Quote the Old Testament Accurately?

11 Are the New Testament Accounts of Demons True?

12 Why Are There Four Different Gospels?

Genesis

Exodus

Leviticus

Numbers

Deuteronomy

Joshua

Judges

Ruth

1 Samuel

2 Samuel

1 Kings

2 Kings

1 Chronicles

2 Chronicles

Ezra

Nehemiah

Esther

Job

Psalms

Proverbs

Ecclesiastes

Song of Songs

Isaiah

Jeremiah

Lamentations

Ezekiel

Daniel

Hosea

Joel

Amos

Jonah

Micah

Nahum

Habakkuk

Haggai

Zechariah

Malachi

Matthew

Mark

Luke

John

Acts

Romans

1 Corinthians

2 Corinthians

Galatians

Ephesians

Philippians

Colossians

1 Thessalonians

2 Thessalonians

1–2 Timothy

Titus, Philemon

Hebrews

James

1 Peter

2 Peter

1 John

2 John

3 John

Jude

Revelation

Publisher’s Preface

With over a quarter million copies in print, the Hard Sayings series has proved itself among readers as a helpful guide to Bible difficulties. The series was launched with the publication of F. F. Bruce’s The Hard Sayings of Jesus in 1983, with subsequent volumes appearing in 1988, 1989, 1991 and 1992. Those volumes included Hard Sayings of the Old Testament and More Hard Sayings of the Old Testament, by Walter C. Kaiser Jr., and Hard Sayings of Paul and More Hard Sayings of the New Testament, by Manfred T. Brauch and Peter H. Davids, respectively. This edition combines the five earlier versions with new material from Walter Kaiser and Peter Davids. Over one hundred new verses have been added to the list of texts explained, as well as a dozen introductory articles addressing common questions that recur throughout the Bible. The result is that all of the Old Testament texts have been addressed by Walter Kaiser; F. F. Bruce’s work is confined to the Synoptic Gospels, with one addition to the Gospel of John; Manfred Brauch’s work is confined to Paul’s epistles; and Peter Davids’s contribution ranges throughout the whole of the New Testament. The general introduction that follows distills the key introductory remarks from the various authors of the separate pieces.

The authors share the conviction that the Bible is God’s inspired and authoritative word to the church, but careful readers will observe that they do not all agree on the best solutions to certain Bible difficulties. This is as it should be. If everyone agreed on the best solutions to these questions, they wouldn’t be hard sayings.

What F. F. Bruce wrote in his introduction to The Hard Sayings of Jesus can likely be said of nearly all the difficult texts in this collection: they may be hard for two different reasons. First are those that, because of differences in culture and time, are hard to understand without having their social and historical backgrounds explained. Second are those that are all too easily understood but that challenge the ways we think and act. As Mark Twain reportedly once remarked, it wasn’t the parts of the Bible that he didn’t understand that bothered him but those parts that were perfectly clear.

This volume is published with the hope that the former kinds of difficulties may have some helpful light shined on them. We hope, however, in the name of explanation, never to blunt the force of latter kinds of difficulties, where God’s Word confronts us to change and conform us into the image of Jesus Christ.

How to Use This Book

Following the general introduction and a group of twelve introductory essays addressing common questions from throughout the Bible, the hard sayings of the Bible are organized canonically by chapter and verse, running from Genesis to Revelation.

Cross-references point readers to comments on other Bible passages or to introductory essays which touch on the same or similar issues. Thus in the comment on Genesis 2:17 on the death of Adam and Eve, readers are referred to the discussion on Romans

5:12. Or readers looking up Mark 5:11–13 to find a discussion of the destruction of the pigs will find themselves referred to the parallel passage in Matthew 8:31–32 for an explanation.

In some cases where there are two or more separate comments on similar Bible passages, readers may discover that different points of view are put forward. This is due to the multiple authorship of this book and the fact that the authors do not always agree on the best solution to certain difficulties. The publisher has felt that readers will be best served by knowing that a variety of solutions have been proposed and by being able to think through for themselves which solutions best satisfy their questions.

The Scripture index at the back of the book will help readers find comments on any Bible passage that is mentioned in the book, whether it is listed as a hard saying or not.

The subject index will help readers find comments on issues that they might not otherwise be able to locate or which have not been cross-referenced because of concern for space. For example, the fear of the Lord is mentioned so often in Scripture that we have not cross-referenced the many verses where the phrase occurs. The page reference for Proverbs 1:7, where the issue is specifically addressed, will be found in the subject index.

General Introduction

In one sense the title of this book is incorrect. Very little of what is included in this work, outside of the Gospels, is a “saying” of anyone. The title, in fact, is taken from John’s Gospel, where Jesus’ ministry was recorded as a series of sayings. In John 6:60, responding to one such saying, his disciples observe, “This is a hard teaching [‘hard saying’ KJV [KJV King James Version] ]. Who can accept it?” From this verse came the title of the original work in this series, F. F. Bruce’s The Hard Sayings of Jesus.

Even though the literature under consideration in this volume lies mostly outside the Gospels, the title is still applicable.

Hard Sayings of the Old Testament

All too often people tell me (Walter Kaiser) they have tried to read through the Old Testament but find too much of it hard to understand. Despite their good intentions, many have abandoned the project out of sheer frustration, discouragement or puzzlement. It is not surprising that so many people find the Bible difficult, for our culture has lost contact with the Old Testament. Thus the book remains a closed document and often is treated as an artifact of our primitive origins.

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth! The Old Testament contains some of the most fascinating and dramatic portions of the entire Bible. Furthermore, if we decide its message is irrelevant to our generation, we are misled by our own false assumptions.

Following our Lord’s example, we should take up the Old Testament once again, confident that not even one passage will pass away until all have been fulfilled (Mt 5:18). In fact, the Old Testament is so relevant that our Lord warned that anyone who breaks the least Old Testament commandment, or teaches others to do so, will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven! That ought to give us pause!

The discussion here of Old Testament passages is a response to the cries of thousands

of laity (and “tell it not in Gath,” clergy as well!). I have tried to answer some of the more difficult sayings which fall into two categories: sayings for which no explanation appears to be given and sayings which seem to contradict other portions of Scripture.

Admittedly, the choice of particular hard sayings is somewhat arbitrary and reflects my own experience addressing students’ questions for the past thirty years.

Why should we contemplate hard sayings at all? The obvious answer is that scores of serious readers want to understand the difficult issues in Scripture. Besides this, by wrestling with Scripture, we can sharpen our attention to the details in all of our Lord’s Word. Thus the more intently and patiently we examine the text, the more handsome the dividends to our spiritual growth.

It was the famous Bishop Whately who commented,

The seeming contradictions in scripture are too numerous not to be the result of design; and doubtless were designed, not as mere difficulties to try our faith and patience, but as furnishing the most suitable mode of introduction that could have been devised by mutually explaining and modifying and limiting or extending one another’s meaning. ( On Difficulties in the Writings of St. Paul, Essay VII, sec. 4) He continued:

Instructions thus conveyed are evidently more striking and more likely to arouse attention; and thus, from the very circumstance that they call for careful reflection, more likely to make a lasting impression.

Others may debate the deliberate design of the difficulties (for often the problem results from our distance from the idiom of that day), but there can be no debate over the therapeutic effect that they produce through our increased efforts to understand and obey God’s Word.

Disagreements within Scripture also supply strong incidental proof that there was no collusion among the sacred writers. The variations, instead, go a long way toward establishing the credibility of both the writers and their texts.

These hard sayings also may be viewed as a test of our commitment to Christ. Difficult passages can be handy excuses for begging off and following the Savior no longer. Our Lord spoke in parables for just this reason: so that some who thought they saw, perceived and heard would actually miss seeing, perceiving and hearing (Mk 4:12).

Indeed, the apparent harshness and obscurity of some of our Lord’s sayings rid him of followers who were unwilling to be taught or were halfhearted in their search (Jn 6:66). They were not willing to look beyond the surface of the issues.

The matter remains where Butler in his famous Analogy left it: These hard sayings afford “opportunity to an unfair mind for explaining away and deceitfully hiding from itself that evidence which it might see” ( Analogy, Part II, ch. vi). For those who seek an occasion to cavil at difficulties, the opportunity is hereby offered in these hard sayings.

There is nothing wrong or unspiritual, of course, about doubting—so long as one continues to search for a resolution. But there are some who, as John W. Haley put it

so well,

cherish a cavilling spirit, who are bent upon misapprehending the truth, and urging captious and frivolous objections [and who] find in the inspired volume difficulties and disagreements which would seem to have been designed as stumbling-stones for those which “stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed”

[1 Pet 2:8]. Upon the wilful votaries of error God sends “strong delusion, that they should believe a lie” [2 Thess 2:11], that they might work out their own condemnation and ruin. ( An Examination of the Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible, Andover, Mass., 1874, p. 40)

That is strong medicine for our more urbane and tame ways of disagreeing with objectors today; nevertheless, the matters Haley’s quote raises are highly relevant to the discussion of hard sayings.

Before we launch into the hard sayings, perhaps it would be helpful to review some of the background studies on the nature, origin and reasons for biblical discrepancies.

Any observant Bible reader who compares statements of the Old Testament with those of the New Testament, statements of different writers within either Testament, or even at times different passages within the same book will notice that there are apparent discrepancies. These statements, taken at face value, seem to contradict one another.

The Christian church has held over the centuries that there is an essential unity of the Holy Scriptures, that they form a divine library that is consistent and unified in its approach and teaching. Alas, however, as the scope of lay readership and the depth of scholarship have increased, an ever-increasing supply of alleged discrepancies and hard sayings has demanded attention.

Why are there so many discrepancies and difficulties? There are a great number of sources to which we can trace them: errors of copyists in the manuscripts that have been handed down to us; the practice of using multiple names for the same person or place; the practice of using different methods for calculating official years, lengths of regencies and events; the special scope and purpose of individual authors, which sometimes led them to arrange their material topically rather than chronologically; and differences in the position from which an event or object was described and employed by the various writers.

All of these factors, and more, have had a profound influence on the material. Of course, to those who participated in the events and times these factors were less of a barrier than they are to us. Our distance from the times and culture exacerbates the difficulty. Specific issues might be mentioned here as illustrations of the wider field of difficulties. For example, the present Hebrew text of 1 Samuel 13:1 is a classic illustration of an early copyist’s error that has continued to be unsolved to the present day. Literally, the Hebrew text reads: “Saul was a year old [‘son of a year’ in Hebrew]

when he began to reign and two years he reigned over Israel.” It is clear that the writer is following the custom of recording the monarch’s age when he took office, along with the total number of years that he reigned. But it is also clear that the numbers have been lost and that this omission is older than the Greek Septuagint translation, made in the third century b.c. So far the Dead Sea Scrolls and all other ancient manuscripts have left us without a clue as to what the text should read.

The selectivity of the writers, in accord with their purposes in writing, can be illustrated from the genealogy that appears in Exodus 6:13–27. Instead of listing all twelve sons of Jacob, the writer is content to treat Reuben (v. 14), Simeon (v. 15) and Levi (vv. 16–25). Here he stops, even though he has listed only the first three sons of Jacob, because the sons of Levi, and particularly his descendants Moses and Aaron, are his special interest. So he does not proceed further.

In treating some of these issues, I have chosen not to focus on points of tension that arise from such factual elements as time, history, culture and science. Instead, I have listened for points of tension in doctrine and ethics within the books or between authors of the Bible. I have included a few illustrations of difficulties having to do with facts, but my main emphasis is on theological and ethical questions.

Hard Sayings of Jesus

Many of those who listened to Jesus during his public ministry found some of his sayings “hard” and said so. Many of those who read his sayings today, or hear them read in church, also find them hard, but do not always think it fitting to say so.

Our Lord’s sayings were all of a piece with his actions and with his way of life in general. The fewer preconceptions we bring from outside to the reading of the Gospels, the more clearly shall we see him as he really was. It is all too easy to believe in a Jesus who is largely a construction of our own imagination—an inoffensive person whom no one would really trouble to crucify. But the Jesus whom we meet in the Gospels, far from being an inoffensive person, gave offense right and left. Even his loyal followers found him, at times, thoroughly disconcerting. He upset all established notions of religious propriety. He spoke of God in terms of intimacy which sounded like blasphemy. He seemed to enjoy the most questionable company. He set out with open eyes on a road which, in the view of “sensible” people, was bound to lead to disaster.

But in those who were not put off by him he created a passionate love and allegiance which death could not destroy. They knew that in him they had found the way of acceptance, peace of conscience, life that was life indeed. More than that: in him they came to know God himself in a new way; here was the life of God being lived out in a real human life and communicating itself through him to them. And there are many people today who meet Jesus, not in Galilee and Judaea but in the Gospel record, and become similarly aware of his powerful attractiveness, entering into the same experience as those who made a positive response to him when he was on earth.

