 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast to support this podcast with the NakedBiblePodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on New Start Here at NakedBiblePodcast.com Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 219 or 29th Q&A episode. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland and he's scholar Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey Mike, how you doing? Pretty good. Pretty good. How are you? I'm doing good. I'm doing real good since our first Naked Bible conference is selling quite well. So we probably got just a little over a hundred tickets left. So I just want to urge people to not wait because I don't want them to miss out. That would be a bad idea to wait. It would be a bad idea to wait. So I did want to let everybody know that I will be recording it. So just know that. Live streaming is still up in the air, but the video I will record it. And what we do with the video after that remains to be seen. So just know that at least it will be recorded. So I wanted to get it. Mike, I'm getting tons of emails about that. So I just want to officially put that out there. And as the summer goes on, I will have more information about live streaming and things of that nature. So there's still hope. So I want people. But you're not guaranteeing that the video taken will see the light of day anytime soon though. We don't know what we're going to do with that, correct? Correct. It will see the light of day, but soon is the optimal word there. I wouldn't say soon. Soon might be a year. Who knows? Hopefully not. But maybe. So I just don't know yet. So as we inch closer to it and I work out more of these kinks to figure out what we're going to do. We'll have that. Those types of answers for you. So just know everybody. The email me questions about the video and live stream and all that. It remains to be seen. At least there will be video. And when you get to see that, I don't know yet. So there you go. Hey, I can bring Calvin along and he can use a video camera. Yeah, there you go. There you go. We can have everybody work go pros. How's that? Yeah. Pass them out. That's exactly what we do. That's where right there. There you go. All right, Mike. Well, we the lie to you last week, you said we were to do baptism of the dead, but we're actually going to do two Q&As one this week and one next week. And then after that, we'll pick up the topic about baptism of the dead. Yep. So I guess with that, you want to jump into these questions here? Sure. Let's go. All right. She has a question regarding generational curses in the book of Deuteronomy. It talks about the curse of the law and about blessings and curses as Christians. Are we still bound by those laws? Do we have to renounce what our parents did and our grandparents and so on? Yeah, I'm not quite sure from this question exactly what curses. Stephanie is talking about because cursing shows up a number of times in Deuteronomy. So if we're talking about curses tied to the land, I would say, well, that's really not sort of in view because the whole concept of the people of God isn't really tied specifically to the land and or Israel failed in those regards and they were cursed. Now I'm thinking of a passage outside Deuteronomy like in Leviticus 26. It's very clear if you do this or that, I'm going to drive you from the land and that happened. That was the exile and so on and so forth. So if she's talking about that kind of stuff in Deuteronomy, the Leviticus 26 kind of stuff, there's not really much of a connection. But I'm going to assume she's talking about Deuteronomy 5. This is one of those generational curse passages that is a bit more sort of not attached to the land. It's a bit broader. Let's put it that way or at least not linked to that specific idea. So on that assumption, I'll just let me read Deuteronomy 5. We'll start in verse 8 and go through verse 10. Again, I'm just guessing that this is probably what's behind the question. This passage says you shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. Sidebar, there's your three-tiered cosmology again. Verse 9, you shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my promise. So that's the end of the passage. And you get this third and fourth generation phrasing in this passage. So I'm guessing that's where this comes from. So it's the question, are we still bound by these laws? Well, in one sense, sure, we're not supposed to worship other gods. We're not supposed to bow down to other gods. The third and fourth generation thing, I think, though, is kind of really what's driving the bus here. And I would say that, again, in my understanding, again, I'm not alone here, just in the academic understanding, third and fourth generation, that language is there because that essentially amounts to the lifetime, the lifespan of the person who commits the crime, so to speak. So biblically speaking, you know, generation is actually not a terribly consistent thing to nail down in the Old Testament because the term is used in different contexts with different time spans, the longest of which would be 100 years for a generation. So if you have this family heritage, if you want to take the long number, you know, it's probably not, you know, something that's in the picture anyway. But when it comes to sort of human life spans, human, you know, lineages, that sort of thing, you're dealing with a generation being roughly 20 years, and that's defined in terms of just