https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=h4-E7SEKGVk
You are looking live at the interior of my office. So welcome back to How to Read the Bible. This is part four, our final part, and we’re blessed once again to have Deacon Radley Durkin join us via voice chat. How you doing, Deacon? Hello, Langdon and surrounding Greater Langdon area. Essentially my parents too. I don’t know. They might be watching this. I love the Seitz family. I love what my parents know about it too. Maybe hello to mom and dad as well. Well you got to be starting to get a little bit close to finals week, huh? I’m intentionally not looking at the date of when we can go, but I think that’s not helpful. But I think it’s around May 25th-ish. Whatever that Friday is. That’s when you can fly the coupe? Yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah. That’s when I will. Yeah. I can go home at any time, but I just can’t come back and I just don’t think it’s worth it. It’s not something I want to do. Okay. So you would have the option of leaving. Well, yeah. But then you’d just be staying around at your parents’ house. That or a parish or something. I’d rather be here at SPS. Yeah. Yeah. For anybody that’s listening, I’m on almost day 30 now of quarantine. Has anybody gotten it? No. No. We had a scare a couple of weeks ago, but the test came back negative. So thankfully everybody stayed healthy this month. Okay. Because I don’t know what we would do if someone got sick. Yeah. Yeah. Just make him stay in his room, I guess. Yeah. I mean, there’s a protocol in place, but I think if push came to shove, it’d be a rough rest of the school year. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody’s been good. Nobody’s left on campus and everybody’s being responsible. Is your computer trying to talk to me, Riley? That was my phone. Let me silence it. Okay. I’ll silence my phone too. Otherwise I’ll just be a hypocrite. In the street corner. Yeah, that’s right. Straining the gnat and swallowing the camel. Beating your breast. As somebody said. Who was that? Well, anyway, I think we’re getting pretty close to this. So welcome back to how to read the Bible, part four. This is going to be the final part. And if everything goes well, we should actually make it out of the book of Genesis today. To be fair though, Genesis is one of my, aside from the Gospels, one of my favorite books in the Bible. Right, right. I know it’s definitely worthwhile to spend the time, but it’s just like, okay, it takes us to how to read the Bible and you spend half your time on the first 11 chapters. Somebody might think it’s silly, but I don’t think it’s silly. Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark. Are we talking about Abraham today? Yes, yes, we are talking about Abraham. Getting to the patriarchal narratives. So anyway, the YouTube chat should be up. So if anybody finds a question gnawing at their heads, they can just go ahead and type it in there. Otherwise, we’ll go ahead and get started. Now there’s a big shift when you get to Genesis chapter 12. A big shift from sort of a mythological genre, as we’ve talked about over and over again, to something that’s a little more straightforwardly historical. And so since we’re having a bit of a genre shift here, it’s going to be important for us to remember to adjust our lens for viewing the scriptures because you wouldn’t want to use the wrong lens. You wouldn’t want to be trying to treat this as if it were primarily a primarily mythological text when it’s actually much, much more historical, both in the way it’s written and in its specific content. And then just to remember that the conventions of ancient history were a little bit looser. They didn’t have room for footnotes on their papyrus scrolls or on their parchment. And so we just got to give them a little bit of room for following the conventions of their day and not expecting kind of modern history book that you would expect from a university professor nowadays. So let’s dive right into it. Our first point of discussion is are these even historical books? Can we treat this as events that actually happened or are these primarily fictional accounts? And so your ancient and medieval sources, they would say it was history, right, that the patriarchal narratives, that’s the narratives about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were primarily historical. You get to the early 20th century, Julius Wellhausen, we’ve encountered him before. His theory was that Moses didn’t even exist, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. These were all idealized accounts from a later time. So we could take a look at the arguments that they have for that. They’re saying that this is an idealized account from a later era, usually dated after the exile. They’ll say that they can’t find any archaeological evidence that a person like Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob would have existed. They point to the fact that they’ve got these encounters with God and these miracles, and they say that that signals that the genre we’re using here is a legend. They point out certain anachronisms. So they say that camels had not been domesticated in the time period described here, that the Philistines would not have been present in Cana at this time, that they immigrated to the coast later. The name Potiphar is historically out of date. So they say, well, these things are all evidence that these events were written down centuries after they claimed to be and have no historical grounding. Then they look at prophecies. So at the end of the book of Genesis, Jacob is prophesying about his sons, and he says that Judah will be the royal son, not any of his older brothers. So they see that as sort of what retroactively editing history to make the tribe of Judah the legitimate royal heirs. But we don’t have to follow these arguments. So first off, it’s not all that unusual to expect that there wouldn’t be any archaeological evidence of a specific historical person from 1800 to 1600 years before Christ. Second off, ancient Near Eastern biographies would often mix historical facts with supernatural happenings. So that was certainly a convention of the genre. And so reading that at the time would not have immediately made you think, oh, that this is just a fictional story. Moreover, supernatural happenings are in fact real, and they can actually happen to people. Miracles, encounters with God, all of these are certainly possible. Yeah, I found a lot of arguments over camels. For some reason, that’s something that scholars really double down on, is the domestication of camels in this area. No camels. That’s something they’re really putting all their chips down on. And maybe it’s more important than I realize, but domesticated camels. For whatever reason, that’s the things a lot of people talk about. Yeah, right. So camels at such a date, gosh, I don’t know when camels were actually domesticated. That’s not going to make me throw out other mountains of biblical evidence in favor of that. And maybe a later author changed Potiphar’s name to Potiphar. That doesn’t really destroy the entire historicity of all 50 chapters of Genesis, or the chapters we’re talking