 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heiser's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 96, our 11th Q&A. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey, Mike, how you doing this week? Oh, good. But it was a brutal week. Let me tell you, just double grading whammy, but it's always this particular week in the eight-week sequence that kind of works this way. So on the one hand, I did nothing productive that I care about, but I'm here. So this will make it possible to avoid a total loss during the week. Well, I'm glad you're here because if you weren't, that would leave me to answer these questions. And I'm not sure what would happen on that show. Well, that might be entertaining. That would be entertaining. It wouldn't be right. It'd be entertaining. Yeah. But the last show with David Burnett was good. We're getting good feedback from that one. And I just wanted to let everyone know that I put a link on the show page to David's PayPal. So if anybody wants to help support him with his endeavors and his graduate payments and anything, you can go over to NakedBiblePodcast.com, go to the episode page, episode 95. And you'll see a link for David. So if you'd like to contribute and help David out, please do so. Yeah, it's a long way away. You know, the conference is in November, but they're expensive, you know. And I know his circumstances. He doesn't have anybody like a school paying for it. So anything would be helpful. I know he's received some donations already. So much appreciated. And feel free to go over there and help him out. Mike, also I want to mention all about God.com. They're going to help us out here with the Fern and Audrey and some other things as far as helping get the campaign funded. And I'll put a link to that as well on this one. This episode page, episode 96, and that's all about God.com. And Mike, won't you tell us a little bit about them? Yeah, the CEO behind all about God.com has offered to help improve some web traffic for the GoFundMe campaign for Fern and Audrey. And part of that process was we had to come up with a one page. I can't remember how many words it is. It's probably about 1500 words. Description of the kind of thing that they deal with. So, you know, what is ritual abuse? You know, what is, you know, satanic ritual abuse? What is dissociative disorder? What is trauma based mind control? You know, that kind of thing. So I wrote that up, you know, and there are, you know, scholarly sources for that in a couple of footnotes. But the important point is it's not designed to be an academic paper. It's kind of an introduction of what it is. This is the sort of thing they run into every week, literally every week. So the SEO there or the CEO, excuse me, at allaboutgod.com said, Hey, if you'll write this up, I'll put this page, you know, online and we'll do what we can to have it be attractable in terms of searches for the kinds of things that are addressed in the article so that we can get good search ranking on Google and whatnot to help direct people to the campaign. So there's going to be a link, I guess, along with this episode, right to that particular page so you can you can go read it. It's not long, you know, but it'll give you a good, you know, overview introduction to what it is for an Audrey encounter again on a weekly basis. And please go support their ministry. I really like what they're doing. They're using search engine optimization to help people come to Christ. So basically anybody searching information about Christianity or Jesus or you name it, they're going to stumble. Chances are they're going to stumble upon allaboutgod.com where they can receive answers and and whatnot and get help. And so if any of our listeners would like to go help support that ministry as well, please go to all aboutgod.com and and support their ministry as well. I know they appreciate it and we appreciate their help. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of remarkable, you know, they have if you kind of snoop around on the website, their website a little bit. I mean, you'll you'll find out that their their goal, really, I mean, in in sort of quantifiable terms is to, you know, try to get decisions for Christ, more decisions for Christ than dollars spent on what they do on an annual basis. And they're able to do that and they get a number of people, you know, who decide to follow the Lord through through their website. I think I think it was over a million last year. And the way they they know that is because that count is based upon people who read a particular page and then send them an email saying, yes, I made this decision. And so then they there are things they can do to try to disciple people. But eventually, I mean, we've been in conversation with them. They're the people at all about allaboutgod.com are familiar with the podcast. They're familiar with my content, very warm to it, appreciative to it. So we're we've actually had conversations about what can we do to help each other? You know, in terms of content, you know, that that I produce, you know, to help disciple people or just, you know, teach people. And then what what's their skill set? You know, how can they help us? And so this is the beginning of that. And, you know, we we thought that the Fernan Audrey episode was a great place to start because again, the people behind allaboutgod.com are familiar with the kind of things that they do. And so they they they get it. They understand what Fernan Audrey are doing. And so, you know, we're at the beginning, but it's a good example of the kind of thing that McClod, again, the nonprofit, this is what it's for. It's not just, you know, so that, you know, Mike can get his time back, even though after this week, boy, man, I would I love that. But that's that's ostensibly, you know, kind of what people would think of as far as McClod. But it's really about this kind of thing, networking with people who are just doing ministry somewhere and using skill sets to help each other and basically, you know, raising awareness so that we know who's doing what. And the thing that that unites them all is is they care about my content. I mean, they're they're benefiting from it. They get it. They want it to be part of, you know, what happens in church and whatnot. And so it's just finding those people to to help each other again, help McClod grow so that I can, you know, devote more time, you know, to what what we're trying to do here. But again, this is the beginning of it and we're trying to take baby steps with the time that we have. And this is just another one of those examples. All right, Michael, let's get into the questions we have about a dozen. So let's start with the first question from Corby. In Kyle Greenwood's book, Scripture and Cosmology, he says that the Old Testament writer's view of the heaven, earth and seas was not figurative or metaphorical. They believed the three tiered cosmos was the nature of creation. Obviously, this view of the cosmos is wrong. No big deal. However, to what extent does a Deuteronomy 32 in Divine Council worldview depend upon this ancient Near Eastern worldview? In other words, how does a Divine Council worldview not suffer as part of the fallout from the collapse of ancient Near Eastern cosmology? The Elohim are real gods, but the wear of their existence from an Old Testament view is not, for example. Yeah, I think the main thing to think of here is that, you know, on the one hand, you know, we can judge ancient Near Eastern cosmology as true or false. And again, it's not scientifically correct by virtue of the tools of science. You know, I've commented on this before. So things that an ancient text, the Bible included, what it says about the natural world, we have tools to actually be able to evaluate that. But the Divine Council worldview itself is not dependent on ancient Near Eastern cosmology because it really has to do with the activity of beings, namely God, and of course, the sons of God in this case, the activity of divine beings in relationship to the affairs of humans. So you could have no cosmology or some different cosmology or modern cosmology. It doesn't matter what the cosmology is. It's not going to affect whether the divine world, again, the non-natural world can intersect with the natural world. So I don't see any sense of dependence at all. Part of the question is about the wear of their existence. And I've commented a number of times that all of this kind of language for the spiritual world. And again, we're not talking about whether the cosmology is correct or not. We're talking about the spiritual world now. We are forced, and the biblical writers are forced, because they were humans, to use the language, the verbiage of place for any talk about the spirit world. You know, God's not going to give the human writers some vocabulary that no one to whom they're writing would ever understand. In other words, they can't have specialized vocabulary that God zaps in their head. Oh, this is what we really call the spirit world. Use this world, you know, like with no vowels or something. I mean, he's not going to give them vocabulary that no one else will understand. That defeats the enterprise of communication, which