Jewish culture
Vern Peterman · Nov 7, 2004
Bible Backgrounds, No. 19
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/482623157517

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Get on your skullcaps and prayer shawls. We're going to be looking at Jewish culture here this morning. And I'm really excited about it. I think there's some neat things. In fact, let me backtrack just a hair. Last week, Brad, who isn't here this morning, but he was asking, what is the word for tax collector? And I couldn't recall at the moment. I frequently can't recall things.

But anyway, the Greek is telones. Where a chief tax collector, as we pointed out, Zacchaeus was, Archetilonus. And this word arche, we use it in our language like arch, like arch enemy, chief enemy, okay, that idea, okay. Arch, you know, we usually have in kind of church history, an archbishop, you know, a chief bishop, that kind of an idea. Same Greek root there, Archetilonus.

So that's the answer to the question that I couldn't recall at the moment. Jewish culture, what we're looking at here this time. In truth, we've been looking at Jewish culture all along, because we've been looking at the influence on Jewish culture and Bible background. But we want to look particularly at Jewish culture here this morning, and looking at the timeline, of course, you really aren't talking about anything Jewish until you get to Abraham, and really Abraham is not yet Jewish.

Why? He's from the culture he grew up in. Yep, that's one. There was a promise to Abraham, a covenant with Abraham. When we say Israel, who was Israel? Jacob. Jacob was Israel. So in truth, Abraham is not quite Jewish. Can you think of other groups that find fatherhood in Abraham? The Muslims find fatherhood in Abraham. Esau. fatherhood and Abraham. So there's still other groups that can look to Abraham as their father and so it's not enough by itself to point to Abraham. Nonetheless, we point out there isn't anything Jewish to talk about until you at least get to Abraham where there's the covenant with him and then it's focused through the descendants of Jacob, who Jacob was called Israel.

The geography, this is a modern map so you get an idea what that looks like. I think last week we showed a the Roman Empire from space, which is really quite a view. You stand way out, and it is amazing how far out you have to get to look at the entire Roman Empire from one view from space.

Now, what you see is Abraham went and tracked from Ur up to Haran and then down into Israel, and then made a trip down into Egypt and back, and then we find Also, the Jews pitched over to Babylon, so there's influence there by their going there and back, some of the Jews remaining. You also find Jews going into Alexandria and Egypt, so there's this path of Jewish travel there.

And also remember about 220 BC, about 2,000 Jewish families told, hey, you move to the area around Ephesus and Colossae and we'll give you 10 years tax-free. They said, where do I sign up? A bunch of them went there. So we have those four areas where the Jews tended to be congregated by the time the New Testament rolled around.

Remember when we looked at these philosophies of empire, every one of those empires had a long-term impact of some kind on the Jews. Egypt, they were there as slaves for 430 years. The Old Testament repeatedly keeps telling the Jews I brought you out of Egypt. And even in the Mosaic law, you were a slave in Egypt, therefore be kind to your slaves. Treat them considerably because you too were a slave.

Very interesting. Elishka, a few of you may remember Elishka. She was here summer before last visiting from Czech. She was here for about two months. I've been emailing with her off and on because she's doing presentations at Charles University where she's going to school there. And one of the things that she was presenting in the class, as a kind of a presentation before the class, was how is slavery in the Bible different from slavery out in the culture, and what's the difference. One of those differences, the Jews were told repeatedly in their law, treat the slaves kindly because you were slaves too. Remember, you were in that position.

Assyria was another one. The Assyrians instituted Aramaic, and by New Testament times, people in Israel were still speaking Aramaic. That was the native tongue of Jesus and the apostles as they were walking the nation of Israel. Babylon. Many of the Jews traveled over to to Babylon, and most of them stayed there after the Babylonian exile, at least at that very time. Some continued to travel back later, but only about 50,000 made the initial trip back.

Persia, they continued to carry on the Persian background, used Persian borrow words, and continued to carry that on. The Greek, of course, was the language in which the New Testament was written. and many things out of there. And finally, the Roman culture was the context in which the New Testament took place. So all of those cultures had some influence, even though many of them were centuries before on the Jewish culture.

