Aug. 10, 2026
Not All Moabites Are Moabites: Gary Edward Schnittjer on How the Old Testament Uses the Old Testament
Most readers hear "Old Testament use of the Old Testament" and picture quotations. Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer says quotation is the small end of it. An interpretive allusion needs three things: a donor text that gives the language, a receptor text that takes it up, and an identifiable interpretive outcome. That third item is what separates an allusion from an echo, and it is also why later biblical authors so often change the wording. Saying the same thing again was never the point. Moving it forward was.
In this episode, Dr. James Spencer talks with Dr. Schnittjer about his forthcoming Old Testament Use of Old Testament in Parallel Layout from Zondervan Academic, a full-color, side-by-side presentation of the evidence built as an inductive tool rather than an argument. They work through Genesis 5 as an interpretive blend of Genesis 1 and 2, where the image of God turns out to mean son of God. Amos taunting his congregation about bringing sacrifices every three days. The Sabbath command, which stops being a capital matter by the time Nehemiah is arguing with merchants at the gates, and which had already been adjusted once inside the Ten Commandments themselves.
The long middle of the conversation is Ruth. Levirate marriage, land redemption, the rights of gleaning, and the Deuteronomic exclusion of Moabites all pressing on one another at the city gate, with the Davidic covenant hanging on how the exclusion gets read. Dr. Schnittjer will not let his students say kinsman redeemer. He makes them say financially responsible near relative, because the plain term forces you to stay in the moment instead of leaping past it. The gospel is already here, he argues. We do not have to smuggle it in.
Content note: the conversation includes a brief discussion of the rape of Tamar in 2 Samuel 13 and the rape laws of Deuteronomy 22.
Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer is distinguished professor of Old Testament for Cairn Theological Seminary at Cairn University. He writes at Carpenter's Student.
This is part three of our conversation, and the first of two on the parallel layout project. In the next episode we turn to the New Testament use of the Old Testament.
Purchase Old Testament Use of Old Testament in Parallel Layout Volume 1: Torah and Prophets at amazon.com
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hy Everyone, Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian on Doctor James Spencer and I'm joined again by doctor Gary Edward Schnitger, and we're going to be talking about his book Old Testament Use of Old Testament in Parallel Layout that's coming out later this year. It's going to be a multi volume work. The first one is on tour and the profits and these are coming out of Zondervan Academic. But what we really are going to start discussing today on a more basic level is when we talk about the Old Testament use of the Old Testament, a lot of our minds might just go to straight quotes of previous Old Testament texts, but that's not quite all there.
00:01:04
Speaker 2: Is.
00:01:04
Speaker 1: And so what we want to start by talking through is what's the role of things like illusions in the use of the Old Testament and how does that even work? How do we identify them, how should we think about them, and how should we think through them. So with all that said, Gary, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for being here, and thanks for your work on this. I really appreciated reading through it.
00:01:25
Speaker 2: H James, I'm thrilled to be here on this. This is my favorite thing to talk about, so thanks for having me on.
00:01:31
Speaker 3: Amazing. Well, let's dive in a little bit.
00:01:34
Speaker 1: You know, like I said, I think most of the time when I talk to people or when I'm teaching students and we talk about the Old Testament use of the Old Testament, they automatically go to quotations, which isn't crazy, It's just.
00:01:49
Speaker 3: Sort of the tip of the iceberg.
00:01:51
Speaker 1: So would how would you explain some of the other things that we should be looking for in the Old Testament, How do identify them, how to define them?
00:02:00
Speaker 3: Like?
00:02:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I want that did you study with Richard Schultz?
00:02:06
Speaker 3: I did? Yeah, I had him at Wheaton.
00:02:08
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean he one of the important things that he did in his research is he got it the idea of purposeful or intentionality. And so that's the watershed is between an illusion and I'm going to use the word illusion as an umbrella. It includes quotation, it includes paraphrase, and it includes lesser evoking of the text, but it's purposeful and there's it's not just purposeful, but there's evidence that it's purposeful. And so the dividing line, then an echo means there's something similar. It might be a just a stock phrase or a figure of speech, but there's not evidence. We're not sure if it's intentional or not intentional. So an illusion, inclusive of power, phrase and quotation, it's on purpose and we can we can tell that, and I think that maybe one of the things that it's good to get out of the way right away. I work on interpretive illusions, and again that's inclusive of quotation and paraphrase. Interpretive illusions have to have three things. There has to be an identifiable donor text that's the one that is the older cited text that donates the idea, and then an identifiable receptor text that is a text a later biblical text that's citing the earlier text. And then there needs to be some kind of identifiable interpretive outcome, and that's where we know that there's an intentionality, and so right away then you can see if there's an interpretive outcome that means it's more than just quoting. And I think that well, in the New Testament, there's plenty of quotations. In the Old Testament, there's less quotations. And what a lot of Bible readers get troubled by is when they don't use the exact words. But when a later biblical author is alluding to an earlier biblical writing, they're probably not going to use the same exact words. The whole point of alluding to it is to move things forward, what I would call advancement of revelation at that point.
00:04:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you don't have to use the exact same words.
00:04:39
Speaker 2: No, And I think that that's kind of a modern expectation that we bring to the text that kind of messes us up. In our hermaeneutics, we wound up arguing about the wrong thing most of the time when we're worried about why did the words change? In the ancient world, you know, they know what the original authoritative text said. The whole point of working with it is to they're trying to the bib of authors are trying to say something new, but they want to say it through this traditional, authoritative discourse that God has given previously.
00:05:16
Speaker 1: When you think about identifying these interpretive illusions, and I appreciate your sort of threefold framework, I think about something like I had a discussion here recently about the early chapters of Genesis, Genesis one through let's call it five, And you have the use of the image of God language in.
00:05:37
Speaker 3: Genesis one, and then you also have the use of.
00:05:40
Speaker 1: That language, very similar use of that language when it's talking about Seth and the genealogy, and he's made in the image of Adam, who was in turn made in the image of God. And the discussion I was having was whether that has interpretive significance, how that might relate to things like the firstborn sort of gard I'm within the narrative of Genesis itself. You know, what does this do for the line of Cain. And is this at all suggesting sort of that weird historical argument of only this line was made in the image of God and no other line. Now I have a very particular understanding of that, but one of the things I argued.
00:06:22
Speaker 3: Was, look, it didn't have to be said.
00:06:25
Speaker 1: Like this was included, and it's included as an obvious callback to Genesis one. Didn't actually have to be There was no reason to make this particular point at this particular moment if it doesn't mean something else. Is that part of Does that line of logic, that way of seeing it, Does that conform to sort of those three points that you've provided there.
00:06:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's a good example. And I actually call that an interpretive blend because in Genesis five and let's there's an intry on that in my book, there's a blending together of a passage from what we call Genesis one with a passage from what we call Genesis two. So it's an interpretive blend. There's a little quotations or illusions, and we can identify specifically what words in the donor text and how it's been morphed by laying them out side by side. And so one of the interpretive outcomes there just in the immediate is you've alluded to it. But the idea that we ask a question a lot of times, what does it mean to be created in the image of God? Right? What is that all about? And we have all these discussions, and most of the answers have been horrible, and the history of this discussion agreed. Genesis by answer is right. If Seth is in the image and likeness of Adam, and Adam is in the image and likeness of God, then Adam is a son of God. So I mean, whether we get into the firstborn or whether we worry about the other line or not, we can at least begin to nail down to be created in the image of God is to be a son of God. And you know, Genesis one, of course pulls up some things about that dominion and so forth. But so that's in the illusion that the biblical author makes in the Book of Genesis to earlier authoritative passages in the Book of Genesis. So the donor text are Genesis one and two, receptor textas Genesis five, and interpretive outcomes at least include sort of spinning out what it means to be created in the image of God.
00:08:48
Speaker 1: I like that a lot at least includes because I think that we can we argue about the rest, we argue about the rest, But I also think that that it does set a constraint and limit and a recognition that hey, look, this text is actually doing something. It really is doing something, and it's at least doing this something. Now what else it might be doing. That's where all these other factors that we would see in the narrative have to come into play. And that's where some of the more interpretive, maybe creative interpretive work could begin. But that isn't necessarily entailed in this specific illusion in and of itself.
00:09:29
Speaker 3: But there is a kernel that is there no matter what, right, And I.
