 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 222, Trees and Kings with Rusty Osborn. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey, Mike, how you doing this week? Pretty good. Pretty good, busy as usual, but it's been productive. Yeah, absolutely. And every week that goes by it, we inch closer to the Naked Bible Conference. So I'm excited. This episode's going to give you a taste of what to expect at that conference. Yeah, it'll be good prep. Be good prep for people and we still have some tickets left. So again, we're hoping that the interview today, again, we're not only prep people who are already coming, but again, get some other people interested. They are disappearing. So now's the time. Absolutely. I think we have about 50 left. So please go to nakedbibleconference.com and get your tickets. And I'm excited to talk to Rusty. Yeah, I am too. I think our listeners are going to be really interested in what he has to say today. Well, we're here with Rusty Osborn. That's not his real first name, but that's how I know him. William Rusty Osborn. And you know, I've had a number of talks over the years, the academic conferences with Rusty about his work, which we're going to talk about in broad strokes today because he is one of our speakers at the upcoming Naked Bible Conference, where he will drill down on some specifics, specific passages related to what we will talk about today. But I've kind of followed his work. His book that was just published is entitled Trees and Kings, a comparative analysis of tree imagery in Israel's prophetic tradition and the ancient Near East. And I've mentioned it several times, Rusty. We went through Ezekiel. Of course, you get to some of that material and all the weird tree images. You're like the trees in the Garden of God and all that kind of stuff. So there's divine counsel stuff in there. Rusty is very familiar with the kind of content that I traffic in, that we mentioned on the podcast that we write about. And so once I found out what he was working on, I was really interested because, honestly, there's not a whole lot done in this that's not in what we academics would call the fugitive literature. You know, so Scandinavian press or something like that. There's not a whole lot. So it was exciting that you were working on this. And it's great that you can be here again to introduce the audience to your work and sort of prep them for what we'll do at the conference and, you know, whatever we can do to again to help people contextualize scripture. That's what we're about. So, Rusty, I'd like you to introduce yourself to the audience to begin with and then we'll start talking about your work. Yeah, thanks, Mike. It's great to be with you and to talk about this. I know we've chatted a few times at conferences over the years and it's kind of nice to have the volume finished and be able to talk about it. Like you said, my name's William Russell Osborn. So my parents named me, but I go by Rusty. And, you know, I studied at Southern Seminary, did a PhD at Midwestern Seminary in Kansas City. And really the tree work came as part of my PhD research. I currently teach as an associate professor of biblical and theological studies at College of the Ozarks in southwestern Missouri and serve as a pastor of Christ Covenant Church there in Branson for the past year. And, yeah, so it's a little bit about me and I teach, I teach some Hebrew Old Testament, also do some Greek teaching some biblical exegesis courses, actually just finished a class this past semester on Ezekiel. So we got to spend a good bit of time looking at some some tree imagery in Ezekiel. And I think my students may have got a little bit more than they bargained for on tree imagery in Ezekiel, but they didn't they didn't complain too much. Yeah, well, you know, they're captives. Yeah, that's right. At least I didn't make it a textbook, right? I was kind. I didn't, but... Well, it's good to to disabuse them of the the thought that they already know all this stuff. That's right. Yeah, you know, the more that we can do the better. Well, let's jump in at this place. Let's just start with ancient Near Eastern kingship, because that's, you know, obviously, I think of kings and trees, okay, you know, kingship and tree stuff, kingships probably more familiar to the audience. They used to be, you know, used to thinking about kings because you run into those in the Bible when they do stuff, but that all has a context. You know, that kingship doesn't just sort of come out of nowhere and the Israelites didn't just invent it. So tell us a little bit about, you know, the trappings of ancient Near Eastern kingship. I mean, if you study kingship, what kinds of things do you need to be thinking about? What kinds of things come up in the discussion? Yeah, no, that's great. And, you know, just before I start, I mean, one of the reasons that I titled the book Trees and Kings was because, I mean, there's a lot of tree imagery in the Bible, but really in this volume I wanted to focus on the intersection between tree imagery and royal ideology. Or that is, how did people think about kings? How did they think about the leaders in their various cultural scenarios and cultural contexts? And so that's really kind of what I'm honing in on. And obviously, as you just said, I mean, kingship and how we think about kings in the ancient world is intrinsically tied to that. And, you know, I think perhaps there's nothing more foreign to modern Americans than notions of ancient kingship, right? I mean, this is a huge idea, but this divide is, you know, a massive worldview chasm that we must get over if we're going to understand many texts in the Old Testament. Because there was no compartmentalization in the ancient world when it came to politics, religion, and agriculture, interestingly enough, that all of these concepts were intertwined with great complexity. So unlike our, you know, modern notions of politician is radically separate from religious leader is radically separate from farmer, I mean, in the ancient world there was just far more complexity and interconnection in these spheres of life that brought these kind of figurative portrayals of kingship and fertility of the land and political power and opulence and all of this is rolled up together. I think Dan Block and Chris Wright just give such a good kind of visual summary of kingship in the ancient world when they draw this triangle. And, you know, the deity is at the top, people is at one lower corner and land at the other corner, and the king stands in the middle of all three of these realities. The king was the greatest religious figure spanning the gap between heaven and earth, the king was the greatest of his subjects of representing the people, and the king's reign was also connected to the fertility of the land. So I think when we think about kingship we have to recognize that we are looking at, you know, the human being par excellence in whatever cultural context we're encountering, whether it's Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ugarit, that we're looking at this human sometimes divinely human figure that encapsulates what it means to be the best of us. And he serves this a unique role in representing that people to the god or to the gods depending on that context. So I mean I think all of those aspects are incredibly important in