The Bible For Normal People - Episode 8 Kent Sparks - Where Did the Israelites Come From

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TitleThe Bible For Normal People - Episode 8 Kent Sparks - Where Did the Israelites Come From

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Kent Sparks, a professor of Old Testament, discusses the mystery of Israel's origins, challenging traditional views by considering archaeological and historical evidence. He highlights the importance of understanding these origins to grasp God's connection to humanity and the Bible. Sparks aims to provide a comprehensive and accessible perspective on this topic, emphasizing that the biblical narrative may not align precisely with historical events. This discrepancy prompts scholars to delve into the complexities of Israel's beginnings, examining ancient texts and records to unravel the truth behind the Israelites' emergence. Sparks' upcoming book, "The Mystery of Israel's Origins," delves into these inquiries, aiming to offer fresh insights and perspectives on a fundamental aspect of biblical studies. You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the Internet. Serious talk about the sacred book. I'm Pete Enns. And I'm Jared Byas. Welcome back, everyone. Today we're going to be having a conversation with Kent Sparks, who is a professor of Old Testament at Eastern University and also serves as provost. Which means he can actually think about this. He can fire himself, folks. He's in a unique position. And he might if he gets on his own nerves. That's right. I would. I think I would. Well, anyway. We'll give him some feedback on whether he needs to do that after this conversation. But he has, interestingly, an interesting background. Bachelor's degree and Master's degree in Biblical Studies and Old Testament, but he also has an MBA. Yeah. That's very unusual to accomplish. Yeah. And he's been a pastor as well. I was having a PhD from the University of North Carolina, studying with John Van Seters, Bart Ehrman. So he has quite the pedigree in his background. No likelihood. He has a very diverse background. One of the more diverse people that I've met in this field. So personally, Kent Sparks, I met him through his writings first, and his book, God's Word and Human Word, I read when I was a pastor, and it was really one of those foundational books that started to shift how I thought about Scripture and what we maybe should be doing with it. Yeah. And he's written some academic books and also some more popular books. But they all seem to center on a theme of challenging conventional notions of how the Bible is read and understood. And today, we have him on the podcast because he has a book coming out. I really hope it's this year, 2017. It might wind up being 2018. But a new book on a, actually it's a very super serious academic contribution to probably the biggest mystery of Old Testament studies, namely where did the Israelites come from? There's the biblical story, but then there are archaeological and historical factors as well to take into account. And it winds up being quite a difficult topic that everyone is sort of talking about. And the book, when it comes out, is going to be called The Mystery of Israel's Origins, which is a great title because it is actually a mystery. Yeah. And I think it'll be interesting because I think for a lot of people, probably wouldn't even know that that's a question. Right. We don't really know, academically speaking or in scholarship, where the Israelites have come from. There's different theories out there that Kent will throw our way during the course of this conversation. And it's an important topic generally because, you know, sort of the thing that's been bugging Christians for at least a couple hundred years now is what the Bible says, is that what happened? Or did something else happen? And what's the relationship between the Bible and history? That is a topic that is not going away anytime soon. And again, something as fundamental as where did the Israelites come from? My goodness gracious. This gets us into those bigger questions of what is the Bible and what do you do with it? What does it mean to read it well? What can we expect from it? There's no better place, at least in Old Testament studies, to go to than this topic of where the Israelites came from. Excellent. I love questions like this. So let's get into our conversation with Kent Sparks. Let's do. I think we already have made an important theological error when we imagine that the best way to teach history, to teach theology, is by narrating history. And let's get right into it here, because here's why you're on the show. It's not because you're good looks. That's true also. We're going to post a picture of you at 3 in the morning. Anyway, but you've written some books that are just really interesting, and some of which we might not even have time to get to today, but the one that I really want to talk to you about has to do with Israelite origins, which, you know, when did the Israelites arise in history? And you have a biblical story, but you also have an archaeological story, or lack thereof, so to speak. And you have a book coming out, hopefully in the not-too-super-distant future, in 2017, with Oxford University Press, right? Yes. That's right. And what's the title of that book? Right now the title is The Mystery of Israel's Origins, and there's a subtitle, which will be something along the lines of an introduction and proposal, or something like that. The idea is to introduce the reader to the issues and problems of Israelite origins, and then to advance maybe some thoughts or theories about where we should land on those questions. What I found is that there were too many books and articles written on Israelite origins that begin in the middle of the conversation, which basically meant that no one could read the materials except specialists, so I decided we needed the book akin to what I'm trying to write. Okay. So who cares about Israelite origins? Why is that important? Well, you know, I think one of the reasons that it's important is, in my opinion, is that whatever is ultimately true in terms of human history and human culture, and whatever is ultimately true of human history and culture with respect to the Bible, is one of the pathways for which we come to understand God and His relatedness to the world. I think there are people who are more of the traditional religious strides who would say the key thing about Israelite origins is just proving whether or not what the Bible says about those origins is historically accurate, or not, right? So there's a battle about how historically accurate it is, but I