about. Prophecies are certainly possible and okay if you believe in God. And I think probably the most important thing about the idealization is that these are not really idealized accounts at all. And so I’m just going to crack open one of my books here and they’re going to show you what the patriarchs were like. I’m just going to do a little flippy here. All right, so Abraham’s marriage to a half-sister contrary to the Mosaic law. So the law of Moses forbade marrying your stepsister, but Abraham did that. And so if this was an idealized account, he wouldn’t have done that. The prominence of Sodom and Gomorrah, which were destroyed in the mid-second millennium BC and played no role in later Israelite history. Jacob, the father of all Israel, duped into marrying a woman and her sister contrary to the Mosaic law. Ephraim and Manasseh, the sons of Joseph and both of them being heads of tribes, being half Egyptian through their mother, the daughter of a pagan priest. Ruben as the firstborn son, despite the fact that his tribe was never prominent. Levi, the forefather of the holy priestly tribe, was a violent killer cursed by his father. And the traditional enemies of Israel, Ishmael, Edom, the Philistines and Pharaoh are portrayed sympathetically in this text. So this is hardly what you’d expect out of an idealized account. We have idealized accounts even in American history. So you could think of something like George Washington and the cherry tree. You know, that wasn’t really a, like there’s no historical grounding that anything like that happened. But we kind of keep on telling the story because it teaches the value of telling the truth and especially when it’s hard. I think there’s a lot of whitewashing, especially in the 19th century, a lot of whitewashing of the pilgrims. They weren’t actually fans of religious liberty. When they landed in Massachusetts, they immediately had an established church and instituted a law that this was the established church and other churches are. I don’t know if they were all the way illegal, but they were discouraged and they were kind of limited. They were disenfranchised churches. But yeah, I mean, they broke away from one religion to have their own religious community. But if you read a lot of popular histories written in the 19th century, they portray the pilgrims as heroes of religious liberty. Well, and that’s true in the sense that they were breaking free so that they could be free to celebrate their own religion. But then they also didn’t allow anybody else. So they’re a problem. Right. Whereas the real heroes of the freedom of religion was the Maryland colony, which was colonized by Catholics and had the first acts of toleration. So there’s a little bit of U.S. history for that. So those are what idealized the Catholic Church. They’re usually very simple and they don’t have complex characters. And obviously we’ve got these very complex characters who are just there. They do all sorts of things that you wouldn’t expect from an idealized account. So what on earth is idealized here? I don’t think there’s anything. So I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t think there’s anything. So that just seems like a pretty solid argument that these are based in history because if you were making it up, why wouldn’t you make these guys perfect? To say it another way, if this is something that the heroes of the story, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Joseph’s family, they’re not portrayed like heroes. They’re not portrayed like protagonists, which would be unlike any other hero genre or epic genre at the time. It would be more like maybe a little bit idealized but more of a historical narrative. Right. Right. And this will come up a little bit later. But did you know that no pharaoh ever lost a battle or made a mistake? Because if you read all the official accounts, they’re just perfect at every single thing they do. Yeah. All the Egyptian accounts. Yeah. All the Egyptian accounts. Ancient Egyptian accounts. Just perfect perfection all the way through. They’re the best. They have no problems. It’s great. They’re tremendous. We love them. Well, they’re portrayed as deities. Yeah. Right. And so that wouldn’t have shocked anybody if they had done that, but they didn’t do that. So that’s pretty interesting. And I think we’ve even got a little bit more evidence for historicity here. So there’s these odd biblical stories, right? Some really, really odd stuff. So I’ll just go through some examples. The adoption of a servant as heir of the household. So if you’ll remember, Abraham’s complaining that he doesn’t have an heir to his household and that his servant was going to inherit all his property rather than having a son to do that. And that’s when God promised him that he would have a son, Isaac. Turns out that there’s actually other legal codes, other customs, other laws from that era of the exact same thing happening that you could adopt a servant as your heir of the household. And so that never made a whole lot of sense to me. But it’s explained by that. Certain tablets recovered in that area. A wife supplying her husband with a surrogate mother in the case of infertility. That happens multiple times across Genesis. Turns out perfectly normal back then, or so people thought. Yeah, the sale of an inheritance to a brother in exchange for provisions to avoid starvation. So you remember the story of Jacob and Esau where Esau’s daughter was a slave. Jacob’s got some stew and Esau wants it and Jacob won’t give it to him until he gives his inheritance over to him. Yeah, it’s even worse than selling Manhattan for $900. I’m trying to think of a way to get that to happen. So I’m going to go back to the story of Jacob and Esau. So if these stories seem very odd, come on Riley. They seem very odd. It was just something really last night. I was just thinking about it. I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it. They seem very odd. It was just something really loud came through your audio. I don’t know what’s going on. Yeah, a lot of them, a lot of these very odd stories are perfectly normal in the second millennia BC. Furthermore, when we look at the stories in Genesis, we’ve got a lot of moving around. We’ve got a lot of trade. The era between 1800 and 1600 BC, which is when a lot of people suspect would have been the era of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There was a lot of free trade and free travel and nomadic clans traveling around with their herds and their tents. And that was a pretty normal way of life at that time. And even by the time you get to 400 BC, things had changed pretty greatly. Egyptian military presence and Canaanite warfare. Things were just a lot more intense in that area. And then Egypt, which had formerly been friendly with the Semitic people of the region. Now we’re beginning to be much more domineering, much more hostile, much more likely to take slaves from among the Semitic people. So the stories we have in the book of Genesis about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob not only are plausible stories, but they’re plausible stories in the time that we would have thought that they would happen. They were plausible