life, life experience, where biblically speaking, people would get married, you know, when they're, early, when they're younger than 20 years, they would have children, and those children would grow up again, they'd get married in their teen years, in the 20s, you know, whatever, and have, you know, babies and so on and so forth. So a generation, practically speaking, was roughly 20 years. And if you have third and the fourth generation, that's 60 to 80 years, chances are the person who commits this offense is going to be dead by the end of the fourth generation. So this is another way of saying, you know, that I'm going to visit, you know, there's going to be an effect of this sin. God is going to visit, you know, the sin of the father, really as long as he lives the rest of his life and his children are going to be affected by it. So third and fourth generation is pointing to a finite amount of time, even if you take the one instance I can think of where the term generation is sort of attached to something that would be longer than 20 years, in case people who are listening are interested in what I'm thinking of there. It's the Genesis 15 passage where God is conversing with Abraham about what's going to happen to his descendants. They're going to go down into Egypt and be, you know, in bondage there for 400 years, and you have the, you know, if you look at the passage, you have four generations mentioned there. So we do the math four divided by four, you know, 400 divided by four is 100 years. So that's probably a broad general statement, because if you actually even go look at the generations involved in national Israel from Abraham's time all the way up there, it's not a very precise number. So, you know, what the exact meaning of that is, again, is debated by scholars. But when it comes to actual physical genealogical generations, people typically in the biblical period got married before they were 20. So we use round numbers. So third and fourth generation is basically the natural lifespan of the person who commits the crime. So, you know, in that sense, you know, we've got, you know, a situation where, okay, let's just say that that's what's going on here. Is that fair? You know, why is God looking at this way? Why does the passage say God's going to visit the inequity of this person, you know, to the third and fourth generation on the children? Part of this has to deal with sort of the Middle Eastern, ancient Near Eastern outlook that scholars would refer to as corporate solidarity. And the idea there is that society, basic unity of society was not the individual, it was the family and the extended family. So you have instances both positive and negative in the Bible where a person will do something, you know, like a sin and their descendants will suffer because of that. And you have the opposite as well, where if somebody does something good, then socially, just societally, their descendants will reap the benefits of what their ancestor did. The positive example, one of them anyway, where, you know, when David is basically trying to lobby, you know, Saul, that, you know, I'm going to go out there and kill Goliath. You know, he gets promised a bunch of things and his descendants are included in the benefits that will accrue to David if he gets rid of Goliath. So you have this sort of social sense that if you, in David's case, if you do this, you know, life's going to be better, you know, for your kids and their kids and so on and so forth. So there's this corporate idea going on in the ancient world that's very common. It's not just with Israel, but it's to other civilizations as well at the time. Now, for this question, though, probably my favorite commentary on Deuteronomy is Teaguez. I've quoted it before. And I'll just read what Teaguez says about this idea because there are other places in the Torah, in Deuteronomy, in fact, that are clear that there's individual responsibility going on. That, you know, it's the idea that even though we have this sort of corporate mindset, basic unit of society, and there's, you know, corporate solidarity and all that, it isn't necessarily the case that God is holding other people guilty for what somebody else does. There's a difference between suffering the effects of sin and being considered somehow a guilty party of something that happened before you were even born. So we have to balance out how we look at this language with other passages in the Torah, and specifically in Deuteronomy. So Teaguez has a nice summary of this. He says, effective as this approach may have been, again, this corporate thing. Deuteronomy 24-16 forbids its application by judicial authorities. And he quotes the verse, a person shall be put to death only for his own crime. That's the end of the verse. So that's very, it's very clear statement of individual responsibility. Teaguez continues, he says, but experience showed that people often do suffer or benefit because of the actions of their ancestors. Cross-generational punishment by God is partially mitigated in the Torah itself. In the Torah, only Exodus 34-7 and Numbers 14-18 state without qualification that God visits the sins of fathers upon children. In both versions of the Decalogue, that means both versions of the Ten Commandments, the list of generations to be punished and rewarded is qualified by the phrases, quote, unquote, of those who hate me and quote, unquote, of those who love me and keep my commandments. And our passage, Deuteronomy 5, 