think that that's missing the real theological point, which is that whatever is true tells you something about God. And when I think about Israelite origins, it so happens that that's a question that I find interesting, and that I find ultimately must have some valence in how we understand the Bible, we understand human persons, how we understand Israel, how we understand the church, and thus how we understand God and our relationship to God. Yeah. So, Kent, you've mentioned that a lot of the books about Israelite origins start in the middle, and you'd like to kind of start from the beginning to get that understanding so that anyone can understand it. Can you just kind of take us back to that beginning, what you mean by that, and bring us up in the conversation? Yeah, I think if you go back in the history of sort of biblical interpretation, so if you go back before what we would call the critical age, that's before people started asking whether, you know, modern people started asking whether geology supports the Bible or history supports the Bible, that kind of thing. There were lots of people in Judaism and Christianity who simply assumed that whatever the Bible said in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges was essentially more like a videotape of what actually happened in Israelite history. Now, at the same time, there were, quote, pagans, that is non-Jewish, non-Christian people, who thought that most of the Bible, you know, when it came to miracles and things like that, was baloney. But even in their case, most people believed that the biblical narrative of early history, especially of Israel's early history, was essentially correct. And when I say that, I mean they essentially believed that Israel began as a group of slaves in Egypt, and that at a certain point there were some series of events, whether miraculous or natural, that caused the Israelites to be released from that slavery, and then the Israelites migrated over into Palestine, and they settled there, and, you know, that's the beginning of Israelite history. So that was the story. What began to happen over time is that we began to learn actual, from non-biblical documents about the actual history of the ancient world, and then we began to fit these pieces together. We began to take the biblical narrative and try to fit it into what was known from actual historical documents. One of the things that happened when we did that is we began to realize that whatever was true about, say, the biblical exodus story of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt and then migration into Palestine, it was not a straightforward videotape of history. So that led scholars to ask all sorts of questions about, well, so what actually happened? And that's how we get to the question of the mystery of Israel's origins, because the Egyptians don't know anything about, for example, a Passover in which all Egyptian human beings, male human beings, and all Egyptian firstborn animals die. They don't know anything about a million Jews, which is, if you use the biblical numbers, that's about where you get, or maybe two million Jews or Israelites leaving Egypt after this sort of series of really terrible plagues. And to put that in perspective, that number of Jews and Israelites would be about the number of ancient Egyptians. So it just didn't fit with real history, and so people began to try to figure out, so what actually did happen? And I'll entertain a question here before I go on with what's happened in scholarship in the aftermath of that observation. So I would just ask this question for, you know, you mentioned a few times actual historical documents and other things. In terms of how you came to those conclusions, just walk me through the language that you used there of, you know, you made a distinction already between, like, what counts as an accurate or a historical artifact or a historical document that is quote-unquote actual history, and why doesn't the Bible fit into that already in this conversation for you? Right. Well, the one thing to remember is I'm not saying that the Bible is never historical and never historically accurate. One of the things, the chapters I'll present in this book is on the antiquity of biblical tradition. I actually find that there have been a lot of skeptics of late that assume that the Bible, when it comes to history, pretty much gets things wrong. I think from about 1000 B.C., that's about the time of, say, David and Solomon, all the way through Israelite history, the biblical history is actually fairly good. Now, of course, it tells the history from the Israelite and Judean viewpoint, so it's not, you know, unadulterated, pure reporting like you would get from a TV reporter. But it is fairly accurate as a historical document. And the reason I say that is that if you look at the contemporary documents that we've dug up from Babylonia, from Assyria, from the environs around Israel and Palestine, we can find a correlation between those documents and what is narrated in Israelite history in many cases. So the questions about the historical accuracy of the Bible, in terms of just general historical accuracy, really have to do with the period before about 1000 B.C., that is, before the time of David, which would be the time of the Exodus. Now, we can just say that if you try to add up the numbers in the Bible, they don't work exactly correctly with modern history, so I'm just going to say the Exodus happened somewhere between, if you just use the biblical sources, 1400 B.C. and 1200 B.C., so somewhere between 400 and 200 years before the time of David in that neighborhood. When you look at the Egyptian sources from that period, and we have lots of Egyptian sources about Egyptian history, those sources never tell you anything about things like the Passover, things like the plagues, miraculous plagues, things like the Israelites migrating a million strong out of Egypt. What that tells me is it just doesn't work historically to say that the Egyptians lost an entire generation of humans and animals and didn't remember that in their sources. You could imagine them remembering it and turning it in to say the judgment was from our gods, not from a foreign god, but you can't imagine them just ignoring it. It's sort of like you pick up the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times on the day after 9-11, and you open up the paper and it doesn't mention 9-11, right? So it is, you know, people will say, well, this is an argument from an absence of evidence is not evidence of evidence, but that has to be judged in the case. You have to always ask the question, should we expect evidence of this in our sources? And