Introduction: Why Study Bible backgrounds?

I've been really looking forward to being able to go through this material with you. It's just been really helpful for me, and I think you'll find it real fascinating and interesting. Looking at the history and the culture, I mean, you've probably been through dry history classes. I have too, and I have no intent to walk anybody through that.

The things we have to present here are some fascinating things, partly because a lot of the cultural things are real interesting, but also because as we get the insight into what the background is for a lot of passages, the meaning of scripture all of a sudden begins to come alive. All of a sudden, you know, ah, that's what he means. That's why he said that. And so we'll look at a number of different passages as we're going through this. And a lot of times the meaning and understanding will become apparent.

So anyway, before we go into that, why don't we just begin our time with prayer, okay? Lord, thank you that as we look at your marvelous word, that we can gain great insights, not just to make us smarter or more heady, but that we might see indeed the truths that you have put into your word, that we might behold you. And Lord, we give you thanks for that. We pray that you would guide and lead our time. In Jesus' name, amen. I put up there on the front slide to sit forward and sit over in this direction. The idea is not to throw stones at anybody.

But the main thing is if people get spread way out, it's real hard to communicate. And it's hard for me to tell. Pardon? If you don't mind. The main thing is, the more folks are spread out, the tougher it is to communicate. The other thing is, just about every week I'm going to have something to hand out to you, and that becomes a bigger, more cumbersome task if everybody is spread out.

I'm going to start off by doing just that. Hold on to that. Don't spread that out. Unless you happen to get two. Did I give you two? I don't think so. What you'll want to do, they're crisscrossed and you'll want to take a grab at each one of them. Did you get the whole package there? Yeah. So what you'll want to do is to take this and open up your binder in the very back. Slap it on the stuff that's on the back. The picture is this. I'm going to have handouts each week and right now you have the first two weeks in your binder.

Those are in the front right after the table of contents. The colored divider sheet, I think it's pink, and stuff after that is the appendix. This will go at the end of all that material in the appendix. And each week there's going to be the main handout which will go in sequence according to the table of contents and then I'll probably have most times some additional materials to go in the appendix.

When they're all done, the idea is that you have a substantial set of resources to work with. So that's the plot. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make available... Questions? Well, that's terrible. Okay. There we go. Everybody covered now? Sorry about that. I'm going to make available different resources. I won't bring them all at once, but take a look at it here. You know, here's a couple of books with charts on the Old Testament, New Testament. And this is a book of, you know, charts, maps and reconstructions. For example, reconstruction, what did the Ark of the Covenant look like? You know, what did the temple look like when it was all built?

Things like that. This has charts that help kind of get an organized view of different things in the Old Testament, the New Testament. Here's all the miracles. Here's the genealogy from Adam through Noah. Things like that. So I'll bring those in each week so you get a chance to take a look at them.

Alright, let's begin rolling. As we've done before, what you'll see is if there's nothing in the way of a number in the corner. Let's see, have I got this coded right? I may not have that coded. Okay, I have to update that. The typical pattern will be, and it looks like I fell short here, is to put a number in there, so you won't find every single slide matching what you've got, but you'll in general find that that's the case.

Okay, let's back up. Alright. What are Bible backgrounds? Things we'll be looking at, one will be history. It'll be history sometimes of whole nations and empires. Sometimes it'll be history of a city. Sometimes it'll be history of an individual. What's, for example, the history of Timothy? What's the history of Ephesus? What's the history of the nation of Israel? What's the history of Egypt? All those histories are relevant. So we'll have a history that will come from each of those.

You'll want to sit up here, we've got some binders for you. And I also mention those related to the Bible. Some of them you may not find in the Bible, but end up becoming real relevant. Let me give you an example. The Parthian Empire was just to the east of the Roman Empire, just to the east of Israel. It's quite relevant in the New Testament, but never mentioned.

The Romans had lots of trouble with the Parthians. I mean lots of trouble. They had a tough time with the Parthians. They battled them back and forth and each gained and lost ground. The Parthians, one of the reasons they had trouble with them is they fought so differently. The Parthians would get on their horses backwards and shoot arrows while they're riding away. How do you fight that? It's like, man, what is this? So here's this Parthian, he comes riding by, he's riding backwards on his horse excellently, and meanwhile just flying arrows at you. They had no idea how I fight this. So it's things like that. It's related to the Bible. It's not specifically mentioned. Okay. Now let's take another one. This is the historical timeline. We'll be working off this historical timeline. Okay.