00:09:34
Speaker 2: Think that that's kind of an important point that what maybe hasn't been done well enough is I think we want to jump off into the exe Jesus and the theology so quickly, yeah, and the thematic But what we maybe need to pause and do just a little bit more is actually get our hands dirty in comparing you know, why is the tense this word different? Why are these two things blended? Why is the prepositional phrase? And start with the mechanics of what the biblical authors themselves are doing, and then we can run there's nothing wrong with us making modern interpretations, but I guess my work has been pained on. Now let's pause and listen to the Biblical authors first, let them be our teachers and guides, and then we can do some of our extrapolations. You know.
00:10:28
Speaker 1: I know we're going to move into the New Testament next time in a future episode, so we're not dealing with the New Testament here, but just for comparison's sake, you know, I, like you probably took Greek and Hebrew coming through seminary and through my PhD studies. What I found the difference was, and I think the reason I gravitated towards Hebrew was that it has more of an openness to it. There isn't a strict logic in the same way that you find in Greek. That there's a much more rigid is probably too harsh a word, but a much more structured, you know, sort of grammatical connections between various things in a Greek text versus Hebrew, which has a fluidity to it that isn't as tied to tense and aspect and syntax, you know, all those different kind of pieces that you'd find in grammar.
00:11:25
Speaker 3: It almost opens itself.
00:11:27
Speaker 1: Up more to an illusion based sort of textuality across the Old Testament. I guess I'm wondering if that insight rings true to you or how you correct that or you know is that you've worked in both, and so I'm just interested to understand your take on the difference.
00:11:47
Speaker 2: Well, I think you're certainly right that the nature of Hebrew is so much different in the grammar and syntax that it opens itself to a different kind of illusions. But I would think, probably James, that the whole idea of alluding and making these connections, it's probably just natural and literary. So I don't think that that part's necessarily different. But the mechanics of how the New Testament within the context of the Second Temple situation and all the complications of describle cultures that are going on that time, that's going to set it apart from the more in house Hebrew Torah and Hebrew prophets and Hebrew poetry and Hebrew narratives. That's a little bit more all on the same page as far as the literary elements go. So there's a different dynamic maybe to the kind of illusions we're going to sit in the Old Testament, and there's an easy move between those. That is, there's there's not a real sense that when we read the prophets they talk about Torah and you talk about God's covenant. But they're not hung up on kind of explaining and getting down and dirty into the details of Tora. They take it for granted that they're that's not the problem. Their readers don't not know what tour is. They don't obey what Tora is. That that's the deeper issue. So they're pushing literarily against the will of the readers so that the prophet even might so let's say, weaponize Torah. So a really good example of this is Amos where he talks about, you know, he makes a playoff of you know, once people get into the land, they're in Deuteronomy fourteen, Deuteronomy twenty six, they only have to bring their tithes and offerings once every three years because it's inconvenient, if you will, and so they can kind of boil it down to silver and then bring it back to sacrifices when they get there. Well, Amos taunts his temple going northern constituents and says, go ahead, bring your sacrifices and your tithes every three days, and so you have this sort of mocking play. So there's an illusion to Torah, but he's not like trying to explain the mechanics of it. All right, he thinks that the problem lies elsewhere with these conngregants who have you know, they're interested in religion for their own purposes, not for gods.
00:14:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, interesting, that's helpful, And I think it sort of leads us into some of your comments related to maybe progressive revelation. You've already kind of alluded to this in your earlier comments, like how these illusions actually work and why they wouldn't necesscessarily have to be or even why quoting wouldn't necessarily serve this aspect of an expanded an expansion of Torah, a faithful expansion of Torah within a given scenario that a later author may be writing about.
00:15:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that in this field now, since I've been talking about it for these past number of years, more and more people are warming up to progressive revelation. But this is not the way we used to look at it, if you will. So this is more of a newer and especially something that I've been pushing is that we do look at the advancement of revelation, and so there is actually and I actually prefer the word advancement better because it's more directed towards the Gospel of Christ. Like this is all going for. There's a direction. It's not just progressive in all sorts of directions. Yeah, but I think that what we're what we need to get out here then is there's uh maybe one way I said, if we look at the genre of say laws, we tend to think of them as sometimes wrongly, as as though they're static, as though they are these inert things. But the Lord doesn't say when people complain about these things to him, he doesn't say I spoke, don't don't, don't talk to me about that. Just read the Bible. We find the Lord making adjustments with uh Torah. And even the whole idea of a prophet like Moses is one who is going to teach and preach in accord with Torah. And so there's there's room. As Israel's messy history goes from this to that to the next situation, from rights slaves to wanderers to settlers to kingdom builders to exile to people that return that are part of the empire and a really small province. All those changes require adjustments to how the teachings function, and so there's there's lots of room for the prophets to follow in the footsteps of Moses, who follows in the footsteps of the Lord who tweaks Torah, and the Lord not even shy about tweaking his own tweaks. When we think about it, for us that that takes a moment, and it takes our breath away, because we're like, well, wait, wait, wait, the Word of God stands forever. Wait, it's authoritati if you can't just change it, well, yeah, but there is a a progressive revelation, a forward motion, a redemptive direction, if you will. And we see that there's this Bible's interpretation of the Bible is moving in this redemptive direction. It's not just change for change's sake, so to speak.
00:18:08
Speaker 3: It's interesting.
00:18:09
Speaker 1: There's a and I'm blanking on the gentleman's name, but there's a scientific theory that deals with something akin to this, but in the scientific field.
00:18:18
Speaker 3: And what he.
00:18:19
Speaker 1: Posits is that there's a hardcore of truth that doesn't change. That this is the underlying I think he uses the word principle, which I'm not real wild on, but it gets at the idea it's this unchanging kernel that it's not going to move. And then what he calls a protective belt around that. And this protective belt is a set of hypotheses and theories and operations and you know.
00:18:46
Speaker 3: Situations right that are sort of malleable.
00:18:51
Speaker 1: But what never changes is this hardcore truth in the middle. And it just strikes me that what you're explaining is very similar to that so much as the underlying core of Israelite faith, of our faith doesn't change.
00:19:06
Speaker 3: But there's a whole lot outside there.
00:19:08
Speaker 1: You know, in the protective belt sort of area of it, that can move around. Because the world is changing, time is going by, we have to adapt to these new situations, and and there's an adaptivity to being in that protective belt so long as it's still reflecting the hardcore commitment in the center.
00:19:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, so an example might help since we're I don't know the name of that scientists either, but the these things can be ethereal if you think all the way at the maybe the end of the story here, and you have Nehemiah who's the governor of Jerusalem, and one of the big problems he runs into is the Sabbath breakers. Well he's he's like the governor, he has power he's the one who's friends with the king of Persia, but he's not bringing capital charges against the Sabbath breakers. He's trying to persuade them. So in other wards, the truth of the holiness of God and setting aside holy worship to God, that hasn't changed. That's still one of the covenantal elements of their relationship with God. But what has changed is it's no longer a capital crime, it's no longer a criminal law, and so kind of we can say, wow, well, this is an innovation, this is a contradiction. Well, it's probably not a contradiction when we look at sort of Neemiah's allusions back to Amos in chapter eight there, I think it is where he's talking kind of making fun of them, you're excited for Sabbath to be over so you can go merchandise again. Or the more specific illusion that we see in chapter thirteen of Nehemiah is from Jeremiah chapter seventeen, where Jeremiah says, if you keep bringing your burdens through the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, the Lord's going to bring his wrath against you. So then we could say, well, wait, where did Amos, where did Jeremiah have the audacity to tweak the Ten Commandments? This is one of the top ten. Excuse me, I'll get in trouble from my school if I say, oh, I need a cigarette right now. It sounds we are up in the north. But I mean, I know you did your dissertation on the ten Commandments, and so it's not that Amos and Jeremiah doing something that's completely outside the box. The Sabbath command is tweaked inside the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy five. Yeah, and so there's there is that. I guess you would say that something that doesn't change, like we're not gonna you know, adult tooth is wrong all the way. You know, you don't need any tweaking of that. But the circumstances of Israel changed dramatically, and so even one of the top ten commandments winds up being repeatedly tweaked as we go across time, from the time that it's given on Mount Sinai, throughout the history of Israel and the Old Testament.
00:22:39
Speaker 3: And I would even I think that's a really helpful example.