I would say if all of the first born males, human and animal, died at some point in the Egyptian New Kingdom period, in that range of 1400 to 1200, the Egyptians would have remembered it. And they don't. They do remember some other things that happened to them. They remember the Asiatic Hyksos who take over Egypt around, you know, 1550 BC. They also remember the Sea Peoples who around 1200 migrate in and start to fight the Egyptians and they have to repel these Sea Peoples who are coming in on boats off the Mediterranean. They remember those events quite well, and they record them. So not only that problem from 1200 to 1000, that's the historical problem, it's not as much the problem of 1000 afterwards. So not only, Kent, is it curious that there is no known Egyptian reflection at all on this cataclysmic event, but you'd also expect maybe other nations around Egypt to at least talk about it. Say, hey, did you hear what happened in Egypt? Correct. No one is talking about this, and that suggests that we're not dealing with a historical record in the Bible, but something else. Yeah, there's also the problem which is easy to overlook, but it's a pretty significant problem for the historicity of this earlier part of the Bible, which is that the first Israelites from everything we know spoke Hebrew. And if the early Israelites had migrated down into Egypt as the Bible tells it, and lived there for several hundred years, when they came out they would be speaking Egyptian. They would not be speaking Hebrew, right? I mean, when the Israelites and Jews went into Babylonia during the Babylonian exile, they were there for like one generation, and already they started speaking Aramaic. In fact, the main Talmud, the Bavli, is written in Aramaic because of that, and Jesus himself spoke Aramaic primarily because of that. So there's just no way to make sense of the linguistic practices of the earliest Israelites, and linguistic features of their language, if they actually had recently lived in Egypt for centuries. All right, well, let's, I mean, there's a really interesting line that we could take now, but I'd like to sort of delay for a second, which is, so what is Exodus about, and what's it trying to do and say? But maybe we can start with someplace else. So what are some theories, or maybe what is your point of view of Israelite origins if the Exodus story itself can't really explain it? Well, one thing, I think it helps to say one more thing about the Exodus story. One of the things that we notice in the biblical story is that in that range, about 1200, from say 1500 to 1200, all the way down to about 1150, before the time of David, the Egyptians essentially ruled Palestine. And it's fascinating that the Bible knows so much about history after 1000, and seems very clueless about some of the history prior to 1000. I suspect that this is a problem of memory and sources. That is that it's only around 1000 as David begins to have a kingdom that coalesces and scribes that write the history that begin to write down what happened historically. But they don't have great sources, they just have bits and pieces of tradition, odds and ends that they have to pull together, and they pull it together coherently, but they end up with a story like the Exodus, and the biblical Exodus story. And I suspect that what that story is, is a kind of mixture of, as I said, odds and ends of traditions about people migrating back and forth, about probably plagues from time to time, about Israel's early relationship with the god Yahweh, and these things all get narrated into a coherent story when there really wasn't historically such coherence that it would be amenable to an easy narrative. I think it's a bit like if you ask a person without sources to write an early history of America. You take a kid, or anyone who doesn't really, hasn't researched the origins of U.S. history, they might say something like, well, Columbus came across the ocean, the Nino, the Pinto, the Santa Maria, he found America, and then the people came over and settled Jamestown, and then the Mayflower came over and the people settled for religious freedom, and here we have America. Well, all that's historically true in a sense, right? There really was a Columbus, there really was a Jamestown, there really were migrations across the sea, but if you actually know the history itself, those sources sort of pushed together as a narrative really miss a big part of how it is that the migrations took place and how America became a nation and some of the elements in that history. So I think that the history we have in Exodus is really more of that kind of a story, an effort to create history out of bits and pieces, but to do it in a way that suited what their theological priorities were. So that said, the question then becomes what actually did happen in history? One way to think about it is there's sort of three reigning theories. One of them is older and is sort of dying off at this point, and then two that are still hanging around. The old theory is that in spite of the fact that the Bible isn't, you know, historically all that accurate, essentially there was a conquest, and this is especially associated with two scholars named Albright and the guy Hatzor Yadin, the Israeli, and both of them believe that essentially the Israelites were sort of pastoralists out in the wilderness and they came into the highlands of Israel, which is where the settlement took place there in the middle of the country of Israel, and they attacked all these Canaanites who lived there and took over the country. And so the idea is that the Bible's not like a videotape, but it did pretty much get that what happened. The second theory which developed after this is called the peaceful infiltration theory, and the most prominent advocate of this is a German scholar named Albright Alt, A-L-T. And what Alt noticed is when you look at the archaeology of the highlands of Palestine, which is again, as I said, where the Israelites settled there in the central mountains of Israel, there really weren't any people settled there, very few. So even though we hear the story of a conquest, in reality it looks like the Israelites were these kind of pastoral nomads who migrated into the highlands and they might have fought a few battles, but in reality they didn't have to fight very much. Hence, the first theory is they had to fight their way in, that's the conquest. The second theory is that they sort of waltzed in and took land that nobody really had or wanted, which is the peaceful infiltration theory. And then came an entirely new theory, and it was based on, I think, actually, religious history. As we began to see that