thinking just about kingship in the ancient world as we start looking at, okay, now how did people in this ancient world view then come to portray kingship visually and literarily? Well, let's pull out a few, you know, a few of those ideas. You mentioned fertility, the fertility of the land. You know, there's also this, you know, how do we look at the king? Is he, you know, essentially a divine being, you know, spawned by the deity? Or is he made, you know, of some quality that's superior to the rest of us? You know, those are related but different concepts. So you have, let's just call it parentage or lineage. You've got fertility. We don't really need to even go further than that because, you know, you sort of can drift off into military stuff and whatnot, but let's just focus on those two things. How would an ancient person think about either of those or both of those, both in a way that would be quite different from the way we look at things and even different from each other? You know, like, you know, give us the lay of the land there and then sort of where the Israelites, you know, sort of drop in or pop up from. Yeah, I mean, I think a really good place to hone in on and kind of getting just a great picture of all of these ideas coming together is really in ancient Egypt around the time of the new kingdom. We see this ceremony with what's called the Ished Tree. And if you're familiar with kingship in ancient Egypt and just kind of the life cycle of how they lived in Egypt on the Nile, there was an annual flood that would come and Osiris was a god that was associated with the fertility of the land and he had this kind of reincarnated visage on earth that was Pharaoh. And so, Pharaoh was very, very intrinsically tied to the Egyptian Pantheon. And as Pharaoh did his job maintaining Ma'at in the world that is kind of cosmic order. When all was well, the Nile would flood, the land would become fertile, the people would farm it, there would be good crops and, you know, that was kind of the rhythm of life, right? And life was the way it was supposed to be. That's exactly right. And the king stood in the middle of that. And so, you know, when life was good, he was great. When life was bad, he was the problem or, you know, he needed to identify something else as the problem. So often happens. But, you know, at that point the king comes to this position of this kind of centerpiece between the land, the fertility of the land, the gods and the people. And around the the new kingdom we have these wonderful kind of iconographic scenes of the pharaoh being superimposed over a tree, which is the Ished tree. We don't know exactly what type of tree. Some have kind of speculated maybe it's a Persia tree or something like that. But the king is superimposed over this image of the tree with the gods, specifically Thoth inscribing the name of the king on the leaves of the tree. And this kind of symbolizing iconographically visually how the king's reign is to be as long and productive and fruitful as this tree. And so these these kind of images of fertility and stability and long reign and connectedness to the deities is all kind of visually wrapped up in that one wonderful image that becomes quite common even down through the the remises the second, remises the fourth. There's several iterations of that scene, especially like at the temple at Karnak and in other places. Now you're as an Egyptian you're buying into this because of what? What have you been taught about the gods and kings? Why is this meaningful? Yeah, I mean you've been you've been taught that the king is the descendant of the gods and that he is one of them and that he spans this gap between heaven and earth and and is this the the presence of the deity on earth that maintains world order and keeps all things established and as long as everyone is kind of contributing and doing their part and the world continues to function. So I think it's it's very much tied up in an just an enormous worldview that shapes and answers many questions and explains the reality that the ancients were experiencing day in and day out. Yeah, I think maybe the closest analogy, I mean if you have a better one, chime in here, but I think for the average Christian Bible reader, Bible student, the closest analogy may be Messiah, the return to Messiah with the new earth, that there's something about that event and that person that returns things to the way they that they are supposed to be. But you know for an ancient person like an Egyptian, that was kind of like an annual re-up. You'd hit the reset button every year to both maintain and restore and continue those kinds of conditions you know through different rituals and whatnot. So is that a reasonable analogy? Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think so. I think that we see you know I don't I don't want to to drift too far astray down the path of you know youngy and the archetypes or anything like this. But you know I mean I wrote an article one time on the you know ancient kings and Dr. Who. I mean there I think there is something intrinsic in in humanity that recognizes that we need someone who is enough like us to represent us and be interested in us but we need someone outside of ourselves that is able to do what we sense that we cannot do. And so from the past to the future we're looking for someone that represents us but is not like us exactly because we recognize our own deficiencies. We need someone other than us but similar and I think that you see that just that idea regurgitate over and over and over and over and over again in the ancient world looking for someone to be the best of us to you know go before us with the deity and intercede for us. You know it's interesting you know in a godless culture let's just say yeah you know an atheistic culture you know that wants to sort of meet the same needs in other words the the human the human psychology doesn't change they're still looking for those things but instead of a person who is most like us you know to be some sort of divine representation now we have the state you know collective the collective is better all of us is better than one of us you know and you can see how the state just sort of slides in there and if we just surrender power to the collective life is just going to be so wonderful you know they they they take the same needs they're they're trying to answer the same issues but removing anything that smacks yeah you know of of of another worldly you know presence you know displacing it with the state you can see how that would how that would work. Yeah and what's fascinating is I mean one's just I think is is far fetched to believe is the other we stand as modern human beings you know shaking our head going tisk-tisk how could they believe in a divine human while at the same time we just kind of attribute the exact same characteristics to utopian state that just doesn't even exist right I mean it's just a kind of a psychological creation in our minds but we say oh no this is what intelligent people believe in right so I mean I think it is fascinating how we are still looking for those similar qualities as human beings in in a fallen world. Yeah yeah it really is what what about Mesopotamia I mean because you know obviously you're going to have prophets especially the biblical prophets you know the major and minor that are