00:22:43
Speaker 1: As I was reading through your work, I was thinking to myself, this gets even more complex and narratives, you know, with the one that came to mind was am Non and when he rapes absolom sister and David nothing about it, and then all of a sudden, Absolom is sort of jockeying for David's position after he kills Amnon. And this is not framed as a cautionary tale against David. What it really seems like it's a cautionary tale against the way Absolum responds to this situation, you know.
00:23:21
Speaker 3: And so even within the narrative, you have this thing.
00:23:23
Speaker 1: Where it's like, well, the king is really in a very deep way withholding justice, but that is in no way, shape or form the focus of that narrative. And the very best I would argue, it's sort of background. Right, David may not have made the right choice there, but it's not the one that's highlighted as the problem. And so you have all these sort of narratives that obviously use the law as a background, even though it's not explicit, they're there. It's part of that sort of narrative context. But ultimately you see these different scenarios playing themselves out and within that narrative situation, And so I don't know whether i'd count that it necessarily as illusion, but I find it fascinating to think through as we just think about how that works from you know, Old Testament use of the Old Testament. These things are in the ether, and those are probably less intentional than some of the the case of Sabbath that you just named, But I do think it's interesting to think through, like as we're considering how that law gets adapted, the stories themselves suggest the adaptations.
00:24:44
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, and there you have. You know, it's boy, it's complicent. I want to make sure I don't say the wrong thing, but you have in Deuteronomy twenty two, you have these series of rape laws.
00:24:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, but what.
00:25:02
Speaker 2: The Aminen's story at least shows, and it's not an exegesus of the rape lause, but it does show how distorted and perverse someone's perspective can be. Because he's the narrative us the word he seizes her. So that's the very language that is used in Deudonomy twenty two that we would say that's rape and it can never be justified. But then Amin's trying to kind of romance his sister, and so you have this then insight that we might not get in Deuteronomy twenty two, but we get that there are perverse thoughts that a rapist has, and the rapists might not be thinking I'm going to rape this person. The rapist might actually between a wu in this case, it's not really quite like a modern date rape. But yeah, so the larger story, though, you're right, is this is all just the bigger story where they're moving between when David is top Jerusalem looking at someone else's wife and where the story's going is one of the most iconic moments in all of the Book of Samuel, where out in exile David's high top a different city crying out absolute my son, my son, absolum oh that I would have died, but you would have lived, Absolute my son. So you have this very literary presentation which is not at all It's a good example because it's not at all stopping and saying, well, let's think through the mechanics of rape. Well, yeah, there is a rape here, and it's very serious, but it's part of a much more complex story with these terrible moving parts that maybe all started when David is raping someone else's wife it turns out to be his friend.
00:27:06
Speaker 1: And I actually think that's crucial to the word you use complexity. Complex The Bible isn't working in simple paradigms, and so as it's narrating, as it's prophesying into these situations, these are not simple cause and effect usually problems, there is some complexity to them, and I think that's part of why you see these adaptations. They're almost like, as you put it, they're advancing towards something, but they're also applying these laws within a context, and so they are doing really I think deep interpretive work of the Torah to give it sufficient teeth within the setting that they're using it in.
00:28:00
Speaker 3: If that makes sense.
00:28:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, it does. And I think that you know, you and I when we gather with church folks in a Bible study or in a Sunday morning discussion, a lot of times we take things what's right and what's wrong? Is this character good or is this character bad? But that doesn't have much to do with real life. And so if we like take a short story like Ruth, all of the sort of the Torah illusions in that book are complicated, and they're very embedded in this story, so much embedded that many many readers just read it as a type of Christ or something like this, and don't even bother with getting their hands messy with the Covenant. But you find a really complex situation is there at the city gate when Bolas talks of this unnamed financially responsible relation. Yeah, and they talk about, you know, keeping his name alive. Are they going to keep the name of the dead alive? Well, that is going to bring in both the love inheritance from numbers twenty seven, but it also brings up from Deuteronomy twenty five the law of lever a marriage yep. And it's more complex than that because there's also the redemption of Naomi's field, and so that's now we're in Leviticus twenty five. But then one of the key things that comes up in the chapter, besides all of this going on between these different laws that they're navigating simultaneously, is it's when bo As mentions, oh, yeah, by the way, she's a moa Bidas. It's like, right, then if more Bible well like, And we don't know if the unnamed financially responsible near relation knew his Bible well, but if he did, he would be thinking, oh, well, you don't one on me twenty three says, thou shalt not be kind to Mobites. Yeah, and he knows that's illegal, and so all of a sudden he's like, well, I don't want to jeopardize my inheritance, is what he says? What does he mean by that? Does he mean like, because Mobites are not welcome into the assembly of yahweh? So is that what he means, which then is pushing us really towards the big finish of the book. Right, he did his maternal one of his the matriarchs of David fourth generation is a Mobiite. So then we're left as readers of the book saying, wait, if Mobiites are excluded forever, then what about the dividic covenant?
00:30:48
Speaker 3: Right?
00:30:49
Speaker 2: What's happening? Right, all of a sudden, this this fun story about this romance between this older gentleman and his uh, you know, this woman from foreign land. All of a sudden it takes on all these covenantal dimensions because the dividic Covenant is in jeopardy, the Gospel is in jeopardy because of Torah. That's complicated.
00:31:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And I think the impetus is to allow that story to degenerate and to say nope, it can't mean that because this dudonimistic law precludes us being nice to Moabites. The better way to read it is to say, huh, there must be something underneath this law and Deuteronomy that I'm missing. Yeah, there must be something deeper there that I'm just not quite getting in that context. And now I need to go back and understand that a little differently and exactly right, right, because as.
00:31:45
Speaker 3: This advance is, what it's showing us is.
00:31:47
Speaker 1: That God's loyalty is covenant love extends well beyond Israelites, even to those who were previously precluded.
00:31:56
Speaker 2: And this is something that when we go back to chapter two of Ruth to the Fields, where Boas is reasoning this out right, he can't give Ruth the rights of gleaning because that's for residing foreigners and it's.
00:32:13
Speaker 3: Not for Mobites, right.
00:32:15
Speaker 2: It's absolutely now, And like his his his guy that's working for him says, the word mobite is you seven times in the book, and the word mobitis is you seven times? All right, so yeah, twice it's used in one verse. So Boa shows up says, who is that? His worker says, that's the Mobiitis from mo app It's like, oh, rely that mobid it's one from mo app good to know, and so it's over the top. But then as Ruth is calling herself, I'm a foreigner, she uses that there's different words for foreigner, but she uses the excluded language. But then Boa says, wait, wait, wait, I've heard about what you've done, and when you've done it, you've placed yourselves under the wings of yahweh, And so bo As grants her the rights of gleaning. He treats her like a somebody who can assimilate, like a gear, a residing foreigner that can assimilate. And then we learn even more when your works top in the middle of the night, you know, a few weeks later, and it's like who are you? And Ruth says, oh, put your wing over me, right, And so his prayer of using that language, he ends up answering his own prayer in a sense when she proposes marriage to him. And all that pushes us back to when she said to Naomi, your God is my god, your people are my people. We realize, okay, not all Mobites are Mobites, right, So it's easy for us, as you said, to say, thou shalt not be kind to Moabites. But in the Bible, all the different interpretations of that law, it's never interpreted as an ethnic or a rarail law. It's always interpreted symbolically, and so it doesn't even apply to mobites in many cases as its right. So the narrative that the law plays off of, right, going back to the nasty mobites in the wilderness who mistreated Israel, that's a symbolic narrative that shows the kind of people that are always excluded, the enemies of Israel.
00:34:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a It's an entire book that I think illustrates the point that there is an advancing revelation here and how whatever confusion we may have about something like God desires mercy, not sacrifice, right, and it's like, well, why did he give us all these sacrificial laws? Then, you know, like Ruth encapsulates this entire tension within it because it's not supposed to happen if we read the law as precluding into perpetuity, if we understand it as the actual exclusion of a people group, not something deeper there that in the context is being warned against. But now as this woman Ruth, you know, pledges herself to this, her mother in law, takes on her gods as her own god. Now you are in a very different context, and Boaz is the one who recognizes this. He sees it and acts on it, even despite it almost encapsulates. We might say, what it means to have mercy rather than sacrifice?