One reason for the complaint that Jesus’ sayings were hard was that he made his hearers think. For some people, thinking is a difficult and uncomfortable exercise, especially when it involves the critical reappraisal of firmly held prejudices and convictions, or the challenging of the current consensus of opinion. Any utterance, therefore, which invites them to engage in this kind of thinking is a hard saying. Many of Jesus’ sayings were hard in this sense. They suggested that it would be good to reconsider things that every reasonable person accepted. In a world where the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong, where the prizes of life went to the pushers and the go-getters, it was preposterous to congratulate the unassertive types and tell them that they would inherit the earth or, better still, possess the kingdom of heaven.

Perhaps the Beatitudes were, and are, the hardest of Jesus’ sayings.

For the Western world today the hardness of many of Jesus’ sayings is all the greater because we live in a different culture from that in which they were uttered and speak a different language from his. He appears to have spoken Aramaic for the most part, but with few exceptions his Aramaic words have not been preserved. His words have come down to us in a translation, and that translation—the Greek of the Gospels—has to be retranslated into our own language. But when the linguistic problems have been resolved as far as possible and we are confronted by his words in what is called a

“dynamically equivalent” version—that is, a version which aims at producing the same effect in us as the original words produced in their first hearers—the removal of one sort of difficulty may result in the raising of another.

For to us there are two kinds of hard saying: there are some which are hard to understand, and there are some which are only too easy to understand. When sayings of Jesus which are hard in the former sense are explained in dynamically equivalent terms, then they are likely to become hard in the latter sense. Mark Twain spoke for many when he said that the things in the Bible that bothered him were not those that he did not understand but those that he did understand. This is particularly true of the sayings of Jesus. The better we understand them, the harder they are to take. (Perhaps, similarly, this is why some religious people show such hostility to modern versions of the Bible: these versions make the meaning plain, and the plain meaning is unacceptable.)

If in the following pages I (F. F. Bruce) explain the hard sayings of Jesus in such a way as to make them more acceptable, less challenging, then the probability is that the explanation is wrong. Jesus did not go about mouthing pious platitudes; had he done so, he would not have made as many enemies as he did. “The common people heard him gladly,” we are told—more gladly, at any rate, than members of the religious establishment did—but even among the common people many were disillusioned when he turned out not to be the kind of leader they hoped he would be.

The view of the interrelatedness of the Synoptic Gospels taken in this work does not greatly affect the exposition of the hard sayings, but it will be as well to state briefly here what that view is. It is that the Gospel of Mark provided Matthew and Luke with one of their major sources; that Matthew and Luke shared another common source, an arrangement of sayings of Jesus set in a brief narrative framework (not unlike the arrangement of the prophetic books of the Old Testament); and that each of the Synoptic Evangelists had access also to sources of information not used by the others.

(The material common to Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark is conventionally labeled Q. The teaching peculiar to Matthew is labeled M; that peculiar to Luke is labeled L.) It helps at times to see how one Evangelist understood his predecessor by recasting or amplifying his wording.

Some of the sayings appear in different contexts in different Gospels. On this it is often said that Jesus must not be thought incapable of repeating himself. This is freely conceded: he may well have used a pithy saying on a variety of occasions. There is no reason to suppose that he said “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” or “Many are called, but few are chosen” once only. But there are occasions when a saying, indicated by comparative study to have been spoken in one particular set of circumstances, is assigned to different contexts by different Evangelists or different sources. There are other principles of arrangement than the purely chronological: one writer may group a number of sayings together because they deal with the same subject matter or have the

same literary form; another, because they have a common keyword (like the sayings about fire and salt in Mark 9:43–50).

Where there is reason to think that an Evangelist has placed a saying in a topical rather than a chronological setting, it can be interesting to try to decide what its chronological setting in the ministry of Jesus probably was. For example, it has been suggested that the saying “You are Peter,” which Matthew (alone of the Synoptic Evangelists) includes in the report of Jesus’ interchange with the disciples at Caesarea Philippi (see comment on Mt 16:18–19), may have belonged chronologically to another occasion, such as Jesus’ appearance to Peter in resurrection. Even more speculative is the interpretation of some of the sayings as words of Jesus spoken not during his public ministry but later, through the mouth of a prophet in the early church. It has been thought best in this work not to engage in such speculation but to treat the sayings primarily in the contexts provided for them by the Evangelists.

Again, this does not seem to be the place for an enquiry into the question whether the sayings examined are authentic sayings of Jesus or not. To help students in answering such a question some scholars have formulated “criteria of authenticity” for application to the sayings recorded in the Gospels. One scholar, who attached great importance to these criteria, told me a few years ago that he had concluded that among all the sayings ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels, only six, or at most eight, could be accepted as undoubtedly his. The reader of this work will realize that it is written from a less skeptical viewpoint than that. Let this be said, however: the fact that a saying is hard is no ground for suspecting that Jesus did not say it. On the contrary, the harder it is, the more likely it is to be genuine.

The second volume of the Encyclopaedia Biblica, published in 1901, contained a long and important entry on “Gospels” by a Swiss scholar, P. W. Schmiedel. In the course of this he listed a number of sayings of Jesus and other passages which, to his mind, ran so much counter to the conception of Jesus which quickly became conventional in the church that no one could be thought to have invented them. He therefore regarded their authenticity as beyond dispute and proposed to treat them as “the foundation pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus.” Several of them will come up for inspection in the following pages, for whether in Schmiedel’s sense or otherwise, they are certainly hard sayings.

In the interpretation of the sayings quoted I am, of course, indebted to many other interpreters. Some acknowledgment of my indebtedness is made in the following pages. There is one interpreter, however, to whom I am conscious of a special debt: that is the late Professor T. W. Manson, particularly in respect of his two works The Teaching of Jesus and The Sayings of Jesus. From the latter of these works I take leave to borrow words which will supply a fitting conclusion to my introductory remarks:

It will simplify the discussion if we admit the truth at the outset: that the teaching of Jesus is difficult and unacceptable because it runs counter to those elements in human nature which the twentieth century has in common with the first—such things as laziness, greed, the love of pleasure, the instinct to hit back and the like. The teaching as a whole shows that Jesus was well aware of this and recognized that here and nowhere else lay the obstacle that had to be surmounted.

Hard Sayings of Paul

The theme for my (Manfred Brauch) contribution to this book is contained in 2 Peter 3:15–16. Here we are told that the apostle Paul’s writings, which speak everywhere of our Lord’s gracious and patient work leading to our salvation, have in them “some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.” Several basic insights emerge from this text which provide an important starting point for my explanations.

First, it is clear that Paul’s writings, which come roughly from the period a.d. 50–65, had already begun to circulate rather widely. Second Peter 3:16 refers to “all his letters.” Since Paul wrote to churches and individuals across the Greco-Roman empire—from Rome in the West to Galatia in the East—some years must have elapsed for Paul’s letters to have become known, distributed and read throughout the churches. Perhaps several decades had elapsed since Paul penned his epistles.

Second, Paul’s letters had already attained quite a measure of authority. Though it is doubtful that Paul’s writings were at this time already seen on a par with sacred Scriptures (that is, our Old Testament, which was early Christianity’s Bible), the reference to “the other Scriptures” certainly indicates that the writings of Christ’s apostle to the Gentiles are seen as an extension of the authoritative Word both of the Lord who meets us in the Old Testament and of Christ, the Lord of the church.

Third, Peter’s reference to “hard sayings” in Paul’s letters shows that, as early as sometime in the second half of the first century, Christians in the churches had a difficult time accepting or understanding or properly applying certain of Paul’s sayings.

Now if this was true within the first few decades subsequent to the writing of Paul’s letters, how much more is that likely the case for us, who are removed from Paul’s time not only by the passing of about two thousand years, but also by such important aspects of human experience as history and culture and language. If it was possible back then to misunderstand or even twist the meaning of certain of Paul’s sayings, it is very likely that this possibility is even greater for us.

A leading continental scholar of the last century, Adolf von Harnack, once said that the only one who ever really understood Paul was the second-century heretic Marcion, but that even he misunderstood Paul. Harnack’s point was that Marcion clearly grasped the radical nature of Paul’s gospel—namely, that salvation comes by God’s grace, not by obedience to the Law—but that Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament on the basis of Paul’s gospel represented a misunderstanding of Paul.

Thus, from the very early years of Christians’ use of Paul’s letters, the possibility of either understanding or misunderstanding, of either proper or improper use, have been ever-present realities. For us Christians today, this fact ought to give both humility and hope. There may be times when, after careful and thorough study of a text, we should in all humility acknowledge that we simply cannot grasp the meaning or know definitely what the writer intends the reader to grasp. But there is always also the hope that careful study—always under the guidance of the Spirit—will lead us to a hearing of the hard sayings in such a way that God’s Word can do its work in our lives.

The selection of hard sayings of Paul emerges from my experience as a Christian, a student and a teacher. In personal study, in work with college and seminary students, and in countless discussions with Christians in churches and non-Christians in the academy, these texts have again and again emerged as “problem texts.” Some thoroughly confuse readers or create unresolved tension between the meaning of one

text and another. Others seem obscure or unclear. Still others lead to different misunderstandings. And a few appear to be so out of character with the overall meaning and intention of the gospel that they meet with opposition or outright rejection, even by some who are deeply committed to the authority of the Bible for Christian faith and life.

It is my hope to make a positive contribution in the continuing effort to provide a clearer understanding of some of the hard sayings of the epistle literature.

Understanding and Interpreting Paul’s Epistles

The reading and study of any writing, if it is to be faithful to the author’s purpose, must take seriously at least three things: (1) the nature of the writing itself, (2) the purpose for which it was written and (3) the situation or context out of which it was written. Failure to observe these matters is more likely than not to lead to misunderstanding or misinterpretation.

In this section I (Manfred Brauch) will discuss the matters of nature, purpose and situation, giving particular attention to principles of biblical interpretation which will assist in the study of Paul’s epistles.

But before we begin we must also recognize that every interpreter of Scripture, including me, comes to the text with certain assumptions about the material to be studied. I want you to know before we begin what my assumptions are.

In approaching the hard sayings of Paul, I write self-consciously from within the evangelical tradition of theology, personal faith and commitment. I write from a perspective that cherishes this heritage’s deep and central commitment to the Bible as the ultimate criterion for our understanding and application of God’s self-revelation, which finds its ultimate expression in the Incarnation. The fundamental affirmation of evangelical faith with regard to the Bible is that we have in this word of God’s gracious self-disclosure an authentic, reliable record of God’s truth and purposes which, when responded to in faith, leads to restored relationships with God and our fellow human beings. Scripture—including these hard sayings—is our authoritative, infallible guide for faith and life.

Having stated this presupposition, which is at its core an affirmation of faith, I must immediately admit that such a commitment does not in and of itself determine the interpretation of any scriptural text. What it does do is set a tone and provide limits. It means that if you share that assumption with me, we approach the texts, recognizing that they are more than the result of human thought and theological reflection—that they emerge from the ministry and teaching of Christ’s commissioned apostles, who were led and inspired by the Spirit of Christ in their ministry of writing.

This assumption about the Bible also means that we cannot simply bypass, ignore or reject texts which may be difficult to reconcile with other aspects of Scripture or whose meaning or instruction we find difficult to accept. Our starting point obligates us to take such sayings with utmost seriousness, seeking to understand what they mean, why they were written, and what implications for our faith and life they have.

Such an obligation brings us directly into the arena of biblical hermeneutics, or interpretation, where persons who are equally committed to the assumptions about the inspiration and authority of the Bible stated above often come to different conclusions.

The extent of such differences can be greatly reduced when we come to the hermeneutical task with equal commitment to take seriously the three items mentioned above: the nature of the writings, the situations out of which they were written, and the purposes for which they were written. To these matters we shall now turn.

The Nature and Purpose of Scripture. When we are concerned with the nature and purpose of the biblical text, we are immediately confronted with the issue of its authority, with its character as the Word of God. How are we to understand this authoritative character in light of the fact that the biblical record consists of the writings of a great variety of persons in different historical periods in response to a host of events and situations and experiences?

To answer this question we need to be faithful to the intention of Scripture and take with utmost seriousness the fact that God’s final, ultimate form of self-disclosure is the Incarnation.

In 2 Timothy 3:15–17 Paul speaks clearly about the nature of Scripture and its purpose: “You have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

It is divine inspiration that gives to the Bible its authoritative character. And that inspiration, while clearly enunciated in 2 Timothy, is implicitly affirmed throughout the New and Old Testaments by the use of such formulas as “God has said” or “the Holy Spirit spoke” (2 Cor 6:16; Acts 1:16). God and Scripture were so intimately linked that “what Scripture says” and “what God says” could be equated (Rom 9:17; Gal 3:8). Jesus’ use of and attitude toward the Old Testament strongly confirms this sense of Scripture’s divine origin and content (see, for example, Mt 5:17–18; Jn 10:35). It is also clear from the New Testament that the words of Jesus and the witness of Jesus’

apostles share the same inspiration and authority of the Old Testament (see, for example, Jn 10:25; 12:49; 1 Cor 2:13; 1 Thess 2:13; Heb 3:7).

That the Bible claims inspiration is evident then. But what is its intention? What is God’s purpose for it? To make us wise for salvation, says Paul, and for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Tim 3:15–16).