Now, the principle to remember, though, as you're looking at these things, is we always want to match the right background to the text. This was a principle that we brought out a lot earlier. We want to illuminate the meaning, not eliminate the meaning, but we want to match the right background to the text.

If I get a wrong historical background, I can draw a wrong conclusion. If I told you, hey, man, when I was in high school, I used a cell phone all the time, you're going to say, hmm, something's wrong here, right? Wrong conclusion. Why? Because you just know it doesn't match up. It doesn't square up with history.

We want to do the same thing. We want to look at get things lined up right so we draw the right conclusions. Matching the right background to the text requires that we respect the inspiration and authority of Scripture and take its text in the normal literal sense. By literal, it doesn't mean that we don't understand figures of speech. We certainly do. Every figure of speech has a literal meaning. A literal thing is intended, even if we say the figure of speech. If I say, this drives me up the wall, I have a literal meaning, even though the figure of speech sounds strange if we take it literally.

For the sake of focus, what we're going to do here, there is so much Jewish background we could go through. We're going to focus right now on the New Testament primarily. We're going to look mostly at that. And one should keep in mind, however, if you're looking at other Old Testament passages, Things are going to vary by time and place. One advantage we have is that society moved at a much slower pace technologically. They didn't have the rapid change that we tend to have.

I remember talking to my grandpa one time, because he was born in 1890. He was 13 years old when Wright Brothers flew. I remember just kind of going through key points in history talking about that, and he said, yeah, I remember that, I remember that, you know. And his contribution to World War I was drafting up one of the howitzers that they used, you know, things like that, so kind of stepping through things. The pace of change during his lifetime was phenomenal, okay. The pace of technological change during the time of the Bible is not as phenomenal. There was more change in empires than there was technology. Okay. So by the first century AD, the Jews were centered in Judea, and over in the area around Ephesus and Colossae, and then down in Alexandria, and then over in the area around Babylon. Those were the four main centers.

Remember what we said before, there's at least twice as many Jews outside of Israel by New Testament times as there were in Israel. We tend to think Jews, Israel, and yes, that's a good connection. But important to remember, most Jews were elsewhere. Big impact. The other thing we pointed out before was that based on Acts 2 and saying where everybody came from, we have Jews coming to Jerusalem from all over the place. And then we also have other places where the New Testament records that there were Jews located.

For example, in Corinth. We have a record up in Thessalonica. It was the Jews in Thessalonica that were just real rabidly against Paul. I mean, they just chased him down. Not just chasing him out of Thessalonica, but pursuing him in other cities. So anyway, the Jews there were a minority, but very passionate. Tarsus. Here's Paul himself. Interesting. Paul is from Tarsus.

We have no record of him establishing a church there or spending a lot of time there. Very curious, huh? And then finally we have it in the area around Galatia. The Jewish issues were there. It's a region rather than a city, but you have that as well. And then in Cyprus. All right, in Antioch. So we have Jews in a number of places, aside from the Acts 2 phenomenon, and of course there in Israel.

All right. Now we've got these different groups, and these are the ones we primarily think of when we think of different groups of Jews. We'll take a look at those first, but there's other groups we don't want to ignore. From the time of Ezra, a group of Jews known as the Hasidim held the Old Testament scriptures.

Even today you'll hear them called Hasidic Jews, those who hold to Orthodoxy. They constitute less than 10% of the Jews in Israel now. How many of you know some Jewish people personally? Do you know any that are Orthodox? Yeah, Nancy and I had neighbors that were Orthodox, and nice enough folks, and we tried to be friendly with them, but they just said, you know, I'm sorry we can't come over for tea, you might have had some sort of ham or something like that in your food, and that could have gotten on the cup, and all sorts of things. There are people who still hold to it. It's a minority, but that's still a term that's used.

These were the roots of several groups which began in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, kind of between the Testaments, as Craig covered for us here. And the New Testament talks about the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots, the Essenes, and the Sicarii. We're going to go into each of those groups in a little more detail here. Now, the most extreme groups, the Zealots and the Sicarii, Those were the ones who, by 66 AD, started a revolt.

So it's like they're just building up for this. So they start this revolt, and the Romans say, OK, well, we've got to come in and take care of that. See, the Romans only kept a few thousand troops in Israel. So for any normal type activity, they could handle things. But once this massive revolt came up, Those 3,000 troops were overwhelmed, so it took time for the Romans to respond, but respond they did.