is ultimately why we have scripture. So, you know, we're forced to use, again, the language of place as though heaven was a where location. The heavens, you know, the spiritual world that had like latitude and longitude, or you could measure the number of miles into the atmosphere or something like that. None of it is actually like that. The verbiage, again, borrows, again, from these sorts of conceptions. But none of them are correct. If I tried to articulate the spirit world using correct scientific cosmology, I'm going to miss the mark as widely as if I'm an ancient person. Because the spirit world by definition does not have latitude, longitude. It doesn't have, you know, breadth and depth and all this kind of stuff. It's a different thing that is separable from the vocabulary and experience of space or location. So, I think it's a good question. But, again, behind the question, I think we have to remember just the vocabulary disconnects and the conceptual disconnects and really the realm disconnects in the case of the nature of this question. Okay. The next one's from Travis and he has about three questions. So, I'll read them all here real quick. In Matthew 12, we see just what Mike was talking about. Jesus cast out a demon and then people say, Can this be the son of David? The Pharisees' explanation was that Jesus's power was from Beelzebub rather than God. The first question would be, is there anything in Jewish sources to suggest what they were thinking here? The second question would be, Jesus suggests that the Pharisees' sons were casting out demons. What was the Jewish understanding for how they did it? And finally, the unforgivable sin of verse 32 seems tied in to answering the Beelzebub argument. Does this give any insight to what blasphemy against the Holy Spirit means? Well, I think those two things in tandem, and I guess before we get into that, I should say something about the third part was something about the unpardonable sin. And that actually, frankly, needs to be its own episode, so that's pretty long. But the first two things about, if I can recapture the question here, Jewish sources that might suggest what they were thinking when they asked this question, and of course, how the Pharisees' sons were casting out demons. I think that probably the best answer to both of these is probably, go listen to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 87, which is the episode on Exorcism of Demons as part of the Messianic profile. So, I mean, can this be the Son of David? That tells you, it sort of, it orients the Pharisees' thinking, because they associated the act of casting out demons somehow, for some reason, with the Son of David. And of course, that whole episode, episode 87, we address that. And it has to do again with a particular reading of passages like 1 Kings 4, 29 through 34 that connect Solomon, again, with specifically speaking and writing certain things that were considered in the Second Temple Jewish period to be, for lack of a better term, spells or incantations against evil spirits. And we talked about in that episode, some Dead Sea Scroll material. We talked about the extra psalm from the Septuagint and from Qumran, Psalm 151, that gets into all this material. So, there was this belief that, I'll put it in a two-fold way, there were two ideas and there are two ideas operating here. One is, again, that the Son of David, who is also, of course, the Son of Solomon, the Davidic line, would be able to do this, again, based on this notion of Solomon having the power in Second Temple Jewish tradition to cast out demons or to bind them with spells. And so, since that stuff was in Jewish tradition, not only asserted, but you will also, there are also a number of texts that would be sort of closer to the rabbinic period, the rabbinic material, later than the stuff we talked about in episode 87. That actually kind of inscripturates or writes down some of those spells. That would be, I think, the answer to the second part of the question. Well, how are your sons able to do this while they follow this spell over here? In other words, it's not a claim that every Jew who would be casting out demons is a descendant of Solomon, like a messianic candidate. Even though that's part of the picture, it's not the whole picture, but some of this stuff was supposedly, again, written down and recorded and quote unquote preserved from what Solomon wrote. And so the easy answer, if I were a Pharisee getting this question, I would say, well, hey, here are the spells right over here. This is what we use. We use these either prayers of renunciation or the prayers of this or that to cast out demons. So we have these things. We've inherited these things as part of our tradition. And these things are traceable to Solomon. But for someone, again, to do this, we would associate this, again, as having some attachment to Solomon, the son of David, all that kind of stuff. So I think both of those questions are tied up in that material, which, of course, we got into in that particular episode, episode 87. So if you're interested in this topic, that would be where I would direct you first. I mean, we could in some point do a later episode on maybe some of the pseudopigraphical texts that have Solomon, again, for lack of a better way to put it, cast Solomon as kind of a great wizard as part of his great wisdom. It sounds bizarre to our ear, but think about it. If Solomon, like was the guy who knew everything, he was the wisest man in the world. Well, he knows how to do this stuff, too. I mean, he would be kind of dumb if he didn't. His knowledge would be incomplete if he couldn't deal with this problem. And so that was the idea sort of behind the reason that Solomon gets cast this way. Okay, our next one is from Matthias in Stockholm, Sweden. I was recently approached by an atheist on Numbers 3117. That really is a nasty piece of scripture. It makes some sense from a divine council worldview, but it's still hard to chew. How would you explain the command to kill all except the virgins that they got to keep? This atheist wanted to infer that it was for sex slavery. Yeah, and he quotes what it was at Numbers 3117. Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones. Kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls is verse 18, who have not known man by lying with them. Keep alive for yourselves. So that's, again, Numbers 3117 and 18. Now, again, this was, as far as the male children, which he's not really directly asking about. I mean, that was a very common practice, again, to cut off a dynastic line, cut off an armed opposition in the years to come and whatnot. Again, that very common in the ancient Near East. Yeah, it's harsh, but again, it's part of the culture. It's part of what you do. Every woman who has had sexual relations with a man, they were particularly singled out, typically, again, not just in the Bible, but generally, because the whole saying to Solomon about, if you multiply wives, they'll turn your heart away from this, that, or the other thing, the Lord, or basically what you should be doing. I mean, that can apply, and it does apply in other cultures, but in terms of the Israelite stuff, it has a very specific religious connotation in terms of idolatry. Since the people in question in Numbers 31 in the context, they're dealing with particular peoples in particular places that were tied to, again, idolatrous practices. So the assumption that would be made, and apparently was made, is that women, again, who had been sexually active, yeah, they might have been sort of just married, but there was a sexual component to a lot of the religious rites of the day. And so the Israelites would have viewed any woman who was not a virgin with suspicion that she could have either lost her virginity or been active in a sexual activity that was part of an idolatrous relationship to another God. And so those women were often, again, excluded from mariable candidacy because of the fear of idolatry, bringing idolatry into the camp. And so that would have been the rationale behind their elimination, which leaves in verse 18, those who had not had sexual intercourse with a man. Now that the questions that the atheist guy gave our questioner about sex slavery, there's no sex slavery in this, in this passage. If you were a virgin, you were mariable. And if you were married by an Israelite man, then you became a member of the Israelite camp, which means you were entitled to the rights and the protections of the Israelite society. I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't necessitate a, a select save like sex trafficking situation. So that's an assumption that is brought to the passage by that particular question or that, you know, who, you know, was questioning the Matthias. So I think it's a mischaracterization on that level. I mean, it's obviously harsh, but you know, I would take this back that when you, when you see these, these, these familiar practices, when you see these, these cultural practices, especially if they are associated with idolatry specifically, I think on the one hand, you know, here we are with, you know, the Moabites here. On the one hand, you could say there is some logic to the fact