The biblical writings were written “to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Rom 15:4). This redemptive purpose of inspired Scripture is also the point of John 20:31: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

The Acts 8 story of Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian is also instructive here. The understanding and interpretation of the Isaiah passage have one purpose: “Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus” (v. 35).

That is the “what for,” the purpose. Jesus did not recommend the Bible as a book of divinely given facts about things in general (science, history, anthropology, cosmology). Rather, he pointed to the Old Testament and said: “These are the Scriptures that testify about me” (Jn 5:39). If our study of Scripture is isolated from these explicit purposes, our attempts to understand the hard sayings may prove futile.

The fact that the writers of our biblical documents were inspired does not mean that

they were stripped of their limitations in knowledge, memory or language as specific human beings in certain periods of history. The presence of this human reality in Scripture has been acknowledged throughout the church’s history. From Origen through Augustine to the Reformers and beyond, the reality of God’s accommodation in Scripture to human weakness and limitation has been affirmed. The condescension of a nurse or a schoolmaster to the limitation of children has been used as an analogy.

God stooped down to us and spoke the language of the recipients so that we might hear and understand him.

And we must recognize that it is precisely some of these accommodations to human limitations which make some of Paul’s and other biblical writers’ words difficult for us to understand, even while we continue to recognize the full authority of their words.

Just as Jesus was fully human and yet fully divine—subject to human limitations and yet without sin—so Scripture, while manifesting many of the limitations of its human character, is yet fully God’s authoritative Word to us.

While the paradoxical mystery of this juxtaposition of both the human and the divine—

in the Incarnation of the living Word and in the written Word—defies final explication, the Gospel of Luke provides us with a key toward understanding. Luke presents Jesus as “conceived by the Spirit” and endowed with the Spirit at his baptism; as the one who, “full of the Spirit,” is “led by the Spirit” into the wilderness; as the one who inaugurates his ministry “in the power of the Spirit” (Lk 1–4). For Luke the presence and power of the Spirit mediate the divine reality of Jesus in and through the human limitations. It is the Spirit who makes the incarnate Jesus’ human words and actions effective. In his words and actions, God speaks and acts. Such an understanding of the Incarnation, when applied to Scripture, underlines its full humanity (with all that this implies regarding the presence of limitation) and its full divinity (with all that this implies about its authority). The hearing and believing of the divine authority, in and through the fully human, is made possible by the Spirit.

Recognizing both (1) the purpose for which the writers were inspired and (2) the limiting human form and context within which their inspiration took place is frequently an important key in understanding Paul’s hard sayings.

The Context of Biblical Texts. Beyond this general understanding of the nature and purpose of the Bible, the specific situations of particular biblical documents have an important bearing on our interpretation and understanding. Though it is necessary to keep this fact in mind regarding each biblical book, the “situational nature” of the Epistles is especially noteworthy.

The Epistles are occasional documents, that is, they were written for specific occasions in the life of Christian congregations or individuals. They respond to questions which have been communicated to the writer (1 and 2 Thess), deal with problems in the church (1 Cor), carry on a debate with a false understanding of the gospel (Gal), nurture hope in a time of persecution (1 Pet) and seek to provide guidance for a pastor in a situation where false teachings and speculative mythology are threatening the integrity of the gospel and the stability of Christian community (1 and 2 Tim).

In addition to these unique needs which called forth the writing of the Epistles, the historical and cultural contexts of the recipients must also be recognized as factors which bear on our interpretation. Thus, when Paul addresses himself to the place of women in the worship of the church in Corinth and calls for certain restrictions, it is

important to ask “Why does he give those instructions?” and to recognize that the cultural-religious environment in Corinth may have made these restrictions necessary in that particular situation, whereas in other situations such restrictions were not called for. Or when we read in 1 Timothy 2:11–12 that women are to “learn in quietness” and that they are not permitted “to teach or to have authority over a man,” it is of critical importance to recognize that one of the major problems in Timothy’s pastoral context was the presence of heretical teachings and mystical speculations, most likely perpetuated by leading women in that particular congregation. For in other early church settings, women were clearly involved in leadership, as well as in teaching and preaching functions.

The consideration of context probably introduces the most difficult issue in the whole task of interpretation: How can we discern between that which is culturally or historically conditioned and that which is transcultural or transhistorical? When is an apostolic instruction an inspired, authoritative word for a particular context in an early church setting and applicable only to that situation, and when is an inspired, authoritative instruction an absolute norm for any and all situations and contexts from the early church to this present day?

The effort to discern between those things which are culturally and historically relative and those which are transcendent is in actuality engaged in by all Christians, in one way or another. At issue is only whether such discernment results from our likes and dislikes, our own cultural conditioning and prejudices, or whether it is the application of a clear principle that emerges from a proper understanding of the nature and purpose of Scripture.

Take, for example, the issue of head coverings. Most Christians have concluded that the “head covering” enjoined upon women during worship in the church in Corinth (1

Cor 11) is culturally relative, and its inspired authority is limited to that historical situation. Many of these same Christians have concluded, at the same time, that Paul’s instruction to these women to be silent in worship (1 Cor 14) is not culturally relative and is an authoritative word for all Christian women in all contexts of worship, both then and now.

On what basis is this distinction made? Arbitrariness in this critical and necessary area of biblical interpretation can to some extent be avoided when we recognize that there are different types of texts, and that these differences provide us with clues to discerning that which is relative to the situation and that which is authoritative for all time.

In an article in Essays on New Testament Christianity, S. Scott Bartchy gathers texts which deal directly or indirectly with the place and role of women in the ministry of Jesus and the early church into three broad categories: (1) normative (or instructive) texts, (2) descriptive texts and (3) problematic (or corrective) texts. These categories are extremely helpful for purposes of our discussion.

Instructive texts are those which declare the way things ought to be among the followers of Christ. They declare the vision or intention of the gospel without reference to particular problem situations. As such they transcend the contexts in which they are uttered and are normative for both individual and corporate Christian existence. The citation of Joel 2:28–32 in Peter’s Pentecost speech (Acts 2:17–21), stating that the Spirit of God was given to both men and women for proclaiming the

good news, is such a text.

Descriptive texts describe practices or actions in the early churches without any commentary. The sense conveyed in such texts is that what is described is perfectly acceptable or normal. The writer does not question the practice but rather seems to assume it as appropriate. Thus Luke, in Acts 18:24–26, tells us that both Priscilla and Aquila instructed the learned Apollos in the Christian faith, and in Acts 21:9 mentions that the evangelist Philip had four daughters who were engaged in the prophetic ministry of the church. Women’s participation in ministry seems not to have been unusual.

Corrective texts are those which clearly deal with special situations or problems or misunderstandings in the Christian communities which are addressed. Here it is particularly important to understand as much as possible the situation which made the corrective, authoritative, apostolic word necessary for that situation. The problem of heretical teaching, addressed in 1 Timothy, is such a situation. Paul’s instruction about the silence of women must be seen in this light. What we must guard against is the temptation to universalize instructions whose primary or exclusive focus was on the situation addressed.

An important dimension of this threefold classification for the interpretation and understanding of a good number of our hard sayings is the matter of their interrelationships. If a corrective text’s admonition reflects the vision of the gospel articulated in instructive texts and is further confirmed by descriptive texts, then the particular teaching would undoubtedly be authoritative for the whole church in all times. On the other hand, if an apostolic word addressed to a particular setting does not conform to the way things ought to be (as revealed in instructive texts) and the way things normally are (as revealed in descriptive texts), then the inspired, authoritative word may very well be intended to deal exclusively with a specific problem and thus be limited to that and similar problems.

The foregoing reflections on the nature, purpose and context of biblical texts provide the parameters within which we will explore the hard sayings of Paul. For readers interested in further and more comprehensive study of the issues in biblical interpretation, I highly recommend the book How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1982) by Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart.

Other Hard Sayings of the New Testament

Though not all the texts for which I (Peter Davids) will offer explanations are in the strict sense “sayings,” they are “hard” for three different reasons. Some of them are hard because we do not understand them. In many cases they can be clarified simply by adding some background information. In other cases (such as some of the material in Revelation), scholars are unsure of the author’s real meaning, so we can only make the best informed guess possible. In such situations dogmatism is ruled out. But any way we look at it both of these categories are the easiest of the hard sayings. Either they can be figured out or they cannot. When they are explained, no problem remains.

Those that remain unexplained should serve to increase our humility about interpreting Scripture. We do not yet know all that those writers did. If we accept this proposition, we can set aside these problems.

Another group of hard sayings is doctrinally hard. That is, the saying appears to

contradict some other teaching of Scripture or clashes with doctrine that Christians have held for years. The disciples’ comment in John 6:60 was made about a saying such as this. Since we as Christians hold our beliefs about the teaching of Scripture deeply and sincerely, we struggle with anything that appears to threaten them. At times it is possible to explain such Scriptures and leave the doctrines intact. Perhaps we are just misunderstanding the scriptural author, and when we understand what he really meant, we can see that there is no conflict. I suspect that the explanation of James 2:24

fits this category. But at other times a real conflict exists between what the author meant and our own doctrinal understanding. This is the real test. Will Scripture be allowed to correct our doctrine, or is our doctrine the grid through which we will insist on understanding Scripture? Either Scripture or our doctrinal understanding is the Word of God. When they conflict, we find out which one we have actually accepted as our final authority.

The hard sayings in the third category are not actually hard to understand. Rather, they are hard because we do not like what they say. They are hard to obey, and we would rather they meant something else than they do. James 4:4 and 1 John 2:15 may be in this category for some people. This book will be of relatively little help with this type, except to assure each reader that the scriptural author does mean exactly what was feared. The issue remains as to whether or not the reader will obey the Scripture.

When it comes to obedience, a book cannot help. Each individual reader must decide.

Thus, such sayings are in one sense the hardest of all, for we struggle with them most on the personal level.

What, then, is the goal of my writing? It is to understand Scripture, especially some of the more obscure passages. By this I mean understanding what the original author intended to communicate when he wrote the words. That is, the author of each book of Scripture had something in mind when he selected the words to use in writing. My assumption is that these words, when understood within his cultural context, accurately represent what he wanted to communicate. In fact, it is a good working assumption that what an average Christian reader in the first-century context in which that book of Scripture was written would have understood by the words fairly represents what the author intended to communicate. And this is what the church has accepted as the Word of God.

The problem is that we are not first-century readers. None of us speaks Koine Greek (the language of the New Testament) fluently. Unlike most of the authors we are discussing, few of us are Jews. None of us are first-century Jews from the eastern Mediterranean world. We have not read the same books or had the same cultural experiences as the authors of Scripture had. We speak a different language.

Even our experience of the church is different. We know a world in which most churches are buildings with rows of pews and a platform of some type in the front upon which ministers of some description stand to lead worship. The authors of Scripture knew a church that met in groups of no more than sixty or so in private homes, usually at night. They sat around a table for a common meal something like a potluck supper, although for them it was the Lord’s Supper. There was no such thing as ordination in our modern sense nor a difference between clergy and people.

Leadership was quite fluid. Those who could lead were leaders. Furthermore, we know a church that is split into many different denominations and traditions. In the early period there was only one church, although it contained a lot of variety, even

among the house churches in a given city.

We carry our Bibles into church, or take them out of the pews. The Scriptures in the early church (the Old Testament, if they could afford it, and perhaps late in the New Testament period some copies of a Gospel or two or some letters of Paul) were stored in a chest in someone’s house and read aloud during meetings by one of the few members who could read. Finally, we know a church that looks back on 2000 years of history and stresses the fact that God has spoken in the Scriptures. They knew a church whose only history was the Old Testament and stories (even eyewitness accounts) about Jesus. What animated them was a common experience of the Holy Spirit and through him the living presence of Jesus in their midst. There was a dynamism (and often a risk) that even the liveliest of our groups has probably not fully captured.

With all of these differences, interpreting Scripture becomes the job of getting back into that ancient world and then understanding how it correlates with our world. To do so we will have to listen to the Old Testament and the sayings of Jesus that the authors we are dealing with certainly knew. We will also have to consult some of the works written by Jews in the period between 400 b.c. and a.d. 100, the intertestamental literature (much of it strange to our ears), which will show what first-century Jews, including the authors of Scripture, thought about various topics. In fact, one of our hard sayings, that in Jude, comes up precisely because Jude quotes some of this literature. Finally we will have to attempt to understand the culture and historical situation, for that, too, will be part of the author’s understanding and something that he shares with his readers. This will enable us to translate not just the words but also the ideas of Scripture into our language.

The last stage of interpretation, however, is that of moving from the world of the New Testament into our modern world. Here we will have to be cautious. Some of the discussions and arguments Christians have had over the centuries were not issues in the first century. The New Testament authors will have nothing to say about such concerns. They may refuse to answer our questions. In other cases we may have to discover the principle that informs the author’s reasoning and apply it to our modern situation. But in most of the cases the real danger is in jumping too quickly into the modern situation. If we have not taken the time to grasp fully what the author of Scripture was trying to say, we will distort his message when we move into our modern period. But if we fully grasp it, we will be able to see where it applies, although it may apply in a different place than we thought at first.