Israelite religion has lots of similarities to Canaanite religion, we don't have to get into that just yet, but let's just assume that this observation has some truth to it, people began to think, well, maybe actually the Israelites didn't come from anywhere. They didn't migrate into Palestine from, you know, the deserts outside of Canaan. Maybe they came from within Canaan, because their religion looks so Canaanite. And here the theory moves in an entirely different way. If you were to take the nation of Israel, and it's sort of vertically oriented, so it's sort of like a very thin at the top and bottom, but very long, sort of like the state of Vermont inverted. If you look on the western coast, all along the coast, it's a coastal plain, so there's all the way north to south through the middle of the country, there are these mountains. And then on the western side, by the Mediterranean Sea, there's this coastal plain. This was pretty, compared to the highlands, was very populated. What this new theory says is that as the Sea Peoples, who I mentioned before, started to settle around 1200, among the most famous Sea Peoples would be the Philistines, settled in those coastal plain areas. And as the Egyptians continued to try to control that area, people began in those coastal cities of Canaan, began to migrate up into the mountains. And so the Israelite settlement, which we see happening between 1200 and 1000, wasn't from people outside of Canaan. It was from lowland people from within Canaan who migrated into the into the mountains. This is called the Canaanite Origins Theory, and it just basically says that the Israelites were originally Canaanites, who eventually, in a process of identity formation, forgot that they were Canaanites and actually thought of themselves as non-Canaanites. So the three prominent theories are the Conquest Theory, which is not so common anymore, the Peaceful Infiltration Theory, which is just made a kind of, it's been renewed recently by some Israeli scholars and others, and then the Canaanite Origins Theory, which is this idea that these people from Canaan migrated into the mountains and settled in the mountains to create Israel. Who's been the champion of this third one, Kent? There was a guy named Mendenhall, and then a fellow who picked up his work named Gottwald, Norman Gottwald, George Mendenhall and Gottwald. Mendenhall was a bit of a, how would I describe him? He had this notion of kind of the bourgeoisie proletariat conflict between those with wealth and those who were poor, and what happened is the city-state populations were oppressing the poor people in the lowlands of Canaan, and so they migrated into the mountains. And then Gottwald sort of picked up this theory and ran with it, and the reason Gottwald is important is he took this theory, which Mendenhall really had only expressed in a couple of articles and in one pretty short monograph, and he wrote a very lengthy, I think it's like 800 or 900 page book, defending the theory of Israel's Canaanite origins. So if you're trying to associate names with these theories, the Conquest would be Albright and Yadin, the Peaceful Infiltration would be Alt, and the Canaanite origins theory would be Mendenhall and Gottwald. And this is happening, to put times on it, Gottwald's in mid-20th century, right? Yeah, all of this is developing really in the 60s and 70s, and then into the early 80s. So that's when they're kind of setting the table for this debate. And it's fair to say that for quite a while, the Canaanite origins theory more or less swept the other theories out of the way. So I think the average biblical scholar who isn't involved deeply in this debate, if you ask them about these three theories, they're going to be an advocate of the Canaanite origins theory. Not so much because they have thought a lot about it or read a lot about it, but just because that's sort of the status quo of scholarship. Most people believe the Canaanite origins theory is the right theory, and mainly because it's right religion. The more we study it, the more we see it is similar to Canaanite religion. So where, then, Kent, where does Yahwistic religion come from? Well, one of the things, the arguments I'm going to make in my book is that this hegemony of the Canaanite origins theory, that Israel came from within Canaan, is a mistake. And a part of the argument, we don't have to do the whole thing in this podcast, is Yahweh. If you start to look at everything we know about Canaanite religion, you start to see, and Canaanite religion is all the way from Ugarit in the far north, along the Mediterranean coast, quite well north of Israel, all the way down into Egypt. The Canaanite gods are, the major gods are Resheph, Baal, or Baal, as some people will call it, Asherah, Astarte, Anap, Horus, right? So you have, I'm sorry, Haran, not Horus. These gods are the preeminent deities of Canaanite religion, and you see them all across the board in Canaanite religion. When you get to Israel, suddenly you have these people worshiping this god named Yahweh who doesn't fit anything into the Canaanite sort of religious scheme. Moreover, when you ask the Israelites where Yahweh came from, there are some old texts, say Deuteronomy 33 and Judges 5, that say that Yahweh isn't from Canaan at all, but actually comes from the dry desert territories to the south of Palestine. And this is variously named, you know, you hear it called Sinai, or Horeb, or, which just kind of means dry desert territory, or Paran, which is a region in the south, or Seir, which is, again, Edom. So the question becomes, why would the Israelites invent the notion that they and their god came from outside of the land that they are trying to lay claim to? It doesn't seem like something they would invent. It seems rather like an inconvenient truth, right? And they actually have to talk about in the text the way that Yahweh marches from Sinai into the land to help Israel conquer and take the land in Judges 5. So I think that Yahweh is the unique factor here. And it's interesting, if you actually look at the other nearby nations, which I would say are a part of this same settlement phenomenon, it's important to remember that we're not just talking about the settlement in what we call Cisjordan, that is, on the western side of the Jordan, in the settlement of the Israelites. This same settlement pattern will also coalesce into the nations of Ammon, Moab, and Edom, which are nations over in Transjordan into the south of the Dead Sea. And in exactly the same way, they, too, are worshiping deities that are not native to Canaanite religion, right? So you have Ammon, you have Milchom, you have Moab with