9, and 10 is one of those, one of those qualifying passages. The phrases most likely refer to descendants, meaning that cross-generational retribution applies only to descendants who act as their ancestors did. In other words, God visits the guilt of the fathers on future generations that reject him and rewards the loyalty of ancestors to the thousandth generation of descendants who are also loyal to him. In other words, God punishes or rewards descendants for ancestral sins and virtues along with their own if they, the descendants, continue the deeds of their ancestors. So that's the end of the TGA quote. So in other words, we can't just sort of lift Deuteronomy 5, 9, and 10 out and say, oh, you know, this, one of your ancestors did something before you were even born and you're going to suffer for it now. You know, God's going to remember that sin is going to hammer away at you. Again, you have these other passages in the Torah that make it pretty clear that individual responsibility is important, you know, to God. And so you couple that with these qualifying ideas from other passages to say, well, essentially, if you walk the same walk, if you walk in the steps of your ancestors who did this thing, you're going to pay for it. You're going to suffer for it. So that's a little bit different than suffering the residual effects, say of a broken marriage or maybe alcoholism or something like this. Some sins that we're familiar with that have a long lasting effect on people's lives or at least could. That's a little different than God holding you guilty for something that happened before you were ever born. What TGA is suggesting here is that it really isn't the case. There are these qualifying passages in the Torah that sort of make, again, following in their footsteps in a behavioral sort of way part of what's going on in these kind of statements in the Torah. Greg has our next question. In one of the podcasts, Dr. Heizer briefly mentioned the documentary, Patterns of Evidence, which discusses an alternate timeline for Egyptian history. The producers also mentioned that the histories of surrounding nations are tied to the Egyptian timeline. Sounds like serious implications if the producers are correct. Yeah, that's true. This is a question that is really, really complicated. It's really not possible to give any sort of detail in a format like this to this question. I'm going to give it some broad brush strokes here, but even that is really not going to be adequate. People out there in the audience are interested and Lord help you if you are in ancient chronology. I say that as somebody who used to really be into this subject and sort of it became the pit of despair for all of you who have sort of watched the princess bride. It is a quagmire of obtuseness, complexity and difficulty and really no resolution. But if, nevertheless, you're still interested in ancient chronology, please subscribe to the newsletter. I've put four or five articles in the protected folder for newsletter subscribers by two authors, one of whom is Rol, R-O-H-L, and the other one is John Bimson, B-I-M-S-T-O-N. And the articles essentially talk about redating the exodus chronology. And there you're going to get all the nuts and bolts, but I'm going to try to broad brush stroke this as best I can. The issue is you do have serious problems in what is called third intermediate period chronology when it comes to ancient Egypt. Egypt for some of the listeners may know you have like old kingdom, new kingdom, middle kingdom, all that stuff. Well, between those kingdoms you have intermediate periods and flash or I guess, you know, quick crash course on Egyptian history. You have kingdoms when you have one pharaoh and everything is sort of solid and stable in society. You have intermediate periods when people are competing to be pharaohs and things are just chaos. So that's how Egyptologists break Egypt's history down. So during one of these, the third intermediate period, which a lot of that overlaps with the divided monarchy in Israel, there are really significant problems in third intermediate period chronology. And this is actually where David Roll, he dealt with TIP chronology, third intermediate period chronology in his dissertations. So he sort of camps out here. And, you know, I've read a number of articles by Roll on this and I think he's right. There are serious problems here. This is not the neat picture that other Egyptologists like to portray. So I think he's got a point. The short version here is that you have missing names in king lists. There are gaps in the king lists for TIP chronology and other issues as well. So if you look at it the way Roll looks at it, you can compress the third intermediate period by a couple hundred years. Now that means when you compress that period, all the rest of Egyptian history compresses with it. And the timeline shifts forward in this case since the third intermediate period is a late period. And if you do that, then the synchronisms between Egyptian history and biblical stuff change because you're moving the timeline. For anybody who's seen patterns of evidence, they try graphically to illustrate this. And I think do a pretty nice job of it visually. But if you compress the chronology, everything shifts. And this is what Roll is essentially arguing. Now, people who don't like Roll would say, well, you can't do that because there's a clear synchronism between one of those pharaohs in the third intermediate period, pharaoh