going to touch in some way again depending on their own historical circumstances they're going to be involved in some way with Egyptian motifs again just depending what the historical circumstances are but you also get a lot that interact with you know Assyrian later Babylonian and Persian motifs just again because of the historical circumstance so how are those how are the Mesopotamian views of kingship how are they similar or different than what you just talked about with the Egyptians. Yeah that's great you know I like to think about this really in a bit of a chronological stream because if you look at the earliest kind of culture of Mesopotamia look at the Sumerian culture there's a very strong connection between kind of trees and kings I mean there's some some explicit figurations with Shoghi and you know just the king is a tree planted by a ditch I mean just kind of very explicit metaphorical language we have a lot of cylinder we have a lot of seals from that time cylinder seals that kind of portray the king and this replacing the tree and so there's a very strong tradition in Sumerian culture of associating the king with a tree and as that culture you know trend kind of goes through various transformations through Assyrians and the Babylonian you know hegemony in Mesopotamia you do see some some various changes but by the time of the Neo Assyrian period kind of the idea of the the sacred tree or some type of stylized tree becomes incredibly important politically so much so that astronauts are Paul's kind of throne room in the palace at the northwest palace at Nimrud that was lined with these stylized trees that many scholars have said became almost emblematic of his reign and kingship so that kingship itself became very visually associated with kind of a sacred tree or some type of stylized tree now what's the significance of that tree you know there in lies a lot of good scholarly debate but you certainly see a strong kind of a flow of ideas through Mesopotamia that pick up that are picked up in iconography later in the Neo Assyrian period but then you also have some literary examples like you know I mean much to be said about the epic of Gilgamesh you know I mean one of the most popular works in the ancient Near East for centuries I mean just based on what we know about the copying and use of Gilgamesh it was a literary work that just had enormous influence over the way that ancients thought in Mesopotamia and we have these wonderful stories about Gilgamesh ascending to the cedar forest and doing battle with humbaba the god of the cedar forests and conquering the cedar forests and chopping down the cedars and shipping them back to build palaces and and temples and those types of things so so a very strong kind of tree imagery throughout Mesopotamia you know even that even the act of cutting them down and shipping them to build palaces and temples I'm I'm guessing you know you've I'm sure you've read it you're probably it's not like you memorized it so I don't know how how what what space this occupies in your head but Lepinsky has this really fascinating article on Mount Hermon and its relationship to you know the Mesopotamian Garden of the Gods the cosmic mountain you know and and tracing the roots all the way back to Sumer that this is the this was the place where the Divine Council was and tree imagery is a big part of that Gilgamesh is a big part of that it's really fascinating but if you're believing that if you're believing that this place or maybe some you know some part of you know Biblos or the the anti-Lebanon or up there where Hermon is yeah when you take trees from that place and you bring them to wherever you're at and you build temples and palaces with it I mean that creates an association absolutely you know it's like it's like divine building material yes you know so there's there's cosmic geography you know involved in that but it I mean it sort of even transcends the cosmic geography now you're taking elements out of a place that has a certain number of associations certain kinds of associations and you're you're recreating you know this even the whole idea of recreation with with this kind of material if this is your world you can't help but understand or see what the connections are you know that you're doing this intentionally yeah you know to to create the the the linkage well and what I think you know one thing that's really fascinating that I discovered in researching this book was the kind of the the political significance of gardens created by Mesopotamian kings so that the garden I mean based on you know and inscriptional evidence that we have we know that these kings would actually dig up trees from the foreign lands that they conquer and bring them back and plant them in their garden so that their palace garden their temple garden actually became kind of like this miniature of their empire including all of the the vegetation all of the trees so that you could walk through the garden and the greater the variation of trees the greater the the variation of plants and and flora and fauna indicated the vastness of the empire it was a it's just kind of this symbol of this is what we rule do you think that that can be sort of again like cosmic geography in reverse where because it's a tree being moved from one place to the other and the trees are going to be associated with deity that now all this conquered region's deities are now either submissive to or they've joined the club over here you know with with our pantheon is there any of that going on you know I think so um I think certainly you know Gilgamesh lends us in that direction it seems like by the time of the Neo Assyrian and Neo Babylonian period these trees kind of they seem to have more significance as a sign of opulence and wealth and prestige and perhaps not so much of a theological you know I've conquered the tree god type of idea but certainly um that that points us back to this continual you know mythopoeic use of the garden of Yahweh the garden of gods the the the location of the divine council I mean there there certainly does seem to be something significant I mean why else would Solomon spend so much time and energy building his palace in the temple out of the cedars of Lebanon I mean there these were the most sought after trees and all of the ancient Near East and Solomon like every other king before him and after him wanted his palace to be the palace of the the palace of cedars right as we're told in in first kings so I mean there is a lot of I do think there's a lot of kind of political significance in building with these materials they were seen as fine they were seen as precious they would inspire all and people who would come to see them but I do think there is something to say this this is kind of sacred ground you know I mean this is where you go to interact with the precious things of this world and and there probably is some theological overtone that's it's carried over but it's hard to say by the time you get down into the Neo Assyrian and Neo Babylonian period how much of that kind of residual Mesopotamian mythology still driving that political that political agenda you know I mean you got Psalm 48 you know with the with the Saffon language you know with attributed to Zion I mean if Solomon had a good theological propagandist you know you could make a lot of a lot out of where