Aug. 3, 2026
Why Study the Old Testament? Gary Edward Schnittjer on How Scripture Guides the Study of Scripture
Christians have inherited a strange habit of treating the Old Testament as optional. Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer argues that Jesus and the apostles would not have understood the question. There was a gospel, a Messiah, and a church before there was a New Testament, and none of it was possible without the Scriptures Israel already had. Even the word "gospel" comes to Mark by way of Isaiah.
In this episode, Dr. James Spencer talks with Dr. Schnittjer about his new book, Connected: How Scripture Guides the Study of Scripture. The premise is that the Bible already teaches us how to read it. Story teaches us to read story in Deuteronomy 6. Prophecy teaches us to read prophecy in Zechariah 1. Poetry and wisdom teach us to read poetry and wisdom in Psalm 1. Jesus models the whole thing in the synagogue at Nazareth in Luke 4.
Along the way they work through continuity and discontinuity between the testaments, the burden of holiness carried by the priests and what Hebrews does with it, Daniel's need for help understanding Jeremiah, and the strange counterpoint in Jeremiah 44 where survivors of Jerusalem's fall blame Josiah's reforms for the disaster. They close on Deuteronomy as a book that builds an entire culture of Scripture study, from the king who writes his own copy of the law to the whole covenant community gathered every seven years to hear it read.
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 one of a two-part conversation. In the next episode, Dr. Spencer and Dr. Schnittjer turn to Ezra-Nehemiah.
Get Connected: How Scripture Guides the Study of Scripture at
Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined today by doctor Gary Edward Snitcher, and we're going to be talking a little bit about the Old Testament today and particularly his book Connected, How Scripture Guides the Study of Scripture. Gary is also a Distinguished Professor of Old Testament in the School Divinity at Cairn University, and he has a sub stack at Carpentersstudent dot com that's with two s's in the middle, Carpenter's Student dot com, so you can check out more of his work there. Welcome very to the episode. Really happy to have you.
00:00:36
Speaker 2: Back, James. Thank you. I had a good time last time and I really appreciate the invite.
00:00:42
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, So today we're going to discuss a little bit about your book Connected, and part of what I think you do really well and Connected, which is how Scripture Guides the Study of Scripture, is you're looking at these sort of interconnections and why the Old Testament would ever be important to anyone in the first place is now that we have the New Testament. I've delved into this a little bit. I got into the conversation when Andy Stanley published his book Irresistible This is a few years back, and did a couple of pieces on Christianity Dot Calm on it. But I'm interested to hear your take on why would anyone bother studying in the Old Testament. That may be intuitived Old Testament guys, but maybe not to everybody else.
00:01:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll jump into that. Let me start first. This is Connected. Is not a book on the Old Testament, and it's on how to study the Bible according to what the Bible teaches us about studying the Bible. So it's a little bit different than the normal things that are out there and the other thing that some people just project onto it. Because the Bible is connected. That's why I called it connected. Ye, people think of some of my other research sometimes where I work on the Bible's use of the Bible. This book's not on that. This book is about how to study the Bible that's already connected for us and anyway. But it does start in the Old Testament. That's two thirds or three quarters of the Bible.
00:02:14
Speaker 1: A lot of yeah, a lot of it.
00:02:16
Speaker 2: So I think that the even when we ask that question, and I'm not picking on you, I think it's one that presses on us from Christian culture these days. But the question of you know, why study the Old Testament, I think that Jesus and the Apostles and the New Testament authors would think, what's wrong with you for even asking the question? That doesn't even make sense? I mean, I think that what we see across the New Testament is an understanding that there was the Gospel, there was Messiah, there was Christianity before there was a New Testament. But there could never be any of those things without the Old Testament. And so the basic understanding that the Old Testament is the scripture of Christians is just it's almost a prerequisite of sort of the outlook of the New Testament teachers. And I think that you know, just one example, we think of the probably the earliest Gospel Mark, how it begins, right, this is the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God. Even the term gospel Mark's not inventing it. He might be inventing the gospel genre. But he gets that term from Isaiah forty verse nine, because then he begins by quoting very well known sort of mix of these several Old Testament passages from Exodus chapter twenty three, Isaiah forty, and from Malachi chapter three sort of brings them together, and he points to Isaiah saying, you know, this is what Isaiah said, and he talks about the one who comes before. So even the way that Jesus is framed from the very beginning of the earliest Gospel, even the term gospel, all of that comes from the Old Testament. And it was just natural for the Gospel writers for Jesus, for the New Testament authors to read Old Testament forward to its culmination in the teaching, death and Resurrection of our Lord. There was nothing unusual about that. So I think the unusual thing is somehow, you know, all these centuries later, here we are amid these Christians who loved the New Testament, as we should, but somehow Christians have given the Old Testament sort of a bad rap, which is very ironic to say it is.