that, well, this is, this is what we do in conquest in our patriarchal Semitic culture. This is how we do things. And there are lots of other things, again, that are, that are familiar to and related to, really part of that world, the world of the biblical person, the world of the biblical writer at the time. And, and they just sort of on one level are what they are. In other words, God doesn't come to Moses or any other biblical author and say, hey, I'd love to use you to write something down, but you need to change your culture first. You need to rid your, your culture of this particular element that is offensive or someone living later might, might, you know, consider offensive or the Gentiles, you know, who are going to read this stuff later might consider offensive or whatever. You need to change your culture first and then we can work together. God never does that. And a lot of this stuff that winds up in scripture, especially in legislation, especially legal kind of things. And again, these are, this is part of it. You have legality, you have conquest, you have warfare again, the rules of war and all that sort of stuff that again, on one level, that just sort of is what it is. And God doesn't say, hey, nobody else does this, but we're going to institute this thing where we go into a city and then you get to kill people. I mean, it's not foreign at all. On the other hand, on the other side, there is again, a quote unquote theological rationale to this because of the issue with idolatry. If you, you know, if you did have a situation, especially with the women, and they're elsewhere in the travels of the Israelites, where, and archeologically speaking too, we might as well throw that in, that there were associations, you know, sexual practices by certain people in certain places that were directly linked to idolatry, then, you know, this is something you don't even want to mess with. And so, you eliminate, you know, this part of, you know, of the refugee, you know, population, that sort of thing. So it has a rationale. It's distasteful to us. And I think, you know, for good reasons because it's very harsh. I mean, it's life or death, you know, kind of situation. I like, I look at something like this and think, hey, I'm glad that the theocracy was planned to be obsolescent from the beginning. And that usually startles some people. But that is true. Okay, the theocracy and these laws that go with it and the culture that goes with it, the patriarchy that goes with it was designed from the beginning to be obsolete. It was designed to go away. How do we know that? Well, we know that because of the Abrahamic covenant, because when God again, disinherents the nations and he starts Israel with Abraham, he makes the covenant with Abraham and says, through you, all of the nations will be blessed. And we know what the meaning is behind that, that they're going to be brought back into relationship with the true God. And we know in salvation history, you know, how God had planned for this to work out, you know, we need, you know, to fulfill the covenants, God has to become a man. And that's, you know, going to happen later. It's not going to happen now, you know, all this kind of stuff. So that there was sort of built into the flow of salvation history, the plan of God to bring all things full circle, the non necessity of the theocracy. And because it would include all these other things, you know, Gentiles and whatnot. So there's planned obsolescence built into this, which makes sense because God doesn't inspire a particular culture. The people who he uses have a particular culture and some elements of it, we can look at and say, that's just terrible. And again, I think rightly so. But God doesn't inspire a particular culture that was a necessity to carrying out the plan of salvation. He just worked with people where they were, who they were at the time that he decided to do so, and then plan to phase out certain things that would eventually eliminate, you know, these these other sorts of things. That's just the way it was. So that might not be a comfortable, you know, answer. But that is, again, the picture that emerges when you look at the whole kind of the whole system of salvation history as a whole, all right. And as an entirety, it's not married to a culture, which ought to tell you from the get go that biblical theology is not necessarily dependent on or endorsing of a particular cultural practice. You get these harsh rules, they're designed to insulate Yahweh's people from other gods. And part of the part of the way you would do that, you know, is to again, have this this kind of thing happen. So again, it's it's harsh, it's distasteful. But it's not something that God looked at and said, Yeah, we need to keep doing that. That needs to be a big part of the gospel, you know, killing off our enemies, you know, that kind of thing. That just wasn't the case at all in the plan to bring the enemies to a relationship with him. We don't need this. But it is the way it is at this moment in time. All right, our next one's from Sean. And this question is important to him because he's an artist who sometimes creates work for video games and fantasy novels. And he wants to know if he should decline to paint an angel or demon because he wants to know how should Christians take the second commandment today? Are depictions of Jesus like the Last Supper or images of in stained glass windows at church sinful? What about other divine beings? Yeah, I mean, this is you also get this question like an association with groups like Jehovah's Witnesses and whatnot. I mean, at least I've gotten it in that context because of the graven image command. You know, the command says you shall not make for yourself a carved image or a graven image or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth, you shall not bow down to them or serve them. And I think the last phrase, which is actually verse five, is the key issue. The key issue here is idolatry, because let's think about it. God himself commands the Israelites to violate this. Okay, they do make a carved image or a graven image. They do make a likeness of something that is in the heavens. Okay, you know, what is that thing, Mike? Well, it's the cherubim. That's the most obvious answer, but they also are commanded to make the brazen serpent, the hushtan. I mean, God tells them to do these things, which ought to tell you that the command, the emphasis of the command isn't so much on the making of the thing. It's on the second part of it. Don't bow down to them or serve them or worship them. So the issue is actually idolatry. It's not specifically the fashioning of the thing. I mean, you could, you know, you could fashion something if you don't worship it. Okay, you don't worship it. You haven't violated the command. Now, I know people who are in this artist's situation. I have friends who, believe it or not, they are the, without giving names, they're the inspiration behind two of the characters in the portent, my second novel. The character names are Clarice and Ward, but those two individuals who, whose first names are obviously different, they run a tattoo parlor and they refer to themselves, you know, whimsically as sheep in wolves clothing, you know, as opposed to the other way around. And they do run into situations and they question people a lot. And if they are asked to create an image, create a tattoo where they suspect that this is, this is some part of an occult issue with this person. This is something that is going to be maybe not people bow down to it, but you get the idea that this is a faith statement in a dark way for this person. They will refuse to make it. And I think that's a pretty honorable decision, you know, on their part, because they're trying to obey the second commandment, again, with the emphasis on idolatry. And so I would recommend the same strategy, you know, for this person. If you think that what you're creating is going to draw attention away from God, draw worship or adoration away from the true God, you know, even though that the person doing it might not, you know, think of themselves as an idolater, okay, it's not really what they think of themselves. It's what, you know, it's what you, the artist, you know, are thinking, your work might be used for. And if you, as you talk to people, I think, again, you have to do that to discern what they're thinking. And if they make it clear, again, that this is a, you know, this is sort of an idolatrous statement on my part. I want this so that I can do that. And what they want it for, again, is going to give worship to some lesser being, then I think you're on good grounds to refuse it. But in principle, just the art for the art's sake, you know, without the element of idolatry, I don't think that you're going to have a problem with the second command. Janine wants to know, how do you think people came to believe in other gods with all the specific names of other gods and even further pictures, images of other gods? It seems to me that these gods had to have made an appearance of some kind at some point. Yeah, I don't necessarily think that's the case because everyone, especially in the ancient world, had this conception or belief