This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 536: How to Read Old Testament History with Sean Finnegan

This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode.

Hey there, I'm Sean Finnegan. And you are listening to Restitutio podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today. 

Now we begin the second main part of this class. On reading the Bible for. Yourself. We'll be breaking the Bible into major sections so I can explain how each works. To start, we'll consider the 1st 17 books of the Bible, the books of Old Testament historical narrative. You'll learn what to look for while reading the major events covered the various cultural backgrounds of those periods. God's personal name and why reading Old Testament history is extremely valuable here. Now is episode 536. Read the Bible for yourself Part 5 how to read Old Testament history. The good news about historical books of the Bible is that they're by far the easiest to read. They just read like narrative. And so today we're just focusing on the Old Testament. And as you know, the Old Testament has 39 books in it, and our focus is on the history portion, which is the first roughly third of the Old Testament. If you think of history, poetry, prophecy is the three main divisions. So it's. Genesis through Esther's 17 books. If you divide 17 by 39, you get 44% of the Old Testament, but if you if you. Count the words. You'll you'll get a more accurate understanding cause then you'll you'll find that it's actually 59% of the Old Testament. Is Old Testament history. This first chunk, and that's because these books are longer than a lot of other books that are in the Old Testament. That's going to be our focus for this session and then our next session, we're just going to look at the first five books and just kind of zoom in on those, which is called the law or the Torah. So Old Testament history. First most important thing about it, it's all about God. It's not really about you. You could benefit tremendously from reading it, but while you're reading it, a better question to ask is instead of what does this mean to me? A better question to ask is, what does this? Tell me about God. What can I learn about God from this incident that I'm reading about in the book of Judges or in the Book of Exodus? My dad has a phrase his his class which is called his story. It's a good phrase, right? It's God's story. You know, it talks about a lot of there's lots of other individuals in it, do all kinds of crazy stuff, really keep your interest? No problem. But it's really all about him. So your first reading through Old Testament history, if you haven't read it before, is just to get your bearings just to get some basic familiarity with the main storyline. You can ask yourself the question, what are some repeated themes? What are some repeated words or what are similar verses as you're reading through? You can gain a lot of insight from that. So for example, if a book blasts. Well, that's a good indication that that's something that people were struggling with. Why else would you address it? If a book talks about not complaining and testing God, guess what the people of Israel were doing that. So the big thing, as I've said it before and I'll say it again, is to read read. Read read Old Testament history. If I could assign you homework, I would assign you all 17 books. For you to read this week, it will be a lot though so. Feel free to take your time to do that, but the Old Testament history is the backbone of the Old Testament, upon which everything else depends for structure. Just like if we had all your muscles and your skin and your organs and no backbone, you'd just kind of be a floppy mess, right? So like the. The backbone of the Old Testament is the history part in the beginning, so we're going to look at just briefly. Obviously, we can't cover everything that happens in this chunk of the Bible. We're going to cover some major Old Testament events. And it's important that you get an overall timeline. Let me just go through this. I'm gonna go through it rather briefly. Each one of these things could be a teaching in itself, I'm sure. So creation and eat in is the first one up #1 here out of I have 16 points on my major Old Testament. Events list so creation and Eden. This is the beginning of the Bible. It tells us how the world originally was paradise and other places of the Bible. The word Eden means pleasure or delight, and so the idea is that. The world starts out good and that's tremendously important for theology is to understand that our world is not a mistake. It's not the result of rebellion or a a war between the gods or something like that. It's no it's it's God's original design. It's good. And that is how we start. But then we move into rebellions and consequences. We usually talk about the fall, a singular cosmic event where humanity rebels against God, but there are actually 3 falls in. The first fall is in Genesis Chapter 3, where the first two people eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The 2nd fall is in Genesis Chapter 6, where every intention of everyone's heart is only evil all day long. And there's a flood. And then the 3rd fall is in Genesis 11 with the Tower of Babel, and there's an open rebellion to make a name for themselves and to not get scattered and to not fill the earth, which is what God had commanded. And so God. Scatters the people by changing their languages. And so that makes it hard for them to cooperate. Still dealing with that today with all our technology, it's still still a problem. All right, then we have Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. This is something we we often will refer to as the patriarchal period. It's a huge chunk of time spanning multiple generations. And it is. The origins of Israel, so there