 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. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, Episode 216, or 28th, Q&A. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey, Mike. How are you? Good. Good. We're glad to be here. We're on our way home on a jet plane back to America, USA. And that is and was a thrill. I am not. Nothing I'd rather do. Let me tell you, they do not make those airline seats to my specifications. I do not fit in those seats. Let me tell you, it's miserable. Yeah. Yeah. And there's everything over there. There's no other way to put it. It makes you appreciate America because everything over there is tiny and small. It's not made for us Nephilim that go over there. Sightseeing. Yeah. They just don't want to see you anymore. So, you know. I guess. They're hoping you'll come back and tell your kind. Just stay away. Just stay away. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, I'm going to, if you're going to keep things small and those airline seats small, I'm telling you, it was miserable, but long flight too. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. That's true. And nothing like your own pug. Let me just have that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And what did y'all do? Who kept your pug? The kids? Did he survive? Yeah. Yeah. The kids and we had some of the older girls, you know, we flew daughter number two in to spend some time with the younger kids. I mean, we didn't have any problem with the two youngest being in the house by themselves. They're 18 and 16. Like, I like to say they can live off the land, you know, like they're proud ancestors, you know, live out of the fridge, I guess, but Party time. It's, it's, it's the dogs, you know, like, hey, let's not forget about them. Take care of them. Take them out. You know. Right. You're more worried about the dog than you are the kids. Exactly. Right. That's, I don't know. That's true. It says something in there. I don't know what, but it says something. All right. All right. Well, let's get to these questions here, Mike. The first one is from a Mike, another Mike. I have a question about an observation that is right up the alley of Mike's expertise. So here we go. Is the quote already, but not yet pattern that seems to be relatively common. Just a matter of the basic Hebrew verbs being either perfect or imperfect. Obviously, completed actions are perfect, but the ones still in process are imperfect. We started, but not yet complete. The part of the process started becomes the already, while the final completion is the not yet. Is this just an example of a natural tension that will always exist to some degree when one translates between languages with different grammar and syntax? Well, I would say on the one hand, you can't express already, but not yet things either in Greek or whatever. Let's use Greek for our example, or of course English, translate them into English without using certain tenses, proclivities of the language. So there's a relationship between the grammar and naturally the ideas that are being expressed. You can't really do one without the other. I would say that we shouldn't go so far, though, as to say that the ideas themselves completely and only derive from the language proclivities or the language conventions, and not from some bigger sense of what's going on in the flow of not just history, but really in the flow of the plan of God on a metanarrative scale. So I would say that the two things, the grammar and the ideas, they're related, but they're not completely equivalent. That's how I would approach this. Let me try to think of a good illustration here. So what I'm trying to say is that the theological ideas come from what the grammar expresses, but you know, and so it's not like this English Greek struggle or disconnect, I mean the ideas are going to flow from the ideas are going to derive from what the grammar allows and what the grammar expresses. The grammar creates the categories or the ideas and it's left for us to discern what the pairing means. So you have semantic issues and you have grammatical issues. By way of example, something else other than eschatology might help illustrate this. How about sanctification? We have statements like in 1 Corinthians 6-11, you have been sanctified versus other statements in the letters of Paul that say, where he requests a hope or a wish, may you be sanctified in 1 Thessalonians 5-23? So on the one hand, he's looking at a bunch of believers and good grief, it's the Corinthians, okay? You can't get more kind of messy than that and he says, you have been sanctified and then he looks at another group and said, may you be sanctified? You also get this notion in Hebrews chapter 10 and if you look at Hebrews 10, 10 and verse 14 and frankly I think verse 14 is even a better example because you actually have both grammatical issues in the same verse there, but I'm going to read verses 10-14. Let's go back to verse 9, get a little context. This is again the conversation between the Father and the Son here about providing salvation. Then he added, behold, I have come to do your will, and the Son says to the Father. He does away with the first in order to establish the second, here's verse 10. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And then you get down to verse 14, by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. So verse 10, we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus. And then the same offering in verse 14 produces this idea of still being sanctified. So you could say, well, is that only, do we only think about that as already but not yet because of the grammar? Well, the grammar is certainly indispensable, but you can think about it in terms of real life and again certain accomplishments of Jesus. Jesus did do a certain thing. He did die on the cross. He did rise again. He ascended to the right hand of the Father, all that stuff. So Jesus does things. He accomplishes tasks. He accomplishes the will of God and that results in something. Namely, when we are joined to his body, we are in Christ. We are sanctified because he is sanctified. We are identified with him, but yet in our own life, we are still progressing. We're still being conformed with the image of his Son, as Paul would say. Those ideas. So there's a progression here and the progression is linked to the same sacrifice as the already element. And we can sort of know this by experience. Yeah, we take a point of theology and we say, well, this is great that God says this about me, that I've been sanctified. OK, this is wonderful. But then we look at our own lives and go, boy, I don't feel very sanctified today. I don't look like it. I didn't look like it 10 minutes ago, you know, I didn't think this way when I sinned or I did this, that the other thing. So we know from real life that this is the Christian life. Again, it's being lived out in real time. We are still people. We are not superhumans. We are not. We didn't absorb the nature of God in all of its exhaustiveness so that we never sinned anymore, never have any proclivity to sin. When there's nothing like that, that's true. And we know that by experience. So in the bigger picture, again, we know we have a good sense. There's already something in the mind of God going on about us when he thinks about us. But then there's still the something else, this not yet aspect that is sort of where the rubber meets the road. And we can we know that that's true not by mere intuition. But there is there is intuition, but there's also our own life experience. So the grammar helps us to express that. And express why it is that God can look at us one way. And our life our life experience be something that seems to be at odds or seems to be out of sync with the way God looks at us. So there's there's there's a bigger picture here. There's a there's an experiential element to what's going on. So the grammar is is intimately part of expressing that. But the theological ideas, again, aren't exclusively about verb forms. And grammar is another illustration would be, you know, died to sin. You know, Paul will speak of believers as having died to sin. And then he can then he'll later command believers to die to sin. Well, you know, how do we get that? Again, it's a differentiation between what we are in the mind of God and what the scripture writers are trying to teach us, trying to teach us to look at us, how God looks at us. God looks at us a certain way, because when we believe in Christ, we are united to Christ, we are we are part of his body, we become the body of Christ, we are in Christ, all these all these metaphorical kind of statements. And that tells us how God's estimation of us, not not on our own merit, obviously, but because of something Jesus has already accomplished in real time. And then there's the the living out of it, you know, our experience in life that doesn't quite, you know, sync up, you know, with with the other parts. So there's a God perspective based on the already accomplished things that that Jesus did. And then there's our own perspective from our own life experience. And so the scripture writers tell us why this disconnect is there and how to process it. So grammar is an important part of that. But I think there's I don't think thinking about the grammar really enables us to think completely or exhaustively about the issue. I think we need a little bit more than that. So that sort of the the sum is greater than the parts in some respects. Our next question is from Elizabeth from Pecos, New Mexico. Now, West Texas, we say Pecos, so I'm going to go with Pecos just for the new Mexicans. Are they New Mexicans? Is that what we say? I know what are New Mexicans? You're from New Mexico, New Mexico. Well, I'm not from New Mexico. Maybe Elizabeth can email me and let me know what the proper term is. But her question is, as Dr. Heizer reveals the book of Hebrews to us, there came up a discussion in regards to wisdom as feminine. So in Luke seven, first thirty one through thirty five, Jesus himself states, quote, but wisdom is vindicated by all her children. In quote, is it fair to say that Jesus, the son of man, is referring he is one of wisdom's children? Is it possible that the father God and mother wisdom begot the word whom created all things as one of her children? Well, if we if we went back to the prior sentence, that this idea that Jesus was one of wisdom's children, if you define a wisdom as God himself, as, you know, another aspect or person using God had language here deliberately. And we were still talking about God. Well, that would be another way of talking about Jesus as the son of God. OK, then you'd be OK. But but following it up with father, God and mother wisdom, as though there's some sort of cosmic cohabitation here between two distinct entities and the key word there is distinct entities to ontologically distinct entities. And then producing Jesus, then there's a problem. And the problem really comes from reading gender terms in the translation. Proverbs eight, do Luke seven, whatever it is, Proverbs eight is the origin point for a lot of this when we have wisdom as being God's agent of creation. Proverbs eight, twenty two and following and wisdom being referred to in feminine terms. So when we read that in translation, we think of wisdom as a woman. And that that is the way in Proverbs that wisdom is cast. You know, we we have the, you know, wisdom as a woman. And then we have the woman known as Folly, you know, that these two are contrast in Proverbs to teach, you know, certain precepts, certain ethics, standards of ethics and morals. Now, you have to ask yourself, well, why is how do we parse that? Why is that done? I actually have a paper on this that's freely accessible online. If you go to www.thedivinecouncil, that's