stories in history, in a specific time of history. So, yeah, there’s plenty of reason to believe that. I believe that, in fact, the narratives from the second part of the book of Genesis are, generally speaking, grounded in real historical people and real historical events. Yeah, I think those are good points. The lifestyle matches up. I don’t think any atheistic historical scholars would disagree with that. What they would say is we shouldn’t believe this because there’s miracles involved. Yeah, yeah, which is, you know, you can’t actually prove that no miracle has ever happened. Well, because you can’t prove a negative. Right, right. You’d have to look at every instance of everything ever and prove that they all strictly followed physical laws. The only person who could do that is also the person who could, you know, cause miracles. Right. Talking about God. Okay. All right. So basically, when you’re reading anything from Genesis chapter 12 to Genesis chapter 50, stories about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and his brothers, these can certainly be regarded as accounts that are based in history, accounts that are based in real historical figures and describing events that happened. So I think that’s pretty great news. Yeah, right. But what’s important to remember is not, similar to when we were talking about the mythical genre, not always necessarily word for word. Right. Even the most ancient opinions about the book of Genesis was that it was written by Moses, and he would have been what, something like 400 years after the time of Abraham. Right. So it’s like, well, you know, like, did he reproduce these conversations exactly? No, probably not. Was he trying to? No, probably not. But these were certainly traditions that could have been handed down generation to generation. And even things like the name of Potiphar or what were some other examples you gave here? The camels. Yeah. So, so little details like that. I don’t want to call them textual errors, because they still hold some early spiritual truths to them because of the scripture. But don’t use every word of this to describe the history text. Right, right. So that makes sense. We could take the anachronistic name Potiphar, you know, maybe it was like, well, we don’t remember the name of the Egyptian captain who owned Joseph as a slave. What’s a good Egyptian name? Potiphar. Okay, we can do that. That shouldn’t shatter your faith in God. That kind of a revelation, I wouldn’t think. But it would, but it is good to take these these portions of the book more historically than Adam and Eve or Noah, necessarily. Right, right. Historically in the modern sense of history. Yeah, yeah. Certainly, certainly. All right. So, let’s talk about something that nobody wants to talk about nowadays, polygamy. Or against. Well, it’s complicated. So, what’s interesting is that nowhere in the Old Testament is polygamy explicitly forbidden. Right, there’s no law against polygamy in the Old Testament. And so we see many of them, especially the patriarchs, they have multiple wives. So Abraham had both Sarah and Hagar at the same time, and he married Keturah after Sarah’s death. Well, that one’s not the same, I guess. And then Jacob had four wives at the exact same time, which is, I guess, how you end up with a dozen sons. So, and there’s no explicit reprimand from God for doing this. But what you notice about the book of Genesis is that there’s an implicit critique across the entirety of the book of Genesis that every time polygamy is practiced, it doesn’t go well for people. So when Abraham has Ishmael, Hagar’s son, causes nothing but strife in the family. So early on, Sarah got annoyed with Hagar because she had had a son and she was, you know, starting to kind of get proud about it and kind of kind of arrogant about it. And so she had Abraham drive her off. No, no, no, Hagar ran away because she was so miserable. And then an angel of God came and said, no, you got to stay there and put up with it for a while. Then after Isaac is born, Sarah sees Ishmael kind of messing, the teenage Ishmael kind of messing with Isaac. And so she tells Abraham that Hagar needs to go. And, you know, Hagar doesn’t want to do that. Abraham doesn’t want to do this, but he relents because God tells him, don’t worry, I’m going to take care of the two of them. They’re going to be a great nation. And then what’s funny is after this whole incident with Hagar’s son, the requirements for the covenant are elevated when God introduces circumcision. So that didn’t become a part of the covenant until after Ishmael was born. But we get to the Jacob story. Jacob obviously plays favorites with his wives and his sons that his wife, Rachel, that was his favorite. And the other the other three were just kind of, you know, meh. And then Joseph is his favorite. And, you know, we get a whole 13 chapters of the Bible out of out of that context. The whole Joseph story comes from the fact that Jacob was favoring one of his wives and one of his sons above all others. Then you can go back to Genesis, Chapter two, verse 24. It says, Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife and the two become one flesh. Well, it’s kind of hard to square that passage with the practice of polygamy. And then also, Lamech, who was the seventh descendant of Cain in the cursed line, was the first to introduce polygamy. And it seems like by the time of Jesus that the ancient Jews had figured out that polygamy wasn’t really the way it should go. It seems because it was not commonly practiced at that time. So it seems that by that time they had learned the implicit lessons of the Book of Genesis. So, yeah, there’s no real trouble with that. It’s like, you know, God hadn’t given an explicit law against it yet. So they couldn’t expect to be following a law that they hadn’t been given. But in the New Covenant, it’s quite clear. So the answer your question against, Raleigh. Right. And that’s an important thing to point out. Even things like, I don’t know if you’re planning on talking about Leviticus or Deuteronomy at all, but the laws in there put restrictions on things that we would say are obviously wrong now. I won’t give any examples, but God was able to put more barriers around to remove this integral part of the culture. To the Christian life we live now. So polygamy, yeah, you can look at it and say this was wrong because God punished it a lot in the Old Testament. But it wasn’t something that the people were ready to have removed because they were young in their faith. They weren’t mature. I don’t know how to say it exactly. God had to start small with the laws and build it from there, basically. Right. Right. Because it all leads up towards Christianity. Right. Right. It’s all preparation stage. And it’s like, well, you can’t build the first floor until you’ve laid the foundation. You can’t lay the foundation until you’ve dug a hole. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So we can look, well, here’s a good example of Leviticus. He puts restrictions around slaves, owning slaves. He never explicitly says don’t in the Old Testament, but he’s integrating, humanizing these people. Right. Right. Because the slaves, especially Hebrew slaves, actually had rights that there were things you couldn’t do to them. Yeah. And I think it’s tough to talk about in the United States because American slavery was particularly brutal in world history. And then tenaciously defended. With biblical passages. Right. So, yeah, slavery is bad. I won’t put that out there. But Jews, because of the laws, treated their slaves at the time a lot better than any other culture. At least they were supposed to. There was an expectation to. Right. Right. There was more rules. All right. So we’re going to take a look at a specific story now. This comes from Genesis chapter 18. It’s about Abraham and God having a conversation about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. So you probably remember this one. Will you really destroy the upright with the guilty? Suppose there are 50 upright people in the city. Will you really destroy it? Will you not spare the place for the sake of the 50 upright in it? Do not think of doing such a thing to put the upright to death with the guilty so that the upright and guilty fare alike is to judge the whole world not to act justly. And then, you know, most of us are very familiar with this passage. Abraham bargains God down for the sake of the ten. And so, you know, we like hearing that story. Normally it’s showing that God is indeed quite merciful that he can be he can be bargained with. But it kind of gets us into a problem. We’ve got a passage from the Catechism of the Catholic Church that says that God transcends the world in history. He made the heaven and earth. The heaven and earth will perish, but you endure. They will wear out like a garment, but you are the same and your years have no end. In God, there is no variation or shadow due to change. God is he who is from everlasting to everlasting and as such remains ever faithful to himself and to his promise. So let’s focus in on that. In God, there is no variation or shadow due to change. And so this is this is something that you could start teaching older children, maybe fifth or sixth grade, talk about how God exists outside of time and about how God is always eternal and he doesn’t change in time. And so that can make understanding passages like the one we have from Genesis, Chapter 18, a little hard to comprehend because it seems like seems like God is changing his mind about whether or not he’s going to heal, destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. But there’s actually a really interesting way to think about this is God’s will can be thought of and functioning in two different ways. So we can and I’m going to have to use a some technical language here. So just bear with me in it. You can talk about the conditional will of God and you can talk about the absolute will of God. So what do I mean by that? Well, the conditional will of God, God can make it so that he will act on the condition of humans doing something with their free will. So I can give you another example. You know, God could say, I will give a certain grace to Deacon Riley, if Deacon Eric praise for a decade of the rosary for him. Right. And so God is as he’s willing that he’s saying, I will give this grace if Deacon Eric praises rosary today. The thing is, is that if I choose to be lazy, and if I choose not to do what is my, my habit is to pray the rosary, that God wouldn’t give that grace that God. He sets himself up with that condition. And so we can distinguish the conditional will of God from the absolute will of God. So you could look at something like in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. There was no conditions put on that there was, he didn’t place himself under that he just went and did it. He’s like, this is how I’m going to do things. And he doesn’t place those kinds of conditions on himself. So when we look at this story here, we see that God, I think God actually probably would have spared the city just for the sake of Abraham’s nephew lot who was living there. But he was unable to find 10 just men in the city. So we ended up destroying it and pulling a lot out of there. So it’s not like God is changing his mind in the way that we would change our minds. He is simply allowing himself to act under certain conditions. And he’s the one who’s placing those conditions on himself. And all of this is a part of the eternal will of God before all time began. Right. So to put this to just bring this to a little homily, if you will, about the power of prayer. That’s why it’s so important to pray for other people, because it really does matter. It really does. I don’t want to say it changes things. Well, in a sense, it does. It changes things in the world. A situation. Yeah. And also, God would first preempt it with giving us the grace as an idea. I should pray for this person. Right. And then we choose to do it or not do it. It’s not like God would say, well, if the only way this person is going to be healed from cancer is if this is if this atheist across the world says a prayer, who’s never said a prayer in his life for this person. And I’m not going to give them any inclination that this should happen in any way. And then it doesn’t happen naturally. And then God says, oh, well, no, there are certain. God will give a little shove to the to the thing that needs to happen. And then it’s our job to respond to that. Right. Right. It’s it goes back to that passage in St. John’s Gospel. It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you. And then elsewhere, it also says, if you remain in the vine, I am the true vine. If you remain in me, you will bear great fruit. And so any kind of genuine prayer, so not just mouthing words, but really getting your mind and your heart involved in it will always begin with call from God, a call to to prayer. God will be the first one to invite you to prayer. You don’t have to come up with the idea of praying yourself. So same here. God was, while speaking with Abraham, inspiring him to intercede for for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, the just people there. But that being said, sometimes that there’s there’s nothing we can do. You know, you hear stories about pastors generally not Catholic. Someone will come to this pastor and say, oh, I prayed to God that my aunt would be healed from her sickness and she died. And the pastor will say, well, that’s because you didn’t pray hard enough or less because you didn’t do X, Y, or Z. No, that’s not the case. Absolutely not. Right. Right. Death is an evil and sometimes it happens. Yeah. And sometimes in horrible, terrible ways that there’s nothing we could do about it. Right. Right. Yeah. Good point. Good point. It’s. God wouldn’t really let that much ride on your cooperation. It doesn’t seem life and death, that kind of thing. Certainly pray for people. But if it doesn’t feel like your prayer is being answered, know that it was the will of God. All right. So we’re going to move on to a another story that can sometimes get people a little bit hung up. We’re going to talk about the the binding of Isaac. So you remember the story that, you know, God ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son. And that’s that can be pretty troubling to people. And there’s a lot of