is no nation of Israel. But these are the ancestors of what will become the nation of Israel, then Israel, as a people about seven, I think 7770 plus people go down. So a big family, multi generational family goes down to Egypt. They sojourn in Egypt. For centuries and then they are brought out of Egypt by. Moses. Well, God, through Moses and Aaron was involved, and I think Miriam was there too, right? She played a role, so they leave Egypt and they go to Mount Sinai. And so that's all described in the 10 plagues and the exodus from Egypt at Mount Sinai, they received the Torah. That's God's instruction. It's also called the law. We'll talk more about that. Next time. And then there's 40 years of wandering, because they actually get all the way right to the promised land. Where Moses told him, you know, God has promised to give you this land, the land of your ancestors, of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And they get there and they're they're right on the edge of it. And Moses says go. And they say no. So there's a rebellion and we get 40 years of wandering in the desert. And then they finally do enter the promised land through Joshua. And then we have a period of judges. The judges are charismatic leaders that God calls for a purpose. They serve out their purpose, and then after they die, there is no judge until there's a need for another judge. And then we have Samuel. He's the hinge of history because he's at the time of the judges, and he anoints the first king. So he's. Of the judges, he's also, in a sense, the first of the prophets. Not that there weren't prophets before this, but not in the same sense of speaking truth to the king and holding the king accountable. Samuel certainly does that to Saul, doesn't he? And to David as well. So then we have the kings of the United King. Them. So that's a period that includes Saul, David and Solomon. They each rain for 40 years. That's 120 years, not a small chunk of time, 120 years. Then we have the succession of the northern tribes. So Israel as a nation splits and the northern tribes succeed, and the southern tribes become named Judah. And then in the north, the Assyrian Empire comes in and conquers the northern Kingdom of Israel and deports them. And they never come back. Nobody knows where they went or what happened to them. Then, some time later, the next Big Empire, Babylon comes along and Babylon attacks and defeats Judah and deports the people from Judah. Into what's called an exile. It's a 70 year period of time where most of the people from Judah are living in the Babylonian Empire, and that's when they developed the synagogue system, probably, and they they figure out how to, like, do Judaism without the temple because the temple is destroyed. For that 70 years, then. At the end of the 70 years, one of the greatest miracles of all human history, they come back to their land. They still retain their identity. They still remember their laws. They still remember their God, and they rebuild the temple and they reestablish the worship of God and the land. So that's the Old Testament in 16 acts. What's the short version? Here's the short version. Only six acts, even even faster, right? So we have origins. We have the origin of so many things in Genesis. Genesis, by the way, means beginning. So origins and then we have Egypt. So Genesis is like all about origins and then Egypt, that's Exodus. Maybe you could lump in some of the other books with that and then after the whole Egypt scenario goes, we get our judges. How can I just jump to judges so quickly? Who was the first judge? Most people would say O'Neal. Most people who remember who the first judge is in the book of judges would say after Neil. But the first judge, my opinion is Moses. Moses is the first judge. He is a charismatic leader that God raises up, sins him for a purpose, and then Joshua is not related to Moses in any way and not even from the same tribe. And so there's a succession to Joshua, but it's not his son. Like a king to a King's son. So I would say. Moses and Joshua arguably are the 1st 2 judges. So that's how I'm simplifying this. List to only six items, so Origins Egypt, judges, Kings exiles and then return to the land. So that's maybe a shorter way when you jump into the the Old Testament history in some random place. You parachute in? You didn't. You didn't read up to that point, you just like, I'm just going to read the book of. Ruth today. OK, well, you want to read the book of Ruth? God bless you. It's a great book. My wife is Ruth, so I I'm a big fan of the book. Of Ruth. But. Like if you don't understand that the book of Ruth is written during the time. Of the judges. You're going to be confused, and if you don't have the the background history of knowing what what happened with the Moabites and Bayla when they were in that 40 years wandering like in in in the. Book of numbers. It's described you don't even understand why roof is such an outsider, because you don't know the history with the Moabites. What the Moabites did to the Israel? It's and why there's actually a law. I think a Deuteronomy that says no Moabite shall enter the congregation of the people to the 10th generation. And here's Ruth and she becomes an ancestor of the greatest king. And you're like it it it blows your mind when you when you put the pieces together because you've read through the whole arc. The story. Read through the historical portion of the Bible a couple of times. Solidify these key events in your mind. Now I want you to to consider with me. Cultural backgrounds, cultural background. When we're in these different periods of time and I I have a different list of time periods for you here than before. Sorry, but these have distinctive cultural features to them that are significant. Now in the pre flood world. The