The study of Scripture is an adventure, for the God who spoke still speaks. One of his ways of speaking to us is through Scripture as we take the time and trouble to study, understand and meditate on it. It is my hope that as we explore these passages each reader will discover the power of the Scripture again as the Holy Spirit makes it alive within him or her.

The History of Hard Sayings

What has been written in this volume on the various discrepancies in the Bible stands in a long tradition of discussion on this topic. Among the early church fathers, Eusebius, Chrysostom, Augustine and Theodoret devoted whole treatises, or parts thereof, to this subject.

The subject apparently dropped out of favor from the latter part of the fifth to the beginning of the sixteenth century a.d. There are almost no extant works that can be cited on this subject for that period of time. However, the Reformation gave a whole new impetus to the study of the Bible, as well as to this subject. John W. Haley, in his magisterial 1874 work entitled An Examination of the Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible, was able to cite forty-two works from the Reformation or post-Reformation era dealing with this topic (pp. 437–42).

For example, a 1527 Latin work by Andreas Althamer went through sixteen editions and dealt with some 160 alleged discrepancies. Joannes Thaddaeus and Thomas Man put out a 1662 London publication with the title The Reconciler of the Bible Inlarged

[sic], in which more than three thousand contradictions throughout the Old and New Testaments were fully and plainly reconciled. This work counted each discrepancy twice, for their earlier editions only had 1,050 cases. Furthermore, complained Haley, he included “a multitude of trivial discrepancies, and omit[ted] many of the more important [ones].”

Oliver St. John Cooper’s Four Hundred Texts of Holy Scripture with their corresponding passages explained included only fifty-seven instances of disagreement in this 1791 London publication.

Coming to relatively more recent times, Samuel Davidson’s Sacred Hermeneutics, Developed and Applied included 115 apparent contradictions from pages 516–611 in the 1843 Edinburgh text. In the last forty years, the most notable contributions to this subject have been the following. In 1950, George W. DeHoff wrote Alleged Bible Contradictions (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker). He dealt with the subject by taking pairs of apparently opposing texts, which he grouped under the topics of systematic theology, ethics and historical facts. This work was followed in 1951 by the reissue of John W. Haley’s 1874 text An Examination of the Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible (Nashville: B. C. Goodpasture). This was perhaps the most complete array of brief explanations of discrepancies; they were arranged under the divisions of doctrinal, ethical and historical discrepancies. A detailed first section treated the origin, design and results of the difficulties alleged to be found in the Bible.

In 1952 Martin Ralph De Haan published his 508 Answers to Bible Questions (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan). It included a mixture of doctrinal, factual and interpretive questions.

J. Carter Swaim contributed Answers to Your Questions About the Bible in 1965 (New York: Vanguard). Most of his text dealt with questions of fact rather than interpretation. Later, in 1972, F. F. Bruce published a volume entitled Answers to Questions (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan). With only thirty-eight pages dealing with questions from the Old Testament, this work was divided into questions about Scripture passages and other matters related to the faith. In 1979, Robert H. Mounce contributed a book with a similar title, Answers to Questions About the Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker). His book had an unusually complete table of contents and dealt with a rather large number of difficulties for such a fairly brief work.

Paul R. Van Gorder added a text in 1980 called Since You Asked (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Radio Bible Class). He organized his book alphabetically by topic and included a scriptural and topical index that gave a quick overview of the areas covered.

My colleague Gleason L. Archer produced a large tome in 1982 entitled Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan). His arrangement followed the order of the biblical books as they appear in the canon. It included a mixture of issues such as authorship of the biblical books, critical objections to some of the books and alleged contradictions and problematical interpretations.

The first in the Hard Sayings series appeared in 1983. F. F. Bruce wrote The Hard Sayings of Jesus (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press). He took up seventy sayings of Jesus that were considered “hard” either because we cannot handily interpret them or because they seem so easy to interpret that their application is puzzling.

In 1987 David C. Downing published What You Know Might Not Be So: 220

Misinterpretations of Bible Texts Explained (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker). Downing concentrated mainly on the confusion that exists between biblical passages and extrabiblical literature, myths and popular religions.

The history of this discussion is filled with the names of the great biblical scholars. Our generation, and the next, must also continue to grapple with these texts for the very reasons already outlined: to understand the Scriptures better and to increase our commitment to Christ.

How Do We Know Who Wrote the Bible?

The issue of authorship is a difficult one. First, it covers sixty-six biblical books, and it would take a book of its own to discuss the issue properly for each of them. In fact, New Testament introductions and Old Testament introductions are books devoted to this and related issues. Second, there are a number of problems involved in defining exactly what we mean by authorship. I will tackle this second question and then give a brief answer to the first.

First, there are many books in the Bible that do not indicate who their author is. For example, only one of the four Gospels (John) gives any information about the author.

Even in that case, the only information we are given is that “the disciple whom Jesus loved” is the witness whose testimony is being reported. It is not at all clear from John 21:20–25 whether “the disciple whom Jesus loved” actually wrote the Gospel (or part of the Gospel) or whether the Evangelist is telling us, “I got my stories from this man.”

Even if this beloved disciple actually wrote the Gospel, his name is not given. We can therefore safely say that none of the Gospels gives us the name of its author. Other books which do not give us the name of their authors include Acts, Hebrews, 1 John and all of the Old Testament historical books.

There are other instances where scholars do not agree if a particular phrase actually indicates authorship. Many of the Psalms are labeled in English “of David,” and Song of Songs is labeled “of Solomon,” but scholars debate whether the Hebrew means that the work is by the person named or whether it is in the style or character of that person’s tradition. Commentaries make us aware of these discussions, which is one reason to read good exegetical commentaries before jumping to a conclusion about authorship. The issue in this case is not whether the attribution of authorship is inaccurate, but whether the person who put the books together (since Psalms, for

example, consists of the work of several authors) intended to indicate authorship at all.

It would be silly to say, “You are wrong; David did not write this or that psalm,” when the compiler of Psalms would reply (if he were alive), “I never said that he did.”

There is another set of books more like the Gospel of John. These works do refer to authorship, and they even give some indication of who the author is, but they do not give a name. For example, 2–3 John were written by “the elder.” There is no identification of who “the elder” is. A different situation occurs in the case of Revelation, where the author is named “John,” but there is no further indication of who this John is (John was a reasonably common name in some communities at that time).

Naturally, church tradition has added specific identifications in many of these books.

Various church fathers stated that Mark was written by John Mark, who was recording the preaching of Peter. The “beloved disciple” and “the elder” and the “John” of Revelation were all identified with John the son of Zebedee, a member of the Twelve.

Hebrews was attributed to Paul (although as early as a.d. 250 some church fathers recognized that this attribution was unlikely). However, it is important to understand that tradition may be right or it may be wrong, but tradition is not Scripture. In other words, we personally may find it easy to accept the idea that tradition was correct about Mark, but if someone else decides that the work was written by someone other than Mark, we are not discussing whether Scripture is right or wrong, but whether tradition is right or wrong. Such discussions have nothing to do with the accuracy of the biblical text.

Second, the fact that some biblical books have the name of an author does not mean that the author personally wrote every word in the book. Normally ancient authors used secretaries to write their works. Sometimes we know the names of these secretaries. For example, Tertius wrote Romans (Rom 16:22) and Silas (or Silvanus) probably wrote 1 Peter (1 Pet 5:12); Jeremiah’s scribe was Baruch. In some cases these secretaries appear to have been given a lot of independent authority. That may account for stylistic changes among letters (for example, whoever wrote the Greek of 1 Peter did not create the much worse Greek of 2 Peter).

Authorship also does not mean that a work remained untouched for all time.

Presumably someone other than Moses added the account of his death to the end of Deuteronomy. There are also notes in the Pentateuch to indicate that the names of places have been updated (for example, Gen 23:2, 19; 35:19). It is possible that other parts of the documents were also updated, but it is only in place names that one finds clear indications of this, because there the later editor includes both the original name and the updated one.

Likewise, it is probable that some works in the Bible are edited works. The book of James may well have been put together from sayings and sermons of James by an unknown editor. Daniel includes both visions of Daniel and stories about him. It would not be surprising to discover that it was a long time after Daniel before the stories and the visions were brought together and put into one book. Psalms is obviously an edited collection, as is Proverbs. We do not know what shape Moses left his works in. Did someone simply have to add an ending to Deuteronomy, or was there a need to put a number of pieces together? Probably we will never know the complete story.

The point is that a work is still an author’s work even if it has been edited, revised, updated or otherwise added to. I own a commentary on James by Martin Dibelius. I

still refer to it as by Martin Dibelius although I know that Heinrich Greeven revised and edited it (and then Michael A. Williams translated it into English). Dibelius died before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, so the commentary now refers to things that Dibelius knew nothing about. Yet it is still accurate to refer to it as by Dibelius (and to put his name on the cover) because the basic work is by him.

We have also received letters from various executives with a note “signed in his (or her) absence” at the bottom after the signature. The executive in question probably told his or her secretary to reply to our letter along thus and so lines and then left the rest to be completed and mailed while they were away. It still carries the executive’s authority, even if the exact wording is that of the secretary.

Therefore, when the Bible says that a certain work is by a given individual, it need not mean that the author is always responsible for every word or even for the general style.

The author is considered responsible for the basic content.

Third, even understanding that a work might have been updated or edited at some time, can we trust the statements that Scripture (rather than tradition) makes about authorship? I am talking about those instances in which a work clearly indicates that Paul or whoever wrote it. The question is whether all of these books are basically by the people whom the Bible claims wrote them.

Scholars would divide on this question. Even evangelical scholars are not totally unified about how much of Isaiah was written by Isaiah son of Amoz or whether Paul actually wrote Ephesians. Yet it is also fair to say that a good case can be made for saying, “Yes, each of the works is basically by the person whom the text claims wrote it.” In order to argue this in detail I would have to repeat the work of R. K. Harrison in his massive Introduction to the Old Testament or Donald Guthrie in his New Testament Introduction. Naturally, other scholars have done equally thorough jobs. In a book like this I cannot repeat that work.

However, it is worthwhile asking if authorship questions are important and why.

Basically, two issues are involved. On the one hand, there is the issue of whether the Bible is accurate in what it teaches. So long as the author of Revelation was John, it does not affect the accuracy of the Bible one little bit which John the author turns out to be. All the Bible claims is that he was some John. Yet if we claim that Paul did not write Romans, it would certainly reflect on the accuracy of the Bible, for Romans clearly intends to claim that it was written by Paul of Tarsus, the apostle to the Gentiles.

Some scholars believe that pseudepigraphy (attributing one’s work to another person) was accepted in the ancient world and that it would not have been considered deception. Certainly some forms of pseudepigraphy were practiced in the ancient world, yet with some possible exceptions (which would be cases in which a person in a vision thought he or she was actually experiencing something from the point of view of another person or receiving a message from them) the evidence is that pseudepigraphy was not accepted practice. That is, the person who wrote a pseudepigraphical work normally was trying to deceive others to get an authority for his or her work that it would not otherwise have had. Also, when such letters or acts were exposed they were quickly rejected and, in some cases, the author was punished. Thus the evidence does not support the idea that an author could use the name of another and expect others in the church to understand that he or she was not trying to deceive them. It does appear

that the accuracy and nondeceptive character of the biblical books is at stake on this point.

On the other hand, there is the issue of the proper setting of a work. For example, if Paul wrote 1 and 2 Timothy, then they were written before the mid-60s (when Paul was executed). We know who the Caesar was and something of what was going on in the world at that time. We also know a lot about Paul’s history up to that point. If we argue that Paul did not write them, we have lost a definite historical context. Even when authorship does not matter from the point of view of biblical accuracy (for example, Hebrews does not mention who wrote it), we still discuss authorship, trying to determine all that we can about it because this information helps us give a date and context to the work.

In summary, we can trust what the Bible says about authorship, but we must be careful to be sure that it is saying what we believe it to be saying. If we argue that the Bible is saying more than it actually claims, then we may end up trying to defend a position that even the biblical authors would not agree with! At the same time, accurate information on authorship assists us with interpretation by giving the work a setting in history, a context which is the background of interpretation.

Can We Believe in Bible Miracles?

In the New Testament we read about numerous miracles. Did these really happen, or are they simply legends or perhaps the way ancient people described what they could not explain?

First we need to look at what is at stake in this question. Both Old Testament and New Testament belief are based on miracles. In the Old Testament the basic event is that of the exodus, including the miracles of the Passover and the parting of the Red Sea.

These were miracles of deliverance for Israel and judgment for her enemies. Without them the faith of the Old Testament has little meaning. In the New Testament the resurrection of Jesus is the basic miracle. Every author in the New Testament believed that Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified and on the third day had returned to life.

Without this miracle there is no Christian faith; as Paul points out, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). Thus in both Old and New Testaments, without miracles, biblical faith is meaningless.

The fact that miracles are at the root of biblical faith, however, does not mean that they happened. Thus we need to ask if it is possible that they did occur. Some people take a philosophical position that miracles cannot happen in that the “laws of nature” are fixed and that God, if he exists, either cannot or will not “violate” them. While this is an honestly held position, it is also outdated. The idea of firmly fixed “laws of nature”

belongs to Newtonian physics, not the world of relativity, which views laws as generalities covering observations to date. The issue for us, then, is whether there is evidence that there is a force (a spiritual force) which creates those irregularities in our observations of events that we term miracles.