Shishank and a biblical reference to pharaoh Shishak during the time of Rehoboam. So you can't just shift things. We have a secure anchor. Well, that's not really the case. One of the Bimson articles in the protected folder will show you in excruciating detail why the military campaigns of Shishank do not align in fundamental ways with the invasion of Shishak described in the Bible. They're markedly different. Just by way of a few examples, you've got, you know, in the biblical account, Shishak and Jeroboam, the king of the north, were allies. But in the Egyptian account, Shishank attacks the northern kingdom and doesn't attack Jerusalem. But in the biblical account, Shishak attacks Jerusalem. I mean, these are just fundamental disconnections between the military campaign stories of in Egypt, Shishank, and in the Bible, Shishak. People have sort of just assumed these are the same guys because their names are kind of similar. But when you actually look at the descriptions of what, you know, happened with Shishak's invasion and Shishank's invasion, they are just, I want to say miles apart. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but there are significant differences that really just can't be reconciled. And so if you don't have that synchronism and that it's really the only quote, unquote, secure one you have where the Bible overlaps with the third intermediate period, then you can shift the Egyptian chronology all you want. Again, you know, again, within the bounds of evidence. And this is what Rol does. He shifts it, he compresses it, and that moves the timeline, which then in turn produces other synchronisms that today Egyptologists and biblical scholars don't see there because they're still playing with the old timeline. So you have Egyptian texts that seem to talk about the plagues. You know, you have Egyptian texts that seem to correlate with certain parts of the Exodus story. And nowadays people say, well, no, we can't use that as evidence because it's 200 years too early or 200 years this or that. But if you compress the timeline, then they line up. And so this is Rol's argument. Again, this is very broad brush stroke. If you want the nuts and bolts details, please subscribe to the newsletter. You can just read all that to your heart's content and just get lost again in the vortex of ancient chronology. But, you know, my personal opinion is there really are problems on the Egyptian side with this. And I just don't know how you surround the disconnections between the Shashank and Shashak problem. I mean, for Egyptologists, it's easy. Or the Bible's wrong. The Bible just got the details all screwed up. You know, and for some biblical scholars, that's where they go too. You know, either, again, they have no qualms with trying to figure this out because they want the synchronism. They need the synchronism to sort of make the picture what it is, regardless of their confessional commitment or lack thereof to any sort of sense of inspiration and biblical historicity and coherence. For those of us, that's just not, you know, like the first default position. Oh, the Bible screwed up. And Rol, I mean, I don't think Rol is a Christian or anything like that. But Rol doesn't like arguments like that. And good for him because they're cheesy. You know, they cheat. They take the easy path. And he's taken a real close look at TIP third intermediate period chronology. And I think he's right. I think there really are problems. The problems need fixing now. My disagreements with Rol are going to be because Rol quote unquote fixes this problem. Then he wants to try to fix ancient chronology problems everywhere. And not just the Near East, but like everywhere all over the Mediterranean to have like one coherent system. And he winds up pressing the case too far in a number of respects. And he says goofy things. He says some truly goofy things. And that's really unfortunate because it makes him an easy target. It becomes a convenient thing to say, well, look at the silly thing he said over there. I'm not going to, I don't have any reason now to listen to him when he talks about the Exodus chronology. That's just really unfortunate because just because he might do something that's just sort of a little weird or a little wild or doesn't really work well in one area. Doesn't mean that he's wrong everywhere else. But that's kind of how the mainstream looks at Rol. So it's unfortunate, but that's just the way it is. Nick wants to know if there is still potential for us to sin in the new heaven, new earth. Well, you know, I've said this before, since our glorification doesn't mean that we become God or become Jesus, then we can't say that we are clones, 100% of them, and possess with exhaustive completeness their perfect nature. So that still means we're lesser, even though we're glorified. So in theory, and this is the way I always put it, in theory, that means, well, sure, we could have a hiccup. We could commit some flaw or some wrong or something like that. You know, I'm only led to say that because we don't become Yahweh. There is only one uncreated creator. I mean, we don't become him. We don't become Jesus as though we are Jesus. But we do become as close, as like Jesus as we can possibly get. So you can say that we still aren't God and therefore, you know, we aren't ontologically 100% the same. We don't have 100% God's nature and the nature of Jesus. So we're still lesser, and yes, that means that there's a possibility of