They eventually ended up just wiping out the Jews there. Masada. Just a few years after they go in and just totally overwhelm Jerusalem and tear the temple down block by block, they go in there and here's Masada, which was basically a fortress up on a flat kind of plateau. and the Jews hole up there, and you can see on the lower right, there's the Roman siege ramp. They just built up dirt until they could get the troops up the side there.

Then you have the Bar Kokhba. Some of that's spelled instead of a C with a K. Bar Kokhba, after the New Testament era. Here's a letter written in Hebrew during the rebellion, so a copy of that letter that took place. These were groups who said, you will fight for Israel, you will fight against Rome.

The first massive losses of Jews during this battle that culminated in 70 AD was Jews against Jews. The Zealots and Sicarii and those that joined with them, slaughtered by the thousands, the other Jews who refused to fight. Isn't that something? So the first catastrophic losses were Jew against Jew, not Romans against Jew.

It was then those who remained after the slaughter who holed up and were finally overcome by the Romans. Then there's the opposite extreme. We've got those Herodians who said, hey, Herod, he may work for the Romans, but he does good stuff. went and kind of started a new project in the temple and, you know, he lets us be Jews and so we think he's a pretty good guy.

So you had that group. You also had those like Matthew who would be Jews collecting taxes for the Romans. So you got real extremes here. Real severe polarization, okay? Now, and then those who walked a tightrope between the extreme groups. And this was like the Sanhedrin. You had the Sadducees and the Pharisees.

The Sadducees were a minority that did not survive that 70 AD event. The reason being, the Sadducees tended to focus around the temple in their practices and activities. And so when the temple was wiped out, they are too. The Pharisees, however, tended to be They said, no, temple activities are great, but we've got to have other things going on in the home, we have to have things out in your work life, we have to have synagogues, and they were more missionary-minded and broad-minded, and they were the ones that survived that 70 AD event. Sadducees, done. All right, here's the Sadducees. They held the first five books of Moses. They didn't believe in resurrection, angels, spirits. So basically, think about the Sadducee mindset.

When this life is over, you're done. How about that? So it's just when you go from birth to death and when that's it, you're through. And so that's the way they viewed things. No angels, very skeptical, if you will. Yes, there's a God, but no angels, no spirits, no afterlife. You have a relationship with God while you're alive. When you're not alive, you're done. That's it. Pretty strange. What's that? Yeah, it's hard to understand why would you even be motivated? It's like, what difference does it make? There's no eternal value in it. Very odd, but that's their perspective.

They were temple-centered. They were a minority. They oftentimes had a kind of a compensating position. They would say, well, we're a minority, but we'll have our guys be the chief priests because we're temple-centered anyway. So you'll find, actually they only had one priest at a time, and you'll find the New Testament says chief priests. Some people will say, well, that's an error. Well, what they would do is they'd say, well, this guy was the chief priest, so we'll still call him one, even though officially we only have one at a time.

Okay? All right. Caiaphas. And you see his ossuary box, his bone box off to the left there, which was discovered about a decade or so ago. The Pharisees held the entire Old Testament Scriptures and basically it's because of the Pharisees that we have those Old Testament Scriptures maintained. They did believe in the resurrection, angels, spirits. It's funny, when we read the New Testament, we tend to think that the Pharisees, they're the bad guys.

They were the culture heroes. The culture looked at the Pharisees and said, man, these guys are really on top of it. I mean, they've got the law done, they've got six extra laws for the ones we've got, every one we've got, and these guys are really on top of it. They were the culture heroes.

If you were a decent Jewish family and you wanted to appoint your kids, be like the Pharisees. They're really cool. So we tend to think of it as a negative thing. In the Jewish culture, though, they looked at the Pharisees like these guys are the best. These guys are really doing it right.