the trees come from because now you know we are this is a this is sort of a sign act at the temple of Yahweh is the seat of the gods you know he is he's the most high and and all that kind of stuff I mean you could these things you're doing overtly you know for for essentially public consumption and maybe maybe priestly consumption and maybe you're the king and you believe it too you know that that whole sort of thing but but these these can be conceived of as sign acts and in Solomon's case you he could actually turn that into a theological polemic that sounded really good yeah the supremacy of Yahweh when you know we all know that Solomon's just gonna go off and in crazy places you know with with his intermarriage and political alliances and all that sort of stuff but again if you had a good theological propagandist you could make that case well you know you know what's interesting is there are texts I think I'm gonna say like Hittite text and that talk about the king requiring permission from the gods to chop down the trees and and it was the king you know the king had to kind of receive this divine ability to harvest the trees to do that and I mean it's kind of interesting because we are we're told in scripture that I mean David was specifically forbidden to build the palace and Solomon is commissioned to do it I mean you still have that same idea of like God is saying okay yes you're the one who's going to build me a temple and and it's the cedars of Lebanon that are going to provide the the backbone of that temple and you know we can turn to other places in scripture especially you know Ezekiel 31 like I'll be talking about in the conference where we see direct reference to the cedars that are in the garden of Yahweh so it is the very trees that Ezekiel 31 talks about that are making up the habitation of Yahweh in first kings so let's let's talk about trees I mean what what was it about a tree that that made it sort of an appealing again I don't know if these are the right terms but an appealing metaphor or an appropriate metaphor because again I look at it I try to tend I tended to try to look at things simplistically okay if I'm in an arid culture and I see a good looking healthy tree I'm thinking well you know there's got to be water around here somewhere this this might be a good place to camp out for a while yeah and the stronger it is you know I'm going to be again propelled by that thought that there's look this this area sustains this tree somehow yeah so so there's going to be other living things here this is going to this is going to be good for me I will be able to survive here and then you have the whole tall tree you know connecting heaven and earth kind of stuff so build on those thoughts a little bit and then you know whatever direction you want to take it but what you know what was the big deal with the tree yeah how is that appropriate yeah I think that's a great question and I think it's actually a really important question for those of us living in North America because our kind of geographical topographical realities in North America can oftentimes run opposites to what you see in Israel and in the ancient Near East and we have an interstate highway system in trucks yeah well yeah but I mean like in the sense of like where I live I mean well right now I'm in North Carolina and the higher up you go in the Mount Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina the more sparse it becomes the the when you go down it becomes more lush and green but in Israel it's not always that case it's not really the case because a lot of times the lower you are in elevation the more desertification has happened I mean the drier the more air it is and the higher you go the greener it becomes because the temperatures are cooler they're more temperate and you get these beautiful forests and and creeks and streams and so it's it's kind of strange I think for us sometimes to think that okay going up is actually encountering the forest going down well might could possibly drive you into you know the the Arabian desert or somewhere that's incredibly hot and dry with with little source of life and so for the ancient Israelites specifically you know to go up to Jerusalem was to walk up into the the central highlands of of the Levant I mean it's it's forested it's it's very green and so there was very much I think this idea in the ancient world I mean where there were trees there was life there was shade there was water there was it wasn't hostile yeah yeah I mean I think that was very much at the heart of of this idea not to try to explain away all of the the inspired nature of the biblical text but I do think that there was something that really resonated with the ancient mind I remember the first time when I was in Israel and I went to Ngeti which is next to the Dead Sea I mean you just talk about the stark contrast the Dead Sea is just I mean as barren as you can imagine and then you walk into Ngeti and it's this natural spring and it looks like you've been transported immediately to a tropical jungle you know there's there's just green everywhere and all because there's water there's water that sustains it there's trees that are growing up it's life in the middle of the desert and I just think it's that stark contrast that really just fueled this type of tree imagery and I mean really provided much of the poetic grist for the biblical prophets and the poets of the Old Testament I mean it really is a picture of death to life when you walk from just sand and dirt as far as the eye can see to a spring that's exploding with different shades of green and flowers and water and in many of the the tree images that we encounter in the Bible are connected to the source of water so I mean we're told several times that where either personification or something I mean we think about the classic example in Psalm 1 right a tree planted by streams of water I mean the ancient world they didn't think trees just sprung up out of nowhere they oftentimes associated that tree with its water source and that water source becomes quite theological in and of itself as being kind of a metaphorical portrayal of Yahweh of of his blessing of those ways that that Yahweh would sustain that individual yeah these these isolated little places are are glimpses of of you know where the gods are you know and and the god you know the gods or in the case of biblical thinking you know the god of Israel that you mentioned this is this is life and death you know this counterposition you know they are the source of life well if you don't believe that go visit you know they're playing I mean yeah what what better place could there possibly be you know so it becomes this sort of you know reinforcing metaphor to you know again pun intended here but to implant the idea that that the divine presence is where life is it's not barren it's not death you know the and so if you want to live this is where you want to be and you want to be you know in the presence of in sync with you know this this deity you know either the god of the bible or the gods of somebody else because they have power of life and death yeah and and the environment itself is proof of that you know to the ancient mind yeah you're exactly right I mean these are not separated realities and in many ways so where you see life in its fullness well why would you I