00:35:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. And I think that you know what what I try to do with my students, and I'm about to probably annoy your readers, is I don't let my students when we studied Ruth use the word kinsman redeemer. You've heard me a couple of times use the word financially responsible near relative, because that's what it means. And so we use the term kinsman redeemer, and we load it with all this typological sense that comes from us. But it's not a sexy term. It's it's not this theologically loaded term. It's just a financially responsible next of kin.
00:36:40
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:36:40
Speaker 2: And so when I when I the reason I do that to my students is so they stop and live in the moment that they don't when they don't know what to do, they just oh, well, this is kind of a story about this romance. So well, we need to we need to find the gospel here No, I don't need to find the gospel. The gospel right here. We're on the way in this gospel story. But we need to see what's going on here in this moment of progressive revelation. I don't need to jump to the future. We can live here. And so I think that kind of our discomfort in dealing with all this is part of the part of the issue. And we don't often like complications and messiness when we have our discussions. We want to settle everything right.
00:37:34
Speaker 1: Well, let me pivot a little bit, because you've got this new book coming out and it's really helpful. You know, you and I have been at this for a long time. You know, I got my doctorate in twenty twelve ish somewhere in there, and so it's been a good decade plus that I've been studying the Old Testament. You're the same, probably even longer than I have. There's a a tendency. I think that as we read and reread these texts, we start to have enough packed into our brains that we start to recognize some of these illusions that we start to connect these dots in a text, and so that even if we're reading Ruth, we go back automatically to some of these laws. Where someone who's more of a casual Bible reader, who's just in the church in the pews, they may read Ruth and go that was a fantastic story. They'll catch some of the themes that they don't always get, the illusions and the depth. How do you help someone develop that depth aside from you know, an expensive PhD in years of study?
00:38:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's that's it's always tempting to take a PhD. Yeah, But I think that I think that we've we kind of have a phobia against the laws. So when we read the old test that we're in a narrative like Ruth, and we somehow can just ignore that this is a very legal heavy narrative and we're able to basically ignore all of that and just read it as a nice harlequin romance, right, Hallmark romance. That's a better way. I said, Well, sorry, like a Hallmark romance that somebody would watch on TV and say, oh, isn't that quaint? Well, yes, it's quaint, but there's something more at stake, and people are trying to live according to God's covenantal will, and so I think part of it is maybe the mechanical issue of you know, reading the cross references in our Bible. But I think the bigger problem that we're up against at the moment is there's sort of a repulsion towards Torah and towards especially the teachings of Torah. And so that that repulsion that a lot of Christians have, they think, oh, I don't want to I'm interested in grace. Well, you know, we have news for people. Torah is God's gift to his people, his covenantal will is the Gospel I mean moving forward. And so I think that we have to both get the mechanics of actually making the connections that are made in the Bible and thinking through the complexities of what are there not to be complex for complexity's sake, but life is messy. And on the other side, to recognize that the Gospel starts way earlier in the Bible, and we don't have to put it in there. We don't have to like find some Kinsman Deemer trick to like push the Gospel into the Bible. It's already there. And so we just have to study the Bible and we have to trust the Lord. And so this progressive revelation then is maybe as much coming out of a value of how we would treat scripture and begin to see the connections that are native to it, not just try to put the message onto it that we want to find. That's a little bit too simplistic, but there's so many you know, I'm just talking about in our day. I'm kind of addressing the Biblical illiteracy which is rampant, and then also some of the related reasons to that, and what we do. We don't bother to undo the biblical illiteracy, We kind of find a way to work in it and accept people's prejudice against God's word.
00:41:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting.
00:41:58
Speaker 1: I mean, the first time you were on the show show, we talked actually about the immoral Torah and your article and jets on this issue, and basically for those of you who haven't listened to that episode, you can go back and find it. But the gist of it was that there's a movement in amongst some Old Testament scholars to mark out a not remove, but.
00:42:17
Speaker 3: Cross out.
00:42:20
Speaker 1: Laws in the Torah that we would deem immoral. And I think that's an extreme case of what you're really talking about here, because the more mundane way of doing is just to say, yes, I know that they're all there. Yes, I know that they're all God's word. It's almost completely irrelevant for anything that I am interested in doing, and so I'm just going to stick somewhere else in the canon and ignore most of that. It's functionally, you know, you're not actually physically crossing anything out, and so it conveys a certain reverence for scripture that maybe the other maybe crossing out versus doesn't, But it's functionally doing the same thing. It's ignoring an aspect of the counsel of God's word that we should not be ignoring. And so, and you're right, I think that is related to a skill level. People tend to get more comfortable. You know, there's a reason I don't read Song of Solomon every day. That's some weird stuff, and I'm just not as good at interpreting that. And so you're going to gravitate to your areas of competence. I think that's a normal thing. But at the same time, it's not like I would say, yeah, I've never read the Song of Solomon before, and I would never read it again, right, And so I think we have to sort of balance somewhere in there, do you think as you wrote your book, and it's got a lot of really helpful charts and layouts and really giving examples of how these things interconnect. Is part of your hope to sort of get people thinking in this way about the Old Testament and helping them to understand how they actually can.
00:43:56
Speaker 3: Think this way about the Old Testament.
00:43:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, this book is the one I really wanted to write. It's and my editor really wanted this too. She's got her PhD In Old Testament, So this is the one that really was driving the others. But I have a book called Old Testament Use of Old Testament, which is a handbook that kind of explains through each book of the Old Testament and sort of the hermeneutical profile of each Biblical author and examples of how they use scripture. I have another book, a co authored book called How to Study the Bible's Use of the Bible, which is really there's seven choices that we need to make in order to interpret the Bible's use of the Bible well, which is one of the hardest things to interpret. But this book that is just coming out this year, Old Testament Use of Old Testament in parallel a out. It's not making an argument, it's laying out the evidence in a new way that will provide a true inductive tool for users. So it's not just like laying it out there in a way that there's some guardrails in a sense, so that the related texture laid out side by side. But there there's a system of color coding so that English Bible readers or seminary students and pastors who have studied Hebrew and Greek, they'll be able to see exactly what is related to each other and what's different. And then also there's suggestions by using red for where the interpretive I guess outcomes are that the author intended, and those kind of put this way in the introduction, the user needs to ask every time they see red, is that where the red goes? Or does it go somewhere else? Right, So there's the cold text is the blue text, and the distinctive text is the black. So the color coding makes it really just jump off the page so that the reader can have real help. But what I've blocked out it doesn't like just talk at the reader and tell the reader here's the answer, here's the answer that's in the other books. So I'm not shy about my views. But this is the inductive study to get the reader's chance to wrestle with the scriptures themselves, but with helps of the reader says, but I don't know what to do. Well, here's the Bible, and it's color coded, it's laid out. You can do something with us.
00:46:58
Speaker 1: It reminded me when I looking through it and just reading through various.
00:47:02
Speaker 3: Aspects of it.
00:47:04
Speaker 1: The synopsis of the Gospels, you know where you have it laid out in Greek and English, and you can compare across the gospels, what's different, what's the same.
00:47:13
Speaker 3: And so I found it really helpful as a reference work. And I think you're right.
00:47:18
Speaker 1: It doesn't make an argument per se, although it's definitely illustrating that this is important work that needs to be done. So very cool. I'm excited for it to come out. When does it release, Gary.
00:47:32
Speaker 2: It comes out in November.
00:47:34
Speaker 1: November, okay, so available on Amazon for pre order, maybe September ish, julyish, something.
00:47:41
Speaker 2: Like that, probably by the end of June.
00:47:44
Speaker 3: By end of June. Okay, here you go.
00:47:48
Speaker 1: Well, I know we didn't cook quite through everything today, but we're going to have you back to talk a little bit about more about Old Testament use in the New Testament, which is honestly seems like the more normal field of study. Normal might be the wrong word, the more popular field of study. People tend to want to see how the testaments connect. But I really find this work Old Testament use in the Old Testament to be fascinating, and so really appreciate your work, Appreciate the conversation, and we'll do this again Old Testament use in the New Testament in the next episode.
00:48:23
Speaker 3: So thanks Gary very much for being here.
00:48:25
Speaker 2: James, thanks for having me on. It's great to have a chance to talk through these things.
00:48:31
Speaker 1: Do me one favor and mention your substack before we leave it.
00:48:36
Speaker 3: Is please, Yeah, go ahead and do that.