The contents of both the Old and New Testament. So you notice we have the Old Testament, the period in which it's written in that red dashed line. And then the period of the New Testament, that shorter solid blue line, those are the times in which they were written. Both of those books refer back to the very beginning, don't they? The New Testament even talks about Adam, right? The New Testament talks about Noah, Abraham, Moses, David. So each of the books, Old and New Testament, look back in time in history and talk about things all the way from the very beginning. The next thing is culture, okay? There is a culture behind every text in the Bible.

And so it's not good enough for us to just do a word study, to just study the language. Okay, now I know Greek and I've got just the language. Because the language is spoken in the context of a culture. Give the quick example. If I tell you, you're pulling my leg. I can look up each one of those words. I can sentence diagram it. But I still don't understand it. unless I understand that it's a cultural expression. See that? Makes a big difference.

Now, cultural backgrounds in the Bible includes patterns of learned human belief, values, communication, and behavior. Within human beings is the possibility for this much, you know, in variation of behavior and values and communication, right? You could take any human being and they'd have the full range of, they could learn to speak all languages. or any one of them. They could behave in all kinds of ways.

Culture narrows how we see things, doesn't it? One time my brother was in a skit years ago where we told him, you're to be in the skit sitting down at the dinner table with three other guys and they are, you know, cultured Western, you know, American human beings and you are a savage differently cultured.

I said, you're supposed to go in there and behave in ways that they don't expect. So he did. He went and sat down at the table and he started grabbing their chicken, pulling it over on his plate. Now when they started to grab back at the chicken, he figured, ah, that's what the knife is for. And so all the behaviors were entirely different for our culture. Culture narrows down how people can behave. And so cultures differ from one another because they're different narrowings. See that? Now, cultures vary as to time and location.

During the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, polygamy was the norm. During the New Testament era, almost unheard of. The Romans and the Greeks didn't mind being what we would consider immoral every day. But the idea of marrying more than one woman was reprehensible and illegal. Whereas in the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of course you do that.

Cultural insights are both provided in the text of Scripture, as we can get insights from Scripture. One of them that we pointed out going through Philippians is it was not the norm in the Roman Empire for one person to thank another person. Not the norm. If you did something for me, there was not a way in the culture to say, thank you.

We would consider that, well, of course, you trained your kids that way. Matter of fact, you spent a lot of effort trying to get them to learn that, right? In the Roman Empire, you didn't do that. So that's why Paul, he's struggling all through Philippians to say thank you. But what was allowed was to thank God for what somebody did.

And so that's what we see. So, now, you also get things outside of scripture that will provide insight, and we'll take a look at that too, okay? Now, the tie, the connection between those is geography. The Roman Empire, okay, the Eastern part of the Roman Empire was the same domain that you find a lot of things happening earlier. Different history, different culture, Same geography. So on the same piece of land, you'll have different things going on. Just like in our own time, we look back on it. Spain ruled the oceans. It ruled the world militarily. Is that true now? No. Things change. And the same thing in biblical times. This is the general geography of the Bible.

By the way, you'll find your map almost unreadable. because that's a real small one. Make a note, and hopefully you have a pen or a pencil available. Anybody need one, by the way? Anybody need a pen or a pencil? You're covered there? Okay. Make a note there is a map of the Roman Empire in the color section that I just handed out in the back. So you might make a note of that. So if you look at it, you say, oh, good heavens, Vern, I can't read it.

That's all right. Look at the one in the back, and that'll cover the same ground. The main idea is it's around the Mediterranean and the surrounding areas that the Bible talks about. Rarely does the Bible talk about other areas, and if so, generally not very specifically or at length. Okay? All right.

Yeah, you have a colored map of the Roman Empire. You should, in your section, just hand it out. Oh, wait a minute. You folks came in after I handed things out. Take a couple of those. hand back what you don't use. Okay. This is the modern map. For example, you see Libya, Egypt, Israel, Jordan. You kind of go around the Roman Empire. This is, again, this is the area that the Bible talks about when you look at the big picture. Now, why do we study Bible backgrounds?