T-H-E-D-I-V-I-N-E-C-O-U-N-C-I-L.com, thedivinecouncil.com and look for the the paper entitled Jesus and the Wisdom Figure of Proverbs eight. Part of the issue is that this language, this feminine language should not be confused with gender, OK, biological gender so that we don't have a dad and a mom. OK, when we talk about God and wisdom, we don't have that. We don't have this cosmic cohabitation that produces Jesus and all that sort of thing. The gender, the reason the translations are the way they are is because languages, inflected languages, those are languages that have like verb endings and noun endings. And then you have to, the endings have to match up for subject verb agreement grammatically. Anybody who's had Spanish or German or French or, you know, Greek and Hebrew, for that matter, we'll know what I'm talking about here is, you know, English is not a gendered or an inflected, inflected driven language. English is largely driven by word order, as opposed to a set of endings and whatnot, but other languages, lots of other languages require grammatical gender for all words, all nouns and what are called finite verb forms so that you can match up a noun with the verb. You can tell what is the subject of the verb as opposed to what's the object of the verb. To do that, languages use grammatical gender. It has nothing to do with biological gender. My favorite illustration of this is in German. In German, Das Mädchen, it's a term that means little girl, is neuter. It's grammatically neuter. Obviously, little girls are girls. They're not neuter, hermaphroditic, whatever, okay? It's just a good illustration. But German, like Spanish, like French, like whatever, words for hammer, words for wall, words for straw, words for glass, words for, you know, corner, words for car, they all have gender. It has nothing to do with biology. We have to realize that this is just a classification system that languages share, and this is how they do it. Gender, number, is it singular or plural? Some languages have a dual, where you do it, you have a pair, not more than two, not one, just two. You have that separate numerical category. Gender, number, or the big ones, you also have case systems and whatnot. But these are all classification features of a language. It has nothing to do with biological gender. So if you realize that, you can read Proverbs eight, you can read statements about wisdom and other passages and know that we're not talking about a female entity. We're talking about a personification of a concept, okay, in this case, wisdom. Wisdom cast as a woman by the writer for literary and rhetorical reasons, to communicate certain ideas. They're not hinting at, not trying to get us to think about biology and mothers and fathers and children in that sense, the sense that we're usually used to thinking about. So again, thedivinecouncil.com, look at the paper, Jesus and the Wisdom Figure, Proverbs eight, and again, that'll serve a little bit better, a little bit beyond this answer, at least in our episode here. Becky from Massachusetts has our next question. The ESV reading of Deuteronomy 32,17 is, quote, they sacrificed two demons that were no gods. To gods they had never known, to gods that had come recently, whom your fathers had never dreaded, end quote. What is the significance of the phrase, quote, new gods that had come recently, end quote? Especially the recent one part. Yeah, well, I'll get to that. But let me say at the first, the ESV translation of Deuteronomy 32,17 is awful. It's one of the few translations that will have something like, they sacrificed the demons that were no gods, plural. Now you think about that. Oh, the demons, okay, they're not gods. And then the very next phrase is, to gods, they sacrificed to gods they had never done. Well, are they gods or are they not? It's a self-contradicting translation. And it's a very poor translation. I suspect that whoever did the translation felt uncomfortable with divine plurality here. What you actually have. And I wrote, I have a published journal article on this that I don't think it's freely accessible. It might be. You might be able to find it with Google. It's the title, something like, it's Deuteronomy 32,17. Or does Elohim in Deuteronomy 32,17, should it be translated gods or something like that? Anyway, what the text actually says is they sacrificed to Shadim, demons in this English translation, not Eloah. Eloah is singular. It's only always, always and only singular. So you should not be translating it with a plural. It should say they sacrificed to demons, not God. To gods they had never known. Now that makes perfect sense. It doesn't contradict itself. So let's just adding that the ESV here is just not good on this particular verse. And most, I think it is fair to say most other English translations will do much better with the verse than that. Now about the newly, the recent gods that they had recently they had never known gods had come along recently so on and so forth. You know, we have to again put ourselves in this historical situation. Israel had a relationship with Yahweh first. Then later, they went after other gods. So the phrasing here refers to the chronology of the story of biblical Israel. They're brought out of Egypt. They journey to Sinai. They enter into a covenant with Yahweh at Sinai, the God of their fathers. They start journeying to the land promised by the earlier covenant. The one made at Sinai and the promise is made to the patriarchs and then they apostatize. A lot of Israelites go off and start worshiping other gods. Once they get into the land, when they have the conquest episodes, the end of Joshua, especially the beginning of judges, comments on this that God forsakes them because they intermingle with the population they should have driven out and they start worshiping those other gods. So this is what it has in mind. This eventually