00:48:39
Speaker 2: Carpentersstudent dot Com. It's free. There's two s's in the middle, Carpenter's Student dot Com, and that's a place where able to get into some of the behind the scenes things that really can't be done anywhere else. There's no room for that kind of stuff in books or in the classroom.
00:49:00
Speaker 3: Very good. Well, we'll have that linked in the show notes.
00:49:03
Speaker 1: So if you want to check out more from Gary, I'd really recommend going there. I've gotten to read through several of his articles just in preparing for these episodes and finding them really helpful. We'll probably reference one of them in the next couple episodes. Grandparent Texts was probably one of my favorites that he did, and so we'll dive into those. But yeah, I encourage you to check out Gary's work and certainly by the book. We'll have links to everything in the show notes. I believe this episode will have launched after the pre order window, and so we'll probably have the pre order link in there for the zonom book that we've been talking a little bit about this time, so also check that out. So that's it for this episode. Thanks again, Gary for being here, and thanks everybody for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian.
00:49:49
Speaker 3: Take Care.
00:49:50
Speaker 1: Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcas cast in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hy Everyone, Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian on Doctor James Spencer and I'm joined again by doctor Gary Edward Schnitger, and we're going to be talking about his book Old Testament Use of Old Testament in Parallel Layout that's coming out later this year. It's going to be a multi volume work. The first one is on tour and the profits and these are coming out of Zondervan Academic. But what we really are going to start discussing today on a more basic level is when we talk about the Old Testament use of the Old Testament, a lot of our minds might just go to straight quotes of previous Old Testament texts, but that's not quite all there.
00:01:04
Speaker 2: Is.
00:01:04
Speaker 1: And so what we want to start by talking through is what's the role of things like illusions in the use of the Old Testament and how does that even work? How do we identify them, how should we think about them, and how should we think through them. So with all that said, Gary, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for being here, and thanks for your work on this. I really appreciated reading through it.
00:01:25
Speaker 2: H James, I'm thrilled to be here on this. This is my favorite thing to talk about, so thanks for having me on.
00:01:31
Speaker 3: Amazing. Well, let's dive in a little bit.
00:01:34
Speaker 1: You know, like I said, I think most of the time when I talk to people or when I'm teaching students and we talk about the Old Testament use of the Old Testament, they automatically go to quotations, which isn't crazy, It's just.
00:01:49
Speaker 3: Sort of the tip of the iceberg.
00:01:51
Speaker 1: So would how would you explain some of the other things that we should be looking for in the Old Testament, How do identify them, how to define them?
00:02:00
Speaker 3: Like?
00:02:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I want that did you study with Richard Schultz?
00:02:06
Speaker 3: I did? Yeah, I had him at Wheaton.
00:02:08
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean he one of the important things that he did in his research is he got it the idea of purposeful or intentionality. And so that's the watershed is between an illusion and I'm going to use the word illusion as an umbrella. It includes quotation, it includes paraphrase, and it includes lesser evoking of the text, but it's purposeful and there's it's not just purposeful, but there's evidence that it's purposeful. And so the dividing line, then an echo means there's something similar. It might be a just a stock phrase or a figure of speech, but there's not evidence. We're not sure if it's intentional or not intentional. So an illusion, inclusive of power, phrase and quotation, it's on purpose and we can we can tell that, and I think that maybe one of the things that it's good to get out of the way right away. I work on interpretive illusions, and again that's inclusive of quotation and paraphrase. Interpretive illusions have to have three things. There has to be an identifiable donor text that's the one that is the older cited text that donates the idea, and then an identifiable receptor text that is a text a later biblical text that's citing the earlier text. And then there needs to be some kind of identifiable interpretive outcome, and that's where we know that there's an intentionality, and so right away then you can see if there's an interpretive outcome that means it's more than just quoting. And I think that well, in the New Testament, there's plenty of quotations. In the Old Testament, there's less quotations. And what a lot of Bible readers get troubled by is when they don't use the exact words. But when a later biblical author is alluding to an earlier biblical writing, they're probably not going to use the same exact words. The whole point of alluding to it is to move things forward, what I would call advancement of revelation at that point.
00:04:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you don't have to use the exact same words.
00:04:39
Speaker 2: No, And I think that that's kind of a modern expectation that we bring to the text that kind of messes us up. In our hermaeneutics, we wound up arguing about the wrong thing most of the time when we're worried about why did the words change? In the ancient world, you know, they know what the original authoritative text said. The whole point of working with it is to they're trying to the bib of authors are trying to say something new, but they want to say it through this traditional, authoritative discourse that God has given previously.
00:05:16
Speaker 1: When you think about identifying these interpretive illusions, and I appreciate your sort of threefold framework, I think about something like I had a discussion here recently about the early chapters of Genesis, Genesis one through let's call it five, And you have the use of the image of God language in.
00:05:37
Speaker 3: Genesis one, and then you also have the use of.
00:05:40
Speaker 1: That language, very similar use of that language when it's talking about Seth and the genealogy, and he's made in the image of Adam, who was in turn made in the image of God. And the discussion I was having was whether that has interpretive significance, how that might relate to things like the firstborn sort of gard I'm within the narrative of Genesis itself. You know, what does this do for the line of Cain. And is this at all suggesting sort of that weird historical argument of only this line was made in the image of God and no other line. Now I have a very particular understanding of that, but one of the things I argued.
00:06:22
Speaker 3: Was, look, it didn't have to be said.
00:06:25
Speaker 1: Like this was included, and it's included as an obvious callback to Genesis one. Didn't actually have to be There was no reason to make this particular point at this particular moment if it doesn't mean something else. Is that part of Does that line of logic, that way of seeing it, Does that conform to sort of those three points that you've provided there.
00:06:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's a good example. And I actually call that an interpretive blend because in Genesis five and let's there's an intry on that in my book, there's a blending together of a passage from what we call Genesis one with a passage from what we call Genesis two. So it's an interpretive blend. There's a little quotations or illusions, and we can identify specifically what words in the donor text and how it's been morphed by laying them out side by side. And so one of the interpretive outcomes there just in the immediate is you've alluded to it. But the idea that we ask a question a lot of times, what does it mean to be created in the image of God? Right? What is that all about? And we have all these discussions, and most of the answers have been horrible, and the history of this discussion agreed. Genesis by answer is right. If Seth is in the image and likeness of Adam, and Adam is in the image and likeness of God, then Adam is a son of God. So I mean, whether we get into the firstborn or whether we worry about the other line or not, we can at least begin to nail down to be created in the image of God is to be a son of God. And you know, Genesis one, of course pulls up some things about that dominion and so forth. But so that's in the illusion that the biblical author makes in the Book of Genesis to earlier authoritative passages in the Book of Genesis. So the donor text are Genesis one and two, receptor textas Genesis five, and interpretive outcomes at least include sort of spinning out what it means to be created in the image of God.
00:08:48
Speaker 1: I like that a lot at least includes because I think that we can we argue about the rest, we argue about the rest, But I also think that that it does set a constraint and limit and a recognition that hey, look, this text is actually doing something. It really is doing something, and it's at least doing this something. Now what else it might be doing. That's where all these other factors that we would see in the narrative have to come into play. And that's where some of the more interpretive, maybe creative interpretive work could begin. But that isn't necessarily entailed in this specific illusion in and of itself.
00:09:29
Speaker 3: But there is a kernel that is there no matter what, right, And I.
00:09:34
Speaker 2: Think that that's kind of an important point that what maybe hasn't been done well enough is I think we want to jump off into the exe Jesus and the theology so quickly, yeah, and the thematic But what we maybe need to pause and do just a little bit more is actually get our hands dirty in comparing you know, why is the tense this word different? Why are these two things blended? Why is the prepositional phrase? And start with the mechanics of what the biblical authors themselves are doing, and then we can run there's nothing wrong with us making modern interpretations, but I guess my work has been pained on. Now let's pause and listen to the Biblical authors first, let them be our teachers and guides, and then we can do some of our extrapolations. You know.
00:10:28
Speaker 1: I know we're going to move into the New Testament next time in a future episode, so we're not dealing with the New Testament here, but just for comparison's sake, you know, I, like you probably took Greek and Hebrew coming through seminary and through my PhD studies. What I found the difference was, and I think the reason I gravitated towards Hebrew was that it has more of an openness to it. There isn't a strict logic in the same way that you find in Greek. That there's a much more rigid is probably too harsh a word, but a much more structured, you know, sort of grammatical connections between various things in a Greek text versus Hebrew, which has a fluidity to it that isn't as tied to tense and aspect and syntax, you know, all those different kind of pieces that you'd find in grammar.