Now, the Pharisees also had concern with temple activities, but they were the ones who actually, you know, they'd go out and have kind of a missionary mind, we're going to go out among the Gentiles, and we're going to make them Jews. So they had kind of a missionary mind, and that's one reason why they would survive the attack on Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, where the Sadducees would not. To the Sadducees, everything was around the temple, and when life is done, you're done. So when you wipe out the temple, and you wipe out the Sadducees, they're done. Whereas with the Pharisees, they could be spread all over the place, even into the Gentile lands, establishing synagogues, trying to get other people to be Jews as well, and so they would survive and maintain. Okay, here's the Mount of Olives. What do you see there? Lots of. Yeah, it's just lots of gravestones and graveyards and that kind of thing. Here's the interesting thing.

The Sadducees, on the one hand, are concerned with the temple. Right across the valley is this, and why would they bury the bones there? Because that's where the Messiah is going to come, and when the Messiah comes back and brings the people to life, that's where they want to be. So here's an odd thing. You have the Sadducees on one side of the valley, putting all their focus on the temple saying there's no afterlife. You had the Pharisees having everybody get buried on the opposite side of the valley where you could see all these graves from the temple and all these people expecting to be resurrected.

Just an odd contrast. Very strange. But the contrast between the two is sharp and stark. And one building on one side said this is all there is and this is what really counts. On the other side, the graveyard, said, I'm looking for the resurrection and the Messiah. Very sharp difference between the two groups, and you see it in the example there.

Now, on the one hand, the Sadducees and Pharisees would agree to challenge Jesus together. Isn't that interesting? We strongly disagree, but we certainly disagree with him, right? So we're going to challenge him, and Jesus warned of the teachings of both these groups at once.

Paul knew exactly how to pitch them against each other. He gets in a meeting of the two groups, the Sanhedrin and Acts 23, and he says, I'm here today because I believe in the resurrection. Boom! The group immediately goes into... we're not talking heated discussion here. Acts actually talks about being concerned that Paul is going to get torn in pieces. These people are... the reaction is volcanic. They are getting rabid. about this thing, tearing each other to pieces and tearing Paul to pieces. So Paul knew how to just completely derail their discussions.

I'm here today because I believe in the resurrection. Okay? He lit the fuse. Okay. Here is another group, the Essene group, and I don't have as much to show you. The Essene quarter, again, notice here's Jerusalem and it's not next to the temple. It's away from it. The Essenes was another group that you see not directly mentioned in the New Testament, but they are at one place implied. The Essenes thought that everything going on in the temple and all the stuff they're doing was just vile because these guys have polluted it. You've got all kinds of extra traditions and you guys are doing it wrong. So, you know, yeah, we'll have an area here where we gather together, but we really don't like what you guys are doing at the temple at all. And it was over in this quarter here where it appears that the Last Supper was held. Isn't it interesting?

The Essenes are not mentioned by name in the New Testament. They didn't exist during the Old Testament. But where you find it is in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says, you have heard that it was said you should hate your enemy. Well, the Pharisees and the Sadducees didn't say that. The Essenes did. But Jesus says, but I say to you. So he's contradicting the Essenes' teaching there, of hating your enemy. So that's the only mention, you know, real strongly of the Essenes, and it's only incidental.

Now, all these groups had a place in the culture of Israel, and of these, the Pharisees were the ones who were most influential and geographically widespread. Basically, when the 70 AD event took place, with the exception of a few groups that continued on with Masada and the Bar Kokhba rebellion, the Pharisees were the group that maintained out of all these different groups.

The Pharisees maintained, and they were the group that became the Orthodox Jews. And basically, with minor exception, all Jews were Orthodox until about the 1600s. They didn't have the groups we have now that are and reformed and conservative and all that. Those are, I would say, liberal Jewish groups that developed later. So the Pharisees are really the group that originated what we call today the Orthodox Jews. The Pharisees held a majority in the Sanhedrin and were more focused on practical matters and matters which had an application in the home, daily life, and the synagogue.

So something that maintained after the destruction of the temple and when all the Jews were told, leave. Outside of Israel, at least half the Jews in New Testament times were located, most concentrated in the areas we pointed out, Babylon, Alexandria, around Ephesus and Colossae.

Their contact with the Gentile culture there was a substantial influence. What you find is every single New Testament book reveals some level of interaction between the Jews and the Gentiles. Some of them are more strong than others, but you can see In every single New Testament book, there is some revelation of the interaction between Jews and Gentiles in every one of those books. At times, such as the Book of Galatians, it's the primary focus of the book. I mean, the sparks fly, and that's the focal point. Other books, it's much more subtle, but it is always there. Every New Testament book has it. The core of the division, the Jews followed the Mosaic law, and the Gentiles basically had no place for it, no place in it. The Gentiles ate the wrong things, they went the wrong places at the wrong times, and did and wore the wrong things.