The response of the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular is that there is. The basic spiritual force is that of God. He, Scripture asserts, is the only fully adequate explanation for the existence of the world. His personality is the only

adequate explanation for the existence of personality in human beings. What is more, because he is personal he has remained engaged with this world. Some of his engagement we see in the regular events of “nature” (Col 1:16–17; Heb 1:3), while at other times he reveals his presence by doing something differently. It is those events that we call miracles.

A miracle has two parts: event and explanation. The event is an unusual occurrence, often one which cannot be explained by the normally occurring forces which we know of. Sometimes the event itself is not unique, but its timing is, as is the case in the Old Testament with the parting of the Jordan River and at least some of the plagues of Egypt. At other times, as in the resurrection of the dead, the event itself is unique.

The explanation part of the miracle points out who stands behind the event and why he did it. If a sick person suddenly recovers, we might say, “Boy, that was odd. I wonder what happened?” Or we might say, “Since I’ve never seen such a thing happen, perhaps he or she was not really sick.” We might even say, “This is witchcraft, the operation of a negative spiritual power.” Yet if the event happens when a person is praying to God the Father in the name of Jesus, the context explains the event. So we correctly say, “God worked a miracle.” Thus in the New Testament we discover that the resurrection of Jesus is explained as an act of God vindicating the claims of Jesus and exalting him to God’s throne.

How do we know that such a miracle happened? It is clear that we cannot ever know for certain. On the one hand, I cannot be totally sure even of what I experience. I could be hallucinating that I am now typing this chapter on this computer keyboard. I certainly have had dreams about doing such things. Yet generally I trust (or have faith in) my senses, even though I cannot be 100 percent sure of their accuracy. On the other hand, we did not directly experience biblical miracles, although it is not unknown for Christians (including us) to have analogous experiences now, including experiences of meeting the resurrected Jesus. Still, none of us were present when the biblical events happened. Therefore we cannot believe on the basis of direct observation; we have to trust credible witnesses.

When it comes to the resurrection, we have more documents from closer to the time of the event than we have for virtually any other ancient event. The witnesses in those New Testament documents subscribe to the highest standards of truthfulness.

Furthermore, most of them died on behalf of their witness, hardly the actions of people who were lying. They claim to have had multiple personal experiences that convinced them that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead (see 1 Cor 15:1–11). None of this absolutely proves that this central miracle happened. There could have been some type of a grand illusion. Yet it makes the resurrection believable enough for it to be a credible basis for faith. We see enough evidence for us to commit ourselves to, which is something that we do in everyday life constantly when we commit ourselves to something that someone has told us.

If the central miracle of the New Testament actually happened, then we have much less of a problem with any of the other miracles. Some of those same witnesses are claiming to have observed them, or to have known others who did. After the resurrection of a dead person, a healing or even the calming of a storm appear to be relatively minor. After all, if God is showing himself in one way, it would not be surprising for him to show himself in many other ways.

Miracles in the Bible have several functions. First, they accredit the messengers God sends, whether that person be Moses or a prophet or Jesus or an apostle or an ordinary Christian. Miracles are how God gives evidence that this person who claims to be from him really is from him. He “backs up their act” with his spiritual power.

Second, miracles show the nature of God and his reign. They may work God’s justice, but more often they show his character as full of mercy and forgiveness. Jesus proclaimed that the kingdom of God had come. The people might rightly ask what that rule of God looked like. Jesus worked miracles which showed the nature of that reign.

The blind see, the lame walk, the outcasts are brought into community, and the wild forces of nature are tamed. That is what the kingdom of God is like.

Third, miracles actually do the work of the kingdom. When one reads Luke 18, he or she discovers that it is impossible for a rich person to be saved, although with God all things are possible. Then in Luke 19:1–10 Zacchaeus, a rich man, is parted from his wealth and is saved. Clearly a miracle has happened, and the kingdom of God has come even to a rich man. The same is true of the demons being driven out, for each time this happens the borders of Satan’s kingdom are driven back. Similarly, many other miracles also have this function.

So, did miracles really happen? The answer is that, yes, a historical case can be made for their happening. Furthermore, we have seen that it is important to establish that they happened. A miracle is central to Christian belief. And miracles serve important functions in certifying, explaining and doing the work of the kingdom of God.

Miracles are not simply nice stories for Sunday school. They are a demonstration of the character of God, not only in the past but also in the present.

Why Does God Seem So Angry in the Old Testament & Loving in the New?

When many peeople read the Old Testament they get the impression that God is a God of wrath and judgment, but in the New Testament they find a God of love. Why is there this difference in Scripture?

This question has bothered Christians for a number of years. In the period of the church fathers Marcion pointed out this problem and suggested that the Creator God of the Old Testament was an inferior being to the God and Father of Jesus. He then set about to remove from the New Testament any influences from this “Jewish” Creator God (for example, in Gospels like Matthew), for the Creator was evil. He ended up with a shortened version of Luke as the only Gospel we should use. The church’s response was to reject Marcion’s teaching as heresy, to list all of the books it accepted as part of the canon and to assert that all of these were inspired by the one and same God. Still, Marcion’s question remains with us.

The reality is that there is no difference between the images of God presented in the Old and New Testaments. John points this truth out when he states that “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (Jn 1:18). What John is pointing out is that what one sees in Jesus is precisely the character of the Father, the God of the Old Testament. There is no difference among them in character; to meet one of them is to meet them both. Thus Jesus is no

more loving than his Father. The Father is no more judging than Jesus. All New Testament writers see a similar continuity between the Old Testament God and the God they experience through Jesus.

There are three points that we can make to expand on this statement: (1) there is love in the Old Testament; (2) there is judgment in the New Testament; and (3) the main difference is a difference between judgment within history and judgment at the end of history.

First, there is love in the Old Testament. God does not present himself first and foremost as a God of judgment, but as a God of love. For example, look at Exodus 34:6–7:

And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”

This is God’s fundamental presentation of himself to Moses. This is who he is. Notice how he first states his compassion, grace, love, faithfulness and forgiveness. He then notes that this is not to be taken advantage of, for those who do not respond to his love will not escape. He is loving, but he is not an indulgent parent. He will bring justice.

Throughout the Old Testament God continually tells people that he chose Israel out of love, not because they were particularly deserving. When Israel rebels, he reaches out through prophets. When they continue to rebel he threatens (and then sends) judgment, but in the middle of it we find verses like Hosea 11:8, “How can I give you up?” God is anguished over the situation. On the one hand, justice demands that he act in judgment. On the other hand, his loving heart is broken over his people, and he cannot bear to see them hurting and destroyed. As he portrays in Hosea, he is the husband of an adulterous wife. What he wants to do is to gather her into his arms, but he cannot ignore her behavior. His plan is not ultimate judgment but a judgment that will turn her heart back to him so he can restore his “family.”

This is not God’s attitude toward Israel only. In Jonah 4:2 we read: He prayed to the Lord, “O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”

Jonah is unhappy about God’s grace toward Nineveh. He was apparently quite happy about announcing that in forty days Nineveh would be destroyed, but when they repent and God forgives them, he is upset. This is not a new revelation to him, for he says, “Is this not what I said?” He seems to have hoped that if he did not deliver the warning, the people of Nineveh would not repent and would be destroyed. But God made him deliver the warning so that they would repent and he could forgive them. Jonah’s complaint is, “You are too nice, too loving, too forgiving.” That is the way God is

portrayed with respect to a violent pagan nation, Assyria.

Jonah and Hosea are also clues to reading all of the judgment passages in the Old Testament. God is not in the judgment business but in the forgiveness business. Yet he cannot forgive those who will not repent. So he sends prophets to warn people about the judgment that will inevitably come, his hope being that the people will repent and he will not have to send the judgment. When his prophets are killed and rejected, he often sends more of them. It can take decades or even hundreds of years before he comes to the point when he knows that if justice is to mean anything at all, he must send judgment, even though he does not enjoy doing so. And even then he often sends with the judgment a promise of restoration. Every good parent knows that they must eventually punish an erring child, but no such parent enjoys doing it.

Second, there is judgment in the New Testament. A word count on judge or judgment in the New Testament in the NIV [NIV New International Version] comes up with 108

verses. Even more significant is the fact that Jesus is the one who warns most about judgment. He is the one who said,

If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. (Mt 5:29–30) He is the one who spoke the warnings in Matthew 7:13–29 and 24:45–25:46. Indeed, Jesus talks about judgment more than anyone else in the New Testament, especially when we realize that Revelation is “the revelation of Jesus Christ” (that is, a message from Jesus).

There are several types of judgment in the New Testament. There is self-judgment (Jn 9:39; 12:47–49), the judgment of God (Jn 8:50), judgments on individuals (Acts 12:23) and final judgment (Jn 5:22, 27). There are simple statements that people doing certain things will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor 6:9–10; Gal 5:19–21) and elaborate pictures of judgment scenes (Rev 20:11–15). The point is that all of these involve judgment and many of them involve Jesus. He is indeed just like his Father.

The New Testament preaches grace and love, but grace and love can be rejected. The New Testament also preaches final judgment. Everyone, according to the New Testament, is worthy of final judgment, but God is now offering grace to those who repent. Yet if people refuse this grace, there is one fearful fate awaiting them. Thus it becomes apparent how like the Old Testament the New Testament is. In the Old Testament God sent the prophets with solemn warnings of judgment and also revelations of the heart of God, who was even then ready to receive repentant people.

In the New Testament God sends apostles and prophets preaching the gospel, calling people to repentance in the light of the coming judgment of God. In this respect the two Testaments are in complete unity.

Third, there is a difference between the Testaments in their portrayal of judgment. In the Old Testament judgment normally happens within history. When Israel sins, they are not told that they will go to hell when they are raised from the dead, but that they will be punished by the Midianites or the Assyrians. Therefore there are many judgments in the Old Testament. In Judges the Canaanites, Moabites, Midianites,

Ammonites and Philistines are all used to punish Israel. Later on it is the Arameans, Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians. In other words, Israel “graduates” from being judged by the use of relatively local groups of people to being judged by the use of great empires. Yet in each case the judgment happens within history. It does not happen at the end of time but is already written about in our history books. Even with respect to Daniel most of what he predicts takes place in recorded history in the story of the conflicts of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties between 300 and 164 b.c.

Because of this difference from the New Testament, Old Testament judgment generally does not talk about eschatological scenes like lakes of fire and the dissolving of the heavens and the earth or the falling of stars or eternal chains. Instead it gives vivid pictures of fearful events that the people living then knew all too well, such as famine, plague, marauding armies and the like. It is unpleasant for us to read the prophets spelling out the details of such events, but they were the realities of life then (and for much of the world, also today). Furthermore, God is spelling them out so that people can repent and avoid them, not because he enjoys them.

Related to these descriptions is the fact that in the Old Testament the idea of an afterlife was only partially revealed and even that revelation comes toward the end of the Old Testament period. Most of the time the people thought of death as going down to the shadow world of Sheol where there was no praise of God and at best only a semilife. What they hoped for was to die at a ripe old age with a good name, having seen their children and grandchildren, who would carry on their name. Therefore the judgments in the Old Testament are those which speak to such hopes: warning of whole families being wiped out or of people dying when they are still young.

By the New Testament period God has revealed a lot more about the future life.

Therefore the judgments spoken of there are the judgments related to the end of history and the resurrection of the dead: eternal life or being thrown into hell, seeing all that one worked for being burned up or receiving a crown of life. All of these take place beyond history, when Christ returns, and thus when history as we have known it has come to an end.

So, does the Old Testament reveal a God of judgment and the New Testament a God of love? Emphatically no. Both of the Testaments reveal a God of love who is also a God of justice. God offers men and women his love and forgiveness, urging us to repent and escape the terrible and eternal judgments of the end of history.

Why Don’t Bible Genealogies Always Match Up?

It is often asked if the numbers of the genealogies of Genesis 5:3–32 and Genesis 11:10–32 can be used to calculate when Adam was born. The most important fact to notice is that the biblical writers never used these numbers for this purpose, although they did provide other numerical summaries. For instance, in Exodus 12:40 they note that Israel was in Egypt for 430 years, in 1 Kings 6:1 that it was 480 years from the exodus until the beginning of the construction of the temple under King Solomon, and in Judges 11:26 that it was 300 years from the entry into the land until the time of Jephthah, a judge who lived around 1100 b.c.

Therefore to add up the numbers of the ten antediluvians in Genesis 5 and the ten

postdiluvians in Genesis 11 in order to determine the date for the creation of the world and the creation of Adam and Eve is to do exactly what the text does not encourage us to do!

What, then, is the significance of these numbers that are so carefully recorded in these texts? If they are not to be added up, of what importance could their inclusion be?

First, they were given to show us that human beings were originally meant to be immortals and to live forever. If one charts the twenty life spans on a line graph, it is clear that there is a general but determined downward trend from a figure that at first bounces just short of one thousand years to a figure that approximates the life expectancy of persons living today, around seventy years. Second, the figures also show that the effects of sin and death in the human body meant that individuals became unable to have children in as elderly a state as once was possible.