00:11:25
Speaker 3: It almost opens itself.
00:11:27
Speaker 1: Up more to an illusion based sort of textuality across the Old Testament. I guess I'm wondering if that insight rings true to you or how you correct that or you know is that you've worked in both, and so I'm just interested to understand your take on the difference.
00:11:47
Speaker 2: Well, I think you're certainly right that the nature of Hebrew is so much different in the grammar and syntax that it opens itself to a different kind of illusions. But I would think, probably James, that the whole idea of alluding and making these connections, it's probably just natural and literary. So I don't think that that part's necessarily different. But the mechanics of how the New Testament within the context of the Second Temple situation and all the complications of describle cultures that are going on that time, that's going to set it apart from the more in house Hebrew Torah and Hebrew prophets and Hebrew poetry and Hebrew narratives. That's a little bit more all on the same page as far as the literary elements go. So there's a different dynamic maybe to the kind of illusions we're going to sit in the Old Testament, and there's an easy move between those. That is, there's there's not a real sense that when we read the prophets they talk about Torah and you talk about God's covenant. But they're not hung up on kind of explaining and getting down and dirty into the details of Tora. They take it for granted that they're that's not the problem. Their readers don't not know what tour is. They don't obey what Tora is. That that's the deeper issue. So they're pushing literarily against the will of the readers so that the prophet even might so let's say, weaponize Torah. So a really good example of this is Amos where he talks about, you know, he makes a playoff of you know, once people get into the land, they're in Deuteronomy fourteen, Deuteronomy twenty six, they only have to bring their tithes and offerings once every three years because it's inconvenient, if you will, and so they can kind of boil it down to silver and then bring it back to sacrifices when they get there. Well, Amos taunts his temple going northern constituents and says, go ahead, bring your sacrifices and your tithes every three days, and so you have this sort of mocking play. So there's an illusion to Torah, but he's not like trying to explain the mechanics of it. All right, he thinks that the problem lies elsewhere with these conngregants who have you know, they're interested in religion for their own purposes, not for gods.
00:14:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, interesting, that's helpful, And I think it sort of leads us into some of your comments related to maybe progressive revelation. You've already kind of alluded to this in your earlier comments, like how these illusions actually work and why they wouldn't necesscessarily have to be or even why quoting wouldn't necessarily serve this aspect of an expanded an expansion of Torah, a faithful expansion of Torah within a given scenario that a later author may be writing about.
00:15:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that in this field now, since I've been talking about it for these past number of years, more and more people are warming up to progressive revelation. But this is not the way we used to look at it, if you will. So this is more of a newer and especially something that I've been pushing is that we do look at the advancement of revelation, and so there is actually and I actually prefer the word advancement better because it's more directed towards the Gospel of Christ. Like this is all going for. There's a direction. It's not just progressive in all sorts of directions. Yeah, but I think that what we're what we need to get out here then is there's uh maybe one way I said, if we look at the genre of say laws, we tend to think of them as sometimes wrongly, as as though they're static, as though they are these inert things. But the Lord doesn't say when people complain about these things to him, he doesn't say I spoke, don't don't, don't talk to me about that. Just read the Bible. We find the Lord making adjustments with uh Torah. And even the whole idea of a prophet like Moses is one who is going to teach and preach in accord with Torah. And so there's there's room. As Israel's messy history goes from this to that to the next situation, from rights slaves to wanderers to settlers to kingdom builders to exile to people that return that are part of the empire and a really small province. All those changes require adjustments to how the teachings function, and so there's there's lots of room for the prophets to follow in the footsteps of Moses, who follows in the footsteps of the Lord who tweaks Torah, and the Lord not even shy about tweaking his own tweaks. When we think about it, for us that that takes a moment, and it takes our breath away, because we're like, well, wait, wait, wait, the Word of God stands forever. Wait, it's authoritati if you can't just change it, well, yeah, but there is a a progressive revelation, a forward motion, a redemptive direction, if you will. And we see that there's this Bible's interpretation of the Bible is moving in this redemptive direction. It's not just change for change's sake, so to speak.
00:18:08
Speaker 3: It's interesting.
00:18:09
Speaker 1: There's a and I'm blanking on the gentleman's name, but there's a scientific theory that deals with something akin to this, but in the scientific field.
00:18:18
Speaker 3: And what he.
00:18:19
Speaker 1: Posits is that there's a hardcore of truth that doesn't change. That this is the underlying I think he uses the word principle, which I'm not real wild on, but it gets at the idea it's this unchanging kernel that it's not going to move. And then what he calls a protective belt around that. And this protective belt is a set of hypotheses and theories and operations and you know.
00:18:46
Speaker 3: Situations right that are sort of malleable.
00:18:51
Speaker 1: But what never changes is this hardcore truth in the middle. And it just strikes me that what you're explaining is very similar to that so much as the underlying core of Israelite faith, of our faith doesn't change.
00:19:06
Speaker 3: But there's a whole lot outside there.
00:19:08
Speaker 1: You know, in the protective belt sort of area of it, that can move around. Because the world is changing, time is going by, we have to adapt to these new situations, and and there's an adaptivity to being in that protective belt so long as it's still reflecting the hardcore commitment in the center.
00:19:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, so an example might help since we're I don't know the name of that scientists either, but the these things can be ethereal if you think all the way at the maybe the end of the story here, and you have Nehemiah who's the governor of Jerusalem, and one of the big problems he runs into is the Sabbath breakers. Well he's he's like the governor, he has power he's the one who's friends with the king of Persia, but he's not bringing capital charges against the Sabbath breakers. He's trying to persuade them. So in other wards, the truth of the holiness of God and setting aside holy worship to God, that hasn't changed. That's still one of the covenantal elements of their relationship with God. But what has changed is it's no longer a capital crime, it's no longer a criminal law, and so kind of we can say, wow, well, this is an innovation, this is a contradiction. Well, it's probably not a contradiction when we look at sort of Neemiah's allusions back to Amos in chapter eight there, I think it is where he's talking kind of making fun of them, you're excited for Sabbath to be over so you can go merchandise again. Or the more specific illusion that we see in chapter thirteen of Nehemiah is from Jeremiah chapter seventeen, where Jeremiah says, if you keep bringing your burdens through the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, the Lord's going to bring his wrath against you. So then we could say, well, wait, where did Amos, where did Jeremiah have the audacity to tweak the Ten Commandments? This is one of the top ten. Excuse me, I'll get in trouble from my school if I say, oh, I need a cigarette right now. It sounds we are up in the north. But I mean, I know you did your dissertation on the ten Commandments, and so it's not that Amos and Jeremiah doing something that's completely outside the box. The Sabbath command is tweaked inside the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy five. Yeah, and so there's there is that. I guess you would say that something that doesn't change, like we're not gonna you know, adult tooth is wrong all the way. You know, you don't need any tweaking of that. But the circumstances of Israel changed dramatically, and so even one of the top ten commandments winds up being repeatedly tweaked as we go across time, from the time that it's given on Mount Sinai, throughout the history of Israel and the Old Testament.
00:22:39
Speaker 3: And I would even I think that's a really helpful example.
00:22:43
Speaker 1: As I was reading through your work, I was thinking to myself, this gets even more complex and narratives, you know, with the one that came to mind was am Non and when he rapes absolom sister and David nothing about it, and then all of a sudden, Absolom is sort of jockeying for David's position after he kills Amnon. And this is not framed as a cautionary tale against David. What it really seems like it's a cautionary tale against the way Absolum responds to this situation, you know.
00:23:21
Speaker 3: And so even within the narrative, you have this thing.
00:23:23
Speaker 1: Where it's like, well, the king is really in a very deep way withholding justice, but that is in no way, shape or form the focus of that narrative. And the very best I would argue, it's sort of background. Right, David may not have made the right choice there, but it's not the one that's highlighted as the problem. And so you have all these sort of narratives that obviously use the law as a background, even though it's not explicit, they're there. It's part of that sort of narrative context. But ultimately you see these different scenarios playing themselves out and within that narrative situation, And so I don't know whether i'd count that it necessarily as illusion, but I find it fascinating to think through as we just think about how that works from you know, Old Testament use of the Old Testament. These things are in the ether, and those are probably less intentional than some of the the case of Sabbath that you just named, But I do think it's interesting to think through, like as we're considering how that law gets adapted, the stories themselves suggest the adaptations.