that there was a world beyond them. In other words, a spiritual world. And the assumption was, again, that this world had beings in it that were intelligent and there was more than just one and they had to exist in hierarchy because, hey, we're intelligent beings over here. And so we don't function well in chaos. That isn't the way our society or our culture runs. We have leadership. Everybody's not a chief. You have to have good Indians here. I mean, you know, not everybody can be the boss. And so we take these natural social relationships, hierarchical relationships from our world. And again, it's reasonable to assume that on the basis of the way we live, order and whatnot instead of chaos, that that's the way the spiritual world operates. So this is why you have, you know, in all major cultures, you not only have an animate spiritual world, but it has some order to it. It has some hierarchical sense to it. And when you do that, when you distribute tasks among the hierarchy, then it's very natural to assume, well, there must be a deity behind this thing in the natural world that we really don't understand because we're not scientists. Okay. There must be a deity in charge of rain. There must be a deity in charge of, you know, fecundity. There must be a deity in charge of fire or whatever. Again, they're not doing science. And so out of their own natural world and their own experience of, you know, the way intelligent beings relate to each other, they are naturally going to assign deities to be behind certain things and to be doing certain things. Now, the deity doesn't have to make an appearance for any of that. That's why I answered it the way I did. I'm not going to rule out spiritual encounter. Okay. Because again, I embraced the notion of a spiritual world. And I have no reason to suspect that a being in the spiritual world would never bother to make itself known, would never encounter a person, especially when solicited. You know, I can't make those assumptions either. So I think, you know, I can say to Jeanine, yeah, they probably did quote unquote make their presence known at some point, but I don't see it as a necessary thing to have ancient people believing in and thinking about other gods. Again, if that makes, you know, some kind of sense. And so the iconography, again, of other gods is often going to be associated with some imagined task. They have something that whatever the population group and it can differ, you know, among population groups, people groups, especially across continents. Okay. The one who's in charge of rain, well, there's going to be something about the way we draw this God or the way we, you know, this idol that we erect for it. There's going to be something that illustrates its function, you know, as we perceive it to be. It's also going to be connected to geography. There might be a main geographical feature, a main natural resource that the God is thought to be in charge of. Well, that can become part of its iconography. It may have some sort of attribute, you know, again, perceived attribute, intelligence, speed, whatever, you know, physical strength, whatever it is. And so you're going to pick an object that for you, for your culture, reminds you of that attribute. So that's how we get this iconography of deities. Now, if you have cultures living in near proximity to each other, you're more apt to have sort of a deity exchange. You know, in other words, Semitic religion, Baal, you know, was, you know, was the storm God, was the God in charge of the heavens or what? You know, and so when that region gets conquered, you know, let's say ancient Syria or, you know, some part of Canaan, you know, gets conquered by a foreign power. Well, they're going to say, no, you know, since we conquered you, our God that's in charge of rain now owns this place. And so there's going to be this overlap. And the longer, you know, you have this sort of cultural interaction, you can actually have names merge, you can have, you know, sort of deities merge into another separate deity that accommodates both of the earlier ones. I mean, this is how polytheism and idolatry sort of works, you know, with cross cultural contact. It's obviously less common if we're talking about something that goes on in the Middle East versus something in China, because you're not, you're going to have minimal, if any, you know, cultural contact at all. But you don't have to have a, you know, an active appearance, you know, sort of like, you know, a weekly showing up of deities, you know, for people to create idols and to have these conceptions. Margo in Santa Barbara, California writes, Mike, some who hold that it is possible to calculate the year jubilee in the present time, say it is occurring now, running from the day of atonement in 2015 to the day of atonement in 2016. And also that it is the 70th jubilee. Do you have an opinion on this? And what do you think would be the significance of our tracking jubilee years after the first coming of Christ? I'm wondering if the second coming was similarly concised with a jubilee, since Satan will be bound in the millennium of Revelation 20, a quasi-identic state will begin. Yeah, the short answer to this is none of us have any idea what's going on with this jubilee stuff. So we shouldn't pretend that we do. And so I'm not going to pretend that I do. You know, we did an episode, you know, on the jubilee, you know, stuff, and I think it was episode, well, it was Leviticus 23 and 25. So it's, I'm looking it up here, it's okay, it's episode 83 of the podcast. And in that episode, we attached an article by Benzion Bockholder, who was a professor at Hebrew Union for many years, called Chronomessianism, the timing of messianic movements and the calendar of sabbatical cycles. Now, I posted that, and we talked about it deliberately because on the one hand, there can be systems, and that this is the important term, systems, plural, of how you would use jubilee cycles to calculate something related to the Messiah. But what a lot of people today, a lot of evangelicals today who are in the popular prophecy movement or whatever, if that even has a name, they assume certain things about the jubilee cycle that will tie it into a rapture or a pre-trib rapture, or a certain concept of the tribulation, a certain interpretation of Daniel nine, whatever. Bockholder points out that, hey, there are various ways you can do this. And he actually illustrates one in the article that basically undermines and destroys all of that stuff. In other words, all of the current use of the jubilee thinking to tie it into a future millennium or a rapture or some other feature of evangelical eschatology, you can use the very same idea and work the jubilee cycle so that it ends in the inter-testamental period, or he also talks about how Christians do this, it ends with the first coming of Jesus. Both of those options have nothing to do with something in the future. So in other words, this feature, this jubilee idea, there is no guarantee and there is no necessary conclusion to be drawn that it relates in any way to eschatology or end times. Okay, it might, but nobody actually knows that because you can work out very neat systems that have other terminus points, other end points that if you again are one of these evangelical prophecy guru people, you're going to be real disappointed with the outcome, but it is just as coherent and quote unquote consistent as any other view. So my assessment of all this is that it's kind of a waste of time. Again, I file this under the the blog series, an obsession with eschatology as a waste of time. This is where I put this whole jubilee idea. Yes, I know it's interesting. It might be mildly entertaining or whatever, you know, there's this mystical mystery kind of thing going on with it as there are other things in prophecy. If you like that stuff, well, enjoy it, you know, think about it, study about it, read about it, I don't have any problem with that. But what I do have a problem with is if you think you've solved it, because yeah, it's going to look beautiful until it gets critiqued by the other options, because they look beautiful too. And there's no way for us to, we'd have to be omniscient to know which system is the correct one or even if we ought to be doing this in the first place. Again, the fact that you can take this idea out of Leviticus and you can tie it to other things, again, like weeks and, you know, all this kind of stuff, calendar and whatnot, the fact that you can do it doesn't necessarily mean that we're supposed to. In other words, there's no, there's no like instruction verse in the Bible that says, oh, if you want to figure out eschatology, you need to take the jubilee thing and do something with it. There's no, there's no instruction manual for this that says that or anything else. And so that's where I leave it. And I, you know, who knows? The answer is who knows? And if you kind of get married into this, you know, I think there's just more productive uses for your time. And I'll say as well that the same thing is true of using astronomy in biblical prophecy. Now, for those who have read the portent and those who have listened to me before, I'm interested in this, but