Bishops Lightfoot and Usher were grossly mistaken to advocate that the human race was created on October 24, 4004 b.c., at 9:30 a.m., 45 Meridian time. The data does not allow for this conclusion! Abridgment is the general rule in biblical genealogies.

Thus, for example, Matthew 1:8 omits three names between King Joram and Ozias (Uzziah), Ahaziah (2 Kings 8:25), Joash (2 Kings 12:1) and Amaziah (2 Kings 14:1).

In Matthew 1:11 Matthew omits Jehoiakim (2 Kings 23:34). Matthew’s goal is to reduce the genealogies to a memorable three sets of fourteen individuals, for fourteen is the number of “David,” D = 4, V or Hebrew waw = 6 and the last D = 4, for a total of 14.

But even more typical of the genealogies is Matthew 1:1, where “Jesus Christ” is said to be the “son of David,” who in turn is “the son of Abraham.” David lived about 1000

b.c. and Abraham about 2000 b.c. Similar huge leaps over intervening generations are also taking place in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11. If one turns Matthew 1:1 around and puts it in the style of the prepatriarchal genealogies, it could read as follows: “And Abraham was 100 years old [at the time that he begat Isaac through whom his line continued to David], and he begat David. And David was 40 years old [an approximate date for when Solomon was born, through whom Jesus would come], and he begat Jesus Christ.” Thus the numbers of when these ancients had their firstborn function as the times when the line that was to come was given to them.

It is as if my father were one of these Very Important Persons (VIPs), and he had four sons, born when he was 100, 120, 140 and 160. Now let us suppose that it was my line, as the eldest in the family, that was the line through which Messiah was to come, and I was born when my father was 100. The Messiah would not come for another 1000 years, but it would be just as accurate, biblically speaking, to say that my father begat Messiah when he was 100.

Furthermore, there are some warnings in the biblical text that if we add up these numbers, there will be distortions and errors. Take, for example, the last one in the series of twenty VIPs: Terah. It would appear that he lived 70 years and then had triplets born to him (Gen 11:26). His total life span was 205 years (Gen 11:32).

However, something does not add up, for Abram left Haran after his father died (Gen 12:4; Acts 7:4), but he was only 75 years old at time and not 135, which he should have been had the figures been intended in a way that current usage would approve!

Hence, had we added up the numbers in this part of the genealogy, we would already be 60 years in error, for the text must have meant that Terah “began having children when he was 70 years old,” but that Abram was actually born when his father was 130

and not when he was 70. He was not the eldest son, but his name is given first because he was the most significant figure.

No one has studied this phenomenon more closely than the late William Henry Green in his April 1890 article in Bibliotheca Sacra entitled “Primeval Chronology.”1 [1 This article was reprinted in Walter C. Kaiser Jr., ed., Classical Evangelical Essays in Old Testament Interpretation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1972), pp. 13–28.] For example, Green demonstrates that the same high priestly line of Aaron appears in 1 Chronicles 6:3–14 and Ezra 7:1–15, but it has twenty-two generations and names in Chronicles, while Ezra only has sixteen names. When the two lists are placed side by side, it is clear that Ezra deliberately skipped from the eighth name to the fifteenth name, thereby abridging his list, but in a way that was legitimate within the traditions of Scripture. This is exactly what is illustrated in the lists in Matthew. In fact, Ezra 8:1–2 abridges the list even further, seemingly implying that a great-grandson and a grandson of Aaron, along with a son of David, came up with Ezra from Babylon after the captivity! Now that is abridgment! Of course, Ezra was only indicating the most important persons for the sake of this shorter list.

In our discussion of some of these genealogies and lineages in the corpus of this work, further examples will be found. However, it must be acknowledged that the phenomenon is a major one, and interpreters will disregard it to the damage of their own understanding of the text.

Aren’t Many Old Testament Numbers Wrong?

Among the particularly hard sayings of the Bible are those portions that record large numbers, such as those in census lists in the early periods of Israel’s history or in numbers coming from the battles of that nation in her latter years.

The transmission of numbers in ancient documents was especially susceptible to textual error due to the fact that the systems were so diverse and with little standardization between cultures or periods of history in the same nation or culture.

In the Old Testament documents now available to us, all the numbers are spelled out phonetically. This is not to say, however, that a more direct numeral system or cipher notation was not also in use originally for at least some of these numbers. While no biblical texts with such a system have been found, mason’s marks and examples of what may well be simple tallies have been attested in excavations in Israel. The only numbers that we have found in epigraphical materials uncovered by the archaeologists are those that appear on the earliest inscriptions known as the Gezer Calendar, the Moabite Stone, the Ostraca from Samaria and the Siloam Inscription of Hezekiah.

There the numbers are either very small in magnitude, from 1 through 3, or they are written out phonetically.

Some numbers should never have been introduced into the discussion whatsoever, for they come from modern additions not found in the text themselves. Thus, one thinks first of all of the 1,656 years that allegedly elapsed from the creation to the flood according to the Hebrew manuscripts, while the Greek Septuagint has 2,242 years and the Samaritan texts have 1,307 years.

The fact that the Samaritan text has deleted one hundred years from Jared and

Methuselah, and one hundred plus another twenty-nine years from Lamech’s age, at the time of the birth of their firstborn, is consistent enough to signal perhaps a transcriptional problem in copying from one text to another. Meanwhile, the Septuagint adds another one hundred years to the ages of Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel and Enoch at the birth of their firstborn, while with Lamech they add only six more years. In giving the tally for the rest of the lives of these same six antediluvians, they deduct the same one hundred years. The Hebrew and Greek texts agree on the figures for total years lived (if one were to do what the text never does, that is, add them up), except for a four-year difference in the life of Lamech. The Samaritan text, however, only gives a total of 720 years to Methuselah, while the Hebrew text would add up to 969 years total. The differences between the three texts are so regular that the mistakes are more easily explained if the copyist was working from some direct numeral cipher system that used a system of marks rather than phonetically spelling out these numbers.

Similar problems occur elsewhere. For example, some texts say that the number of persons that were on board with Paul when he was shipwrecked was 276, but a few manuscripts read 76. Likewise, the famous 666 number of Revelation 13:18 is found in a few manuscripts as 616. In the Old Testament the death of 50,070 male inhabitants of Beth-shemesh for irreverent treatment of the ark of God (1 Sam 6:19) is better put, as some manuscripts have it, at 70, since the town hardly even came close to having 50,000 inhabitants at this time.

Not all the large numbers in the Bible are as easily handled as the ones just surveyed.

The number of warriors in Israel twenty years and older would seem to imply that the population that came out of Egypt and wandered in the wilderness for forty years exceeded two million people. This has given rise to a number of attempts to reduce this number and to serve as a model for treating similar claims in the Bible. One of the most famous is to take the Hebrew word <elep÷, usually translated “thousand,” and to translate it instead as “family,” “clan” or “tent-group.”1 [1 The first one to have suggested this is Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie, Egypt and Israel (London: SPCK, 1911), p. 42. It was picked up and recycled by G. E. Mendenhall, “The Census Lists of Numbers 1 and 26,” Journal of Biblical Literature 77 (1958): 52–66.] If the word were so rendered in Numbers 1 and Numbers 26, it would yield a total of only 5,000 or 6,000 men of fighting age, instead of 603,550.

It is true, of course, that the word can be used that way, for Judges 6:15 reads, “my clan ( <elep÷) is the weakest in Manasseh.” But the problem with this attempted reduction is that it only creates more problems elsewhere in the text. For example, in Exodus 38:25–26, where a half shekel was to be given for each of the 603,550

warriors above the age of twenty years old, the amount given was 100 talents and 1,775 shekels. There are 3,000 shekels to a talent, therefore 3,000 times 100 equals 300,000, plus 1,775 equals 301,775. Given the fact that each male over twenty was to be valued at a half shekel, 301,775 times 2 equals 603,550, a number matching that of Numbers 1:46, or similar to the number at the end of the march in Numbers 26:51

(601,730 men). Therefore, if the problem is solved at one end as “family units,” it is only made worse elsewhere—in this case in the list of materials for the tabernacle; therefore, 603,550 warriors is the correct number and the nation probably numbered around two million.

Some of the most notorious discrepancies in biblical numbers are to be found in the postexilic era, particularly in Chronicles. Most nonevangelical interpreters feel the Chronicler’s numbers are impossibly high. It is this fact, more than any other, that has

made the Chronicler’s work so suspect in the eyes of many modern exegetes. There are some 629 specific numbers that occur in 1 and 2 Chronicles.2 [2 The most recent work on the numbers of these passages from a conservative side was by J. Barton Payne, “The Validity of the Numbers in Chronicles,”

Bibliotheca Sacra 136 (1979): 109–28, 206–20; Payne, “The Validity of the Numbers in Chronicles,” Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin New Series 11 (1978): 5–58.]

A typical example would be the number of Jehoshaphat’s army. Second Chronicles 17:14–18 details the fighting personnel in five groups of 300,000, 280,000, 200,000, 200,000 and 180,000, which add up to give an army of 1,160,000 men. This many scholars thought to be excessive. But there are no other comparative figures with which to judge the authenticity of this number except what moderns regard as

“excessive.”

More serious are those texts where we do have parallel figures. Some noteworthy examples include: 1 Chronicles 19:18 has “7,000 chariots” whereas 2 Samuel 10:18

has “700”; 1 Kings 4:26 has “40,000 stalls,” but 2 Chronicles 9:25 has “4,000”; 2

Kings 24:8 declares “Jehoiachin was eighteen years old,” while 2 Chronicles 36:9

assures us “Jehoiachin was eight years old.”3 [3 Note the important study by John W. Wenham, “Large Numbers in the Old Testament,” Tyndale Bulletin 18 (1967): 19–53.] It is clear in each of these examples that there is a transcriptional error that represents a primitive error in one or more of the families of manuscripts of the Hebrew texts.

The conclusion of J. Barton Payne is that “in the eleven cases of disagreement over numbers that have arisen between the MTs of Chronicles and of Samuel/Kings because of copyists’ errors, Chronicles is found to be correct in five cases, incorrect in five, and one remains uncertain.”4 [4 J. Barton Payne, “1, 2 Chronicles,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary, vol. 4, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1988), p. 311. Note especially his Appendix A on p. 561, “Numbers in Chronicles That Disagree with Their Old Testament Parallels,” and Appendix B on p. 562, “Numbers over 1,000 Unique to Chronicles.” See also Payne, “Validity in Numbers,” Bibliotheca Sacra, p. 126. Payne opined that out of the 629 numbers in 1 and 2 Chronicles, only the figures in 1 Chronicles 22:14 and 29:4, 7, listing the precious metals offered for Solomon’s temple, might one need to resort to an explanation of special providence.]

One more outstanding example of some unreconciled numbers in parallel lists can be seen in Nehemiah 7 and Ezra 2.5 [5 See H. L. Allrik, “The Lists of Zerubbabel (Nehemiah 7 and Ezra 2) and the Hebrew Numerical Notation,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 136 (1954): 21–27.] Thirty-three family units appear in both lists with 153 numbers, 29 of which are not the same in Ezra and Nehemiah. Once again, it may be said that if a cipher notation was used with something like vertical strokes for units, horizontal strokes for tens, and stylized mems (the initial letter in the Hebrew word meµ<ah—“hundred”) for hundreds, then the scribe miscopied a single stroke. Most of the differences, on this supposition, would involve a single stroke.

There is also the real possibility that the different circumstances under which the count was taken affected the numbers. Ezra’s list was made up when the people were assembling in Babylon, while Nehemiah’s was drawn up in Judea after the walls of Jerusalem had been built. Thus many could have changed their minds while others may have died in the meantime. In the end the matter is as Allrik stated it: “while at first glance these textual-numerical differences may seem detrimental, actually they greatly enhance the value of the lists, as they bring out much of their real nature and age.”6 [6

Ibid, p. 27.]

Do the Dates of the Old Testament Kings Fit Secular History?

If chronology, as they say, is the backbone of history, it would seem that a major attempt ought to be made to reconcile the plethora of chronological notations about the kings of Israel and Judah in the Bible. The astonishing fact is that the book of Kings is filled with chronological material concerning the Hebrew kings: when their reigns began, when a king came to the throne in the parallel kingdom of Israel or Judah, the total number of years that each king reigned and an occasional correlation of events in biblical history with those in the other nations of the ancient Near East.

But the tangle of dates and systems is so complex that the remark attributed to Jerome in the fourth century appears correct:

Read all the books of the Old Testament, and you will find such discord as to the number of the years of the kings of Judah and Israel, that to attempt to clear up this question will appear rather the occupation of a man of leisure than of a scholar.1 [1 As cited by Edwin R. Thiele, A Chronology of the Hebrew Kings (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1977), p. 12. No citation given there as to its source.]

Modern scholars are even more vehement in their denunciations of unwieldy material.