mean that would be why wouldn't you want that that yeah that's kind of the domain of the the deity and I think you certainly see that with many of the the traditions that emerge in the Old Testament that kind of point Yahweh's residents back to the lofty mountains of Lebanon and these beautiful mountains full of these trees that were awe-inspiring that were refreshing that just looked like vibrance in life yes that is what we think of when I mean that that is that is Yahweh right yeah and to take it back to kingship well the the guy sitting on the throne you know with all with all the women in his hair you know all these pejorative stereotypes but the the guy sitting on on the throne there is again you've been taught that he's an extension of that so if you want life to be all it could be if you want you know in any way to get along in life and have you know something that that to you at least would feel like a good life you're going to obey you're going to align yourself with him align your will with him you know because he is the one that holds all of these things in place you know to displace him you know to to make trouble for him is not only going to be a personal threat but it's going to be a threat to your own family to your own extended family to your town you know to your city you know you just there's this ripple effect because everything is viewed as connected to this guy who is connected to the real source of life you know god or the gods absolutely and in a way that is almost a bit unnerving yeah you know it is kind of creepy you know one of the i mean one of the the realities that you just are kind of smacked in the face with when you read through the the biblical literature from the divided monarchy right from the the time of the prophets is you just really don't learn a lot about the life of the average israelite or judein during the time of the prophets in the prophets i mean there's a few times where you you have them you know like amos giving speeches at a temple where obviously there were some bystanders and you know some some other phenomenon but most of the time the prophets are dealing with two types of people prophets and kings and you know the the nation really is is not addressed and that i mean at that much i mean you might have some direct address to the people but we don't really know what's going on on the ground uh during this time and it just i think it highlights the significance of um that the reality that the bible states and that is so goes the king so goes the nation when the the king responds in faithfulness to yaoi then the nation is blessed when the king rebels against yaoi and creates foreign alliances with egypt or asyria whoever it is the nation as a whole is punished um and with all of the the ethical intricacies that emerge from that it shows us however how important the role of king is to the future stability and vitality of the nation and so just as these wicked kings really or the deuteronomists you know first and saying kings want us to realize that it's the wicked kings that prompted the destruction and exile of israel in the same way yaoi is going to have a new king and that new king is going to establish his world order and on his holy mountain and and frequently that new king is also portrayed with a young sapling or a a small insignificant looking chute something that's not very inspiring not very powerful looking but that this young new growth of yaoi's planting is going to be his king that will establish his world order on his holy mountain something that these other kings have failed to do yeah all that all that stuff you know the stump the branch yeah um it's it's connected back to the tree you know imagery i mean again this what i'm hoping listeners you know get out of this is this is intentional okay the the stuff that happens in the hebrew bible and of course in regards to other things just in the bible generally they're not trying to fill space it's like oh well i need to vary my vocabulary here so i don't get a d on this paper you know it just it it's not random it's not just sort of peripheral they're doing these things intentionally to conjure certain thoughts in the mind of the reader again a reader that is that is actually connected to this world uh that that they're going to be able to process things like stump branch you know the sapling they're they're going to know how to orient that you know in the bigger picture and and we just sort of missed that thing but again on this podcast you know we are constantly harping on the intentionality of the biblical writers that that god you know prepared the biblical writers in the way that he did he picks them out of the culture that he did i mean he god knows what he's getting when he picks these people and and he has providentially prepared them and they are equipped to communicate something very intentional very specific to their audience and yeah we're disconnected from that but it's our job to try to get back into that world so that we can process you know scripture better and and this is a very simple example we're all familiar with this branch language with messiah and the line of david but there you go it's part of the the the matrix of ideas associated with tree imagery which is associated with kingship yeah i mean in fact i would go so far as to say that when the prophets of israel are grasping for their kind of preferred stock metaphor or stock image of talking about royal figures both contemporary and future and messianic they reach for this kind of working metaphor of the tree is a king that this kind of relationship between talking about kingship as a as a tree that has branches that shadow the land and provide shade as a dynasty that has roots that reach down as a tree that is nourished by the divine springs of yahweh i mean all of these ideas are wrapped up in this kind of working cultural idea and for us it's really i think important as you're saying to to kind of tease that out because the significance of figurative language is that it's bringing together two worlds that don't normally exist and and the only way that that figuration or that metaphor or simile makes sense to us is when there's shared knowledge and i sometimes use the example of uh one of my colleagues had a his son had a favorite saying for a while he would say that he was fast as a lemon and i would always say you know either he he must know something about lemons that i um right i mean so metaphors and there's some other layer to that yeah they break down when there's not a shared understanding and so this is really the study of of imagery and metaphor in the Hebrew bible is i think one of the places where our knowledge of ancient culture can really just become so profitable and helping us establish those connections of shared understanding to where when we read that yes yahweh is going to take this young chute and it's going to grow up and we can go okay that's not just a random image that has an enormous you know kind of cultural um uh you know a huge cultural currency that the reader would be going okay this is yahweh's new dynasty this is yahweh's new king this is they're picking up what he's laying down that's right it just goes right over our heads yeah yeah that that's really important you actually gave a little bit of an infomercial there for uh john hilber's session at the naked bible