Chemosh, you have Edom with Kaus. All of these new settlements and these new peoples have gods that don't fit into the Canaanite scheme. Now, eventually, the Israelites will have to try to figure out how to relate this to the Canaanite scheme, in my opinion. And they do go about that in various texts and ways. But the main point is that Yahweh is unique and I think is a hint at the origins of Israel. So I would actually advocate for something more akin to a combination of the peaceful infiltration and conquest model, which would be that the Israelites migrated into a land that was basically empty, but there were people there who were Canaanites and were necessary. The Israelites fought them. And what we have in the book of Judges and Joshua are memories of some of these battles. Yeah, you say basically empty, which is not very much in accord with the biblical story, which maybe glorifies the battles. But there were some battles there, right? You see that there's some skirmishes, perhaps. Sure. I think the problem is, I mean, you have some cities that, like Bethel or Hathor, that were inhabited, but you have other places like Hai, which from all we can see, even though the Bible has a big story about this huge tell that was destroyed, there was nothing there at the time that the Israelites invaded. So, you know, what you probably have here is an ideological pattern in which when the Israelite historians are trying to tell their history, they look around. And if you've been to Israel and you look across the landscape, there are tells everywhere, these big, flat-topped hills that are left over from former, you know, successive settlements on a place, you know, once it's a good place to settle, everybody wants to settle there. So they just built one level on top of the other over, you know, for hundreds of years. I think they would look at a big tell and say, you know, we must have destroyed that city. And so then they tell the story of how they destroyed it. But in fact, they're just inferring that they destroyed it. They actually don't realize that the city of Hai was not populated at the time of the conquest. Right. So we actually, we do have two big, let's say, historical issues and maybe conflicts of the biblical record with respect to both Exodus and also with respect to the conquest. And throw into this mix, perhaps, the Merneptah Stele in 1208, 1207, that mentions Israel and Egyptian inscription that mentions Israel and how that fits into that, because people make a lot out of that. But I'm wondering what we should make out of that. Yeah, so the Stele that you're referring to was erected by the henchmen of Pharaoh Merneptah, written by his scribes, apparently, around 1200 BC, just before that, maybe around 1208. It commemorates Merneptah's conquest in Libya and also over in Palestine. He talks about Canaan and some of the Canaanite cities. But then he has a little phrase there where he says that he conquered Israel. And he said, its seed is not. And what is fascinating about this is, here we are at 1200 BC, at about the time when we would expect Israel to be settling in the highlands, Merneptah claiming that he fought the Israelites. And also interesting is that in the Egyptian language, they have these determinatives, they're sort of identifiers they put on nouns to describe the noun that they're, so they give you a noun and they put a determinative to say what kind of noun is it. When Canaan is described and when the Canaanite cities are described, there is a place name in the determinative put on the name to show this is like a political entity. When Israel is described, there's a determinative but it says a people, it doesn't say a city. So the implication here is that our first glimpse at Israel matches what we would expect from the Bible, which is that these were not necessarily settled people, that these were more nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists who have not really settled down in the highlands yet. So, you know, there's not a lot to go on there, but insofar as it dovetails with what we see in the biblical memory about early Israel, it does dovetail pretty well. Yeah, it dovetails nicely with the existence of an entity referred to as Israel, but not necessarily the entire biblical backstory for how Israel got there. Correct. I mean, it doesn't tell us what was Israel. My guess, if you were asking me, and there's some bit of evidence for this that we'll get into, it's interesting it's called Israel and not Israel. Yes, it isn't called. The idea is that Sarah, this verbal form from which we would get Israel, is like to struggle or fight or something like that. So Israel is really a sentence, and it means the god El fought or struggled or, you know, something like that. If Yahweh was their primary deity at that time, you wouldn't have expected them to say Yisra, Yisra'ah, the short form of Yahweh. But in fact, they don't. So, you know, I suspect that the god El and not only the god Yahweh was an important deity in early Israel. There's actually a text in Deuteronomy 32 that talks about Yahweh. If you do the textual criticism there, Yahweh is actually viewed by some early Israelites as the son of El, rather than equated with the god El. Along with the gods of other nations. Right, exactly. So you can see if you read between the lines, the religion of early Israel was not Canaanite. On the other hand, it was not Jewish, right? So full bore Jewish monotheism doesn't yet exist in the early Israelite situation. So can you speak to, you know, you named a bunch of other gods, Chemosh and all these others. You didn't mention El in that mix. So where does El pop up? What region, if not Canaanite, do we see that? Yeah, I think the reason I didn't mention El is it's very interesting. Most of our pictures of the gods that have labels on them paradoxically come from Egypt. And there's not a single picture in Egypt of a god that we would imagine as El or that we would call El. However, we know that there was an important god El from the Ugaritic sources, because at Ugarit, they wrote lots and lots of texts, religious texts and stories. And the god El is sort of the wise old white bearded father of the gods. And we have some statues of El and we presume that they're of El because they don't match the iconography of other gods. And on top of that, there is a temple of El and we have found in this temple some of these statues. So there is a god El. This god was native to Canaan, and this god was known among the Israelites. Eventually, over the course of Israelite history, Yahweh was no longer the son of El. But before too long, it would seem, certainly by the time of David already, I think Yahweh and