Is it just interesting? Yes, I think it's fascinating. I love it. However, that's not enough. For Bible backgrounds to be valuable, it's got to be more than just it's fascinating, even if it is. Bible backgrounds help put together with language study our understanding of what was said. What are we trying to do? Instead of reading a passage and looking at it from our culture and our language, what we want to do is to step back in their culture and language and see what was said and written.

We read Philippians chapter 3 verses 12-14 and that's where Paul is writing to them and he talks about I haven't yet laid a hold of the prize but Christ has laid hold of the prize at me. He says I'm looking for that upward call and we look at it and we think okay the upward call must be when the Lord says okay Vern you're done come home. No. The upward call is when you get called up to the judges stand to receive your award for winning, okay? When he uses three times, laid hold of, and it means to take down first prize, okay?

And he talks about keeping your eye on the goal. That was the skopos. We get our word scope, like a telescope or a microscope, or we zero in on something. All the words he uses in those 12, 13, and 14 just rich with athletic terms for chariot racing.

And if you don't see that, you will understand it completely differently. The Romans were rabid about chariot racing. And if you don't understand it, it'll look like, oh, that's another few verses, and what's next? Instead of seeing it, when they saw it, they were jumping up and down, hearts beating. I mean, they were ready to put the letter down and scream for a while.

They were really They were really getting intense about it because of the richness of words that he pictured there. So, real key that we understand it. Matter of fact, one of the personal rules of thumb that I've used, if I am not jumping up out of my seat about this passage, I probably don't understand it yet.

Now, the other thing is that it also, as a secondary thing, supports the defense of the faith. Not because you're out there to try to prove something, but when you see confirmation of, hey, you know, that fits within the time frame and the history and the culture, that that's confirming of the Bible's historicity. We'll get into one in a little bit, but the point being, there's lots of situations where you look at it and you say, that only took place in a certain small period of time. The term Luke uses for magistrates, okay? when he describes what happens in Philippi, is a term that was only used in a very short period of time in Philippi. And so if Luke had written it later or earlier, in other words, if it was bogus, he wouldn't have used the right word. And it so happens it is just the right word. Now, does that prove that everything in there is true? No. But it's confirming. See the difference? It's confirming. It's consistent. It has not falsified. the account. What we're going to do is we're going to observe, interpret, and apply. We've gone over this previously, but I think it's important to look at it now.

We're going to observe the elements of language and of history and of culture in order to understand the Bible correctly. It's the last two that we're looking at here. The last two that we're looking at here. History and culture. We're going to observe, and what that means is we're going to look at the language and the literary context.

And so we're going to investigate the grammar and sentence structure. That's not what we're covering in this class, but I just want to make sure we get the full picture. We seek to understand the original meaning of the words and context, and that's where we connect up culture with it. Oftentimes, if we simply translate it without looking at the culture, we still don't understand it.

It's just like that upward call. You know, we think that's, you know, gee, God's calling me home. No, it's a call before the judgment stand, the judges stand, to receive reward, okay, for having won. And again, it's the cultural context that gives us the understanding of what's being said. We read the verses before and after the verses we're studying, so we don't grab things out of context, okay? And we look at the larger context of scripture beyond the immediate book.

Where does this book fit in? We looked at, for example, in Philippians, when we were going through it, the fact that it uniquely, compared to the number of the other books, was written to a Roman colony, to the church that was located in the Roman colony. Therefore, the whole book has a different character. A different character from, say, Ephesians, which wasn't a Roman colony, or Colossians, which wasn't a Roman colony. The thing that we're focusing on here is the historical and sequential context. And where do things fit the sequence here? And so we'll look for the historical sequence of events in scripture.

Take, for example, Galatians. How long ago, when Galatians was written, how long ago had it been that Paul had just been there? Decades? A few years? When you look at it, when we study the historical sequence, he may have been there just a few months before writing the letter. So he's having to correct a problem that's come up pretty quick. So the historical sequence, that's going to tell us something about what's happening. He has just been visiting them a few months at very most, a few years later.

It hadn't been that long and these legalist teachers were coming in and persuading the people. Now, we look for the key events in scripture that change things that follow, cause and effect. This happened, and then that happened. We look for that cause and effect. The other thing that comes out is history matters. We pointed this out in the church history class early on, that in scripture, in biblical Christianity, history matters.