conference okay sorry he's gonna do it you know what no that's it's great because he's his talk is about why a quote unquote literal hermeneutics should not be our default and it's it's this kind of thing you know this this disconnection with metaphor really harms our ability to understand scripture it's really important what do you think about um you know something else you you just said i mean there's this the tree language here nobody nobody in the israelite world is going to read that and be confused by it they're not going to think oh that's kind of odd you know why would you pick that you know they're just going to know what to do with it um what do you think about this is kind of a a broader perspective that you get in other cultures and you get a little bit of it in the ancient near east and of course there are places in the hebra bible where you run into it but the whole world tree idea the the the tree is a good metaphor because it reaches to the heavens and it's connected to the earth you see you have this heaven and earth intersection and you can even press it to well a tree is actually you know penetrating the earth too so it even connects to sheol and you know you you have all this kind of stuff going on in your in the course of your book you know how much of that specific you know idea factors into kingship yeah that's a that's a great question um i mean i certainly think that when you look at the various cultures across especially the ancient near east you do see some just kind of similar themes emerging as as kind of the this this large tree um stretching from from heaven to earth and in fact i think that there is especially in the hebra bible a another metaphor that's working alongside this tree metaphor that is height is arrogance or a height is extending to the heavens right the the heavens is the the the the the place where god dwells and reigns and so you know isaia chapter two right i mean in isaia chapter two every high thing is going to be brought down and it's like well really i mean just everything that's high as ship massed is going to be judged because yes because and i think the idea there is that you you have this metaphor of height equals arrogance and hubris it says though anything that's tall that's extending into the heavens is seeking to occupy the place or the space of god and that gets tied up very closely with the the tree imagery and kingship so that any king that is going to be a great tree or an ezekiel you don't even have to be a tree i mean ezekiel kind of takes up isaia's vine imagery and you know talks about a vine that does what trees do the vine grows to the heavens and extends its branches out providing shade and protection and these types of things but once your top is in the heavens um you know there's a lot of potential for trouble especially in the the hebrew bible oftentimes that's the precursor of arrogance of look what i've done look what i've become at which point you always steps in and says no this is my domain you will be judged for your arrogance and your your hubris so i mean at one level i think you you really can't avoid the reality of this kind of world tree idea that there is um this this tree that stands as this figure planted by yaoway to extend and to establish his world order but oftentimes that idea kind of gets turned on its head or quite literally chopped down by the prophets because of the the pride and hubris of the nations yeah we we don't want to we don't want to go too far into that because of the the daniel for and i know that's that's conference turf yeah yeah sorry but but there you i mean you you really get it there too yeah absolutely what do you make of ashura you know and you you have of course tree symbology there is is there a is there some sort of rivalry going on there did you get into that at all like why why would that be her symbol why did the israelite seem seemingly adopted so easily and even in some cases transfer it to yaoway in some conceptual way it is is the reason that that could and did happen is the link there the tree was that was that just too close of an association what what do you think about that yeah i mean when you start looking at um the use of ashura and asharim in in the old testament i mean i i do think that a lot of those references are in in our hebrew bibles are specifically speaking about a stylized tree you know when i say stylized i'm talking about like a tree that has been pruned to a kind of a unique shape like a you know a sacred type of of tree that is either alive or possibly even dead that's that's put in a sacred location like on top of a mountain you know we've got our references in jeremiah the people worshiping wood and stone i i think that what you have there is is the people of israel just kind of embracing the the the cultural symbols of canaanite worship which were you know of course bal and ashura and um and conflating those with yaway i mean we we see um theological conflation happen with the people coming out of egypt making the golden calves um here are your gods of yaway it happens again with with jerebon the first i mean we know that it's not far-fetched for the people of israel to kind of have this theological conflation of okay we have yaway but we're going to represent him the way that the cultures around us do we want to see yaway we want something physical and tangible that we can bow down and worship and just as the tree was a significant sacred object in egyptian worship uh and mesopotamian context i think it's also you know it was also a significant object in canaanite worship before israel even got into the land of canaan right one of the things that would pop into a you know a listener's head would be well well shouldn't they have known better because you're not supposed to make a graven image of anything you you know in the earth or under the earth or because yaway is so unlike anything else in creation so shouldn't they have known hey we shouldn't be making tree objects here so how would you address that well i mean i think in in one sense i don't know how much um israel was associating yaway with the ashura pole or the tree i mean there are a few inscriptions that you know i deal with in the book from kintelut azrud and in other places where you have references to yaway and his ashura um which could be talking about yaway and his consort or something on those other lines as far as the the text goes i don't know there's really only one place in the hebra bible and that's in hosea 14 where yaway himself is actually kind of directly associated with a tree in all other places the references to ashura or baal and his ashura um so i mean it's the question like you know didn't israel know that this was wrong um you know one of the ways that i talk about idolatry especially during um israel's occupation land of canaan is it's so easy for us standing on on this side of history to look back and just go gosh what is wrong with them you know i mean when everybody has a bible you know yeah just like the ancient israel yeah but i mean just to say like godly couldn't they figure it out um but you know the the difficult things about idols both then and now is they're deeply culturally embedded and they're not easy to see when you're in that culture and um you know when israel went into the land of canaan i don't i don't believe that the main threat that