Think about this. You're a Gentile. Maybe you're a Gentile businessman. You say, hey, we've got some great stuff over here for you to buy, and maybe you have some things to eat. The Jew looks at it and says, I can't eat that, can't eat that, can't eat that, and I might be able to eat that, but you may have touched it with that. So, sorry, we can't buy any stuff you've got to sell.

Well, how about some clothing? We've got clothing over here. Okay, we'll go over there. Did you mix the fibers? Oh, I can't buy that then. See? One thing to the next. Now, if you were in a particular craft, the practice in the Gentile lands was you're going to be in a guild, and the guilds always met in a pagan temple. Oh, well, I can't go there. You see the problem? Everything you do is a problem.

Oh, well, let's talk about school. Oh, wait a minute. We have to teach our kid Hebrew. He's got to learn all our laws and traditions and history. He can't go to school. It's your school. Every single point, even down to the worm in the apple, can't have an apple with worms in it. If I bite into that, that's against the law. Sorry, you can't buy your apples.

Every small, separated the Jew and the Gentile. They could live side by side, but the interaction was always troubled. Besides that, the Gentiles were uncircumcised. And you could tell that when you went to the latrine. Here's the Agora, the marketplace. Everything about the marketplace was a problem. You had to have separate areas for the Jews and separate merchants. The number of things that they could buy from each other was sometimes limited, often limited.

Go to the theatre. What do you do when you go to the theatre? At the typical theatre activity, they would have, for example, an orchestra and then a play. Like say in Ephesus, Colossae, the women who were in the orchestra and in the play were also doubled as prostitutes.

So that was a bad thing. You want to travel. In the Gentile lands, the motels, what they had as an equivalent to the motel, were brothels. So it was constantly a problem. The Jew could not interact easily with these things without compromising. So the Jew is either compromising or fighting. Constant tension.

The Temple of Artemis was not just a temple for Artemis, it was also the place to keep your valuables safe. It was kind of a bank safety deposit box kind of place, and a major area for that region, except for one thing. If you're Jewish, are you going to take your valuables there? Problem, huh?

You see, every single step of the way, what the Gentiles did, the Jews could not accept. What you wear, where you go, when you go there, it's all wrong. And we just can't do that. Okay? Now, but here's the odd thing. There was not only, you know, here's the law and it divides us. There were numerous areas where the Jews were evidently compromising. Here's one of them.

This is a magic text written in Greek and it's Jewish. Jewish magic, yeah. And so they would have spells that were Jewish spells. Very odd, isn't it? Hard to imagine that. You look in Acts 8 and Acts 19 for examples of Jewish magic and magicians. The Jews would compromise with what they got out of the Old Testament and mix in with the Gentile cultures, but say, well, I'm Jewish and that gives me special magical powers. And so, very odd to our thinking, but it doesn't fit in with what we see in the Old Testament. The Old Testament condemns that kind of But nonetheless, some of the Jews knuckled under the pressure and compromised that way.

Ephesians 1.21 says, far above every name that is named.

And we saw similarly in Philippians 2.9. Naming of names was naming certain names because that had magical power. So what Paul was telling him in Ephesians, in the letter to the Ephesians and to the Philippians, was Jesus Christ is above all those magic names that you might drop. the names that were involved in your incantations and the Jewish incantations. Now, let's switch to another one. Here's Timothy.

Timothy was from a forbidden marriage. Remember, the Jews were not to go in and start marrying Gentiles, right? So what do we find is Timothy had a Jewish grandmother and mother, but Timothy also had a Greek father. This is also why Paul circumcised Timothy so that he would be acceptable. Later, likely his Greek father said, circumcise him? No way. You know, we don't do that because the compromise had already been made. Interestingly, we might say, well, how come this Jewish lady got married to a Greek man? It may have happened because Timothy's grandparents had made the arrangement. And so the compromise was there, and their daughter was then just kind of brought into this forbidden marriage.