But one such scholar who gave most of his life to untangle this Gordian knot was Edwin R. Thiele. He was finally able to make sense out of all the data and to show it all was accurate, as a part of his doctoral program at the University of Chicago.

Despite the fact that neither Thiele’s system nor anyone else’s has achieved anything approaching universal acceptance, the evidence Thiele has amassed has never been completely refuted. The main complaint is only that he has taken the biblical data too seriously and has harmonized it perfectly. However, the word harmonized is not seen as a positive concept, but a negative one. Nevertheless, I think his case has stood now for well over forty years and will follow here, though there are numerous other efforts to supply other solutions that do not take all the biblical data as seriously as did Thiele.

Thiele began by first establishing some basic dates. Most important in accomplishing this first step was the archaeological find of the Assyrian eponym list that covered every year in order from 892 to 648 b.c. These lists named a “man of the year” as the eponym, but they often noted principle events that took place as well.

For the year of Bur-Sagale, governor of Guzana, it noted that there was a “revolt in the city of Assur.” In the month of Simanu an eclipse of the sun took place. Now this event we can locate on our Julian calendar as June 15, 763 b.c. by astronomical computation. Since we can establish every year with an absolute date on either side of this solar eclipse on June 15, 763 b.c., in the eponym list, it is significant that in the eponymy of Daian-Assur, 853 b.c., the sixth year of Shalmaneser II, the battle of Qarqar was fought, in which the Israelite king Ahab opposed him. Twelve years later, in the eponymy of Adad-rimani, 841 b.c., Shalmaneser received tribute from a king

“Ia-a-u,” a ruler of Israel. This could be none other than King Jehu.

Now it so happens that there were twelve years between the death of King Ahab and the accession of King Jehu (two official years, but one actual for King Ahaziah, 1

Kings 22:51) and twelve official, but eleven actual, years for Joram, 2 Kings 3:1). Thus 853 is the year of Ahab’s death and 841 is the year for Jehu’s accession. This gives us a toehold on linking Israel’s and Judah’s history with absolute time and world events.

Another such linkage is to be found in the Assyrian chronology that puts the third campaign of Sennacherib in 701 b.c., when he came against Hezekiah. The Assyrian

sources put 152 years from the sixth year of Shalmaneser III’s battle against Ahab at Qarqar in 853 b.c. But according to the reconstructed history of the Hebrews, it was also 152 years from the death of Ahab to the fourteenth year of Hezekiah, 701 b.c.

Thus there is a second main tie-in with world history and chronology.

As Thiele worked with these two main linkages with world history, he noted three important chronological procedures in ancient Israel and Judah. The first involved the distinctions in the calendar years of Judah and Israel: Israel began its year from the month of Nisan in the spring, while Judah reckoned its year as beginning in Tishri in the fall. This meant that in terms of an absolute January calendar year, a Nisan year began in the spring and extended into the next spring, thus bridging parts of two of our calendar years. The same would be true of a Tishri year lapsing over into two falls. But even more complicated is the fact that a regnal year in Israel would also overlap two regnal years in Judah.

A second feature was the use of accession year and nonaccession year reckoning. Ever since the division of the country after Solomon’s day, the northern and southern kingdoms mostly used the opposite method of counting up regnal years that their neighbor was using. Thus, on the nonaccession year principle, the first year counted as year number one, while the accession year principle did not count regnal year one until the month starting the calendar (Nisan or Tishri) was passed and one year after that was completed. Judah used the accession year principle from Rehoboam until Jehoshaphat, while Israel used the nonaccession year principle from Jeroboam to Ahab.

However, the relations between the two nations thawed during the days of Ahab and Jehoshaphat, as it was sealed with the marriage of Athaliah, daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, to prince Jehoram, son of Jehoshaphat. Clearly, as 2 Kings 8:18 notices, Jehoram “walked in the way of the kings of Israel, as the house of Ahab had done, for he married a daughter of Ahab.” Jehoram and Athaliah introduced the nonaccession year system into Judah, which remained until the snub of King Jehoash of Israel to King Amaziah of Judah over the proposal of marriage of the royal daughter to Amaziah’s son (2 Kings 14:8–10). However, prior to this rupture in diplomatic relations, both nations had already resorted to the accession year principle, which for some reason they continued to maintain to the end of their respective histories.

A third principle Thiele sets forth was that each nation used its own system in reckoning the years of a ruler in the other nation. Thus Rehoboam of Judah had a seventeen-year reign according to Judah’s accession year system, but according to Israel’s nonaccession year principle it was eighteen years. These three basic principles of chronological reckoning in the two nations of Israel and Judah are foundational to grasping the meaning of the numbers used to describe the reigns of the kings.

The date Thiele projected for the division of the kingdom after the death of Solomon was 931/930 b.c. This date, however, is generally rejected by the larger academic community. The fashion had been (until just a decade or two ago) to accept William Foxwell Albright’s date of 922 b.c., but his date involved an almost outright rejection of some of the biblical data. Albright argued that in view of the data found in 2

Chronicles 15:19 and 2 Chronicles 16:1, it was necessary to “reduce the reign of Rehoboam by at least eight, probably nine years”2 [2 William Foxwell Albright, “The Chronology of the Divided Monarchy of Israel,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 100 (December 1945): 20, note 14.] from that required by the biblical text. Such a reduction is not necessary when the details are correctly understood, as Thiele sorted them out. More recently, the figure of 927/926

b.c. has been proposed as the first regnal year of Rehoboam in Judah and Jeroboam I

in the northern ten tribes of Israel by John Hayes and Paul Hooker.3 [3 John H. Hayes and Paul K. Hooker, A New Chronology for the Kings of Israel and Judah and Its Implications for Biblical History and Literature (Atlanta: John Knox, 1988), p. 18.] This date is arrived at by denying all three principles of Thiele and readjusting the biblical dates when they are not felt to be accurate for one reason or another.

But Thiele’s date of 931/930 b.c. can be demonstrated to be accurate. One need only consult the following diagram to demonstrate this claim.

Judah

Israel

Official Years

Actual Years

Rehoboam

Jeroboam

Abijam

Nadab

Asa

Baasha

Jehoshaphat

Elah

Omri

Ahab

Ahaziah

This chart from Thiele demonstrates two important points: (1) the eighty-six years of Israel on the nonaccession year reckoning is only seventy-nine actual calendar years, fully in accord with Judah’s accession year system; and (2) from Ahab’s death in 853

b.c., as established from the astronomical observations in the eponym lists and the twelve years separating Jehu from Ahab, to the beginning of the divided monarchy was 78 years. Therefore, 78 plus 853 equals 931/930 b.c. for the division of the kingdom.

During the time of the Hebrew kingdoms there were nine overlapping reigns or coregencies. This fact makes the fourth important principle that must be recognized and factored in when using the numbers of the reigns and coregencies of the kings of Israel and Judah. The first overlapping reign was that of Tibni and Omri in Israel. First Kings 16:21 reads, “Then the people of Israel were split into two factions [or, parts]; half supported Tibni son of Ginath for [or, to make him] king, and the other half supported Omri.” Accordingly, there were three kingdoms at this time: two in the north under Tibni and Omri and one in the south, Judah.

The same three-kingdom phenomenon happened later on, for Menahem ruled one kingdom in the north and Pekah ruled the other, probably from Gilead. Hosea 5:5

witnessed to this fact as it warned, “Therefore Israel and Ephraim [they] will stumble

[or, fall] in their iniquity, Judah also will stumble [or, fall] with them” (my own translation, emphasis added). Note the three Hebrew plurals, for again there were two kingdoms in the north.

A third overlapping involved a coregency of twelve years between Jehoash and Jeroboam II in Israel according to 2 Kings 13:10 and 2 Kings 14:23. Thus the sixteen years of Jehoash and the forty-one years of Jeroboam II would add up to fifty-seven, but with the coregency, it was actually only forty-five years.

In another coregency, twenty-four years of Azariah’s fifty-two years overlapped with

the twenty-nine years of Amaziah. Again, this reduced the total from eighty-one years to fifty-seven actual years.

A fifth overlapping reign came in the coregency of Jotham and Azariah, as mentioned in 2 Kings 15:5. Azariah became a leper, so his son governed the land in his stead.

Likewise a sixth overlap took place between Ahaz and Jotham in Judah, for the attack of Pekah and Rezin were not solely against Ahaz (2 Kings 16:5–9), but it is also against Jotham as well (2 Kings 15:37).

King Jehoram was coregent with his father Jehoshaphat, as alluded to in 2 Kings 8:16:

“In the fifth year of Joram son of Ahab king of Israel, when Jehoshaphat was king of Judah, Jehoram son of Jehoshaphat began his reign as king of Judah.” Further confirmation comes from the synchronism given in 2 Kings 3:1, where Joram began in

“the eighteenth year of Jehoshaphat king of Judah,” but according to 2 Kings 1:17, he began “in the second year of Jehoram son of Jehoshaphat.” Thus, the eighteenth year of Jehoshaphat was the second year of Jehoram’s coregency. That would mean that Jehoram became coregent with his father in the seventeenth year of his father’s reign, the year in which, it turns out, Judah joined forces with Israel against Syria. Prudence dictated that Jehoshaphat place Jehoram on the throne prior to his undertaking this joint venture—a venture in which Ahab of Israel lost his life (1 Kings 22:29–37), and Jehoshaphat narrowly escaped losing his own life.

The eighth coregency was between Jehoshaphat and his elderly father Asa. In the thirty-ninth year of Asa’s reign, he became seriously ill with a disease in his feet. This led him, at the close of his forty-one-year reign, to make Jehoshaphat regent with him to help govern the people (2 Chron 16:12).

The final coregency was between Manasseh and Hezekiah. Here again illness was the factor (2 Kings 20:1, 6). Knowing that he, Hezekiah, had only fifteen years to live, it is only to be expected that he would place his son Manasseh on the throne early enough to train him in the ways of government.

Such is the nature of dual dating in reckoning the reigns, coregencies and synchronisms of the kings of Israel

Does Archaeology Support Bible History?

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Biblical Archaeology Review, the editors invited Michael D. Coogan to list the “10 Great Finds” or discoveries from the years of modern archaeological exploration in the ancient Near East.1 [1 Michael D. Coogan, “10 Great Finds,” Biblical Archaeology Review 21, no. 3 (1995): 36–47.] His selections included: (1) the Gilgamesh Epic tablet XI from Nineveh, a parallel with the biblical flood story; (2) the Beni Hasan mural from nineteenth-century Egypt, showing 37 Asiatics coming to trade and depicting what the patriarchs may have looked like; (3) the Gezer High Place near Tel Aviv from 1600 b.c.; (4) the carved ivory knife handle from Megiddo in the thirteenth or twelfth century b.c.; (5) the fertility goddess pendant from Ras Shamra, Syria, from the fourteenth or twelfth century b.c.; (6) the Gibeon Pool, six miles north of Jerusalem, from the eleventh century b.c., where David’s forces probably fought under Joab against the forces of Saul’s son Ishbosheth under Abner (2 Sam 2:12–17); (7) the Beersheba Altar in southern Israel from the eighth century b.c.; (8) the seventh-century

b.c. silver scroll amulet from Ketef Hinnom, near Jerusalem, with the name Yahweh on it; (9) Masada on the southwestern shore of the Dead Sea from the second century b.c.; and (10) the sixth-century b.c. mosaic map from Madaba, Jordan. Each of these was indeed a sensational find, illustrating some aspect of the biblical text.

The harvest from archaeological discoveries has truly been amazing. Among some of the most startling finds that have been uncovered in recent years are (1) the 1993

discovery by Avraham Biran of an Aramaic inscription from Tel Dan of a mid-ninth-century mention of the “House of David”; (2) the inscription from Aphrodisias in southwestern Turkey published in 1987, mentioning for the first time indirect evidence for Luke’s references to “God-fearers”; (3) the first external evidence for Pontius Pilate, discovered at Caesarea in 1961; (4) a plaster text at Deir Alla in Jordan from the mid-eighth century, recording a vision of Balaam, son of Beor, apparently the same Balaam of Numbers 22–24; (5) the 1990 discovery of twelve ossuaries, or bone chests, including two bearing the name of “Joseph, son of Caiaphas,”2 [2 See Zvi Greenhut, “Burial Cave of the Caiphas Family,” Biblical Archaeology Review 18, no. 5 (1992): 28–36, 76; and Ronny Reich, “Caiphas Name Inscribed on Bone Boxes,” Biblical Archaeology Review 18, no. 5 (1992): 38–44, 76.] probably the same high priest who tried Jesus; and (6) the 1995 location of Bethsaida on the northeastern shores of Galilee from where several of Jesus’ disciples came. The list could go on and on.

But not all of the finds have occasioned an advance in our understanding of the biblical world and the Bible. Some have presented us with enormous problems of interpretation and have resulted in hotly contested opposing positions. The most outstanding of these dilemmas is that neither the Egyptian nor the Israelite data have been able to settle the issue of the date, route and nature of the exodus. This is most disappointing, for it covers almost everything from the exodus from Egypt and the wilderness wanderings to the conquest and settlement of Canaan. Today the field is in more disarray than ever before on these questions.