the canaanites were posing was you know do away with yaway um because more than likely i mean the canaanites were polytheistic or certainly henotheistic it was not your god's not real it is if you want to experience life and thrive in the land of canaan you better pay homage to the gods of canaan if you want to worship yaway on your own you know you got your sunday morning yaway service that's fine but if you want to live in this land you better pay homage to baal and his ashura and you know i mean we can come up with all kinds of of contemporary narratives that say yeah you know you want to worship your god on sunday that's fine but if you want to experience life in its fullness in the land of america you too better worship x right you too better worship this and and so i think that we can fall prey to those same henotheistic tendencies um that that israel did and um that the the monotheism of the bible doesn't say that you know god is um the greatest of all of these other gods they exist and you need to pay homage to them at times it is that yaway is lord alone yeah the cultural embedding is an important thing because i mean let's be realistic here not everybody has access to scripture we i mean even beyond that we don't even know necessarily what existed when in in certain circumstances so does the material exist if it exists how is it being disseminated if at all if you get like in the divided monarchy if you get a situation and we're the you know you get a king in there and he's putting up the ashura pole or some other object and says well this is how we worship yaway here in 20 years in 30 years in 40 years you have you have a generational slippage absolutely you know the old generation is going to die out that remembered well we shouldn't be doing this yeah and the new generation grew up with it so you know how are they supposed to know what to do or not to do and you know the biblical answer is well you know god raises up a prophet this guy runs around starts yelling at people about the covenant and and but if but again if you just grew up with these with the trappings of this and then you go out and you listen to this guy and it's like well why should I listen to the wild man you know why it's a real question in your mind yeah absolutely and then again in you know in the biblical context which again biblical material is selective there are going to be occasions where the wild man turns out to do a miracle or the wild man challenges that you know you're this deity or the king or whatever and and there's there's some act of power that that draws your attention to well maybe we ought to listen to the wild man because look at that yeah you know it I mean you have these these kinds of points of interference where god will intervene you know to to keep a remnant alive you know that that whole point of biblical thinking but it it isn't hard to imagine when people don't have access to truth and and isn't that a trajectory we could we could pursue even in the in the age of information so much of the information we have access to is just nonsense and garbage but when people are cut off from that or they can't filter it they can't filter out the noise yeah then when you when you have a exposed generation to that and you go 10 15 20 25 years down the road now what are you gonna do you know it just changes the picture completely so I I try not to be too hard-nosed about what people are doing and not to call evil good and all that kind of stuff but you you can understand that it's not really a question of intelligence absolutely it's not that they're stupid and we're so smart it's that they don't they really don't have access to to what they should be thinking or or the alternative they you know the it's really it's really an access you know question it's not intelligence question well that's one of the reasons Mike I mean I really appreciate your vision with the podcast and just the many you know areas and ways in which you're trying to help people grow and their understanding I mean as a college professor I see year after year after year after year what I can anticipate students coming into a basic bible class understanding is just getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller you know and and and you're right it's not a matter of it's not a matter of intelligence it's a matter of exposure and it's a matter of exposure to good information and the reality is that I mean many people have noted just the the rise of biblical illiteracy in the American church and the ability to to interact with just the the information of the Old Testament and the New Testament so that yeah I mean I think you're exactly right it's not a matter of is this are people intelligent or not it's what did they have access to as far as information goes and how do we in this in this information age where you can get tons of information help people begin to decipher what's true good and beautiful in a world that they are bombarded by lots of noise yeah chances are they they would think better thoughts if we gave them better things to think about yes you know that doesn't seem to be rocket science you know but it's a it's a real problem I have one more question before we we wrap up this is something I just I've been a bit frustrated on I've not really found anything I've just haven't found much information at all commentators just don't seem to really drill down on this to my satisfaction and I'm not asking for a dissertation I'm just asking for a really good article I mean it but I haven't been able to find it and that is the the the 70 trees you know the at a lean the place a lean you have this oasis you got the trees it just seems that there's something going on here you've got the number 70 you know and again even the word play with a lean being a plural you know of gods you know I know I know you have a homograph issue or or I guess do you but you can see water the gardens the trees the number 70 it just seems like this is there's there's this is divine counsel stuff here but I have not found anybody that has really drilled down on that so I'm wondering in your research about trees did you ever come across anything useful about the oasis there at a lean in the 70 you know trees you know I think I look at it briefly in the book I mean one of the things that you do notice in in the Bible is that especially early on in the the patriarchal narratives um there seems to be this overlap of kind of sacred sites you know um especially Shechem Shechem has a pretty significant role to play and it seems as those there's kind of a sacred grove at Shechem um and and so yeah I mean I am okay with the people of Israel kind of theologically usurping these perceived sacred locations as they come to understand them through their yawistic perspective you know like they they encounter this site that there seems to be something significantly spiritual about this grove at Shechem and you know this seems like a place that we too should worship that we should worship Yahweh here um and so you know when we get to the this um this moment here at a lean with the 12 springs and the 70 palm trees um you know there's just there's just so much packed into the yeah I mean there's a lot you know numerically and symbolism there um but it's it's hard I don't know you know I mean it's it's hard to say beyond that what's what's happening yeah