misconceptions about it. So we can look at this picture I’ve got here. This is a fairly common depiction. You can see they’ve got the altar built and they’ve got the wood for the fire. And then they’ve got Isaac lying there and Abraham with his knife. And usually in these pictures, Isaac is depicted as about a, you know, seven year old, eight year old. But really, there’s not a whole lot of biblical evidence or traditional evidence that Isaac would have been that age. He was a lot closer to 18 than eight. So the Hebrew word used here is also used in Genesis, Chapter two, verse five. So Abraham said to his young men, stay here with the donkey. I and the lad will go yonder and worship and come again to you. That’s how the standard version puts it. But in Hebrew, the words for young men and the words for lad that were translated here, the exact same word. So what the word means in the Hebrew is young man. You know, that could be 18, maybe up to 24, 25 years old. Moreover, so if we want to want to get a good picture of what that would look like, we’ll just go ahead and say that you can see in this picture here. We’ve got a bit of an older bit of an older Isaac. But here’s the thing. He would have had a lot of wood on his back for a proper burnt offering. So I looked up how cremation works. And in order to get full cremation, you put the body in a crematorium for at least 90 minutes or so. And you heat the oven up to about 1600 to 1900 degrees Fahrenheit. So several times boiling water, and that’ll cause complete disintegration. So if you want to imagine the pile of wood that Isaac was carrying, you know, that’s obviously an insufficient pile right there. And I’m not even sure about that pile right there. It might be a little bit more like this scene from Lord of the Rings. You know, like a big pile for a burnt offering. And so you’d need to be a pretty hearty young man there. And at this time, Abraham was 99 years old. So if Isaac did not want to be sacrificed, he would not have been sacrificed. Right. He would have been able to overpower the old man and run away pretty easily once he figured out what was going on. So that means that in this story, instead of having a young boy being forced into it, as I think a lot of our imaginations would naturally tend there, we actually have a grown man who is presumably also a believer in God, who presumably also had faith, who’s following this prophecy. Moreover, we can look back at Genesis chapter 22 verse five. Abraham says, Stay here with the donkey, I and the lad will go yonder and worship and come again to you. So I guess a lot of people might assume that Abraham doesn’t know what he’s talking about or that he is lying to these young men that Isaac’s going to return. But we actually have this very interesting passage from the letter to the Hebrews. That’s a New Testament letter. Hebrews chapter 11. It was by faith that Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac. He offered to sacrifice his only son, even though he had yet to receive what had been promised and what had Abraham been promised. He had been promised a great nation through Isaac, right? Not Ishmael, explicitly not Ishmael. Through Isaac, he had been promised a great nation. He was confident that God had the power even to raise the dead. And so, figuratively speaking, he was given back Isaac from the dead. And so I think that’s really important for understanding this passage because this is an incredibly important passage of scripture. This is a very early prophecy of Jesus Christ himself. Jesus Christ who carried the wood of his execution on his back. Jesus Christ, who as a grown man, willingly gave himself up as a sacrifice. And as it says here, God himself, Isaac asks, where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham says, God will himself provide the lamb for the burnt offering. And then God does fulfill that with the with the ram they find after Abraham had stopped. But the true fulfillment is in Jesus Christ. And so if you didn’t understand this story here, you might have a distorted vision of who Jesus is. If you were trying to have an eight-year-old Isaac as your foreshadowing of Jesus instead of the 18-year-old Isaac, somebody who’s capable of making his own choices, you could get what you believe about Jesus kind of mixed up. So I think it’s worthwhile to spend some time here and begin to understand this passage deeply. Yeah, I mean, this is what we’ve been talking about for the past few weeks is the is the truth behind the works, the prefigurements that are happening. When we don’t see him right away. And there’s I don’t know if we have time to get into it now, but you touched on it is that there’s so many parallels. You can draw between the binding of the biser and Jesus’ sacrifice on the prescription to the Passover lamb. And even since ancient Christian times, church fathers, church doctors have been drawing these connections. This is talking about Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. Abraham had no idea. Right. Yeah. The Jews have been preaching about Jesus since the beginning, since this. Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s it’s right there right in the beginning. Prophecies about Jesus can be seen. So so anyway, hopefully that puts some people’s minds at ease about Isaac. So next we’re going to get to a pretty interesting part of scripture. We’re going to talk about Jacob, Rebecca and Esau. Jacob and Esau are Isaac’s sons and Rebecca is his wife. And let’s talk about Jacob first off. Genesis, chapter of twenty five, he won’t feed his famous brother until he trades his birthright. So that’s that’s some real brotherly love right there in Genesis, chapter twenty seven. Jacob steals Isaac’s blessing from Esau by. Putting his clothes on, putting Esau’s clothes on, tying sheepskin to his arms. Right. Because apparently Esau had these big hairy arms. Sheepskin was the closest approximation of it. And then lying to his father and receiving his blessing. And these blessings were a big deal in this culture. The father’s blessing to his firstborn son. And so when Esau catches words of it, he’s begging his father in tears if there was a blessing left for him. And all of this was done at the instigation of his mother. Rachel highly favors his wife, Jacob highly favors his wife Rachel over his first wife, Leah. And this is the person that is the the first in the line, the founder of Israel. His name is later changed to Israel. He’s the father of the twelve tribes of Israel. What’s going on here? And so we can look at this. You can see in the text of the book of Genesis, while God never explicitly punishes him for his lying and his deception. There’s implicit punishments all over the place. So it’s not like Jacob gets off scot-free for what he does. In Genesis chapter twenty seven, shortly after stealing the blessing, Jacob has to run away from his home. Because he catches word that as soon as Isaac is dead, Esau is going to kill him. So that’s great. You got to run away from home and go make it on your own. Genesis chapter twenty nine, Jacob is actually tricked into marrying Leah, not Rachel, by his uncle Laban. It’s the same sort of deception that he had pulled on his own old