I'm always very clear to say, and there's a reason why I did not reproduce future dates in the novel is because people will read my novel and think, you know, okay, this Mike has figured it out now because Mike's a Bible scholar. And so Mike, when's your next book coming about the second coming of Christ, you know, and how astronomy helps us figure this out? Yeah, I'm not going to do that because we don't have a single verse that tells us we should be using astronomy to figure this out. There's just zero. We don't have a single verse that says, oh, the astronomical elements of the first coming of Christ that, you know, hey, Mike says Revelation 12, that's what it's about. And I do believe that. But we don't have any verse that tells us that the signs in Revelation 12 play any role at all in what's going to happen in the future. There is no verse like that. And so I'm not going to, I'm not, you know, hey, Trey, maybe we should do this, like to raise money for McLeod or something. I mean, you're into astronomy. I mean, we could work the system here and make some money, but we're not going to do that. We're just not going to do that. It's irresponsible. I think it's deceptive on a certain level. And it's the same thing with this Jubilee stuff. So yeah, you know, if you like it, hey, if it gets you into your Bible, be warmed and filled and enjoy that, have fun with it. But don't marry the Gospel to it. Don't let it consume your time, you know, that sort of thing. There has to be something to Vatican being so interested in astronomy. I mean, the Vatican has been interested in astronomy since the days of Galileo. I mean, yeah, they condemned it. But then they're talking out of the other side of their mouth, you know, they had astronomers, you know, looking into these things while they're saying, yeah, no, over here, they're saying, hey, we should look at this over there. You know, they just do that. They just play the game. You know, and I personally think that the Vatican, especially the Jesuits, the Jesuit interest in astronomy, I don't think is any different than the Jesuit interest in biology or anthropology or anything else. This is the, the quote, academic wing of the Catholic Church. I think they, they do these kinds of things. I'm going to try to be as broad as I possibly can here. I think they, they endorse scientific inquiry within their own ranks, because they want to sort of be at the forefront of discovery for certain things so that they can render commentary on those things according to the theological system of the Catholic Church before anybody else does. In other words, they want to control the narrative. And to me, that's a very kind of normal, understandable human thing to do. I don't, I don't assign any particular conspiratorial bent to the fact that the Vatican has astronomers interested in astronomy. They, they do all this, this kind of stuff in other areas again, because I think they want to be on top of, of the subject matter so that they can be the first to comment, oh, the, well, the, the church, you know, we knew about this from the beginning and, and we're not denying this or that science. And here's how we, we need to understand this. Here's how it fits within, you know, Catholicism. Here's how it goes with this papal bull over here and then this statement that the pope made over there. We're on top of it. We're not Neanderthals here. We're, you know, we got this covered. You know, we're not, you know, country bumpkins here. You know, we are after all knowledge, you know, and God is the God of all knowledge, including the natural world. We have a complete, coherent theological system. That's why you should be Catholic because we do have everything covered. You know, my aliens are our space brothers as well. Yeah, aliens are, you know, so they're already down this road of, you know, baptizing space aliens, which, you know, I just, every time I hear that, I just want to, just want to growl or something. I roll my eyes, you know, but, but, but that, that's a direct reflection of, of their approach to, you know, original sin and salvation. In other words, it's a component thought. So it's very natural that a Catholic would, would think that, you know, because they're, they're, they're assigning, you know, they're, they're linking the intelligence issue and an intelligent alien with the image of God, which of course, makes us brothers, you know, space brothers. And therefore, somehow, you know, the atonement has to be, you know, a, you know, some issue, you know, for a space alien. So we need to, we need to make sure they're covered in the atonement, you know, so that we need to baptize them and take care of original sin if they have, you know, they've got all these things covered already. They've just been down this road and back and, and, and they, they do this with all sorts of disciplines, you know, charitably because they think that's their responsibility. The church, if you believe the church is the repository and the protector of all truth, well, you're going to do this. If you didn't believe it, why would you do it? But if you do believe it, you're certainly going to do it. So on one level, I think, you know, charitably, again, they're doing it because they feel some responsibility, but, you know, a little, a little more jaded, I think they just want to control the narrative so that they can, you know, appear to be, you know, the religious place to be that's on top of everything that, that the world is into. You know, we're there. We're not like, you know, some group over here that's just, they're still believing in the Flat Earth or something, you know, we're not that we're over here where the real science is. So I think that's just part of it. Again, I tend not to be terribly conspiratorial on that. I don't see it as a, as a shocking thing. They've been into science for centuries. Why would this be any different? Sounds good. All right, Mike, moving on. Our next three are from Greg in California. First one is, where do I find more information on the archaeological evidence for giants? Well, I'll tell you where you don't find it. You don't find it on the internet. Well, you just don't. You know, to date, you know, when it comes to the biblical world, you know, to date, we don't have any known examples of giant skeletons in the Middle East. And for those of you, you know, who haven't read Unseen Realm here, and you thought, I saw this YouTube video with Professor Jonathan Tubb of the University of London. And he found two female skeletons over seven feet tall. Hey, read the Unseen Realm because I've corresponded with Professor Tubb. Professor Tubb did not find that. That's a misunderstanding. I reproduced the actual email on the companion website, Unseen Realm, whereas in the book, I just have the text of the email. There's nothing like this to date, you know, like a specimen or something like that. Now, you know, you obviously have specimens of really tall humans in other parts of the world and whatnot. Yeah. I mean, they exist. But again, to date, we don't actually have a scientifically endorsed, you know, like, hey, we actually did a real lab, you know, session on this thing of some remains of a giant that's any taller than extraordinarily tall people of today. You know, seven, eight foot range, that kind of thing. So again, I don't see anything you know, revelatory necessarily about such a discovery. I mean, when it comes to the biblical world, I'll be honest with you. You just think about it. There have been millions of people who have lived in Canaan, Israel, Syria, Palestine, whatever term you want to use Middle East. There have been millions of people who have lived there, lived and died since the biblical days. But if you actually go to the database of human skeletal remains, you know, in Tel Aviv, you know, the people who actually keep this stuff that archaeologists find, there are very few. There are a couple thousand, you know, that have survived. And it's extraordinarily rare to have anything older than 1000 BC, which is half a millennium too soon for the conquest account. And you say, well, why is that Mike? You know, it must be proof that it never happened. No, it's proof that they didn't embalm. You know, most of the people who have ever lived in this area of the world from biblical times are literally dust. The remains are literally unrecoverable. So the fact that you don't have these sorts of things doesn't mean really anything because you don't have the physical remains for the quote unquote normal people that lived either. So like they didn't exist as well. I mean, it's just, it's an illogical argument. But you don't, you know, where can you go for this stuff? That's about it. I mean, there's really no place that you can actually go to to learn about the archaeological evidence for giants, because what you're going to get in books are modern specimens. Some of those are going to be outright hoaxes. If you go out on the internet and look for this stuff, you're going to find basically Photoshop stuff. You're going to find 19th early 20th century newspaper accounts. And I collect these things again. But hey, can we like go look at that specimen now? Where was it stored? Oh, yeah, I remember