world has gone. The world that we have no access to, like even archaeologically, I don't know if there's much access we have to that world, which I wouldn't expect because there was a big flood. But maybe there, you know, there would be some stuff buried, I don't know. Well, when it comes to the pre flood world, we don't know much is very little that we know about it. But there are some things we know about that world, and it's more sophisticated than you would have thought. It's not people living in caves in Genesis Chapter 4. It's described they have domesticated livestock. How do we know that able? They had farming. How do we? Know that cane. So like the first struggle of the first brothers is a shepherd and a farmer. This is something that kind of like repeats itself throughout the history of human civilization. And we know that they're offering sacrifices. We know that they built cities in Genesis 4, talks about that, talks about polygamy, where somebody married multiple women. The Old Testament never condemns polygamy, doesn't say anything wrong with it. However, every described instance of polygamy involves suffering. And a lot of negativity. So you're not gonna get, like, a clear like statement in the law saying that thou shalt not marry multiple wives or multiple husbands. You're not gonna get that. But every instance of it looks bad. For the people involved, so maybe it's more of a subtle condemnation of it. Back to the the pre flood time here. They also had the liar is mentioned so you have musical instruments. You have a pipe that's mentioned bronze and iron tools are mentioned. They people believed in God and prayed to him and according to Genesis 5 they lived very long lives. Totally distinctive to this pre flood period. Once we get to the period of the Patriarchs after the flood, which is going to start with Noah. But then the genealogy advances you very quickly to get to Abraham. I mean, within one chapter you're you to get from basically Noah to Abraham, even though it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. You'll see that the lifespans have dropped radically. Abraham dies at 175, Moses dies at 120, and his eye was not dim, nor was his vigour abated. What a way to go and lifespans basically come to what we would consider normal today. In this patriarchal period, the people of the Bible describes who lived during this patriarchal period are nomadic shepherds. So like we think about Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Becca and so forth. You know, they're they're grazing. They have these animals, animals graze, and they live in tents which are semi permanent structures that are portable and then they will move to a new area and they will graze over here. And they and they have to find a well, they have to find water. This is a different kind of world than the pre flood world, at least as far as what the Bible is focused on. The Bible, incidentally, is not concerned about everything all people are doing. Is very much zeroed in on what is the prehistory of Israel? So it's not, it's not talking about what was going on in Africa or in the Americas or if people made it over to Australia or whatever. You know, it's just like. Much more focused on Israel. So the big thing that happens in the early patriarchal period was the City of Babel. That's where they try to make a name for themselves. And God condemn them by confusing the languages. This is a huge, significant moment in biblical history because it explains the origins of cultures, because once you have different languages, you have groups of people separating from each other and living in different places where they can communicate with. Each other. And as soon as you have groups of people separating from each other, these ones like the food a little spicier over here and these ones like the they like potatoes and non spicy foods. And these ones over here they like, they invented the noodle, you know. And they're like we got noodles. What do you got, you know? What I mean that's how culture. Develops it's the isolation and then also the interchange after that, so that all starts happening during this patriarchal period. Where you have independent cultures developing, you also have the practice of slavery mentioned in Genesis Chapter 12 and you have some cities, especially in Egypt. Egypt is seen as like a very sophisticated, very powerful place where there's organization, there's a pharaoh, he's a big deal. And this is also the patriarchal periods where we get the first instance of primogenitor in the Bible, and this is the custom of passing down the lion's share of your inheritance to the first born son. And so that's that plays very largely in the narratives about Ishmael and Isaac, for example, or Esau and Jacob. Right, who who's the first born? Shouldn't the first born get it? Well, Ishmael's the first born. He should get it. And it goes to Isaac. Right. And Esau is the first born. By like a couple of minutes cause they're twins, but Jacob gets it and so on and so forth. So that that's kind of like part of the cultural background that's happening in that patriarchal period. Once we get to Egypt, it's a little more urban, a little more sophisticated. There's lots of build. The Israelites end up getting enslaved and building a lot for the pharaoh. There's a lot of exposure to these Egyptian gods. Egyptian gods are super famous in the ancient world because they were kind of weird and more animal like than a lot of what other people would worship, like the Canaanites, for example. The Israelites are exposed to these Egyptian gods and they they learn about them to whatever degree of just like living in that place. But what's interesting is that they seem to retain some of their stories that they have been passed down to them of this other God named Yahweh. But