man. And that was used against him. When we get to Genesis chapter thirty two and thirty three, Jacob is kind of on the road with his family. They’re moving and he hears that Esau is coming and he’s spending three days thinking that Esau has finally come to get his vengeance. That Esau is going to kill him, kill his servants, take his wives and his children as slaves. And then when Esau finally shows up, Esau is like, Jacob, hey, man, I haven’t seen you in years. What’s going on? And then Jacob’s a little shocked that Esau is not angry at him. And so he spent three days stressing out over meeting his brother instead of being able to relax and plan a great big party for the two of them reuniting. And then when we get to Genesis chapter thirty seven and fifty, the entire Joseph cycle, a lot of pain and drama that Jacob thinks that his favorite son has been killed for most of it. And then he thinks that, you know, that a famine comes and, you know, all of all the pain and drama that goes with that and all that drama would have been skipped if he had not favored Joseph so highly to the point where his other brothers became deeply envious. And then Rebecca, Rebecca was never able to see her favorite son again. So, you know, she was the one who was pushing Jacob towards deceiving their father, Isaac, and she never got to see her favorite son, never got to see the grandchildren there. So a little bit of a bit of a punishment for their duplicity. And then I think probably a good point to think about not only Jacob and not only Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but anybody who’s has wrongdoings or sins recorded in the Bible anywhere is that God uses these sins for his own design. So, you know, Joseph being sold into slavery in Egypt was an indirect result of Jacob favoring one son over the others, which isn’t certainly not good behavior, might even rise to the level of a sin. But if Joseph hadn’t gone to Egypt ahead of time and hadn’t been placed in the position he was, then the land of Egypt wouldn’t have had time to prepare for the famine that Joseph prophesied. And then Jacob and his family would have likely starved during that famine. But because of all of these things, you know, certainly Jacob’s sins and then the sins of his brothers, you know, selling their own brother into slavery and lying to their father about his supposed death. If those things had not happened, then that good wouldn’t have happened. So God was able to use these sins even for his own designs. Yeah, he worked the failure of man into his plan. It wasn’t the perfect plan, or it was a perfect plan, right? Because God made it wasn’t the perfect way these things could have worked out. But God made it work. Right, right. Yeah, God is able to maneuver around our sins, which is great news. If he plans for the best and expects the worst. Yeah. Yep, yeah. So anyway, that wraps up our discussion on the Book of Genesis. If there’s anything that you want to hear about, you can go ahead and ask that in the comments section. But that’s all I brought forward. And I think we’re going to end here, the entire program in the Book of Exodus, talking about the book, not the band, continuing almost a continuous narrative from the end of the Book of Genesis. The Book of Genesis ends with the Tel of Tribes of Israel being established in Egypt, and then the Book of Exodus begins with them being reduced to slavery. Now again, we’re going to talk about the historicity of the Book of Exodus. So, some people who deny the historicity of the Exodus from Egypt and the existence of Moses. They said that there’s no ancient non biblical sources confirming it as history. Again, with the whole miracles thing, it’s a folklore, because it has miracles, that there was no archaeological evidence present and that nobody’s been able to set widely agreed up or universally agreed upon date for when this would have happened. But there are plenty of plenty of good arguments for the Book of Exodus. The story told there being founded firmly in history. Don’t we have archaeological evidence of at least Jewish slavery in Egypt? We’ll get there. Okay, great. So, look ahead. Yeah, ancient non biblical sources. Why aren’t there any of those? Well, one of the most well documented civilizations we have is the Egyptians civilization and as we mentioned earlier, the official Chronicles state quite clearly that no Pharaoh has ever lost a battle or made a mistake ever, just like the Congress party in China. Moreover, we have secondary accounts from a just Egyptian historian named Manetheo, fourth century BC who was certainly no fan of the Jews of his time, but he grudgingly admitted the history of the Exodus account and just explained why it wasn’t really that important. We don’t have his writings, we have them through another historian named Josephus, but he referenced this historian. Moreover, you know when we talk about folk tales, we usually start those with once upon a time in a land far away. Exodus is not like that at all. We’ve got specific names of places, we’ve got specific geographical features. They’re giving dates after the time of Abraham, which are not commonly part of folklore. And then again with the whole miracles thing I think people just need to get over that. And as for the archaeological evidence I just want to ask how much of the Sinai desert have you personally dug up looking for looking for people living in tents, wandering around there for 40 years. Like are you expecting to find the tents, because I don’t think deserts are too kind to, you know, 23,000 year old cloth. Moreover, the historical context makes a lot of sense. There were Semitic slaves common in Egypt at this time. There were records of slaves escaping and the military trying to stop them. The plagues, the tent plagues seem to follow the Egyptian agricultural calendar. So, when this plague would have happened, at what point during the season planting or what the specific detail of bricks made with straw. All the bricks we can find from this period do in fact have traces of straw in them. There’s even more evidence that the historical context of this story fits well with the time that this story would have been. So again, you know, we have these biblical scholars who are making arguments that it’s not historical, and they don’t have the definitive word on it, because there’s plenty of good evidence that there is historical, maybe even a preponderance of evidence that it is historical. Let’s just get over the miracles thing like maybe they actually happen. Yeah. So anyway, I don’t think we need to belabor that point too much. Now, the interesting question when exactly did the Exodus occur. So there’s two major camps among biblical scholars first as it happened sometime in the 1450s BC. That would line up very well with the date given in the first book of Kings, talking about the 480th year after the Israelites came out of Egypt. King Solomon built the temple. He began building the temple of God in Jerusalem. So the dating works out, we got a pretty good sense of when David and Solomon would have lived. And moreover, we have these copies of correspondence between the Pharaoh and kings in Canaan that were happening in the 