Here's Old Testament and New Testament patterns. The Jews often used distinctly Jewish patterns of language. And this is something, as you're studying the Bible, a valuable tool. One was to rhyme ideas and meanings, and we've talked about that to some extent, rather than sounds, such as in their poetry.

Psalms 6, 1-6, if you want to read through that, He says, I cry every night, my bed swims with tears. It's interesting, we would listen to a piece of poetry or sing a song and we want the sounds to rhyme. They don't care if it rhymes or not. They want the meanings to rhyme. An example that we saw just recently is Ephesians 2, the last couple of verses. An example of Hebrew poetry pattern. They rhyme the meanings, not the words, not the sounds of the words.

The Jews would describe the whole of something with either both halves or both ends. You don't say God created everything, you say God created the heavens and the earth. Paul would say that the church is Jew and Gentile, male and female. Both halves. The other is to describe both ends.

Jesus says, I am the Alpha and the Omega. If you describe the first thing and the last thing, it includes everything in the middle. That's because the Jewish rabbis, if they wanted to say everything, they would say Aleph, Tatav, the first and the last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. So John said, okay, I'll just carry that over into Greek, Alpha and Omega.

So the Jewish understanding of things is to lay out two halves or the two opposite ends. At one point in time, early in Revelation, John names two gemstones, and you say, well, why is he picking two gemstones? The Jews each had gemstones for each of the tribes, and what he's listing is the first and the last gemstone, which points that means all the tribes.

So you can look for that as you're reading the New Testament. Paul frequently writes that way, being trained Jewish to the core. Here is where it is really helpful. is if you're trying to understand something, look for that parallelism because what it does, because the ideas rhyme, if you see a pattern that looks like a rhyming of ideas, it gives you a second test on, do I understand it? Paul also frequently, and we discovered this in Colossians 1, would say things using the Greek manner of speaking and then switch to the Jewish so that he spoke to both groups.

That also helps you better understand. Example in Colossians 1, he said Christ created everything, the heavens and the earth. To the Greeks, he would say everything. To the Jews, he would say the heavens and the earth. See that? He would speak to both groups By stating both, it helps us better understand and it serves as a cross-check in our interpretation. Cool. All right. Now, the image of something was important.

We see in Genesis 1.26, let's just make man in our image. The flip side is that you don't want to make any graven image. So that's another Jewish pattern that you'll see. Both the Old and New Testament focus on this idea of image.

Romans 8.28, all things work together for good.

Why? It's not because everything you look at and say, well, it's really good, I got in a big wreck, or I just came down with some serious disease. All things work together for good because we are being conformed to the image of His Son. Real interesting, the idea of an image is very important. They just had a forbidden thing because of the Mosaic Law, don't make a graven image. So it's a contrast, isn't it? All right.

The New Testament is written in Greek. One can recognize Jewish patterns of speech. Look for the Old Testament words, phrases and themes. Here's an interesting thing that I was looking at recently. Hebrews 3 talks about Moses. It says Moses was a servant, and ordinarily we have in Greek the word for servant as a doulos.

In this particular place in Hebrews 3, It uses a word that is only used in that one place for servant and not used anywhere else in the New Testament. Therapon. It's the only place that's used in the whole New Testament. I looked at that and I said, why do they use that word? Then I looked in the Greek Old Testament and found that that word therapon was used in the Mosaic Law, the Greek Old Testament, to describe Moses. Moses was a therapon.

It's the exact word and it isn't used substantially elsewhere in the Old Testament. When the person who was writing Hebrews was writing it, he drew exactly from the word used in the Old Testament and not just picked the common word. So it's very pointed. It's very deliberate in what is chosen there. Phrases. John wrote throughout the book of Revelation after these things. In the Greek it's metatauta. What you find is that that word is used throughout the Old Testament, starting in the Book of Genesis. It always means something that is historically real. So when he's saying, after these things, he is trying to make emphasis. This is something that really is taking place. So the Book of Revelation is not made-up stories. It's not just a big allegory. Real world, real time, real history. It just hasn't happened yet.

The Greek Old Testament is a good place to start. I've given a few of you copies of the Greek Old Testament. How many would like to have a copy of it on CD? A few people would. Okay. I'll try to bring some extra copies next week so you can make use of that.