they don't really necessarily know his name, but then God introduces himself to Moses and tells him his name. And this is like a big moment. That's Exodus chapter 3. And so you've got sort of a battle of the gods. That's the 10 plagues. So it's a very pluralistic religious environment that we're seeing in this. Egypt period and the Israelites are still considered to be shepherds and not. And that's a big deal to the Egyptians. The Egyptians look down on shepherds, they don't like them. And so the Israelites are sequestered away in a land called Goshen, a little section over here. And they're doing their shepherding. Then we get to the tribal period. The tribal period is like the book of judges is when they enter the land. Now we have the transfer to farming. Of course, you're still gonna have some shepherds, but now, by and large, you have stable villages and cities developing surrounded by farms, and this is the most anarchic period of Israel's history. Once they're in the land, at least where basically there's no central government. You have 12 different tribes. And they will occasionally band together. Usually not all 12, but you know 2 will band with the 3rd or 4th in order to fight off some external threats. Once they defeat the threat, they go back to just basic freedom of not having a government. You know, they had a law, but they didn't have necessarily a government. With a king or anything like that. There's a lack of internal cohesion, but when there is a problem, a judge will arise and fights and bring back stability into the region. However, in judges 17 verse six, it says in those days there was no king in Israel, all the people did what was right in their own eyes. So judges in one sense, like if you're an anarchist, you're thinking man, this is like the Golden Age of Israel, but from a moral point of view, it was a disaster. There were some really terrible things happening. In Israel in this time, which brings us then to the monarchy in the monarchy. If you're reading something from. First King Second Kings first, chronicles, second chronicles. You're in a totally different situation. You have a centralized government, you have taxes. You have especially Saul, David and Solomon. Very successful kings. Saul basically pushes the philistines away enough for the people to have peace. During the reign of David, David's fighting with the Philistines right under Saul. But then he he has a basically a lasting impact. So that by the time Solomon takes over, it's the Golden Age. It's the Golden Age economically and militarily for Israel. They're able to extend their influence far beyond any other period of time up until then, and you have this whole concern about political alliances where Solomon, there's no way Solomon didn't overdo it, just doesn't explain at all, OK. 700 wives. My goodness, but. When you're trying to establish political alliances with all the nations around you. That's a very typical way of doing it is you marry especially in a polygamist society, you marry into each of these different city States and different powerful ethnic groups all around them. And actually one of them is Pharaohs, daughter. Solomon married Pharaohs daughter at one point and it's like he's just got alliances all over the land and that's the time of the monarchy. You have lots of trade with the neighbors and then after Solomon, things decline. But it's not. Like, disastrously. So, it's just like a slow decline. And then it holds steady for a while and it maybe goes up and down a little bit, but then it goes down rapidly once you start getting to the age of empires. Once we're in the age of Empires, Israel is always in trouble. Always because Israel is. Geographically positioned between. Asia, Africa and Europe. Israel's like the place you go through if you want to get from Europe to Africa or get from Africa to Asia. That's the land route. You go through Israel. Why? Because east of Israel is desert. West of Israel is the Mediterranean. So it's the walkable. Trip that you can go through so every empire wants Israel, not necessarily as like a great prize and a place to, like, build a big capital, but just a place to control so that they can get between places that they care about. So in the age of empires, we have first up the Assyrian Empire, then we have. The Babylonian empire. Then we have the Persian Empire. Then we have the Greek Empire. Under Alexander the Great. And then we have the Roman Empire. When it comes to Old Testament history, it covers the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires. Although the book of Daniel does mention the Greek Empire, but there's not really much about that in the Old Testament. So the Greek and the Roman empires are going to come next. And these are successive multi. Regional powerhouses that gobble each other up, and each one is slightly from a different place, of course, like Assyria and Babylonia are near each other, but they're not that close. Now if you look at a map ninova versus Babylon, and then the Persians, they have their capital. Out east, more the Greeks come from way out West, but these empires really come to dominate the cultural context of Old Testament history. So when we think about Old Testament history, the way I would recommend you think about it is as a history of Israel's family tree. Going forward and going backward, it's really about Israel. And there are some significant differences between their history and our history. So I want to cover a few of these just briefly now. The first thing I want to say is when it comes to Old Testament history, it's not Fable. It's not mythology. These are real events. Fee and Stewart say Old Testament narratives are not allegories or stories filled with hidden meanings. And I think that's important. There have been some Christians who have