1300s BC. They were talking about this landless people called the Apiru who were attacking and destroying their cities, which would be, you know, that’s what the Israelites had to do when they got to the promised land is they had to fight for it. So you remember Joshua, the big wall at Jericho, other battles he fought. So it’s like, well, there are these Apiru people, which, you know, kind of sounds a little bit like Hebrew. Is that what these letters are referring to? And we can’t know for certain because there’s also evidence for placing the date of the Exodus in the 1200 BCs. So the date, that date is actually supported by the majority of scholars, and it would have occurred during the reign of Rambassiz II, circa 1303 BC to 1213 BC. So they talk about how the Israelites were forced to build the store cities of Pithim and Rambassiz for Pharaoh. And we know that Rambassiz II made the city named after him the capital city. I guess dictators are pretty fond of naming cities after themselves, you know, Stalingrad and all that. Moreover, Rambassiz was very, very much into using slave labor from the Canaanite peoples, the Semitic peoples, for his building projects. So that actually fits the profile of the king who forgot Joseph and forced them into slavery. That fits a profile really well. Rambassiz’s successor, I’m going to try, Minirptha. Minirptha, yeah, that’s how it’s spelled. It’s a newbodies guess here. Yeah. He actually left behind a record that listed his successes in battle listing among them Israel. So this is the actually the oldest written account we have of the existence of the people of Israel. And the grammar and context used in this passage that he’s writing make it clear that Israel is an ethnic group without a land, which would fit well into the Joshua narrative. So there also is some archaeological evidence for destroyed cities at this time. But archaeology, when you get back this far, is really hard. It’s really hard to date things properly. And there’s a lot of arguments. So you don’t want to put too much stock in what archaeologists say because there’s, you know, when you’ve got three archaeologists in a room, you can probably find four different opinions on the same topic. So, at the end of the day, it’s either of these dates seem like they could be fairly probable to me. Or, you know, you might worry about the, the author of the first book of Kings getting the date wrong if you pick the 1200 date then he has not enough time between Moses and Solomon and David. And you remember that first Kings would have been written after the exile right so after 587 BC when Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem and exiled much of the population to Babylon. So, that would have been what it was written, it would have to been after that event. And, you know, like maybe the historian at that time didn’t have records he just had some oral traditions. He was keeping exact dates from the time of Moses to the time of David and Solomon. And so maybe he just got the date wrong and that shouldn’t, shouldn’t throw our biblical faith off. Yeah, I mean, these are. It’s often by God through written by humans. Right. Honestly, dates don’t really matter that much, but this is what I love about being Catholic is we do take these things seriously. We do sit and we study scriptural texts from a rational level, like we would any historical text, but then through the lens of faith or ancient text I should say, and then through the lens of faith. But dates aren’t a huge deal. You can subscribe to a school if you’d like, but it doesn’t matter for for your salvation. Right, right. Yeah, you don’t have to you don’t have to know exactly what Moses lived you can still go to heaven. That’s great news. Um, I’ve just got a few slides left. I think we’re going to keep on going even though it is 730. Unless there’s a mountain of questions in the queue. Yeah, no, you can keep going. Yeah, that’s what I thought. So let’s talk about these plagues right 10 plagues against the people of Egypt. So you could think wow boy that’s, that’s a lot seems a little excessive. First off, one thing you have to understand is, at this time, it was commonly assumed and held that the king of a people had in his person, the entire people right so Pharaoh was basically the personification of the whole land of Egypt, and therefore his sins would would be felt across the entire land. And moreover, every one of these plagues corresponds with an Egyptian god so happy the god of the Nile, well, the Nile gets turned into blood. So, she was just depicted as a frog. And all of a sudden these frogs who she should be in control of are swarming the place. So we’ve got the and flies we’ve got keffer, the beetle god, and a symbol of the sun, and who touched it, the fly god, well all of a sudden they’re not in control of their flies anymore. What is the four in front of Kepfer. So three and four you notice I skipped four and go to five. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. We’ve got the death of livestock that’s the fifth plague. And we got a piece the bull god and Hathor the, the, the cow goddess cow goddess boils and sores that’s the sixth plague we’ve got segment, the goddess of healing hail during a harvest we don’t have to explain to the people of Langdon why that’s bad. We’ve got nut the sky goddess shoe the air god and Tefnut the rain goddess all of them dropping the ball locusts coming in that that’s on Sanahem’s plate. Three days of darkness that we’re getting to the major league gods here. Amon Ray the sun god, he should be able to prevent three days of darkness. And then finally we’ve got the death of the first born of Egypt that’s going directly at Pharaoh not even Pharaoh son was spared and Pharaoh, at this time was considered a god and Osiris the main major Egyptian god, the god of life and the god of Pharaoh, the patron of Pharaoh, obviously, unable to stop Yawish unable to stop. El Shaddai Elohim, whatever names you want to give them, they’re all referred to the same pop God. So hopefully that can that kind of context can make those stories seem a little less, a little less harsh. Yeah, you can. Eric, do you think this is something that when this was happening in real time, do you think this is something the Egyptians were thinking about? Right. Well, that was that was a common. You know, it was certainly acted out in their religious. So let’s talk about Pharaoh as the personification of Egypt. Their religious ceremonies would have included Pharaoh. If they had a bad year, Pharaoh repenting for not being a good Pharaoh that year and if they had a good year, praise for Pharaoh in his person. And certainly, you know, ancient peoples, ancient polytheists, they had they had gods coming out of every, you know, doorknob and, you know, inch of square land. They just they lived in a world flooded with gods. And when things happened, it was because of the gods. It wasn’t, you know, because of natural processes. So, so I don’t I don’t see how, you know, all of a sudden all these bad things happen. People with that mindset wouldn’t see the gods behind every single part of it. Yeah. And then here comes a guy claiming, claiming a new god, one that’s foreign to