the Smithsonian absconded with all of them. It's just a fact. And you can buy books on this too. I have them that the 19th century was known to be basically most of your major major newspapers in the 19th century were national inquirers. Let's just put it that way. It's a known journalistic phenomenon for this time in the country's history. So I'm willing to believe that some of these things were real. And hopefully the specimen went somewhere. But you could actually go find it and look at it. But most of the time, they're literally just making stuff up or they're misidentifying things. I blog a lot about this on paleobabble. A lot of these presumed remains are like the remains of a mammoth or something like that. Because when you take the tusks out and the trunk rots away, it looks like a cyclops. And you can reassemble the bones so that it appears to stand upright. These are called Probocidian fossils, Probocidian specimens in the anthropological literature. They're well known. But you'll see this stuff trolled out on the internet like it's a giant from Genesis 6. It's not. It just isn't. I don't really know any other way to say it. But evidence for giants, skeletal, they're very evasive. And what you do run into that might have some merit is modern. It's more recent. So that's just the situation for what it is. It wasn't the average person's height back then, low five feet, four or something, I don't know. Yeah, I have it in the book. I can't remember the exact number, but I have the book and the references and the articles on it. But for cultures that didn't bomb like Egypt, where you have a lot more specimens, the average height of a male was like five and a half feet. For the Canaanite, the Middle Eastern specimens, it's a little shorter. And all these factors are due to life expectancy, to disease that they can't prevent certain conditions. Nutrition was a huge factor. Since all of these things for us have improved, we grow bigger and stronger than ancient people. It's just an issue of health, public health on a broad scale, control and treatment of disease, quality of food, variety of diet, all these things are factors. So basically, if you made it to six foot, you're a giant. Yeah, I mean, if you were six and a half feet tall in the biblical world, that was extraordinary. I mean, that was just that was freakishly tall, which is why, again, in Unseen Realm, when I write about this, that it's not taking away from the narrative to think that, hey, if we go into Canaan and we run into places where there are clusterings of people that are six and a half feet tall or so, and we're sitting here and we're looking around like, hey, who's the tallest one among us? Like you're five, three? You're going to feel like you're going to get your butt kicked really fast. If you go into this place and try to do a hand-to-hand combat with these people, it is a mismatch. It's as much of a mismatch as it sounds, especially if they're a warrior class and you're not, I mean, where have you been for the last 40 years? All walking around the desert, you're not training for combat, you're not defending anything, you're not fighting, you're not training to be a soldier. Well, these people are, they live in walled cities, they're used to this stuff. And who are you? You're a squirt that doesn't, you know, it's lucky that he can handle a sword, you know, you're just going to get destroyed, you know, left to your own ability. It's a real threat. So, you know, when we point these things out, you know, the height differential, you don't need eight, nine, 10, 13 feet tall because there's nothing archeologically that supports that. Yeah, and I know that this creationist website over here has the giant femur bone, you know, a femur bone of a giant and the giant that had this femur must have been 15 feet tall. What's nice? Did they have it tested? Can you show me the lab results? Because if you don't do that, you're dishonest. If you don't do that, I suspect you have something to hide. I suspect that that'll be an animal remain, a prehistoric animal remain. I'm just being blunt. You know, it really bothers me that Christians who, you know, have these objects and who tout them refuse to let anyone verify them. That tells me you have something to hide and you shouldn't. People who name the name of Christ shouldn't be pulling that kind of stuff. It's just dishonest. And was it Goliath, like 6'6 or something? In the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yeah, he's around 6'6, 6'9, depending on how you take the qubit. And also in the Septuagint. The Maseridic text is the one that has him at, you know, over nine feet. But the Dead Sea Scrolls have him shorter. But again, for his day, he's enormous. Oh, yeah. He's enormous. Yeah, absolutely. But in today's time, 6'7, you know, I wouldn't classify 6'6, wouldn't classify that as a giant. He's a second round draft. Exactly. He's just a good nutrition. And he's made it a little longer, took his vitamins, and he can dunk the ball. So yeah. All right. All right. Well, let's get to Greg's second question. And that's on scriptural authority. How do we as Christians assert that the Bible is distinguishable from any other so-called holy literature? Yeah. For me, this is about testing the coherence of its truth propositions. So this, I mean, that's my short answer to that. So, okay, here's your holy book. What does it tell me about God or the gods or salvation or whatever point it has and historical statements and record keeping and all that kind of, it's all a factor. But let's just be, let's focus on the theological statements, all of the Bible's theological statements about the existence of God and what God does and things like incarnation and the deity of Christ and all this kind of stuff. These things have been hashed out for literally millennia by the best thinkers that Western civilization has ever had. And their logical and theological philosophical coherence has been tested and approved over and over and over again. So this is the first thing I want to know. So if we have a competing truth assertion, truth proposition from some other holy book, if it's different than something in the Bible, well then it needs to be probed to see which one is more coherent. That's the way I would approach the whole question. I mean, there are bigger issues like can we trust the sourcing, the composition, all that kind of stuff. And there are other factors here as far as how did we get this book in the first place? If you're talking about the Orantia book, there's lots of ways to disqualify that. If you're talking about an ancient book, okay, well then there are other things you have to consider. But the bottom line is, again, about truth propositions. So I think that's what distinguishes the Bible from a lot of these other books in significant ways. Real quickly, what's your thoughts on the Orantia book? I think it's most likely an amalgamated forgery. And what I mean by that is I think it has modern origin and that its content is drawn from theosophical literature of the day with rewriting. I suspect that if you put all of the theosophical literature of the late 19th century, early 20th century into a database, I've actually looked into this. It would be a monumental task because there's thousands and thousands of publications. It's not just Madame Blavatsky. That's the familiar stuff. But there were hundreds of people writing stuff about theosophy in those periods. If you put that all into a database and then you ran searches through it for, let's say word combinations more than three or four words in a row from the Orantia book, I don't doubt for a minute that you're going to get hits. In other words, that the content of the book will have been drawn from these sources. But that's a doctoral dissertation waiting to happen. I'm doing that anytime soon. But the technology exists for it. You just have to do the grunt work. It's in public domain. Somebody could do that, digitize it, put it into one resource and start running scripts through it. You could do it. And email me. Let me know what you find out, please. All right. Well, Greg's last question is on Michael's assertion that evolution is not a theory in crisis. I heard him say in one Q&A that he has done a lot of research on the topic and that he believes in a type of evolution, but not necessarily Darwinian evolution. I'd be interested to hear more of his views on this and also be interested in any sources he might suggest for reading on this topic. Yeah. I mean, first of all, it's not my assertion. I was quoting Todd Wood, who is a young earth creationist, 24-hour solar day young earth creationist, run of the mill, Ken Ham kind of creationist. Todd would cringe if he heard me say that, but I apologize. Todd, it's for illustration purposes only. But Todd Wood is the guy who said he's a biologist. He's a PhD in biology. His special focus is genetics. That's what he did his dissertation on. He did comparative work on the chimp genome and the human genome. He is the one who says evolution is not a theory in crisis. Mike Heiser doesn't say that. Mike Heiser is not a biologist or a geneticist. It's Todd Wood. Again, if you want to take it up with Todd, good luck with that