looked at a historical narrative and said Ohh, what this really means is this and what this really stands for is that and I showed you an example of that from Dennis Sublime a few weeks ago. And I don't think that's a proper reading of it. I think you're supposed to read it as narrative. Has stuff that actually happened. Bruce Walker put it this way? He said they were recording historical events. These are not fairy tales. These events actually happened. I think it's important to start there. The riders point to specific times and places in order to anchor us as readers in real history. Most of us skip over this stuff, but this is what the scholars love the part where it talks about the city of Bethel or AI, or Bethlehem or Jerusalem. Or they give you some like random little tidbit or fact about the a valley or some other geographic feature. These situate the stories within physical space, which is an indication that it is intended to be historical. Alright, #2 ancient historiography. Historiography is the rules by which you tell history, the rules that a historian uses to write their history book, and I want to say a couple of things about this. First up, they did not have our sense of precise. Vision we have almost an obsession with precision in our culture and and this is made possible by technology. We did not have the technology we have. We would not have this great concern that we have about precision. So for example, in the ancient world there are no two books that are the same. There are No 2 copies of the same book that are actually the same. It's impossible. There's going to be one spot or other where you missed a word or you added a word, or you spelled something slightly different. It's just the human being is not capable of copying with absolute precision, and they and everybody knew that, and it wasn't a big deal. You saw us, you know, a word repeated. You're like, ohh, you know the scribe got a little sleepy there. Or you know what I mean? Like the best of all the scribes were the Jewish scribes. I will certainly say that, but. Even the Jewish scribes there are little differences and we have to correct for them in our our critical Hebrew text. So only once we got the printing press could we have exactly the same book. But even with the printing press, sometimes the ink is a little running off the side here. Or push a little harder there, right. There's still a little asymmetries, but then we got desktop publishing, and so long as that laser printer wasn't out of ink, you know, we could, like, reproduce. And we got photocopiers where you could actually copy. And now we have digital stuff with our. Loans. As a result, we have very low tolerance for deviation. But the ancient people are just not like that. That's not their world. It's not their technology. Theirs is mostly an oral culture and an oral storytelling. You're not allowed to just make stuff up or change things, but you are allowed to elaborate more on this or. Shorten something that you don't think is important for the audience you're talking to, right? So there's an acceptable amount of that happening in oral cultures, and that's their default world. They also don't concern themselves with a lot of descriptive language. Most American books, or, I don't know, American, but Western books. To say or if it's a fiction book, like, they'll go into great length describing what somebody's wearing, what the room looks like. You know, there's all this descriptive language. The Bible is incredibly sparse with descriptors, so if it gives you something, it's significant. These are people that are dealing with. They don't even have paper. They have animals that they kill and they and they cut the skin off and they work with the skin to turn it into what we call parchment. Right. This is what we're dealing with. Then they roll it up and it's a scroll. And now we're going to have ink and we're going to carefully write all our letters down. You're not adding in extra. Details that are insignificant. Well, they don't really concern themselves about childhood like we do. Like, if you're telling the story of a famous person, you always want to talk about their parents and and you want to sort of foreshadow who they're going to become by talking about childhood experiences. There's just none of. That maybe there's a little bit here and there. But that's just not their concern. Again, their history is not our history. Their way of writing history was determined by their time period and what their concerns were. They want to. Get to the action. What? What did this person do? What was Moses like? As as a kid growing up. How many verses do we have about his childhood? Of course, we all want to know. We all want to know about Moses Child because he was in the river and the Pharaohs daughter found him right. We know that and he was brought up and then boom, he's 30 years old or he's 40 years old and and he he sees two guys that are, you know, an Egyptian is beating up on a Hebrew and he and he jumps in there. So we all want to know like, what was the childhood like? It doesn't say ancient people didn't really care about a lot of the stuff that we care about, and we're reading their books. So just a word about their historiography. There's no interest in psychology or psychological explanations, sociological explanations, everything is seen through the progress of history. Leading to the forming of the Nation of Israel, the disastrous exile and then the return from the exile, and the hope that the Old Testament ends with, like, hey, we're back in the land. All right, #3 biased, but honest, the idea of objective reporting did not exist in the ancient world. They just didn't have that idea. Ohh, I'm an objective reporter. I don't have a perspective. They just didn't have that, you know. So they are biased