00:24:44
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, and there you have. You know, it's boy, it's complicent. I want to make sure I don't say the wrong thing, but you have in Deuteronomy twenty two, you have these series of rape laws.
00:24:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, but what.
00:25:02
Speaker 2: The Aminen's story at least shows, and it's not an exegesus of the rape lause, but it does show how distorted and perverse someone's perspective can be. Because he's the narrative us the word he seizes her. So that's the very language that is used in Deudonomy twenty two that we would say that's rape and it can never be justified. But then Amin's trying to kind of romance his sister, and so you have this then insight that we might not get in Deuteronomy twenty two, but we get that there are perverse thoughts that a rapist has, and the rapists might not be thinking I'm going to rape this person. The rapist might actually between a wu in this case, it's not really quite like a modern date rape. But yeah, so the larger story, though, you're right, is this is all just the bigger story where they're moving between when David is top Jerusalem looking at someone else's wife and where the story's going is one of the most iconic moments in all of the Book of Samuel, where out in exile David's high top a different city crying out absolute my son, my son, absolum oh that I would have died, but you would have lived, Absolute my son. So you have this very literary presentation which is not at all It's a good example because it's not at all stopping and saying, well, let's think through the mechanics of rape. Well, yeah, there is a rape here, and it's very serious, but it's part of a much more complex story with these terrible moving parts that maybe all started when David is raping someone else's wife it turns out to be his friend.
00:27:06
Speaker 1: And I actually think that's crucial to the word you use complexity. Complex The Bible isn't working in simple paradigms, and so as it's narrating, as it's prophesying into these situations, these are not simple cause and effect usually problems, there is some complexity to them, and I think that's part of why you see these adaptations. They're almost like, as you put it, they're advancing towards something, but they're also applying these laws within a context, and so they are doing really I think deep interpretive work of the Torah to give it sufficient teeth within the setting that they're using it in.
00:28:00
Speaker 3: If that makes sense.
00:28:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, it does. And I think that you know, you and I when we gather with church folks in a Bible study or in a Sunday morning discussion, a lot of times we take things what's right and what's wrong? Is this character good or is this character bad? But that doesn't have much to do with real life. And so if we like take a short story like Ruth, all of the sort of the Torah illusions in that book are complicated, and they're very embedded in this story, so much embedded that many many readers just read it as a type of Christ or something like this, and don't even bother with getting their hands messy with the Covenant. But you find a really complex situation is there at the city gate when Bolas talks of this unnamed financially responsible relation. Yeah, and they talk about, you know, keeping his name alive. Are they going to keep the name of the dead alive? Well, that is going to bring in both the love inheritance from numbers twenty seven, but it also brings up from Deuteronomy twenty five the law of lever a marriage yep. And it's more complex than that because there's also the redemption of Naomi's field, and so that's now we're in Leviticus twenty five. But then one of the key things that comes up in the chapter, besides all of this going on between these different laws that they're navigating simultaneously, is it's when bo As mentions, oh, yeah, by the way, she's a moa Bidas. It's like, right, then if more Bible well like, And we don't know if the unnamed financially responsible near relation knew his Bible well, but if he did, he would be thinking, oh, well, you don't one on me twenty three says, thou shalt not be kind to Mobites. Yeah, and he knows that's illegal, and so all of a sudden he's like, well, I don't want to jeopardize my inheritance, is what he says? What does he mean by that? Does he mean like, because Mobites are not welcome into the assembly of yahweh? So is that what he means, which then is pushing us really towards the big finish of the book. Right, he did his maternal one of his the matriarchs of David fourth generation is a Mobiite. So then we're left as readers of the book saying, wait, if Mobiites are excluded forever, then what about the dividic covenant?
00:30:48
Speaker 3: Right?
00:30:49
Speaker 2: What's happening? Right, all of a sudden, this this fun story about this romance between this older gentleman and his uh, you know, this woman from foreign land. All of a sudden it takes on all these covenantal dimensions because the dividic Covenant is in jeopardy, the Gospel is in jeopardy because of Torah. That's complicated.
00:31:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And I think the impetus is to allow that story to degenerate and to say nope, it can't mean that because this dudonimistic law precludes us being nice to Moabites. The better way to read it is to say, huh, there must be something underneath this law and Deuteronomy that I'm missing. Yeah, there must be something deeper there that I'm just not quite getting in that context. And now I need to go back and understand that a little differently and exactly right, right, because as.
00:31:45
Speaker 3: This advance is, what it's showing us is.
00:31:47
Speaker 1: That God's loyalty is covenant love extends well beyond Israelites, even to those who were previously precluded.
00:31:56
Speaker 2: And this is something that when we go back to chapter two of Ruth to the Fields, where Boas is reasoning this out right, he can't give Ruth the rights of gleaning because that's for residing foreigners and it's.
00:32:13
Speaker 3: Not for Mobites, right.
00:32:15
Speaker 2: It's absolutely now, And like his his his guy that's working for him says, the word mobite is you seven times in the book, and the word mobitis is you seven times? All right, so yeah, twice it's used in one verse. So Boa shows up says, who is that? His worker says, that's the Mobiitis from mo app It's like, oh, rely that mobid it's one from mo app good to know, and so it's over the top. But then as Ruth is calling herself, I'm a foreigner, she uses that there's different words for foreigner, but she uses the excluded language. But then Boa says, wait, wait, wait, I've heard about what you've done, and when you've done it, you've placed yourselves under the wings of yahweh, And so bo As grants her the rights of gleaning. He treats her like a somebody who can assimilate, like a gear, a residing foreigner that can assimilate. And then we learn even more when your works top in the middle of the night, you know, a few weeks later, and it's like who are you? And Ruth says, oh, put your wing over me, right, And so his prayer of using that language, he ends up answering his own prayer in a sense when she proposes marriage to him. And all that pushes us back to when she said to Naomi, your God is my god, your people are my people. We realize, okay, not all Mobites are Mobites, right, So it's easy for us, as you said, to say, thou shalt not be kind to Moabites. But in the Bible, all the different interpretations of that law, it's never interpreted as an ethnic or a rarail law. It's always interpreted symbolically, and so it doesn't even apply to mobites in many cases as its right. So the narrative that the law plays off of, right, going back to the nasty mobites in the wilderness who mistreated Israel, that's a symbolic narrative that shows the kind of people that are always excluded, the enemies of Israel.
00:34:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a It's an entire book that I think illustrates the point that there is an advancing revelation here and how whatever confusion we may have about something like God desires mercy, not sacrifice, right, and it's like, well, why did he give us all these sacrificial laws? Then, you know, like Ruth encapsulates this entire tension within it because it's not supposed to happen if we read the law as precluding into perpetuity, if we understand it as the actual exclusion of a people group, not something deeper there that in the context is being warned against. But now as this woman Ruth, you know, pledges herself to this, her mother in law, takes on her gods as her own god. Now you are in a very different context, and Boaz is the one who recognizes this. He sees it and acts on it, even despite it almost encapsulates. We might say, what it means to have mercy rather than sacrifice?
00:35:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. And I think that you know what what I try to do with my students, and I'm about to probably annoy your readers, is I don't let my students when we studied Ruth use the word kinsman redeemer. You've heard me a couple of times use the word financially responsible near relative, because that's what it means. And so we use the term kinsman redeemer, and we load it with all this typological sense that comes from us. But it's not a sexy term. It's it's not this theologically loaded term. It's just a financially responsible next of kin.
00:36:40
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:36:40
Speaker 2: And so when I when I the reason I do that to my students is so they stop and live in the moment that they don't when they don't know what to do, they just oh, well, this is kind of a story about this romance. So well, we need to we need to find the gospel here No, I don't need to find the gospel. The gospel right here. We're on the way in this gospel story. But we need to see what's going on here in this moment of progressive revelation. I don't need to jump to the future. We can live here. And so I think that kind of our discomfort in dealing with all this is part of the part of the issue. And we don't often like complications and messiness when we have our discussions. We want to settle everything right.