El become equated. That is, Yahweh is simply the name of El, rather than Yahweh and El being separate deities. Mm hmm. Where I mean, where does even the term Yahweh come from? Do we know? No, I don't think we do. There's a there's a scholar who's Axel Knauss, I believe, who's a Swiss scholar, who he says something about I think he theorizes it comes from some Arabic words meaning to blow or something like that. But I haven't I don't think anyone really knows. Where it came from. Within this, I mean, I feel like we've dug into some really interesting ideas and some of which, you know, you talked about peaceful infiltration and also a little bit of conquest and how that ties to the biblical text. I'm wondering for the average listener who maybe hasn't gone through graduate school as we all have and can toss some of these names around, what's the import for someone who has maybe been grounded in maybe the everyday reading of scripture and took the exodus for granted as happening as it was? Not that they're necessarily tied to that, but haven't really been taught anything else, haven't thought about anything. What's the what's the takeaway in your mind for how they can make sense of this and integrate it into, you know, their faith? Yeah, thanks for the question. I think it's very interesting. That when you look at the life of Jesus and his mode of instruction, the one genre that is most associated with the way Jesus taught is, and I bet you could tell me what that genre is. Absolute historical accuracy. You're a loser. I know the poetry, the wisdom, the parable. Yeah, parables. Jesus teaches in parables, right? And his reputation is he teaches in parables. He doesn't teach in direct historical discourse. Right. But parables, of course, the nature of the case is that you're telling a story to make a point. And it's precisely because it isn't historical that you're able to adjust the story to make the point you want to make. Right. So I think we already have made an important, an important theological error when we imagine that the best way to teach history, to teach theology, is by narrating history. I think it's much more using narratives because narratives richly connect with real life because life is closer to a narrative than, say, intellectual discourse. Right. But it doesn't need to be historical. Right. And I think that the people who wrote the Exodus story, for instance, the people who wrote the conquest story in the Bible, in Joshua and Judges, they're trying to convey ideas and thoughts about God and his relationship to humanity, his relationship to Israel. And then we read it as an expression of that. And we we take that in as one of the key voices God wants us to listen to as we try to understand God and how we try to understand ourselves in human condition. If you spend too much time trying to prove its history or not, you're probably like spending a lot of time trying to prove whether the story of the Good Samaritan is history or not. You could try that, but you'd be missing the point of the story. Right. Which is that it's all about whether you love your neighbor and not about whether you're a Jew or a Samaritan. Although, I mean, you know, too, that I mean, I definitely correct with you. And I think this is a very fruitful and important line of discussion. But, you know, what people say is that, well, everyone knows that parables back then were stories, but people believe the Exodus happened. They believed Abraham existed as a human being. So within the Bible, you have a little bit of a, I guess, a hermeneutical and theological complexity, right? There's no question. But let me just put this into perspective to give you an example. Let's take the creation story in Genesis. And I don't want to get too far afield from the topic, but if an author wanted to convey to you that a story is being written that is really about symbol rather than straight history, what an author might do is to give you, say, trees that symbolize good and evil and fruit that symbolizes the experience of sin and snakes that talk to symbolize, you know, how evil gets into the world. The author doesn't say, hey, I'm writing a parable, but the author is in everything the author can think to do to tell you that they're writing a parable, right? Now, I don't actually think that the Exodus story is a parable. My main point is that that fictional narrative that is narratives written to be creative rather than strictly historical can convey and be valuable theologically. Now, what I actually think is going on in the book of Exodus is that it's a mix of an author trying to do history with the sources at hand as best he can, along with theological concerns and agendas, and those things get mixed together. And so if you're too fixated on the history, you're going to miss the theology. And on the other hand, if all you are is about the theology, you'll miss the way that the human author was limited as a historian and you'll miss the import of that, which is that no human being, no biblical author, not you, not me, no one fully grasps and understands history and can narrate history as it actually is. There's only one person who could presumably understand history as it actually is, and that would be God. So there's a certain humility in recognizing that even the biblical authors had to work within their limited finite horizon and framework, and that you and I, as people trying to follow God and trying to follow Jesus and trying to understand the world, we too have to live within that same finite horizon. It doesn't mean we don't do anything. We still try, but it also doesn't mean that we should live under the illusion that sometime, somehow when we say God says something, that that is the same as God saying it, right? I can say God said something and I could be wrong, right? That doesn't mean I never try to speak for God as best I can, but it means that we all know better than to think I'm God or I speak for God finally. Right. Well, I want to go back to something you just said and ask the question maybe even to both of you. I mean, what you were just saying is what I think I've heard a lot, which is all history writing has a perspective and we just need to get over the idea that we're going to ever get this object of history. That's true of the biblical writing as much as it is in the history of the Peloponnesian War. Right. Because it's true of human beings. Right. Right. But the other is, I wonder if you would call it, I feel like sometimes we're beating our head against the wall by putting categories on ancient texts using modern ideas. So is it anachronistic to even try to parse out, you know, were the ancient, was the writer who wrote