and they they're gonna own that. They're like, yeah, I believe in this stuff. And so they're injecting their theology into the history that they write, which I think is great. It helps us to see, like, the God's eye perspective of things. They believe God is a major player in history. So as they're writing their history, God is involved in it. And that's not just like a Hebrew thing or an Israelite thing. There are no secular societies in the ancient world 0. There are none. Secularism is a new idea. It develops in the West because of historical reasons, and I and you know what? The test for honesty is when they talk about their heroes. Do they mention anything bad, like when they tell the stories about Abraham? Do they mention how he lied about his wife because he's a wuss and he's going to let her go? With pharaoh. Yeah, they do. Or the time that Moses who gives us the law forgets to circumcise his own kids, and an Angel of the Lord comes and his wife does it for him because he's got some sort of hang up. This is the guy who's giving us the Torah and he's in disobedience. So all these little blunders and. Some of them are big blunders. Show us that the historical narrative is actually trustworthy. It's not just made-up to look. Make everybody look good. No, it's telling us what happens. Jacob takes advantage of his blind father. He cons his hungry brother out of his birth. You know, like, this is the guy whose name is changed to Israel. That's that guy. Joseph is a spoiled little brat and a tattletale. And then his brother Solomon to slavery. This is the founders of the great Nation to me. I love it. I love the honesty. I think it's so helpful when it comes to trustworthiness. And then, genealogies. Let me say a few quick words about genealogies. Because I know people get hung up on genealogies. They're weird. I don't know. When's the last time you read a genealogy in a non biblical book? Probably not. There are 11 major genealogies in the Bible, and they cover a whole bunch of different subjects. But I just want to mention a couple of reasons why we have genealogies. One is legitimacy. We want to establish historical legitimacy. How do we do it? We we give a list of names of people. So so is the father of so and so and and all the way down the line. So that shows that there's an unbroken chain going from Adam and Eve to Noah, and then from Noah to Abraham. So that's those are like the spots we have to get to. So we start with Adam and Eve. We have to get all the way here to Noah. How are we gonna do it? Let's do a genealogy. We're not going to tell everybody's story. It's too much. We'll do cane and Abel. And then boom, right down to Noah, do Noah slow it way down. Give him a couple of chapters. Lots of detail, lots of detail. But we don't want to. We don't want to do a lot with Tara and Nahor and all that. Let's just jump to Abraham. So the genealogy is like the slide you can take to get to the next big thing that you want to focus on. Genealogies are also extremely important to establish the pedigree of a king. When it comes to royalty. You've got to establish your ancestors. This is why we. See them all over the like Matthew chapter one and Luke Chapter 3. I know it's not Old Testament, but those are examples to establish that Jesus is a legitimate claimant to be the Messiah. We also see that the genealogies tell us a lot about the origins of nations that's in Genesis Chapter 10 and Chapter 25. The King's pedigree is also mentioned in Ruth Chapter 4, and then the other one is first chronicles. If you ever get to first chronicles, you'll notice that the 1st 9 chapters is all genealogies unbroken list of names that just makes everybody's top 10 verses, or all out of first chronicles. Chapters one through 9. Just kidding. Why would first chronicles have so much of that? Well, First Chronicle is written by Ezra. If you read the last chapter of Chronicles in the first chapter of Ezra, they're almost exactly the same. And so that's a good indication of who wrote it. We know Ezra was described as well, and that he was a very fastidious fellow. So it makes sense that he would be the chronicler. I'm not saying he didn't have anything to work with from predecessors. I don't know anything about that, but I'll just say that if you're living in a post exile community, what you care about, you care about land, who's getting the land we're going to come back here. Who gets this land over here? Who gets? You know, Joshua, they he gave the land to certain tribes to certain places and then that was owned by certain clans and then families. And the land is a big deal. So now if we can establish ancestry, we can know who goes to what land. And who is going to be serving as a priest who's going to be serving as a Levite? Show me your genealogy and you've got a job in the temple. So this is all very relevant to his time period. It makes sense to do 9 chapters of genealogy to sort of like extend everything all the way back. All right, ideologies. Ideologies are stories about why. So a kid says to their parent. Why do we have a rainbow? The parent says, well, the reason why we have rainbows. Because there was. A flood and at the end of the flood, God made a covenant with humanity and he put his bow in the cloud as a sign that. He would never destroy the world. That's an ideology. It's an explanation why so the Old Testaments got tons of these. Why are there different languages? Why do we rest on the? Why are baby boys circumcised? You could just imagine the Israelite children asking these questions and or even adults asking like why? Why are we doing this? You read Genesis, you read axis, you read numbers through irony. It tells you why. There's usually some historical incident that occurred that explains why and. The biblical authors love to do this. This is like