rebellion. You can say that. But possibilities are not probabilities in any really meaningful sense in this case. Now, I would illustrate it this way. It's possible, like I've said on coast to coast AM in a number of settings, it's possible that I could be the next American Idol, that I could be President, that I could win an Academy Award, that I could win a Nobel Prize. All those things are possible, but they ain't going to happen. They're just not going to happen. The possibility is so infinitesimal that it's basically meaningless. And that's what we've got going on here. Ken asks, if salvation in the Bible is strictly loyalty to Yahweh, are modern believers of Judaism with loyalty to Yahweh saved while not embracing Jesus as the Messiah? No, they're not. To refuse Jesus is to reject Yahweh incarnate and to reject the plan of salvation that Yahweh came up with. So if you reject Jesus, you are rejecting the plan of Yahweh, the wisdom of Yahweh, and saying, you got something better. You reject the old plan, which by the way wasn't works to begin with, but you don't get to make the rules. You don't get to prefer one thing over the other when Yahweh says, this is my plan. This is the way of salvation. You can't reject his plan and be saved. You don't get to swap something else in. If you could, that sort of makes all the preaching of the apostles meaningless and kind of dumb, really just pointless, hopelessly self-contradictory. So this is what Yahweh decided. Yahweh, again, came as a man in Jesus Christ, died on the cross, rose again, ascended to the right hand of the Father and all that stuff that the New Testament, including of course the book of Hebrews, talks about. And if you think that you can just sort of trade that in for something else and say that you're still being loyalty, being loyal, Lord, I'm rejecting the plan that you've given me, but I'm still loyal to you. That's just not coherent. Our next question is from a chef WB in the axe podcast. Dr. Heiser said that idols were thought of as a house or dwelling place for those particular gods they were fashioned after. In Zechariah 1117 it says, woe to the idle shepherd that leaveth the flock. The sword shall be upon his arm and upon his right eye. His arm shall be clean, dried up, and his right eye shall be utterly darkened. What is this verse trying to say in regard to idle shepherd? With my new understanding of what an idol is, it almost sounds like the idle shepherd will be indwelt by one of the divine counsel. Yeah, the text really doesn't mean anything like that. There's a translation problem here. Idle shepherd is apparently, well, it's not apparently, it is the King James translation, which is pretty awkward and I would say pretty poor in this instance. Now I've looked at the new King James, and the new King James actually doesn't have what the regular King James has for here. The new King James is like basically every other translation and they'll translate the Hebrew word as worthless or something like that. The word translated idle in the question in the reading of Zechariah 11 and 17 that was in the question and again is reflected in the King James. That Hebrew word is alleal and that term can be used and is used elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible for something that is weak or faceless or defective or useless or vain or worthless. For example Job 13 4, let's just read that passage just to give you one example, there are others. As for you, you white wash with lies, worthless physicians are you all. So, worthless physicians, the word worthless there is alleal. So again it has this idea of uselessness and think about the context, Job 13 4. Again it's not talking about idols that are masquerading as physicians or divine council members that are sort of possessing or inhabiting physicians. It's not talking about anything like that. It's about physicians were useless in helping Job they were worthless, they were defective, they couldn't help it. They were totally ineffectual and so that's what's going on in the Zechariah passage. A shepherd that deserts the flock is by definition useless because he's not doing the job of a shepherd. He's abandoning the job of the shepherd so he is useless. I don't think this has anything to do with the divine council. Alright, Mike, there you go. That's all the questions we have for this week so you did it. What do you know? I actually got through a bunch in a reasonable amount of time. Put it on the calendar. Nothing left to talk about now other than we need to give, we've got a live studio audience member Robert we need to give him a shout out. That's right. Let's turn him loose. Robert, you want me to mic there? Hey, what's going on? Oh, yeah, I don't think Okay, that's enough. You're part of podcast history now. There you go. Alright. Where's that from, Robert? I'm from Little Rock, Arkansas the old place mentioned a modern city in the vibe. Here we go. We can edit that out. Alright, Mike, well, that's it, man. I guess we want to thank Robert for coming in the studio. We need to start doing a live audience. That'd be fun. He snuck in. He snuck in here. That just sounds good. I like saying that. Alright, Mike, well, that's really it. Unless there's anything else you'd like to get off your chest. Alright, Mike, we're done. Alright, sounds good. Well, we appreciate you answering our questions as always and I want to thank everybody else 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.ermsh.com