this beginning relationship with Yahweh, the God of Israel, the God of the Bible, the God of their fathers and then they drift off into worshiping new gods. That just had come along much more recently in their history that they're not part of their ancient past and they apostatize. Now, I wanna add one other thought here. This question is a really insightful question in another respect. And that is think about the wording and the wording and the story of biblical Israel pretty much requires that Deuteronomy 32 had to have been written after the conquest, okay? After or subsequent to the end of the conquest, the beginning of the book of Judges and therefore not by Moses. Because you can only make this comment about Israel going after other gods, gods they had not known until recently after it happened. And that didn't happen in the Mosaic period. The only alternative would be to say, well, maybe Moses wrote this and he's thinking about an apostasy in Egypt. Well, we don't have any biblical record of that. What we do have is a biblical record of Israel being taken out of Egypt, brought to Sinai, covenant with God, the God of their fathers. Yeah, we don't read about any mass apostasy while they're down in Egypt. And then the journey to the Promised Land, they don't carry out God's directions completely. They intermingle with the populations and they wind up worshiping other gods. Okay, for Deuteronomy 32 at this point of Deuteronomy 32 to make sense, that's hindsight. That's the kind of thing that you get in hindsight in Israel's history. So part of this song of Moses, I think at least of this verse and maybe some of the other parts very clearly are looking back on something that happened, post-Moses. And I say this is insightful because this is the kind of thing you run into elsewhere in the Torah and really in other parts of the Bible too where we assume that it was written during a certain time by a certain person even though it's not really claimed. I mean, there's no reason that we have to take the phrase law of Moses and presume that Moses wrote every word of this. You know, we've had this discussion before on the podcast and I'm what used to be called a supplementarian. I think that, you know, Moses, you know, there's a core to the Pentateuch that Moses either wrote or had dictated or something that's specifically connected with the lifetime of Moses and then it gets accrued to by other people in the prophetic tradition. And ultimately, again, we had a question a couple of Q and As ago about Genesis one through 11. Again, which I view a lot of that work either editorially or maybe in some cases compositionally done during the exiles specifically to poke the Babylonian gods and their religion in the eye. You have things like this happen in the Torah. All law of Moses means, you know, Torah at Mosheh, it can mean the law that originated with Moses. It can mean the law that was produced by Moses. It can also mean the law that is associated with Moses. Moses is the central character for most of the Torah. And so it's very natural to think of it as the law of Moses. It could be, you know, the law that, you know, not only is associated with Moses, but the law that, you know, refers, it is what it is, you know, in reference to the character of Moses. I mean, there are different ways to understand the semantics realize that this is a, in Hebrew, this is a simple, what they call a construct phrase an X of Y relationship between two nouns. The construct phrase has its own semantics. There's 12, 15 different categories, different ways of thinking about how noun of noun relationships work. You know, what they're trying to say they're different semantic categories, not just one. So, you know, there's no reason to think that or require that Moses had to write every word. Even with Jesus, Jesus, you know, quotes passages and attributes it to the law of Moses. Well, what else would he call it? By Jesus' day, it's the Torah, it's the law, that's what it's known as. If he calls it something else, they're not gonna know what he's talking about. He also refers to, you know, other books that don't really even have stated authors. They just get named after the main characters, you know, Samuel, you know, that sort of thing. Again, we have to make sure that how we think about scripture actually is gonna sound kind of crazy, but oftentimes the way we think about inspiration, the Bible itself gets in the way of our theology. Okay, we need to, you know, put the brakes on that. How we think about inspiration and how we think about issues like this, like authorship and whatnot. Our conclusions actually need to conform to the Bible itself, to the scripture itself. You know, we can't formulate an idea and then kind of ignore stuff that we run into. But often what happens is we do formulate ideas and then we run into passages like this and we make the passage stand on its head so that we can still keep our idea the way we think about a certain topic. And that isn't being text-driven. So we wanna try to be text-driven. That's what we do here at the naked Bible podcast or at least we try. And I think this question again brings us to one of those points where we really have to think about what we're looking at. Okay, Michael, that was our last question. So we appreciate, again, you taking the time to answer our questions. And hopefully we've returned home safely from Israel and we learned something and had a good time. Yeah, all of that. Lord willing. All right, Mike. Well, I just wanna remind everybody, send me your questions. If you have any at TrayStricklin at gmail.com, you can get that on the website. Mike, I'll also post a link to your Deuteronomy 32-17. Assume or deny the reality of other guides paper on the podcast page. So I'll put a link to that. And again, thanks for answering the questions and we wanna 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.