because he's very honest about it. Now, as far as what I believe, I don't really know. What I've said is I'm open to the idea of God using evolution as a process. That's it in a nutshell. If he didn't do that, I'm as open to that as anybody else too. I just don't know. I'm just not offended by the idea that God could have done that. Again, that's very normative within the under the creationist umbrella. Not everybody's a young earther. You've got old earthers that like evolution. You've got old earthers that don't like evolution. You've got all sorts of varieties. It's not just one or two. Since I don't have the training in this field to really be able to evaluate what's said as opposed to what's not said and all this kind of stuff. I don't have the tools to evaluate this. I'm only going to let other people work on it, fight about it, hash it out. I have read a lot of it. I find it real interesting. The historical atom thing is sort of what I've been most interested in. I do think it's legitimate to say that the science of statistical genetics is still in its infancy. In other words, I don't think the statistical genetics stuff that denies a single pair of humans. I don't think that's conclusive. It has been criticized, I think, coherently by some people at the Discovery Institute. That's where Stephen Meyer is at and a few other people that are well known. Darwin's black box, Michael Behe. I've read a lot of this stuff and am interested in it, but I am just a lurking amateur. I will let other people hash it out. When Todd Wood, again, and he doesn't accept evolution, he just thinks that there must be a better way to understand this, something better will come along. He says, look, the model of evolution itself actually has some clear explanatory power. It's not a theory in crisis. He objects to, this would be strong, but this is the way he'll characterize it. I don't know if it's true or not, because this isn't my field. I know that he feels that some of the rhetoric about this is not honest. That's what he objects to. He wants to be clear that from a geneticist perspective, some of these things that are said about evolution are not true. They're just not true. On the other hand, he doesn't like evolution. He doesn't buy it, but he sees it as powerful payoff in certain respects. We need to be thinking about it very, very closely. That's just where he's at. I'll give you another example of this. The whole soft tissue in the T-Rex thing, the woman who discovered that is a Christian. She's a Christian that used to be a young earth creationist. Now, she's an old earth creationist because of really her own work. Well, you get these creationist websites that say, Mary Schweitzer, that's her name, Mary Schweitzer is wrong. This is what it means. This is what the sample says. Look, dude, she's the guy who published the research. It's her discovery and it's her research. I think she's a better commentator on it than some guy running a creationist website. I mean, I'm just sorry, but it's just incoherent to think otherwise. She submitted her work to peer review. People know she's a Christian. The university that hired her knows she's a Christian. Her advisor, Jack Horner, the guy that the Dr. Grant from Jurassic Park is based on, knows she's a Christian and really likes her. If you're into this, read How to Build a Dinosaur by Jack Horner. He talks about Mary Schweitzer in the book very affectionately, sort of gives her story as part of his story, as her mentor, but it's just dishonest to take this woman's research and say, it doesn't mean what she says it means and what her reviewers reviewed and said, yeah, this is good science, but yeah, you know better than she does, better than the person who discovered it herself. I mean, come on. It's just not honest. It's not becoming for believers to do stuff like this. Dolly's question is regarding the reading and interpretation of Exodus 3.15 and I'll read that real quick. God also said to Moses, say this to the people of Israel, the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name forever and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. Now Dolly takes it that the text means Yahweh has sent Moses me to the Israelites you, but there's a different reading that interprets the me as the angel of the Lord. Is this correct or just reading too much into the text? Yeah, I don't know what the different reading would be if she referring to some sort of like a Septuagint reading or something because I mean, I read it that God's saying, here's what you tell these people. Tell them that I've sent you because he names the Lord, the God of your fathers. So I take it the first way. I think it's kind of transparently that's the case, but I don't know of any other reading that would sort of be different. So yeah, I think it's kind of over-reading the text there, but if there was some sort of manuscript information, maybe she came across something in a book or whatnot, I'd like to see it. If somebody footnoted something or other, I'd be interested in seeing it. Okay. The next couple are from Grant. The first one is, while the Bible makes a clear case for the other gods being creations of Yahweh, are there any other traditions that maintain that their gods are creations of a supreme creator God? There are other, well, the only one that sort of would, well, it depends how you frame the question here actually, you will get, you know, other religions that sort of start the ball rolling, you know, in terms of, you know, generating the other gods. In many cases, it's with sort of an original pair, because the analogy to that is, you know, procreation, you need a god and a goddess, like at Ugarat, you know, El and Afirat are the parents of the other gods, the sons of El. So that's a familiar male-female pairing, but you get something like, well, I don't know if I want to say that the Memphite theology works here now, because there's verbal creation by the word of mouth, but it really refers to the natural world there. But you do, in some religions, you have this sort of thing or place, like the prime evil sea, that, again, for lack of a better way of putting it, births or produces, you know, the other gods. And so, well, is that a single entity that's producing the other gods? Is that how they would have looked at that? Well, maybe, maybe not. I mean, so the short answer is, yeah, you could find that, but it's not really ever cast as something that, you know, okay, here you have this god who creates, he is the lone thing that is uncreated and eternal. Again, that's what you have in the Bible. You know, God is the creator of all things visible and invisible. He's the lone uncreated thing. You won't get that, but you will have sort of a, in a few examples, there will be sort of like a single point of origin. That's probably the best way I can answer that. His second question is, bear with me when I read it. As I thought there was compelling evidence to show that Peter's vision in Acts 10 had nothing to do with food, I am wondering what passages he's referring to. Acts 1521 seems to imply that after Gentiles knew to Judaism, started tending synagogue and follow the initial four guidelines of the elders that they will hear Moses preached every Sabbath. To me, this implies that they will have the opportunity to gradually hear why the dietary instructions will be a blessing to follow. I guess I don't view the instructions as the word Torah implies as something to be liberated from. God repeats over and over that the consequences for following the instructions is blessing. Why would I want to be liberated from blessing? I suppose I view the Torah as something that some of Judaism's adherents use to manipulate people by connecting Torah observance with salvation, but that was not God's intent then or now. The problem, as I view it, is man's proclivity for legalism and not the Torah. Christianity is plenty prone to legalism despite claiming that they have thrown off the law. I have some problems with the wording of the question, but I also have some agreement with the wording of the question. I agree that the point of the law is not to produce salvation. In other words, I would agree that someone who knows the Old Testament well, either in antiquity or now, would not be reading the law thinking, oh, if I do these things, I will merit salvation. In other words, I don't know how you can do that and even have the covenants in your head at all because salvation is initiated by the God of Israel, by grace. It's really, God is going to have to be the judge here. It's not a video game where you just pile up points and then God says, oh, well, hey, I don't really like you, but I got to let you in here because you have enough points. That's not what the Torah is, so I agree with that. Some of the other things I think are a little odd. I don't know what the compelling evidence to show that Peter's vision in Acts 10 has nothing to do with food, rise, Peter, kill, and eat. That's pretty clear to me that the food laws, again, are being set aside or dispensed with or at least shown to not be something God really cares about anymore because, again, it leads to gentile salvation, so these things aren't part of a relationship with