It doesn't matter one whit whether Buddha ever lived. Somebody came up with this eightfold path to enlightenment. And it really doesn't matter if he ever lived. If he lived, died, it doesn't make any difference. Because it's not historically based truth. This is. It matters whether Jesus lived. It matters whether Paul actually wrote those letters. If he didn't, then this is garbage. So it matters.

History matters in Scripture here, okay, radically different from some other religions and teachings, okay? Now, the last one, of course, we're pointing out here is the cultural context. We look at all the cultural context and we want to match our understanding of the culture with what we're reading. I don't want to, for example, take my understanding of the culture of the Roman Empire and begin interpreting Genesis with that. it won't work.

If Abraham had had multiple wives in the Roman Empire, he would have been in trouble. People would have turned him in. It was against the laws that were put in place under Caesar Augustus, who was the Caesar when Jesus was born. All throughout the Roman Empire, all throughout the New Testament times, what Abraham did would have been illegal and he would have immediately gotten in trouble.

So we have to match the culture with the time. We look for cultural insight into the meaning and significance of the words. That's what I mentioned earlier with the chariot racing. When it says, lay hold of, it means to take down first prize. And if we don't know that, we just think it's, hey, I got it. And we check to see if there are applications to our own lives and churches because of the cultural context of the words. We're looking for What did that mean to them? Okay, now, how does that apply to me? How does that apply to me? All right.

The critical first step is observing. We look at language and literary context, historical and sequential context, and cultural context. When we put those together, now we have something where we can look at what does this passage mean? Now we've got the tools. See that? You're going to put the three of them together and say, if I understand the language, If I understand the history, and if I understand the culture, now I'm really ready to understand what this passage means.

Let me give you a for instance. Jesus said, I will make you fishers of men. In our culture, what do we think fishing is about? You've got a rod, and you've got a reel, and what are you going to attract the fish with? With bait, right? Now, how did they fish in those days? They went out in boats, and they used nets. And they were hoping to catch a whole bunch with the net. And if they didn't, they were disappointed.

Real difference. So, I Will Make You Fishers of Men isn't get the rod out there just right, and make sure that fly is real attractive, or get the bait hooked on there, see? So there's a difference in culture. We read it, and we think of this, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz They read that and they thought, ah, nets. Real different.

We think of fish, and we think of these things and, you know, it's something you find maybe in the refrigerator, on ice, you know, at the store. In the Roman culture, they had three kinds of fish. Fresh fish was the least common. They also would put down a layer of fish, put down a layer of salt, put down a layer of fish and a layer of salt, and let it dry, so it salted and dried, and that's most likely what the fishes and loaves were when Jesus fed the 5,000, the dried fish. The most common form was fermented fish paste. You and I would just barf at the thought, but that was the most common form, even to the point where the Romans had military specification fermented fish paste for their soldiers.

To us, that's inconceivable. Again, the difference in culture. When Jesus spoke to the guys who were out there in the boat, after he was resurrected, remember, Peter said, I'm going fishing, and the rest went fishing with him, and they weren't having any luck. He says, boys, have you got any fermented fish paste? Okay? That's the word he used.

So, real different from what we think of. Real different. Again, it's culture. All right, now. What we're going to do, we've got 26 weeks of this plan. This is the first one, of course. So we're covering introduction, and the next week, kind of the big picture. We're going to do a big, broad sweep to pick up the whole thing.

We're next going to go into a section in history and go through Old Testament history and New Testament history. And notice what we have there in number six. About 400 year gap between which is real important to study say well, why study it? There's no Bible books written Ever wonder why there's Pharisees in the New Testament, but not in the old Okay, Hanukkah ever hear about Hanukkah, okay, it is one Jewish festival that is not mentioned in the Old Testament and it's because the period between the Old and New Testament is why it showed up and one place in the Gospels it's mentioned. So things like that help explain why do we have this set of circumstances instead of what's in the Old Testament. We need to understand what's in that gap between that made the difference in culture and in history.

And in the words they use, why is all of a sudden we got Greek? Things like that we'll need to take a look at, won't we? The next thing we'll be looking at culture, and we're going to start off with pre-flood culture. The only source we have for pre-flood culture, with very rare exception, is the Bible itself. It records things about tents and tools and weapons and things like that. Post-flood culture and the patriarchal cultures. Fascinating are the cultures of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Real different from our own and real different from later times. We'll be taking a look at that.

