 You explained the relationship of the Torah to other sources and codes from that time period. That of the Sumerian King, a list to Adam's descendants and how the ages and dates in the Old Testament have to do with numerology. Also, you explained how Paul writes on the head covering as to do with the pre-scientific view of procreation. All of this is fascinating new information. My issue is I'm struggling to reconcile the doctrine of infallibility and inspiration with your explanations. Well, let not your heart be troubled. The problem isn't the biblical text. The problem is that you've been taught a flawed view of infality and inspiration. Where does the Bible... Why is it... Why would these things not be inspired? If it's God's choice to pick people living in the 1st or 2nd millennium BC or the 1st century to write something down and they can only do it with what's in their brain. And God, of course, knows that. He knows who he's picking and he knows what he's getting. How is that not inspiration? If God is the one who picks the person and prompts the person to write and that's what comes out by definition, it's still inspiration. What else would it be? If God is behind it, you can't call it anything else. The problem is that we've been taught inspiration as though it was dictation, that God has to feed the words to the writers or somehow that God took a person and changed their brain. It says, well, you're not quite as smart as I am. And I know people are going to be reading what I want you to write in the 21st century. So let me download a bunch of 21st century science into your head and now you can write. There is zero evidence for that in the Bible. Zero. And there's a lot of evidence to the contrary to that idea. Why doesn't God fix people's thinking when it comes to what's biologically speaking, what is the seed of emotions? It's not the heart. It's not the kidneys. It's not your intestines. It's your brain. There is no Hebrew word for brain. Why doesn't God fix the writer's head in all sorts of ways? Because he would have to make the modern people to do it. And if he makes them modern people to do it, then how are they supposed to communicate to other people who aren't modern using modern language? It undermines the very notion that the writers that God picked could write something comprehensible to their own audience. They're not writing to us. But this is the way we think about inspiration and somebody needs to stop the madness. God doesn't look at a person he wants to write scripture and say, I wish I could use you, but I got to fix you first. I've got to make you something you're not before I can pick you, before I can use you. That is not the way God operates. And we can tell that from the text. We can tell it just by the way God uses people in scripture just by reading how he does what he does. He takes people where they are, who they are, and he uses them to accomplish his will. And that's all he's doing in inspiration. When it comes to scientific stuff, God wants certain ideas communicated to people. The numbers in Genesis 5, I do think there's a mathematical cipher there. I don't know that we'll ever be able to completely understand it. I posted on this on my blog a while back and posted an article. I believe it was by Bato on this. And again, he makes a good case for a mathematical cipher. But even if you could demonstrate that this is what's going on, it's very difficult for us to know exactly how an ancient person would be thinking about this and what exactly God wanted communicated in those things. We can pick out a few things and have more hits than misses, but we're never going to perfectly understand in a case like that what's going on. Now, let's say Paul with the head covering. Paul wants to teach some very simple ideas. He wants to teach modesty. He wants to teach sexual fidelity. And again, submission in sexual terms to your partner. There's loyalty there. And he does so using the vocabulary that his readers would understand. What else would he use? If God just said, okay, Paul, I want you to stop here mid-sentence and I'm going to give you the Greek word for genetics. Even though there is no Greek word for genetics, I'm going to make one up because I'm God. And now I want you to use this term because in the 21st century, we need to satisfy readers there, too. Nobody reading Paul's material until we knew what genetics was would have any clue as to what he meant. The whole enterprise of communication, which is really what God wants in Scripture, why else create a written document if you didn't want it to communicate? The whole enterprise is undermined by this thought that God is just going to dump modern knowledge that no one in the time period would ever comprehend into the brain of the writer just so that the writer could write it. But that is how we're taught. And I'm saying it's wrong. It's flawed. It is deeply flawed. And it sets up a situation where Scripture becomes an easy target for critics. Rather, what I'm recommending is let