And you can look things up. You find something in the New Testament, you look it up in the Old Testament, look at the passage. It's amazing the connections that you'll see. What's amazing is Ephesians chapter 1 has a massive number of words that are taken from Daniel chapter 2, but you won't recognize it unless you look at the Greek Old Testament. As a starting place, try using the Bible itself to reveal Jewish words, phrases, culture, patterns, and history. Some of the things that you'll see is that the Bible will sometimes explain why this or that is the case, and will state things that way. you will find patterns and phrases that carry over. For example, I mentioned the heavens and the earth. As I look throughout both in the Old and New Testament, that pattern of heavens and the earth, both places. I mentioned one before, metatauta, after these things, Old Testament and New Testament phrase. You'll find those kinds of phrases. One of them we looked at the main service last week. It had to do with made without hands.

That was another, again, Old Testament pattern and New Testament pattern. You can use the Bible to look at cultural patterns because frequently it will reveal what's there in the way of a cultural pattern. And except for Luke, possibly Job, the authors of the rest of the Bible were Jewish. So you'll see Jewish patterns of speech and writing. Now, we're going to get into other biblical cultures next.

We're going to look at all these. There we go. This is where you've got all the Hivites and satellites and termites and everything else. So we're going to be looking at other groups. Some of those groups are like Old Testament groups that seem to kind of pass off the scene, but there are other groups that had an impact. Let's see.

So also Crete was an area where they spoke Greek, they had their own particular cultural pattern, and Paul writes to Titus, Paul's letter to Titus is, you're going to go and you're going to appoint elders in Crete. And by the way, you need to know, they're always liars. And he quotes one of their own to prove his point. He doesn't make the accusation himself. Here's one of their own authors that said they were liars. And what we find historically is that's what they were.

It was, you were considered a hero if you lied really good. Now, among that culture, try to pick an elder. Oh boy! Here's a place where if you lie really, really good, you're a hero. Here's a culture where if you trick somebody and steal from them as a result of your trickery or even get them killed. Oh man, that's just the best. See? A really upside down culture. So that's an example of cultures that are just kind of special places. Here's another one. Thessalonica and Philippi. We've studied the book of Philippians last year.

That's a place where it's the feminist ideal. Women could vote. Women could own things. It wasn't like most of the Roman Empire. Women could get up in a big meeting and speak. They had rights. Part of the culture there that was kind of a feminist ideal and very unlike the rest of the culture. So there are pockets of different aspects of culture that's good to know about. And that's why you'll find, like in Act 16, several references in that section of Acts to the prominent woman.

Why? Because the rest of the culture didn't have that. It wasn't allowed. But in that part of the Roman Empire, it was. So those are the little things that it's good to get the insights on. We'll take a look at some of those, obviously briefly, because we'll be looking at a lot of things. Other groups. Barbarians. What do they think of barbarians? Occasionally you find mentioned Scythians. Groups like that.

So we'll take a look at that this next time. Once we get through with that this next week, what I'm going to be switching to is case studies. We'll be looking more at particular things directly out of scripture because we've done a lot of background work. Looking at things directly out of scripture and seeing the patterns of life that are quite different from what we're accustomed to.

We like to sit down in our culture, maybe sit down and have a family meal together in the evening, something like that. In that culture, you didn't have the guys and the gals sitting down eating together. If you did, that was horrible. So a very different culture, a very different mindset. We would be alarmed to have our neighbors looking in the windows and the doors and making comments about what we're eating and who we're eating with. To them, that was the norm. To have people crowded around your house looking in the windows and commenting what you're eating, not eating, who you're eating with, All that would be the norm.

Wouldn't that just drive you bonkers? To them, that was what you did all the time. They would have so many people crowded around the window that they had to tell Jesus that his mother and brothers and sisters were outside because there were so many people crowded around looking in the windows and looking in the doors that he couldn't even see them. Can you imagine that?

So the culture is very different. To me, a lot of it is almost humorous. I'm sure we would be shocked to step back into it. You're sitting down, there's no silverware. What are you putting on this bread? Fermented fish paste? Eww! The things that we do and eat and things like that, that's the background from which Scripture is written. And it's not irrelevant background because it does affect how you see what's described right there in Scripture. Anyway, we'll take a look at those things. I think they're extremely valuable. We brought up one when we were studying through Philippians.