like I just haven't found anything on the history of the place you know and then I realized it's even you know who knows if they can identify it and you know you you run into all sorts of problems there but it it seems pretty clearly to be a place associated with either divine encounter or again the the abode of the gods because you got these divine council trappings you know there yeah and and the 12 is really significant because of the number of the tribes tribes yeah you know it there's there's gotta be something going on there but I just haven't found anything that really sort of like wow you know somebody actually did the work here yeah I think you know as we're all as biblical scholars you know we're all kind of all scared to to take that step you know there's something there and I'm gonna leave it for the next guy to figure out but you know I think right it just it just seems that it's it's sort of you know pregnant with these motifs and again I I don't know that you can get you know a good article out of it because there just doesn't seem to be a lot of supporting material to it yeah but you know who knows so I well I mean I think you certainly could you can build on the idea of the the theological significance of of water and trees and then when you when you look at the significance of water and trees together with the numerical you know numbers of 12 the the tribes of Israel and the 70 palm trees I mean it does seem to be a very significant theological respite that the people are experiencing before they are sent out into the wilderness of sin right I mean it's a picture that if we if we want to make that association between the springs in Israel that God has you know he's providing blessing for his people and the the trees are you know a perfect shelter for them 70 of them or you know I mean I think I would maybe we'll resort to Gamatria one yeah I don't know I mean well that's that's where you know and that's where I I guess I kind of pull up on the range I don't want to go down the path of Gamatria yeah start doing some midrash here on 1527 but there's certainly something there you know yeah well you know thanks for for being with us anything else you want to you know mention again your your book of course is for sale yeah this is the kind of thing that you know okay maybe you didn't go to seminary maybe you didn't go to grad school but look there's going to be plenty in this book that you can digest that will you know put lots of lots of seed thoughts again there's another pun in your head you know so that you can be thinking better about kingship and why the bible does all this tree stuff I mean even with the messiah again you can get these you get these metaphors and and extensions of metaphors and they're actually intentional and they mean something so this is the kind of book that you're going to benefit a lot from it you may not pick up everything in it but who cares you know there's it's going to be one of the best things out there for this so of trees and kings comparative analysis of tree imagery and Israel's prophetic tradition the ancient Near East that's eyes and bronze it is available on amazon if you go up to the site you'll notice that they the publisher hasn't put a picture a cover picture there don't worry it is for sale I have proof of that I have like I said I have one sitting on my desk yeah it's real it's real so again it's a good resource to recommend but are there any online resources that that you have found might be useful for metaphor or an iconography and stuff like this just real quickly as far as online resources oh goodness that is tough you know this might sound really bad but I would almost kind of encourage people to stay away from online free of life resources um I mean in all honesty I mean it is it is kind of a hot topic with with with people that like to to kind of grab things and and run I would encourage people if you can get your hands on there's a great book by William Brown called seeing the Psalms in which he kind of walks through metaphor and in various kind of metaphors that are picked up in the Psalms and one of those he's got a fabulous trap chapter on tree metaphors in the Psalms that kind of is going in similar ways but just a really good that's a good recommendation and it's very readable seeing the Psalms by William Brown and I mean for the more technically inclined you know Brent Strong, Isaac the Hellster and and others have put together a fabulous book called iconographic exegesis of the Hebrew Bible an introduction to its methods and practice which is kind of a really good volume in exploring how we associate ancient iconographic images with our understanding of the biblical text right I mean it's I would actually encourage listeners to to push into that because I find that um that there's a lot of room for error when people start saying see look at this image from the ancient world see this biblical text voila right um there's not always a clear connection right I mean there's not always a an organic connection so we need to be careful about how are we using images in the ancient world to help us better understand kind of the the cognitive worldview of the ancients and I mean those are good yeah those are good recommendations I mean they're things people can get you know some of the some of the stuff isn't I mean it's it's not exorbitantly expensive it's not like you know a dime paperback or anything like that if those of you sure exist anymore but again catching the drift you know if you if you want good resources they are available and again a lot of them you know are are reasonable and I think those are two of them that would would qualify for that statement so yeah yeah those are good well thanks again for being with us and we look forward to your session at the conference again you you mentioned Ezekiel 31 and Daniel 4 hey folks you know read those chapters and you're going to see why Rusty's going to focus on those at the Naked Bible Conference it's going to be good stuff and honestly I feel quite confident that you're not going to really hear it anywhere else you know you don't need to go to grad school you know we have people like Rusty you know to take us into see I want to make another pun here to lead us into the forest it's just it's just getting bad we need hopefully we don't lose the lose the forest for the trees right yeah there's that one lose the forest for the trees and all that so no but but we appreciate your work and again you're you're trying to you know teach you not only in your classes but just participating in the conference to make it accessible absolutely that's been great thanks Mike I appreciate being with you and being a part of the conference and look forward to it yeah thank you all right Mike well I'm really looking forward to Rusty diving deeper into it at the conference and again go to NakedBibleConference.com to get your tickets we I think we have about 50 tickets left so don't wait please go get Rusty's book Trees and Kings it's on Amazon and you'll be ready for the conference come August 18th yeah absolutely and and we're we're serious don't wait because they are disappearing the tickets are disappearing absolutely we're expecting a full house and we're super excited about that and we want to thank Rusty for coming on 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.brmsh.com