Egyptian culture. People have always been fascinated by Egyptian culture. Have you noticed that? Fascinated by pyramids and tombs, and it seems like there's hieroglyphic writing and all that. I mean, it's just very interesting stuff. People have always been fascinated, and we want to take a look at that.

Assyrian culture, one that we tend to hear less of. Babylonian, Persian, and the Greek culture, which of course greatly impacted the New Testament, even though The Greeks had lost power by the time the New Testament came around. One of the things that we'll find is that the language tended not to become prominent until the ruling empire had lost power.

Interesting, huh? So here's Greek prominent when the Romans are ruling, okay? You know when Latin became real prominent? When the Romans started to lose power. Isn't that interesting, okay? And interesting, what language are we speaking? English. Is England still rule-overs? No. It's an interesting pattern, isn't it?

And we see that in the biblical case, too. Okay, we're also going to look at the Jewish culture. And by the way, when I say Jewish culture, I don't mean singular. There's 24 different Jewish cultures during the New Testament times. How about that? A whole bunch, and we'll see why. Other biblical cultures, I mentioned the Parthian Empire is one.

Barbarians. Barbarians are brought up, Paul writes about barbarians. The barbarians, when the Romans came up against them, the Romans just went nuts, because the barbarians would come, they would fight naked, with their bodies all painted, they had long hair, and they would come screaming out of the woods. And instead of fighting like Romans do, their swords were five feet long, and they would swing them over their heads while they're screaming. They would let out blood-curdling yells and screams as they came at them. Imagine you're a disciplined, well-trained Roman trying to get yourself together with this stuff.

Fascinating differences. And then the last thing, we're going to look at some case studies. And let me step quickly through those. One is we're going to look at family traditions, and of course those changed over time. But how did the family work? How did people get married? How did family life go? The reality is that impacts all of us, doesn't it? What does our family typically do? How are mates selected?

They had slaves in those days, to find out, for example, that if you got in financial trouble, you could sell your family. and yourself into slavery to solve your financial problem. They didn't have bankruptcy as we have it. As a matter of fact, our word bankruptcy is a word from the Romans. Bankruptcy means break the benches. They would come into a worker's shop and bust all his benches if he declared bankruptcy. And that was where we got our word. Bankruptcy. Very different idea.

What, how do families work? How did finances work? How did they, how did they get married? How did they eat? All those things are very different. Okay. Then we'll look at, I said, never talk about religion and politics. That's in polite society in our culture, right? Well, they talked about it in the Bible all the time. Okay. Both religion and politics were frequent topics. Okay. So what to us would be, you know, if you don't want to get any arguments, don't talk about it. Bible talks about it left and right. Okay.

The next thing is slaves again. Slavery varied throughout the Bible. The slave during Abraham's time was different from the Israelites as slaves in Egypt, is different from the slaves that were in Babylon, is different from the slaves under the Roman Empire. All different. And different from American slavery, too, by the way. Okay.

The Bible makes multiple references to slaves, all the way from the first book to the last book. So it's good to understand it. I've been working on the is not on the railroad certainly didn't have those but what was work like what was the typical work situation and how do you see that reflected in scripture and you do quite often the heavens and the earth is it is an introduction to to biblical phrases that keep showing up the phrase the heavens and the earth is a Hebrew phrase shows up in the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth and we see that phrase and variations on it used all throughout scripture all the way the book of Revelation It's a Jewish phrase, okay? We'll go through phrases like that and you'll get to see patterns of how those phrases were used Some of them were carried even though culture changed were carried through all the way from Genesis to Revelation because they maintain the continuity of those phrases and the heavens and the earth is one of them Lastly, the Seven Churches of Revelation.

Let me just say, if you don't know the history and culture behind the cities in the Seven Churches of Revelation, you will not understand what Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 of Revelation are about. Period. You just won't. You cannot read it and really understand what's being said unless you know the culture and the history. When the promise is made, I'll give you a white stone, it's like, so what? What am I going to do with a white rock? until you understand that if you got the upward call, you were given a white stone, and that was your path to the victor's celebration. Okay?