God anymore. Again, rise, Peter, kill, and eat. You eat food, so again, I don't know what the compelling evidence there is to divorce food from that. In Acts 1521, it says this, for from ancient generations, Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him, for he is read every Sabbath in the synagogues. That doesn't say to me that the Gentiles are having Moses proclaimed to them. I'm not even sure that that's what the questioner is thinking, but I thought I should throw it out. To me, it's just a statement, well, who proclaims Moses while the Jews do? Yeah, I guess what, those are the ones who are in the synagogue, so it's still a statement about Jews. It's not a statement about Gentiles, what Acts 10 is about. We're going to ask the Gentiles to do certain things so that they don't offend Jews, but verse 21 isn't about proclaiming Moses to the Gentiles. That's just not what the verse says. But again, having said that, I think what Paul says is, again, kind of the way, this is going to sound goofy, but I think I'm going to agree with Paul here, and that is, look, if you want to observe a day, observe the day. If you don't, don't. If you're going to say, I can eat this or not, or drink this or not, again, possible reference to the food laws, well, go ahead, either shun it or accept it. Again, Paul's verdict is, look, we don't let these things redefine the gospel in either direction, either the absence or the presence of these things. They're not the gospel in any regard, and you need to do, again, what draws you closer to God, either way. I'm sympathetic to certain things that I've seen happen in messianic congregations that I've been in, things that, oh, if I had a church, that'd be kind of a neat thing to do. I think it would be kind of neat to follow the Jewish calendar just because it gets us into the Old Testament. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's certainly not a substitute for the gospel. If you don't do that, there's something wrong with you. You better check your relationship with God. Again, I just don't go there, but I see a lot of the people who are really into this somehow either connected to the gospel or if they don't do that, they somehow look at themselves as somehow being more spiritually committed than someone who doesn't. I think both are a mistake. I think God allows you to do, as your conscience tells you, whatever, again, draws you into a better relationship with the Lord. That's what you should do. So I tend to sort of just leave it there. There is a lot of legalism, so I'm kind of agreeing and disagreeing at the same time. I agree that if you're in a situation where your church wants to do the Jewish calendar thing or wants to preach against eating this or that, if this is where you and your people are at, fine, don't make it legalistic, don't make it about salvation, and don't pretend that you're more spiritual than somebody else. If you can do that and do those things, I think God's fine with it. Okay, that's where you're at. Worship me, honor me, follow Jesus, do all that stuff, and just let it there. Guard yourself against making it something it shouldn't be. The last question is from Slash. Would you ask Mike to comment on his on this footnote from the Innocent Watchers, Template in the Gospel of Matthew, on page 63, note 145, Leviticus 1815. By engaging tomorrow for sex, he uncovered the nakedness of his daughter-in-law, Leviticus 2012, repeats the prohibition and identifies it as capital offense. If a man lies with his daughter-in-law, both of them shall be put to death. What I don't understand is why this was called, albeit anachronistic, violations of the holiness code in Leviticus 18. Oh, so he doesn't understand why the author of the book, it's Richter. This is Richter's dissertation. Why she would refer to it as an anachronistic violation of the holiness code? Well, there's a couple of directions you could go with this. Again, I don't know what's in Richter's head here, but it's probably going to fall in one of two directions here. So if you think that Leviticus was written prior to the book of Judges, which would be a very traditional view because you'd have Law of Moses, Mosaic stuff, and then the book of Judges is written sometime later, quite a bit later, a couple hundred years or a few centuries, whatever, then it wouldn't make sense to call what Judah does in Judges anachronistic because you're assuming that the Levitical laws existed already. So there are lots of scholars though who don't. They believe that the Levitical laws are much later than Judges. And so it could be that Richter, that's her perspective on the holiness code in Leviticus, that it was authored much later than the book of Judges. And if she does think that, and she may, that may be what she's thinking here in this statement, then she would call it anachronistic because of when she believes one was written as opposed to the other. But again, I'm not sure that's what she's thinking, but it certainly could be what she's thinking. If the questioner, if Flash is asking something about other than the chronology, then I don't know that I could hazard a guess, but that seems to be the angle of the question to me anyway, to my ear. That's the word of the day. Anachronistic. There you go. That's the word of the show right there. The last question. You know, what was it that, boy, this is going to date me, but the Groucho Marx, the secret word that Duck would fly down from the ceiling and you'd win something, but nobody's won anything here. So. All right, Mike. Well, that's it for this show. So let's switch gears here. And you've got an event coming up in LA. That's what this weekend, isn't it? Next weekend? April 23rd. The details are up on the website, drmsh.com slash events. And then you'll see the link for, what is it? San, am I saying this right? San Juan Capistrano. It's about an hour from Los Angeles. Now, if you go up there, you'll notice there is a link that you can register online for this event. And there's some statement about seating is limited. The room that we were originally assigned only holds 50 people. I have heard that there have already been more registrants than that. So they're either going to cram people in there into that room, or it's in a Christian school complex, or we might be able to move to a bigger room. So if you're still interested in coming and haven't registered yet, I would still try the link. I would still register. It's free. It's not going to cost you anything. You're not going to lose any money. But hint, hint, if you're going there, get there early. So that they don't have to squeeze you in with a shoehorn. But that's about all I know. But I think it's fair for me to tell this audience, again, if there's any among you that are planning on coming, get there a little early to make sure you get a seat. That's a packet, people. It's a packet. All right, Mike. What about your book giveaway? You got an update with that? Oh, yeah. There is the second book giveaway. I got a lot of emails. There were a few things on the blog, the comments that said, hey, the book giveaway lasted less than a day. What happened? It was supposed to last a few more days until the 14th. And what happened was that when you set this thing up with Amazon, you have to put in a number, a number of responses. And then Amazon determines the random distribution of the prize. And so the number I put in there wasn't very low. I mean, it wasn't very high, excuse me. I think I probably put in something like a thousand. And that didn't work real well. It hit the max just in a few hours. And so it awarded all the books. So the next time around, and I've already, it should already be live, but the next giveaway is a book about the watchers. And I increased that number quite a bit, hoping again that the giveaway process would last the full seven days that Amazon allots to it. So hopefully we won't have that problem. But if it just gets beaten, I'm going to have to put in some ridiculous number in the future to try to not have this happen again. But I don't think it'll happen again. I put in a few thousand or something. Well, all right, Mike, next week, we're going to do another Q&A. So please send me your questions at TrayStrictly.net at gmail.com. You can get that on our website, the nakedbiblepodcast.com. Just know that from this time point, any questions sent in now, we'll probably air roughly four Q&As from next week's show. So just know we'll get to it, but it's probably about four Q&As down the road. Please keep them coming. We couldn't do it without you, the listeners. And when you do send it in, your questions, let us know where you're from. Always enjoy seeing where people are from, Mike. Is there anything else you would like to... Well, just a shout out to people who have been donating through PayPal and just say thank you, but collectively thank you because you do make the things that we're doing, even though we're doing these little baby steps now. You make them possible. And we needed to continue again to expand what we're doing and just say thank you. All right, Mike. Well, thank you for answering our questions and thank you all for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www.brmsh.com.