important to them to explain why things are. All right, let's talk about names ever so briefly. In the Old Testament history, names are not just something that sounds cool, they have great significance. A lot of times a child is named after God. So the the name of God is most important, and that's I'm gonna get to that in a second. But then even just the word God can be shortened to L. Just El or the name of God, Yahweh. A lot of times. If it's at the end of a name will be shortened to yah. A lot of the children's names are named after God in one way or another, or after some significant historical situation, circumstance of their birth. And they loved word play. Like, that's just so important to them in a way that doesn't like, doesn't even register with us as, as Western modern Westerns. For, like, who cares? Well, like, this name kind of sounds like this over here. And I was doing that when this when this kid was conceived. So like, that's that would be significant. Of them in a way that it's not to us, like Jacob is called the heel grabber. Like, who would ever name their kid heel grabber? He'll grab her. It's time for dinner, you know, but like here, he was, like, came out of the womb, you know, let's say it's on his brother's heel. And you know, so he's living with that. Interesting though God changes his name. To Israel. Better than heel grabber? Way better. But let's talk about God's name just briefly here. So this is how we spell God's name in Hebrew. Yoda. Hey, vahey. Those are the the four letters. From the right to the left. So this is yud. Hey, vav. Hey, which transliterates to English? YHVH. Now a lot of scholars, they say that the ancient valve is pronounced like a W sound. So instead of saying yahveh, they say Yahweh. OK, I don't have a horse in that race, but it seems like that's the that's the general consensus. There are some other views on that you have or yahuwah. I'm just going with the majority here, pronounced Yahweh, and that's translated in most translations, not all, as the Lord with all capital Lord. Now this name of God occurs over 6000 times, almost 7000 times in the Bible in the Old Testament. And so I'll show you an example. Exodus Chapter 20 says I am verse two. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. Do you read that with his proper name in it? It totally gives clarity. I am Yahweh your God. So we went from like, something vague to something specific. And so that's why when I read and they come across the Lord, I know I can read Hebrew. So like I could see it myself anyhow. But like, I know that's what it says. It doesn't say the Lord. It says Yahweh in the text. So I'm just reasserting that and a lot of other teachers do that too. Ezekiel 311 is an interesting case where. What happens when you get Lord, Lord? So what they do is they'll put Lord God, they didn't want to write Lord. And then Lord with all capitals. They thought that would be awkward. So they use this capital G capital O Capital D and what that indicates is that it's really in the Hebrew Lord, Yahweh. OK. So that's how you would read that. Literally. Adonai, Yahweh. Alright, parallel accounts. There are some parts of Old Testament history that repeat. I'm going to just show you one example here. The Assyrian threat to Jerusalem. It repeats in Second Kings 18 through 19. In second chronicles 32, and then again in Isaiah 36 and 37. There are quite a few. Other places that have this too, especially between kings and chronicles. And there's a different perspective. And I can't get into this because we're we're out of time, but there's a different perspective of the person or group of people over time who wrote the Book of Kings, the books of Kings versus Ezra, who I believe wrote first and second chronicles. They're just a different focus. And so each one is going to give you a different angle on the same incidents where they where they have the same ones. So I think it's great that we have multiple. But just be warned. There are plenty of places in the Bible that will rehearse what has happened before, like in a prayer, for example, or in a Psalm, and we'll see that later on. Alright, let's just finish up with the value of reading Old Testament history. #1. It's not just boring history about wars and national policies. This is a God's eye view of what happened. So it's sacred history. It's not just like regular everyday facts and figures, it's sacred history. Second point is that as fee and Stewart say, if you're a Christian, the Old Testament is your spiritual history. As we'll see in the New Testament, because of what Jesus has done, we've been grafted into the olive tree of faith, whose roots are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So this is not maybe your ethnicity. I'm not of a Jewish ethnicity, but I do consider this to be my family history also because of what? Christ has accomplished and bringing us in. Point #3 is that it hones moral intuitions. This is a subtle point, but this is like going back to what I said. About polygamy. If every time you read about somebody doing that, having multiple wives, their life is miserable. Guess what? That hones it, it justs. It sharpens your moral intuitions. You're like, you know, I don't think I'm. Going to marry a second wife. Not that it's like a problem. In America today, but like. Even in ancient times, you could say. I don't know. Didn't work out well for brother Jacob. He was miserable, right? And there are 1000 little things like that. I'm just using that as an example. You see something happen and then it goes badly. You say to yourself, I'm not going to fall for that one. You see somebody do something courageous like Joseph and you know, the thing with the dreams and then like. Suddenly he's in charge of the whole entire Kingdom of Egypt. You're like, wow, that's