That when Jesus spoke to the church at Sardis and said, wake up! It has to do with an event that happened decades before, where the city was sleeping because they thought they were so immune to attack by enemies. And they got attacked and overtaken. They didn't even put anybody on guard, even though the people were out there ready to attack them. And they knew it. So decades before that event happened, and the people in Sardis knew it, and it was to their shame. So when he said, wake up, it was immensely relevant. That grabbed him. It was like, whoa. It caught hold of him. We're going to ask some does it help to know questions and they're going to be kind of examples of where history and culture starts to fit. Case one. And here's one you may have heard of it and wondered yourself.

OK. Another of the disciples said to him Lord permit me first to go and bury my father. But Jesus said to him follow me and allow the dead to bury their own dead. Now if anything sounds like a cold hearted statement isn't that it. Right. What a horrible thing for Jesus to say. Right. Well, maybe not. Here's what's going on.

During the time from about 10 A.D. to 60, and that was the prime period, it actually started about 30 B.C. and extended to about 70, but the peak of it was about 10 to 60, the Jews would bury their dead as they did with Jesus, where they'd wrap them, and they'd put frankincense and myrrh in the wrappings, and one was to glue the cloth to the body and the other was to keep the body from stinking.

And when all the flesh had rotted away and you had the bones left, a year later, the family and the primary responsibility, being with the oldest son, was to take the wrappings off, take the bones out, and put those bones, all of them, in an ossuary box, typically made out of limestone.

And you had to do it a year later. So meanwhile, you can't go anywhere. It was considered rude, like you didn't care about your father. So you were stuck. You had to stick around for at least a year to go through that process. And so it became just a common excuse for anything you didn't want to do. I have to bury my father. So here's an ossuary box. This one here is the writing on the side that says, you know, James, the brother of Jesus is controversial. We won't go into it now, but it's an exam. It is a true ossuary box.

Here's the ossuary of Caiaphas. And everything about that appears to be the Caiaphas of the New Testament. The bones in it were of the right age. They were male, about 60 years old. It says Caiaphas on the box. It's of the right period of time. And what you would see is the pattern on the side being carved ornately like it is. That was only those who were more well off. All the facts and information point to this being the real Caiaphas. But it's just an example.

So when here's this guy who comes up to Jesus with an excuse, he's just saying, hey, you know, this isn't high priority for me. I don't really want to follow you. I think that I'll call upon this cultural custom, which by the way, Moses never commanded. I think I'll call upon this cultural custom and just blow you off. That's what the guy was saying. So Jesus' response is not cold-hearted at all. He was saying, you have got your priorities way out of whack. That's what Jesus' response was all about.

Here's an ossuary boxes place, and this has been touched up, so this is not an as-found situation. You can see some of the things that have been kind of cleaned up. But it shows, here's these various ossuary boxes, and typically, most of them are kind of flat and plain. There's one that may be a little hard to see, a couple of them actually. See how this one is carved? And that one is carved.

Those would have been people who are more well-off because they paid for the upscale ossuary box, right? Just like you'd go into a mortuary and pay for a more expensive hermetically sealed coffin or whatever, right? So these would be more like Caiaphas. These were upper-class people with more income. Okay? Now, by the way, any questions? Or am I just blowing you away or is it okay? So far so good? Speaking Greek?

Alright. By the way, I don't find this stuff technically difficult. It's just real interesting. I think it is. Okay. This is the book, Genesis 5-1 says, of the generations of Adam. Now you say, this is a book. Okay. From there, there's only about 32 verses about Adam's descendants. And before that, there's just a few chapters, and not all of them have to do with Adam. Part of it has to do with the creation. Why is this a book? How can we call it a book?

Well, it turns out quite likely that none of the authors of Scripture, there were about 40 of them, none of them ever saw a book like you and I know of. Books that were bound on one edge, like this, weren't invented until just about the time John died, the last New Testament author. So they never saw a book like we saw them. So what you see translated in the Bible as a book, if you see it translated that way, is almost certainly never describing one of these.

It's a scroll, it's a tablet, it's a stack of papers, but they just didn't bind them on one edge until the whole Bible was completed, and about that time they began putting things together in books. Now, Our English Bibles use the word book for almost any written document.