down or the editors who compiled Exodus and these other texts, were they trying to do history or were they trying to write theology? Even asking that question seems anachronistic. Yeah, I don't think it's anachronistic. And here's the reason, because if you're going to read any text, you will make a judgment about what it's doing. In other words, you cannot read any text unless you're actually trying to make sense of how it works. And when you do that, you're doing what I would call generic judgment. You're offering a generic interpretation of what the text is. Then you can put a label on the genre and you can ask whether there are any modern labels that help you do that or whether you have to invent a new kind of label. But the bottom line is you can't escape genre because every act of reading is a generic engagement where you implicitly give the text the generic type. Here's what's going on. Here's what's not going on. Here's what it means. Here's what it doesn't mean. But couldn't we then get frustrated? There seems to be a little bit of loss in translation where maybe the generic or the genre categories we have to work with weren't the same as they would have had back then. And so there's always going to be this overlap where we're not fully going to be able to pinpoint it in the way that the original writers would have done. Yes. And I think that there's this Cartesian kind of preoccupation with how do we know for sure that we're making the right judgment or how do we make sure we know it? Well, you know, to a lesser degree and sometimes to a significant degree, even in our modern world, misunderstanding is endemic to how we live. Right. I mean, I'm married and we've been married for 27 years. We've had many times where I say something or my wife says something and we misunderstand each other. Sometimes that misunderstanding, we don't even realize it happened. In other words, God didn't design a world so that you could get full proof understanding, designed a world in which you get understanding. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes you get it really wrong. We have people who read Deuteronomy and Joshua and Judges historically and think that what it means is that God's people should kill their enemies. I mean, you can't really get it more wrong if I'm correct that Jesus, when he says to love your enemies, would have us never find that in the text ultimately. So, I mean, the errors we create are not so much about whether it's historical or not. I don't think I don't think it's a big error one way or another in terms of practical impact, whether you think there actually was an exodus or there wasn't. But the ethics that you pursue out of scripture, which is the more important judgments that come out of how you read the text, those can have very grave consequences for other people and also can be a real blessing to other people. So, yeah, you can't escape the interpretive context of life. You always be trying to figure it out. You always be making judgments, always be thinking, I got this right. Oh, I didn't get that right. I got to make an adjustment. There's this false thing that what we're after is some kind of perfect, incorrigible interpretation that we can stand on forever and know it's forever. It's never wrong. It's just not true. I've had many texts that I thought I understood. And then one day I go, oh, I didn't understand it. C'est la vie. Yeah, let me let's say all that is true. And I think it is. Why do you think it's so difficult for people to get there? It's a good question. I think that what is going on, and especially within the evangelical tradition in which I was raised, in which I still consider myself very much a part, there is a soteriological anxiety. We bought into this notion of the gospel, this quote, good news. So I want you to just listen to this good news. Here's the good news. There's a God. He created us. He loves us, but we sinned against him. Therefore, he wants to destroy us forever in fire. But he sent Jesus. And if we believe in Jesus, the God who wants to burn us forever in fire will not burn us forever in fire, but loves us and will send us to heaven. Right. I believe that that narrative would be utterly foreign to early Christians. Right. I think they thought in terms of salvation and being lost and things like that. But I think they did not buy into the notion that I had to know for sure what my eternal destiny was. What they did is they said, I'm either going to follow God or I'm not going to follow God. It's really when you get to Luther and Calvin and the reformers that you start to ask a question that somebody like Augustine would never have asked. How do I know for sure I go to heaven? If you ask that to Augustine, he would look at you like you were from Mars. I mean, you can't know if you're going to go to heaven, Augustine would say. God decides that. I mean, you can see this in Paul, right? In 1 Corinthians, when he says, my conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. God is my judge. Right. So the point is, it doesn't do you any good to worry about your eternal destiny. All you can do is do the best that you can to figure out what is loving God and what is following God and how I do that best. The minute it becomes an epistemological game to prove that I know for sure that I'm going to go to heaven, so I don't have to be afraid of judgment, you start to build up, you start to have to build up this biblical, incorrigible edifice of truth in which you trick yourself into believing that you know for sure you're going to go to heaven. But I would argue that's a total trick, right? That's a trick we play on ourselves. Just because you convince yourself that you know for sure that you're in good shape with God doesn't mean it's true. I mean, isn't that the story of the two men who went up to the temple, right? The one who went up, who was confident in his righteousness, he's the one who's in trouble. It's the other guy who's afraid and beating his breast that God says is actually going to walk away justified. Right. So this notion that it is about incorrigible, you know, confidence that I will be saved and I don't have to worry about that, it's not an epistemic game, right? And to put this in a different perspective, I will give you an example about my relationship with my wife. If you ask me, is it possible that I or my wife might have an illicit relationship outside of our marriage? I would have to say, yes, it's possible. Now, if you ask me, do you worry about it? I would say, no, I don't. Well, why don't you worry about it? Well, because I love her and she loves me and we're committed to each other and I don't worry about it. But