inspiring. You know, maybe God could work with me like that, too, right? So this is something that's happening behind the scenes. You don't notice it happening, but as you read and reread the Old Testament history. It's changing you and it's changing what you think is right and it's changing what you think will probably happen if you do something that. You've read about. #4. It's necessary background if you're going to understand the rest of the Bible. You have to understand Old Testament history. Bottom line, you cannot understand the prophets. You cannot understand the wisdom literature, and you sure can't understand the New Testament without having the Old Testament history under your belt. Let's review. Read Old Testament history asking the question, what does this tell me about God? Old Testament history serves as the backbone of the entire Old Testament. Getting your bearings amid the chronology of major events will help you understand the rest. When you encounter the Lord or all caps or God, all caps substitute in Yahweh. God's personal name, says the Old Testament covers thousands of years. It's helpful to determine the cultural background for the time period you're reading. It's fine to skim or even skip genealogies and give you permission, though they do have value in establishing legitimacy in their culture. Old Testament history is not objective or as concerned with precision as our modern history books. Names of individuals and places bespeak the parents faith in God, a historical event, or a play on words. And last of all, reading Old Testament history influences your moral intuitions as you encounter positive and negative examples, and you're not going to find the Bible saying. And that was really dumb, and you shouldn't do that. No, they just describe it. You're supposed to figure that out. Like, if it is a disaster, it's a negative example. It's it's an example of what not to do. And if it ends really well, then it's a positive example and feel free to imitate that. So next time we're going to delve into the concept of Torah, the law as we continue in our course on how to read the Bible for yourself. 

Well, that brings this teaching to an end. What do you think? Come on over to restitutio.org and find episode 536. How to read Old Testament history and leave your questions and comments and feedback there. On episode 530, God's heart for Shalom, Hugh Daniel wrote in saying thank you for your message, brother. I appreciated it greatly alongside your message about remembering the Lord Peace and love to you from Korea. Praise to God for the gifts of his spirit. Well, thanks for writing in from Korea. We don't get too many comments in from that. Country. But I know that there are some English speakers in Korea and certainly. Have some Koreans in my home church as well, so it's always nice to make a connection there. And you know, for those of you who haven't heard that episode, this was a teaching I did as part of a Kingdom Fest weekend, which is our big fall celebration where we get together at my local church with a number of folks from outside the area. And we have teachings and just top notch music and activities, lots of stuff for the kids and adults. Past year, the theme was on Shalom and I shared on the biblical definition of this Hebrew word and also a personal story about losing my kids in Italy and how I lost along with my kids, my Shalom. So take a look at that if you haven't already. It certainly is an important concept and really relevant to the Kingdom of God as well, which is the time when God Shalom will finally pervade the entire earth as the waters cover the sea. John wrote in on my recent blog post from a couple days ago called All 150 Psalms categorized. That's where I came up with a categorization system of 15 different types of psalms and went through and labeled each of the Psalms just to help people figure out what psalms to read when depending on what kind of situations they're going through, what kind of emotions they're dealing with. John wrote in from California saying, Wow, Sean, this is very impressive, quite a workload you took upon yourself. I remember a long time ago reading that the Book of Psalms is split into five books, don't really know the details. Do you have any elaboration on that? The fact you did this work tells me you don't buy into that. In my read the Bible in a year process. I am just about halfway through the Psalms. It's always a joy to read them. Sometimes I think it would be nice to just read them on a loop. God bless. Well, John, thanks for writing in. You are right that the Psalms is broken into five books, probably to imitate the Torah. I don't honestly know much about why and how they divided up the Psalms. But I did watch a Bible project video that I thought was pretty helpful on the topic, so you could just search Bible projects and psalms and you'll be able to find it. It's the first one that shows up with the most views from a number of years back where they just break out the Psalms into those five books and talk about that structure a little bit. Tim Mack, he's great on this stuff. He's just such a structure. Guy and he always finds the structure and overall logic of any particular book of the Bible, and certainly recommend. Him for that. In a future episode of my read the Bible for yourself class, I will be going through these psalms and hopefully helping you understand how they work a little better. So stay tuned for that in a future episode. Well, that's it for today. Thanks for listening. If you'd like to support restitutio, you can do that at our website, restitutio.org. Thanks to those of you who are supporting this ministry, especially those who have set up monthly recurring giving. It sure does help a lot. I'll catch you next week and remember the truth has nothing to fear.