00:37:34
Speaker 1: Well, let me pivot a little bit, because you've got this new book coming out and it's really helpful. You know, you and I have been at this for a long time. You know, I got my doctorate in twenty twelve ish somewhere in there, and so it's been a good decade plus that I've been studying the Old Testament. You're the same, probably even longer than I have. There's a a tendency. I think that as we read and reread these texts, we start to have enough packed into our brains that we start to recognize some of these illusions that we start to connect these dots in a text, and so that even if we're reading Ruth, we go back automatically to some of these laws. Where someone who's more of a casual Bible reader, who's just in the church in the pews, they may read Ruth and go that was a fantastic story. They'll catch some of the themes that they don't always get, the illusions and the depth. How do you help someone develop that depth aside from you know, an expensive PhD in years of study?
00:38:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's that's it's always tempting to take a PhD. Yeah, But I think that I think that we've we kind of have a phobia against the laws. So when we read the old test that we're in a narrative like Ruth, and we somehow can just ignore that this is a very legal heavy narrative and we're able to basically ignore all of that and just read it as a nice harlequin romance, right, Hallmark romance. That's a better way. I said, Well, sorry, like a Hallmark romance that somebody would watch on TV and say, oh, isn't that quaint? Well, yes, it's quaint, but there's something more at stake, and people are trying to live according to God's covenantal will, and so I think part of it is maybe the mechanical issue of you know, reading the cross references in our Bible. But I think the bigger problem that we're up against at the moment is there's sort of a repulsion towards Torah and towards especially the teachings of Torah. And so that that repulsion that a lot of Christians have, they think, oh, I don't want to I'm interested in grace. Well, you know, we have news for people. Torah is God's gift to his people, his covenantal will is the Gospel I mean moving forward. And so I think that we have to both get the mechanics of actually making the connections that are made in the Bible and thinking through the complexities of what are there not to be complex for complexity's sake, but life is messy. And on the other side, to recognize that the Gospel starts way earlier in the Bible, and we don't have to put it in there. We don't have to like find some Kinsman Deemer trick to like push the Gospel into the Bible. It's already there. And so we just have to study the Bible and we have to trust the Lord. And so this progressive revelation then is maybe as much coming out of a value of how we would treat scripture and begin to see the connections that are native to it, not just try to put the message onto it that we want to find. That's a little bit too simplistic, but there's so many you know, I'm just talking about in our day. I'm kind of addressing the Biblical illiteracy which is rampant, and then also some of the related reasons to that, and what we do. We don't bother to undo the biblical illiteracy, We kind of find a way to work in it and accept people's prejudice against God's word.
00:41:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting.
00:41:58
Speaker 1: I mean, the first time you were on the show show, we talked actually about the immoral Torah and your article and jets on this issue, and basically for those of you who haven't listened to that episode, you can go back and find it. But the gist of it was that there's a movement in amongst some Old Testament scholars to mark out a not remove, but.
00:42:17
Speaker 3: Cross out.
00:42:20
Speaker 1: Laws in the Torah that we would deem immoral. And I think that's an extreme case of what you're really talking about here, because the more mundane way of doing is just to say, yes, I know that they're all there. Yes, I know that they're all God's word. It's almost completely irrelevant for anything that I am interested in doing, and so I'm just going to stick somewhere else in the canon and ignore most of that. It's functionally, you know, you're not actually physically crossing anything out, and so it conveys a certain reverence for scripture that maybe the other maybe crossing out versus doesn't, But it's functionally doing the same thing. It's ignoring an aspect of the counsel of God's word that we should not be ignoring. And so, and you're right, I think that is related to a skill level. People tend to get more comfortable. You know, there's a reason I don't read Song of Solomon every day. That's some weird stuff, and I'm just not as good at interpreting that. And so you're going to gravitate to your areas of competence. I think that's a normal thing. But at the same time, it's not like I would say, yeah, I've never read the Song of Solomon before, and I would never read it again, right, And so I think we have to sort of balance somewhere in there, do you think as you wrote your book, and it's got a lot of really helpful charts and layouts and really giving examples of how these things interconnect. Is part of your hope to sort of get people thinking in this way about the Old Testament and helping them to understand how they actually can.
00:43:56
Speaker 3: Think this way about the Old Testament.
00:43:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, this book is the one I really wanted to write. It's and my editor really wanted this too. She's got her PhD In Old Testament, So this is the one that really was driving the others. But I have a book called Old Testament Use of Old Testament, which is a handbook that kind of explains through each book of the Old Testament and sort of the hermeneutical profile of each Biblical author and examples of how they use scripture. I have another book, a co authored book called How to Study the Bible's Use of the Bible, which is really there's seven choices that we need to make in order to interpret the Bible's use of the Bible well, which is one of the hardest things to interpret. But this book that is just coming out this year, Old Testament Use of Old Testament in parallel a out. It's not making an argument, it's laying out the evidence in a new way that will provide a true inductive tool for users. So it's not just like laying it out there in a way that there's some guardrails in a sense, so that the related texture laid out side by side. But there there's a system of color coding so that English Bible readers or seminary students and pastors who have studied Hebrew and Greek, they'll be able to see exactly what is related to each other and what's different. And then also there's suggestions by using red for where the interpretive I guess outcomes are that the author intended, and those kind of put this way in the introduction, the user needs to ask every time they see red, is that where the red goes? Or does it go somewhere else? Right, So there's the cold text is the blue text, and the distinctive text is the black. So the color coding makes it really just jump off the page so that the reader can have real help. But what I've blocked out it doesn't like just talk at the reader and tell the reader here's the answer, here's the answer that's in the other books. So I'm not shy about my views. But this is the inductive study to get the reader's chance to wrestle with the scriptures themselves, but with helps of the reader says, but I don't know what to do. Well, here's the Bible, and it's color coded, it's laid out. You can do something with us.
00:46:58
Speaker 1: It reminded me when I looking through it and just reading through various.
00:47:02
Speaker 3: Aspects of it.
00:47:04
Speaker 1: The synopsis of the Gospels, you know where you have it laid out in Greek and English, and you can compare across the gospels, what's different, what's the same.
00:47:13
Speaker 3: And so I found it really helpful as a reference work. And I think you're right.
00:47:18
Speaker 1: It doesn't make an argument per se, although it's definitely illustrating that this is important work that needs to be done. So very cool. I'm excited for it to come out. When does it release, Gary.
00:47:32
Speaker 2: It comes out in November.
00:47:34
Speaker 1: November, okay, so available on Amazon for pre order, maybe September ish, julyish, something.
00:47:41
Speaker 2: Like that, probably by the end of June.
00:47:44
Speaker 3: By end of June. Okay, here you go.
00:47:48
Speaker 1: Well, I know we didn't cook quite through everything today, but we're going to have you back to talk a little bit about more about Old Testament use in the New Testament, which is honestly seems like the more normal field of study. Normal might be the wrong word, the more popular field of study. People tend to want to see how the testaments connect. But I really find this work Old Testament use in the Old Testament to be fascinating, and so really appreciate your work, Appreciate the conversation, and we'll do this again Old Testament use in the New Testament in the next episode.
00:48:23
Speaker 3: So thanks Gary very much for being here.
00:48:25
Speaker 2: James, thanks for having me on. It's great to have a chance to talk through these things.
00:48:31
Speaker 1: Do me one favor and mention your substack before we leave it.
00:48:36
Speaker 3: Is please, Yeah, go ahead and do that.
00:48:39
Speaker 2: Carpentersstudent dot Com. It's free. There's two s's in the middle, Carpenter's Student dot Com, and that's a place where able to get into some of the behind the scenes things that really can't be done anywhere else. There's no room for that kind of stuff in books or in the classroom.
00:49:00
Speaker 3: Very good. Well, we'll have that linked in the show notes.
00:49:03
Speaker 1: So if you want to check out more from Gary, I'd really recommend going there. I've gotten to read through several of his articles just in preparing for these episodes and finding them really helpful. We'll probably reference one of them in the next couple episodes. Grandparent Texts was probably one of my favorites that he did, and so we'll dive into those. But yeah, I encourage you to check out Gary's work and certainly by the book. We'll have links to everything in the show notes. I believe this episode will have launched after the pre order window, and so we'll probably have the pre order link in there for the zonom book that we've been talking a little bit about this time, so also check that out. So that's it for this episode. Thanks again, Gary for being here, and thanks everybody for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian.
00:49:49
Speaker 3: Take Care.
00:49:50
Speaker 1: Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcas cast in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.