them, and kind of overrides the theirs. Right. And everything he says is going to happen happens. Yeah. Yeah. Good question. Good question. Happy to answer it. All right. So let’s talk about Pharaoh’s hardness of heart. And it’s it’s kind of a shock. The first time I read this in the Bible, it literally says the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart. So there’s like the God all of a sudden not let Pharaoh have free will and would have even been possible for Pharaoh have to have relented to have given up to have let them go earlier than he did. We have another passage that says quite clearly when Pharaoh saw that rain and hail and thunder had stopped, he relapsed into sin, and he and his officials became obstinate again. Pharaoh was stubborn and as Yahweh had foretold through Moses refused to let the Israelites go. So it’s very interesting that they would use the word sin there. And throughout the whole tradition, we’ve always believed that sin committed by an individual is always involved free will. So you could have chosen not to sin. And then in several other places, it also says that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. So it puts it into kind of a passive voice. So we have the Lord hardening Pharaoh’s heart. We’ve got Pharaoh hardening his heart. And then we have something else. Pharaoh’s heart was hardened and we can interpret this is that all these phrasings are present to handle the providence of God and authentic human freedom. So Pharaoh’s stubbornness doesn’t derail God’s plan. In fact, God’s plan prepared for his stubbornness ahead of time and worked that in to the plan for maximum effect. So that’s why it would say the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Also, this didn’t override Pharaoh’s free will. He could have theoretically chosen to relent. He still had that capacity. However, repeatedly, he chose stubbornness and stubbornness and stubbornness. And so that’s why we’ve got this middle passage where it talks about Pharaoh hardening his own heart. And then thirdly, why do we have this phrasing where Pharaoh’s heart was hardened? We have that in the passive voice. So we don’t know what was doing the hardening. And think about sin is it’s always more mysterious than good. And it’s always more irrational than good. So if you can really have somebody who’s repenting, they can look back at the sin they did and say, no, I knew exactly what I should have been doing and I didn’t do that. And this has actually worked out worse for me overall. So it’s always a virtuous behavior that’s clear and rational. So many commentators suggest having this passive phrasing in there is to show the mystery, this mysterious force that’s driving Pharaoh to sin rather than be good. Well, I mean, that mysterious force is himself. We look at any of us in our lives of sin. We keep doing it. And we know that it’s bad. And if you and we all know people that have entrenched themselves so much into it that they that they rationalize that they say this is a good and I’m doing what’s I’m doing what’s right. And we can look at it through Christian eyes and say, no, you’re not. But I don’t see it. Yeah, I don’t know about you, Riley, but a lot of my confessions have the exact same content. You broke up a lot of your what? A lot of my confessions have the exact same content every time. Oh, my goodness. Yes. And it’s like, I’ve been educated in theology. I know that’s wrong. I’m still doing it. So, yeah. And we always and we always choose it. No one’s forcing us into doing these bad things. But sometimes then just become so entrenched. We don’t know. It’s like trying to uproot a milk drink. Yeah. Yeah. I think I might get it up. Yeah. But you and I and good Christians can at least say I knew that was wrong. And I did it anyway. And I screwed up. But you look at someone like Pharaoh that’s so deep in this. He thinks he’s he thinks he’s doing what’s right. Mm hmm. He couldn’t be fully aware that these are selfish choices, but he thinks that it’s that is OK. Yeah. Sin, always a mystery. This is the last slide, the last slide I’ve made and we’re getting into it in decent time. Very interesting. So the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, that has said the Red Sea and so we’re talking about Moses crossing the Red Sea. That’s what everybody says and it’s a traditional interpretation. However, if you go back to the original Hebrew text it says Sea of Reeds. So that’s very interesting. That kind of cuts against the grain of what we’ve been raised with. And a lot of people think this is that one of several marshy lakes between Egypt and Sinai. So not amazingly deep but very wide lakes and would have had considerable flora around the edges of it. And so some people have gone so far as to say that God didn’t actually perform a miracle here. That they just managed to cross this while the tide was out and then the tide came in on Pharaoh and his chariots and his charioteers. But however, you know, you don’t have to really be in that deep a water to have a miraculous wall of water on each side for the Israelites to pass through. It’s like if you’re in five feet of water, seeing that split and then being able to walk across dry ground, not muddy ground, I think under ordinary circumstances that would certainly be considered a miracle. And it could still be deep enough to drown the Egyptians. Maybe a little deeper, maybe need six feet or something, I don’t know. But if they can’t swim, then they’re kind of done. And then the biblical text explicitly says that the mud began to clog their wheels as they were going through. So while the Israelites were walking across it, they had nice firm ground and then it became muddy after the Israelites went past and it clogged up the chariots. So I read that for the first time recently. I was like, huh, never heard that one. So either way you go with the Red Sea or the Sea of Reeds, it could still be the story you remember. It just won’t be, you know, the whole Sea of Reeds thing. Is it gonna be quite as epic as Charlton Heston, you know, splitting 30 feet of water? No, it’s not as dramatic. Yeah, so Hollywood has my permission to continue using the Red Sea instead of the Sea of Reeds. Please do. Highly encouraged. Yeah, there you go. That’s it. So now does everybody know how to read the Bible? I hope so. No, there’s a lot to it. I hope that at least these past few weeks, Deke and Eric and I have gave you a good basis of how to interpret, at least in the beginning level, how to read it. And keeping in mind, Eric and I are still learning as well. Right, never stop learning. Just want to have you on a solid foundation so you don’t get surprised or shocked or disturbed by something you read in the Bible. You’ll have ways to think about it that’ll keep you close to God, hopefully. Yeah, the inexhaustible depths of Scripture. Yeah. And I hope you learned a thing or two as well. Me? Oh, I learned a lot researching this. Good. I did too, just listening to you. The fruit of your research. Yeah, Riley’s the fruit of my research. Well, I think we’re just gonna go ahead and call it. So say goodbye to the world, Riley. Goodbye world. We’ll see you in the summer maybe. Yeah, bye world.