We just need to remember that. Culturally, we think of this thing bound on one edge. They never meant that, ever. What did they have? Early on, they had clay tablets, and they would mark it with a little stick, stylus. And they had scrolls. They had sealed papyri, like that one up at the top there. Take the thing, fold it up, wrap it around, put a seal on it, mark it, send it off. It wasn't a book as we would call it, okay? No bound on one edge type book. All right.

Does it help to know that? Now here's one that people have asked often. Have you ever wondered, you know, why God goes to the Israelites, they're getting ready to go into Canaan, and what does he tell them? You know, be nice to these folks, ask if you can buy some property and scoot in with them. Is that what he says? What do you say? Take them out. Okay? Every last one. Down to the animals. Down to the children. Kill every last one. Don't let no thing live. Push them all out. Drive them out. I mean, this sounds nasty.

Was God just being cruel? Ever hear somebody complain about the God of the Old Testament? How the God of the Old Testament is so wicked and horrible that finally in the new he gets a heart? Okay. Here's what's going on behind that. The Canaanites were spiritually and morally corrupt in the extreme. Even the pagan communities around them were disgusted by them. They were that disgusting. These kinds of spiritually corrupt practices are targeted in the rest of Numbers 33-52. In other words, it's warnings about don't take on the character of the people that you're moving in to wipe out. That's the kind of warning you'll see there. So here's Deuteronomy 1231.

You shall not behave thus toward the Lord your God for every abominable act which the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods. This here up at the top is Molech and the drawing is not that great so let me describe it. They would have a clay or a metal god that was basically a furnace in the bottom, some sort of an animal head up at the top, and big arms sticking out. You'd get the fire really hot, and then you'd take your firstborn and put them in the hands of the god.

Moms, dads, would you care to do that? No thanks. But that's what they did to Molech. That was part of the practices of the Canaanites. Take your firstborn and sit there and watch as they get scorched to death. Great, huh? Even the pagans around them were disgusted by this. We're not done.

The Canaanite religious rituals included child sacrifice, some of it in fire, that we've described, incest, all sorts of crossing around within the family, bestiality, sex with all the animals. We even have writings about how they waited to do this or that until they had sex with the animals. So now, you can imagine the venereal diseases that get passed around between people and the animals have them too.

Oh, good. See the problem? Nasty, nasty stuff. I won't describe anything in detail. They had things with women and snakes. Nasty stuff. Homosexuality was regular. They had both male and female cult prostitutes at the temples. And that's what comes up next here. Now, the culture was so disgusting, they've Archaeologists have found like jars with pickled babies in them, stuff like that.

I mean, just awful stuff. And that's why God couldn't say, you know, hey, you know, wipe out the guys, but keep this and that. It was all so nasty, rife with disease left and right. The animals were diseased. The people were diseased. The kids were diseased. The kids were ruined from the beginning if they weren't burnt. So it was a horrible culture.

So that's why God couldn't say, hey, just move along next to him and be nice. He does two things. He says, go in and wipe them out. And don't you dare practice the things that they're practicing. And what you find is a lot of the Old Testament law is centered on prohibiting the things that the Canaanites did. Don't lie with an animal. Don't burn your daughter. Don't burn your son.

See that? That's what it's about. So what God said was not some hard-hearted thing. God was saying this awful, horrible, disgusting culture, that even the pagans were disgusted by, had to be wiped out. And the only way, you can't retrain them, you can't get rid of all that disease, you've got to wipe them out. That's the only way to start fresh.

See that? Makes a difference if you know that, doesn't it? At least I think it does. We mentioned some of these things here previously. Okay, here's another one. Here's the Lord's Prayer. You've been in churches where they repeat that every Sunday? Okay, we call it the Lord's Prayer. It turns out, and we could go into more detail, but this is enough of an introduction, that what would be seen as the Lord's Prayer is really traditional in a lot of churches as if that's the way we're supposed to be praying.

The context, however, is very Jewish. Three times that I've counted in the Sermon on the Mount, And the Lord's Prayer is right in the middle of it. It talks about, you know, not like the Gentiles. So it's very Jewish, okay? Something else. Here's the Kaddish prayer for the synagogue among the Jews. Do you recognize some of the ideas there?

Exalted in how it be his great name in the world which he created according to his will, may he let his kingdom rule in your lifetime and in your days and in their life, in the lifetime of the whole house of Israel, speedily and soon. Praise be to his great name from eternity to eternity. To this say amen.