For example, several issues have prevented scholars from accepting the traditional biblical evidence of a 1450 exodus and a 1410 b.c. entry into the land. Since the middle of this century, there has been a tendency to favor what has become known as the Generally Accepted Date (GAD) of 1230–1220 b.c. for entry into the land of Canaan.

But even that is breaking down now as six of the sites that the Bible says were conquered by the Israelites (namely, Jericho, Ai, Gibeon, Hebron, Hormah/Zephath and Arad) have yielded no occupation evidence from the thirteenth century. The same story could be repeated for the cities of Debir and Lachish.

This poor “fit” between the archaeological evidence and the biblical tradition of the conquest has led scholars, who had down-dated the entry into the land already by nearly 200 years from the date that the biblical evidence implied of 1410 b.c. to the revised date of 1230 or 1220 b.c., to look for different solutions. Several new theories have now gained considerable support. Among them are the peaceful infiltration theory (a view long favored by German scholars) or the more recent peasant revolt theory of George Mendenhall and Norman K. Gottwald. Both of these theories drop the necessity of a conq uest altogether and substitute for it instead a revolt of local peasants against urban centers or a peaceful takeover.

But 1 Kings 6:1 claimed that the exodus was 480 years before Solomon began to build the temple in 967 b.c., which would again place it in 1447 b.c. Judges 11:26 also claimed that the Israelites had been settled for 300 years prior to Jephthah’s day, who lived about 1100 b.c., again yielding approximately 1400 b.c. for the entry into the

land.

Recently John J. Bimson and David Livingston have offered major strides forward in solving the archaeological problems and in harmonizing these results with the Bible.3 [3

John J. Bimson and David Livingston, “Redating the Exodus,” Biblical Archaeology Review 13, no. 5 (1987): 40–53, 66–68.]

They accomplish this mainly by moving the dates for the end of the Middle Bronze down 100 years or so from 1550 b.c. to around 1420 b.c. When this shift is made, there is almost a perfect correlation between the archaeological evidence and the biblical account of the conquest of Canaan. It will be interesting to watch what will happen on this issue in the future.

There are other examples of a present incongruity between archaeology and the Bible.

One case is that of Genesis 14. If ever there was a chapter that promised to link the patriarchs with the outside world of that day, it is Genesis 14. Alas, we have not been able to identify with certainty any one of the four kings from Mesopotamia. Some think that “Arioch king of Ellasar” (Gen 14:1) might be the Arriyuk mentioned in the eighteenth-century Mari tablets, but that too is not certain. Years ago some thought Hammurabi (allegedly the Amraphel of Gen 14:1) was one of the four, but that proved to be incorrect both on philological grounds and the grounds that Hammurabi came much later in time (c. 1792–1750 b.c.) than the setting given in Genesis 14.

In Genesis 14:13 there is the first occurrence of an ethnic name in the Bible, “Abram the Hebrew.” In the Mari tablets and in the Tell el-Amarna letters of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries b.c., there is frequent mention of a mysterious ethnic group of people who at times also served as mercenaries called the Hapiru, Habiru, Hapiri or Apirim—all variants on what might be a group of people who were associated in one way or another with the Hebrews. Etymologically, the name Hebrew comes from the name Eber, one of Shem’s descendants. Still, it is thought that the Hebrews may have been one group that made up the Hapiru.

The reference to the “trained men” in Genesis 14:14 is a technical term that is a loan word from Egyptian texts dating about 2000 b.c. for “retainers” of Palestinian chieftains.

Finally the title for God found in Genesis 14:19, “God Most High,” <eµ->elyoÆn,

“Creator of heaven and earth,” occurs in a Phoenician inscription found in Karatepe, dating about the eighth century b.c. Thus, even though we have not found the main characters in any of the external epigraphic materials from archaeology, there are already a number of other points in the chapter that prompt us to continue to look for the evidence that this chapter is an authentic report of actual events.

Scholars have tended to become extremely skeptical, as we have already illustrated in the exodus and conquest debates, about almost all events prior to the days of Omri and Ahab in the middle of the ninth century b.c., when it is felt that the history of Israel, in the technical sense, actually begins. Thus even such figures as David and Solomon are thought by some to be Persian time creations retrojected back onto the eleven and tenth centuries in order to glorify Israel. But the recent find of an inscription from Tel Dan reading “House of David” may have assuaged some of this skepticism and given promise of more evidence to come.

Another sort of archaeological evidence from the Near East is The Instruction of Amen-em-opet, which many believe bears a strong resemblance to Proverbs 22:17–

24:22. Papyrus 10474 in the British Museum, or The Instruction of Amen-em-opet,

consists of thirty somewhat brief chapters and is of uncertain date, though usually assigned somewhere between the tenth and sixth centuries b.c.

What is most startling about this connection with the Bible is that Proverbs 22:20–21

reads, “Have I not written thirty sayings for you, … so that you may give sound answers to him who sent you?” The parallel to these two verses is found in the Egyptian document at xxvi.15, “See thou these thirty chapters: They entertain; they instruct … to know how to return an answer to him who said it.” The similarity is striking. There are several other close, but not exact, parallels to this short section in the book of Proverbs.

Biblical scholars differ over whether there is a direct or indirect literary dependence of Proverbs on Egyptian wisdom. Since the dating is lower for the Egyptian proverbs than those traditionally assigned as coming from Solomon (971–931 b.c.), there is just as strong a question as to whether there is a direct or indirect dependence of The Instruction of Amen-em-opet on Proverbs. Even if some kind of dependence could be proved, the book of Proverbs remains free of all allusions and senses that are distinctive to the cultural, political and religious environment of Egypt. It would only be an example of common grace of the created order in which all persons are made in the image of God and therefore reflect his truth in bits and pieces all over the world.

Archaeology will continue to produce many exciting moments since it has been estimated that less than one percent of the available material on the tells of Israel have been excavated, not to mention those in the rest of the ancient Near East. Moreover, there are still great quantities of tablets and manuscripts in the basements of many universities that have conducted excavations over the years that still need decipherment and publication. In that sense, the future for this discipline could hardly be brighter.

When the Prophets Say, “The Word of the Lord Came to Me,”

What Do They Mean?

One of the most common introductory sets of words in the prophets is the formula

“thus says Yahweh/the Lord.” Obviously, what was intended by these messengers of God was to indicate that it was not really the prophet who was speaking, but Yahweh.

It was stated explicitly that Yahweh was speaking “through” the prophet (Is 20:3; Jer 37:2; 50:1; Hag 1:1, 3; 2:1; Zech 7:7; Mal 1:1).

The content of some prophetic oracles was so weighted with negative words of judgment at times that it was known as a masŒsŒaµ< , “a burden” (for example, Jer 23:33; Zech 9:1; 12:1; Mal 1:1). Modern translations tend to translate this word as “an oracle,” but the heavy, somber, burdensome aspect of this word would seem to demand otherwise.1 [1 See further evidence for this assertion in Walter C. Kaiser Jr., “MasŒsŒaÆ< ,” in Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, ed. R. Laird Harris, Gleason Archer Jr. and Bruce Waltke (Chicago: Moody, 1980), pp. 601–22.]

Thus the prophets brought words of comfort, encouragement and judgment.

It was said that the word of the Lord “came” to the prophets. By saying this, the stress was on the action coming from the prompting divine source and not from the prophet

who was the recipient. In that setting, Yahweh was said to speak through the prophets.

The characteristic technical formula of the prophets that appeared over and over again was nƒ<um Yahweh, “the utterance of the Lord,” or simply, as a frequently repeated refrain, “says Yahweh.”

Such formulas emphasized the importance and the reliability of what the prophet had just said or was about to say. The chief mission of the prophets was to carry Yahweh’s words to the people of Israel and to the nations at large. They had a charge to keep: it was simply that they were to speak God’s word. Even when the prophets received nothing but scorn for their efforts, as Jeremiah frequently experienced (Jer 20:8), they were, nevertheless, to carry on with an indefatigable spirit.

Jeremiah, for example, knew that the word spoken to him was veritably “the voice ( qoÆl) of the Lord (Yahweh)” (Jer 38:20 RSV [RSV Revised Standard Version] ).

The people also understood it to be the same, for when they responded to what the prophet had said, they obeyed “the voice of the Lord (Yahweh)” their God (Jer 42:6

RSV [RSV Revised Standard Version] ). Thus the refrain rang out throughout Scripture, from the time of the exodus until the last prophet, “Listen to my voice,” said the Lord through his prophets (Jer 11:7; Hag 1:12). Thus there was no essential difference between Yahweh’s word as heard through the prophet and Yahweh’s own voice.

Even more metaphorical was the expression that “the mouth” of Yahweh had spoken what the prophet just said (Ezek 3:17). Thus the true prophet said what the mouth of the Lord directed him to say, but the false prophet pronounced what came from his own heart, rather than what came from the mouth of the Lord (Jer 23:16).

When a king wanted to know “a word from the Lord,” he sent to the prophet to ask him to inquire on his behalf, “Is there any word from the Lord?” (Jer 37:17). It was like asking it from Yahweh’s own “mouth” (Is 30:2). When one asked for an oracle from God, one asked, “What has the Lord answered?” or, “What has the Lord spoken?” (Jer 23:35, 37). That is how intimately connected the prophet’s word was with the very heart and mind of God.

God would “put [his] words in [the] mouth [of the prophet]” (Jer 1:9, Ezek 3:17), and those words would, at times, be like “a fire and these people the wood it consumes”

(Jer 5:14). Those words from God were so certain that they would “overtake” those who thought that they were outside the pale of their effectiveness (Deut 28:15, 45; Zech 1:4–6). It was as if the words themselves were like policemen in their cruisers, with a blinking light on top of them, pulling the law breaker over to the curb for violating the word of God.

The relation between Yahweh and the authors of the divine word is very clearly illustrated in the relation between God, Moses and Aaron (Ex 4:15–16). Moses would be instructed by God what he was to say to Aaron, and Aaron would be his prophet, who would speak the same words to Pharaoh. Therefore, what Aaron is to Moses here, every prophet was in relation to Yahweh. The analogy could not be any clearer or the connection any more direct.

God used many means to communicate with his prophets. There was God’s “mouth,”

his “voice,” his “vision,” his “dream” and his “appearance,” among a host of other means of communicating, that were used to give the message to individual prophets at

one time or another.

It is often asked if the prophets became unconscious and wrote or spoke like automatons, as if in a trance or on drugs. There is no evidence whatsoever for that suggestion, for the prophets were never so fully alert as they were when they were receiving revelation. When they did not understand, they would say so, whether the revelation came in a dream or in a word. Daniel and Zechariah often asked for an interpretation if they did not understand the vision or dream given to them. This would then be followed with another divine word or a word from an interpreting angel. God wanted his prophets to understand what they wrote and spoke, for after all, this was supposed to be a “revelation,” a “disclosure,” a “making bare or naked” what God wanted to say (1 Pet 1:10–12). The only things the prophets did not understand were

“the time” and “the circumstances” surrounding the time. But they did know that they were speaking of the Messiah, his sufferings, his return in glory, the order of the previous two affirmations, and that their words were not simply for their own day, but for the days when Peter was speaking to the church as well!

But did they hear an audible voice? some will ask. Apparently they did at times, for was not the baptism of Jesus accompanied by just such a phenomenon when the Holy Spirit came upon him? Was there not a voice from heaven that said, “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!”? And Paul too heard a voice when he was converted as he was on the road to capture more Christians, even though those around him said it merely thundered. So we can assume that the same audible voice may at times have been the experience of the prophets.

It is curious that the prophets not only are said to have heard the word of God, but they often say they saw it as well. The prophetic revelations are treated as visions even when nothing is “seen” in our sense of the word. Thus Amos tells us about the

“words” he “saw” (Amos 1:1). Likewise, Isaiah tells us in his second chapter how he saw the word of God on the mountain of the Lord. It is probably for this reason that the prophets were at first called “seers” (1 Sam 9:9) before they were given the name of “prophets” ( nƒbâéÆ<éÆm).

But 1 Corinthians 2:13 is the most definitive statement that we have on the nature of inspiration and how it took place on most occasions. Paul argued there that just as no one knows the thoughts of a person except that person, so no one knows the thoughts of God except the Holy Spirit. Now it is this same Holy Spirit who takes the inner thinking of God and makes it known to his prophets. He does this by “expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.” Thus, it is not a mechanical symbiosis between the divine and the human, but instead a living assimilation between the skills and personality of the writers and the mind of God takes place. Accordingly, all that has gone into the preparation of that writer, the vocabulary, the metaphors of life, the occupation entered prior to the call of God, all play a real part in the “teaching”

experience of preparing the speakers for their roles as prophets.

What, then, was the process of this communication from God and the actual writing of Scripture? The best description of this process is to be found in Jeremiah 36. There Jeremiah informs us that he was in the habit of dictating “all the words the Lord had spoken to him” to his secretary, Baruch (v. 4). Baruch would then write them down on a scroll. The fact that less than a century later, when Daniel was reading “the Scriptures, according to the word of the Lord given to Jeremiah the prophet,”

Jeremiah’s prophecies were already being read by those as far away as in Babylon and

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