it be what it is. Just let the Bible be what it is. God comes to Paul and says, hey, I have a few points. I want you to get across to the Corinthians because the Lord knows they need it. This is one of the most immoral bunches that we've ever encountered here. They're struggling in their Christian lives because of all this garbage that they had in their lives before, all the garbage they're living around, all that sort of stuff. So I want you to teach them a few ideas and more or less get that done. And Paul does get it done. He is able to communicate those ideas to his audience using the language that he knows and the language that they know. Mission accomplished. So again, just to try to summarize this, and I get this question a lot in email and whatnot. Frankly, we need to unlearn dictation theory of inspiration. And I don't care if your pastor doesn't call it that. That's what he's giving you. And he has to have God feeding words to the biblical writers and has to make the biblical writers what they were not. In other words, if God has to brain dump them to make them modern or write something that conforms to modernity, that's what it is. And it's not correct. And the reason it makes scripture vulnerable, it makes the whole idea of inspiration vulnerable, is it's easy to demonstrate that that can't work. It just can't work. There are too many exceptions to it. There are too many obstacles to it. It's so obviously not what's happening that a critic can just come along and pluck one out and just undermine the whole idea of inspiration. This is why I've said many times. If you strip the humanity out of inspiration, you undermine the doctrine. That sounds counterintuitive because inspiration is about God giving us information. But if you strip the humanity out, in other words, if you don't let God use who he was using, the way he was using them, you undermine the doctrine. And I see that happen all the time. So we need to unlearn this. We need to let scripture be what it is. God picked people living at a certain time, a certain place, a certain culture with knowledge specific to that period. Whenever they were alive, he prompted them the right things. He didn't change their brain or the content in their brain. If he wanted to do that, he could have, but he didn't. How do we know he didn't? Because we're looking at the text. We're looking at the text, and the text doesn't have a Greek word for genetics. It doesn't have a Greek, you know, the Greek delta, new alpha, you know, for DNA. It doesn't have that. God wasn't interested in having a first century writer produce content for 21st century readers. Because the content would have been foreign to the person writing and whoever the letter was to. This is a letter sent to the church at Corinth. Again, what other language is he going to use other than what he knows and they know? If you're going to use 21st century stuff, if God's going to invent terms and download them in your brain, why even bother? Nobody's going to understand it. So let's, let's, we wind up being in the situation where we, you know, we, we let people judge scripture for not being what it wasn't intended to be. And again, I have a whole lecture on this, you know, with, you know, again, out of my own experience, you know, with an atheist or two. Why are you criticizing the Bible for not being what it wasn't intended to be? Are you mad at your dog for not being a cat? Okay, but they don't, nobody ever says that to them. Nobody ever points out the obvious to them. This is what you're doing. You're mad at the Bible for not being a scientific document that gets, you know, modern science, right? Well, congratulations. You're criticizing it for not being what it never was intended to be. What else in life do you treat that way? Because it's absurd. It's an absurdity. But if you want to resist that, then you make scripture vulnerable. Editing. I mean, I could just go on and on with this. Read, read Ezekiel 1. Read the first five or six verses. Can't God make up his mind whether to use the first person grammatically or the third person? Was God undecided? No, there's editing going on. Well, if there's editing going on, God isn't feeding them the words. Okay, why do Biblical laws sometimes conform to Mesopotamian laws? Other times there's Hittite stuff. Covenant structures could be Mesopotamian Hittites, you know, Seropalistinian, Egyptian stuff. Doesn't God have an original thought in his head? Does God need to quote pagan sources? Well, he sure does because he has to give them the words. He has to give the writers the words. The writers aren't thinking themselves. I mean, they're blank slates and God has to dump something in there. That's bogus. It's bogus. God picks people. And he prompts them to write the things he wants them to write, the thoughts he wants them to communicate. They use the words that are in their head that they know, the language they have, to communicate to people at the same time period. Otherwise, there's just no point to it at all.