Standard Jewish prayer during the New Testament times. Here's the morning and evening prayer from New Testament times. Bring me not into the power of sin and not into the power of guilt and not into the power of temptation and not into the power of anything shameful. Doesn't the Lord's Prayer sound like a combination of those two?

Yeah. It's very Jewish. So what's happening is you've got churches all across the country that are basically repeating a Jewish prayer. every Sunday, intended for the Jews, that the Jews had come up with, and the Jews have been saying for centuries. Okay. The Jews are addressed as a group quite apart from the Gentiles. We pointed that out. The Mosaic Law is a major subject. These are, you know, significant things, whereas we look at Romans, it says we're not under the law. How clear can it get, you know?

Now, after the context of the Lord's Prayer, The twelve and then Christ himself are said to be sent to the lost sheep of Israel only, and explicitly not to the Gentiles. The Lord told them when he sent them out, don't even go on a road that goes to the Gentiles. There's a discernment here that needs to be made, doesn't there? The Lord's Prayer was not intended for Christians to repeat every Sunday morning. Every single phrase in the Lord's Prayer can be traced back to Old Testament reference for the Jews.

All right, here's another one. In Revelation, then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and having turned, I saw seven golden lampstands. In the middle of the lampstands, I saw one like a son of man, clothed in a robe, reaching to the feet, and girded across his chest with a golden sash.

His head and his hair were white like white wool, like snow, and his eyes were like a flame of fire. Now, what does that do when you put that together in your mind? Whoa. I mean, you think, man, this guy's got eyes on fire and, you know, his hair's woo!

If you walk in here this morning, this description, I'm sure all of us would be stunned in the least. But we have to understand, because it goes on in the description there in verses 15 and 16, the Greek tradition, which we have gotten culturally, is what does it look like when I put the symbols together? The Jewish tradition is different. It's not, what does it look like when I put the symbols together and make a composite and then go, oh, okay. But what does it mean? What do each of the symbols mean? Not what does it look like when you paint a picture of it and describe it? See?

So the Jews thought differently. We come up with poetry and we want the words to rhyme. The Jews want the meanings to rhyme. They don't care if the words rhyme. See the difference? The Jewish mind looks at the meaning And what that looks like and what that sounds like, the Greek mind says, how does it sound and how does it look? In our culture, we have come from a Greek tradition. So when we look at the Jewish symbols, we need to say, what does it mean? Not what does it look like?

Okay, make sense? Okay. Now we're going to go next time through the big picture. And that'll be a big sweep, you'll want to get your view belts on because it's going to be a, you know, Crash through thousands of years all in, you know, 45 minutes. Now, we've run out of time. Any questions? Either I've done real good or really, really bad.

Is this helpful? Do you feel like we're starting to get some insights from it? What, to me, when I look at it, I find it intensely interesting. I find that it brings the meaning of scripture just alive. And passages that were either puzzling or sometimes even, well, why does he say that?

That's not good, you know? It's like Jesus telling what he did to that guy, let the dead bury their own dead. In our culture, that just sounds like an awful thing for him to say. How inconsiderate and insensitive can you get? When you understand it, then you know what he means. If we read about God telling them, go in and just wipe out the Canaanites. Kill every man, woman, child, animal. All dead. Every one of them.

Unless you understand the background of the Canaanites, it sounds like God just told them to do something that's just flat out immoral. But once you understand, you see why God would just tell them, hey, you can't compromise and mix in with this stuff. This is so corrupt and disgusting that you've got to get rid of it. There isn't any other solution. As a matter of fact, the rest of the nations around them would applaud because it's so disgusting.

So anyway, as I look at it, to get a better insight, what does this mean? To me, every page just comes alive screaming with intense and fascinating meaning and deep significance. So I'm looking forward to it. Any other questions come up feel free to give a call and Feel free to come up take a look at the books up here Everybody get with all the coming and going everybody get a copy of this handout in addition to a binder I think you might be out of the picture here, so you want to pick that up, okay?

All right, let's pray Lord, thank you for the time that we've had for the immense depth of your word and sir Lord for the The fact that we can look at it and you've inspired every word in it and we can trust you and count upon you. And thank you even more so that it is interesting and fascinating and it draws us into what you have for us for eternity. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.