isn't it possible? Well, yeah, I guess it's possible, but I don't worry about it. Right. So I think soteriology should be a bit more like that, right? If you say to me, Kent Sparks, you know for sure you're going to go to heaven when you die or something. I would go, well, you know, I don't know, but I don't really worry about it. I love God. God loves me. And that's kind of where I am. Yeah. It sounds like you're talking about the sin of certainty. Yeah. You know, somebody ought to write a book like that. I know a guy. I know a guy. Hey, listen, Kent, this is, I mean, as I tell my students a lot, you can't talk about anything without talking about everything when it comes to the Bible. And it's so true. I just find it fascinating. We start with Israelite religion and, you know, we need to come to an end here. But we're talking about the nature of the Bible, the nature of the Christian faith and basic fundamental and important theological issues like soteriology. And it's, you know, it's almost like you can crack that door open almost anywhere. And one way, I mean, you know, you deal with people, too. And I talk to a lot of people. Israelite origins, that and violence in the Old Testament, I think, and maybe throw in science and faith while we're at it. I think those are three things that people keep coming back to. You know, you know, this one may be a little bit technical because it's not something you may be necessarily talk about in Sunday school, the others you do. But I just think, you know, these are pressing issues that really make us examine. Okay, what is all this? What is the Bible? What do we do with it? What's the nature of the Christian faith? And it's good to talk about it. Yeah, I think so. I think so, Pete. And I think one of the things that gets lost these days is if we could just step back, even from the very specific claims of the Christian faith, if there is a God and if that God is a God that has love for human beings, and I think that one could arrive at that without, in fact, people did, without ever having heard of Jesus, you could decide that there is a God and that this God is about love rather than say about nasty things. If all of that is true of God, then that God wants us to pursue the truth. That God wants us to understand. That God doesn't want us to think that we should avoid understanding how the Bible is put together, that we should avoid understanding where it is historical and where it is not, that we should avoid understanding how Israelite religious theological ideas developed over time. Every bit of truth ultimately tells us something about God, our relationship with God, and we have to be devoted to the pursuit of what is true and the pursuit of that truth for the purpose of loving God and our neighbor well. The minute you start to make it about my own theological agendas and games, the pursuit of truth dies because then everything becomes a slave to you and then there's no discovery, then there's no growth, and then that's when you begin to become a tradition that is insulated from the real world that God made. Yeah, it's like, you know, the end of The Wizard of Oz, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, and you're saying, no, we need to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, how things work. Yeah, and you know, I think a part of it, you know, I forget the fellow, you may remember the fellow who made that movie, he actually was trying to say something about God, meaning, you know, God is really a bumbling guy behind the curtain, and that, you know, The Wizard of Oz that we see is this projection that God makes to trick us. I would play with that a little bit. I actually think it's not God, it's human beings who get involved in the theological game, and we find ourselves behind that curtain trying to project images of God that make others scared and that make us comfortable, and, you know, and God is looking down on it and saying, you know, pull the curtain back, be honest, notice the way in which you're construing your theology in ways that aren't helpful to advancing love for God and neighbor. Follow the example of Jesus who did the best that he could to help his Jewish neighbors understand the Bible in a way that would create connections with people rather than separations. You know, it's all about truth. The truth will set you free. I think somebody said that. Yeah, again, so we've gone from Israelite religion to, like, the nature of the Bible, the nature of the Christian faith, and we're ending here on who is God, what is God like? I mean, it's really amazing how in the short span of less than an hour we're getting to all this stuff. Hey, listen, Kent, thank you very much for coming on. I got, like, 50 other things I want to talk about. Maybe we can pursue those some other time. Yeah, thanks, Pete. I do want to just reiterate your last point, which, I mean, the value of Scripture is that it opens us up to theological conversations. Of course, you could just do history with it, and that would be what you do, and in that case it wouldn't be any different than the history of any other nation. But insofar as it's Scripture, it serves as the beginning point by God's design for our conversations that lead back to God. If it doesn't do that, we're really not reading the Bible as what it is, which is the Word of God. And they're conversations within the Bible itself. Amen. Yeah. All right, Kent, thanks. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Aaron. Maybe I can actually meet you on campus one day. Let's plan on that. I have my people, as I said, my people will contact you. Okay, good. See you again. See you later. Thanks again, everyone, for listening. We want to just mention a few of Kent's books here. I mentioned at the beginning his book, God's Word and Human Word, but also check out Sacred Word, Broken Word. It came out four or five years ago. A good introduction, maybe, to that. Yeah, very readable. Not highly academic, very readable. Right. And you can check him out online. You can also check us out online. I'm on Twitter at jbias. And you can find me also on Twitter, at Pete Enns, and Facebook, where I spend far too much time, at Peter Enns. And you can check out what I'm doing on my website, petenns.com. And if you have a chance to, you can look at some of my recent books there, like The Bible Tells Me So, Where There's Been Uncertainty. Sign up for my newsletter, Why Wouldn't You? See my speaking schedule. And most importantly, continue on my blog, The Conversations, like the one we just had. Thanks again. We hope you join us next time, where we'll be talking with our friend and New Testament scholar, Daniel Kirk. Daniel Kirk.