It was not the norm in any of the culture of the New Testament to tell somebody, thank you. You just didn't do that. As a matter of fact, it was considered if you did that, that you were bringing a curse upon them. So how does Paul say thank you to the Philippians for all the contributions financially that they've made? He can't, within the culture. So he spends the whole book saying thank you in other ways, because he doesn't want them to feel insulted or shocked that he would say thank you directly to them. Amazing stuff. I find it fascinating. Maybe you do too.

But anyway, we'll start with that two weeks from today. All right. Now, any questions? Now that you've been baffled and overwhelmed. Yeah. We will have the CD with everything, the handouts, the overheads like I use, because sometimes I have slides that aren't your handouts, and some supplemental resources as well. You'll get all those. OK.

The supplemental resources will be fairly substantial too. So, I mean, basically it'll be books and books if you were to print it out. But, so anyway, lots on there. Part of the problem I'm having now is it's already filling up one CD and I'm not done. So, it's a lot. Yeah, yeah, it may take two because I try to use a lot of pictures and graphics and things like that and that tends to take up a lot of space.

Alright, so yeah, and I'll just go ahead and do that at the end, everybody who'd like one can get a CD. And I'll go, let's see if I can, yeah, I was trying to think, I might want to just put the Greek, New Testament, Old Testament, you know, you're on that. That be alright? I'll do that, and I'll wait to do that, so we'll do it that way. Yeah, other questions? Hmm?

What is the, I don't know, the mystical faith connection with Jews Kabbalah, yeah. Judaism out of the Old Testament is not mystical, but again, one of the things that came out of integrating Judaism with the other cultures was to bring in mystical Judaism, which ends up being more of almost an Eastern idea.

Remember one of the points we made early on studying Ephesians and Colossians was the influence of the Silk Road. You brought in a lot of early Hindu and Buddhist ideas, and that influenced the Greeks, and the Romans, and the Egyptians, and it also influenced the Jews, and they came in with this mysticism that is just an integration, basically, of what I'll call pre- or early Buddhism, and pre- or early Hinduism, and Eastern philosophy, because there were other Eastern philosophers as well. The time period when a lot of world religions got influence and a lot of world philosophies was around 500 or 600 BC and that was several centuries before the start of the Silk Road and the Silk Road started roughly around 200 BC. So by the time the New Testament came around, there was plenty of influence from the East and the Kabbalah, The Jewish mysticism is basically, here's this Old Testament law, and I'll just basically marry the two.

And to do that, of course, you have to supplement the scriptures, but the Pharisees had already done that. So it's just a matter of expanding that practice to include mysticism as well, not just how do I define the law and put a hedge around the law, But how do I go ahead and take this mosaic law that I have written and add mysticism to it? So adding to the scriptures is something they're well-practiced at by that time. Other questions?

I think this is fascinating stuff, but I also think it's really helpful, especially when you begin to understand the history and the culture and you see what's going on. When you see the contrast with our culture, that's where it's, I think, extremely helpful to see it and to know it and to realize it. Because if we don't understand how the culture might be different in some respects, we will misunderstand it.

We won't see what's going on. Once we see it's the norm to sit around and watch your neighbors eat and who they're eating with, it would be normal for the Pharisees to stand around and say, look, he's eating with prostitutes and tax collectors and sinners. And how come your people don't wash their hands before they eat, etc.?

Those kinds of things. Those will all be normal questions because your neighbors are looking in your windows and your doors. Of course they're going to say things like that. It fits the culture. Whereas for us, it would be like, hey, that's invasion of privacy. What are you doing looking in my window while I'm eating? Yes, that's right. We'd pull the shades. They didn't have shades. They didn't have ways of closing things without making the room dark. So, yeah, real different. Well, let's call it quits here, okay?

Lord, it is amazing and fascinating to look at the background of these things. But how much more wonderful to get the richness and depth that is in your word. And we thank you for that. We find in it, too, just a sense of the arbitrariness of our own culture and ultimately a recognition that it's the absolute and eternal truth that you revealed that count. And we thank you for that. Thank you for your precious son who gave his life for us. In Jesus' name, amen.