00:05:07
Speaker 1: I remember, I think it was my PhD program. I had a class called Continuities and Discontinuities, and it assumed the connectivity of the scriptures. But then you have these discussions about how contiguous is the Old Testament with the New Testament. Where does it actually remain interwoven across, and when is there a more stark disconnection between the two. How do you think about that? Inconnected? Like when you're when you're looking at the scriptures as connected, do you see points of true discontinuity or disconnection between the Old and the Testament or do you view it more as a as a total outgrowth across.
00:05:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I want to be clear for listeners, this is not a technical book. There's a very introductory book, but certainly the more technical, whether you fraindaimed, it undergoes it all. But yeah, I think that probably connected. You can hear it in the title is emphasizing continuity. And so one of the things that comes up in one of the early chapters is how we need to read the Bible in its interconnected way. So I use Nehemiah chapter nine, the Prayer of the Levites, and connect that with Acts chapter thirteen, Paul's first recorded sermon in the scriptures, and those are two retrospective, panoramic sorts of things, and so they tell the big story between them. The big story is the Gospel story. And looking at these two biblical stories for framing the Biblical story, you can see three parts really Torrah story, Israel story, and Messiah story, and those three parts together Torres story, Israel story, Gospel, Messiah story, they make the gospel story of the entire scriptures. And so one of the things that connected emphasizes is how we need to read each book, each passage within that biblical framework. So I think the dominant emphasis of certainly this approach to studying the Bible is more focusing on the continuity. But your question is really important. I mean, the thing that we always that gives us pause is just the surprising uniqueness of when God condescended to the incarnation in Christ. There's something new and bold that just can't be constrained. Right. That's where we don't want to just do continuity. We have I say, no, no, no, There's something new and a culmination of all God's revelation in Christ. So it just feels almost wrong to just, you know, look at what God has done in the Gospel of Christ and not see some measure discontinuity is not a friendly word, but to feel a sense of surprise and just a jarring that you know, the hinge of history is right there.
00:08:31
Speaker 1: Yeah. I just I just finished teaching on Hebrews. I did a I'd run a Bible stay on Wednesday morning, so I just finished reading on Hebrews. And what I was sort of struck with this time around was this notion that the author of Hebrews in talking about the good and the better or the copy, the shadow and the substance sort of ideas, right, what I came across this time and I just said, you know, we're we're not looking at Let's say he described the Temple and being in this outer court and not being able to enter into the Holy of Holies. It's very Old Testament language. You can't understand what even is going on there without looking back to the Old Testament and understanding it. But then the author of Hebrews paints this tension of because we're still in the outer court. We know that we're not we have not yet arrived where we really desire to be. But there's no sense in which he's saying the outer court is bad. This is a gift for which we should be grateful for. But at the same time, it's a gift that points us towards something better that's coming. And I think that some of that would be stronger framing in a discontinuity. It emphasizes this deep connection, but it doesn't flatten that connection to say it has to be uniform. No, no, no, it can be an advancement, it can get better, but it can't be really disconnected so in or woven. So I don't know thoughts on that.
00:10:02
Speaker 2: I just yeah, I think that that's a good example, because you know, at the outer Court we're already talking about the chosen people. We're talking about the covenantal relationship to be able to come into God's courts. But you know, thinking before there was the New Testament, at the Tabernacle, or at the First Temple, or at the Second Temple, there's the priests, and so coming into the courts is not to be a priest right. The priests are called specially to bear the burden of holiness, and I don't think today's Christians quite get that special burden that the priests alone had to bear, and they had to be very careful not to transmit holiness that was their birth onto the people. So they had the disrobe before they came out so that the holy garments wouldn't transmit holiness, and those cause things that weren't set apart that is owned by God to become holy. And so then the you know, once there was that whole debacle in numbers, especially chapter sixteen and seventeen, and God again says after that whole uprising with Cora and the other rebels were swallowed, God says through the Aaron's staff, butting, I chose Aaron. Now stop it. Yeah, And then chapter eighteen the teaching goes into reinforcing again the burden of holiness, that's the priests. And now the Levites are seen not just as carrying stuff through the desert, though they certainly started to do that, and they didn't always like that, but they're they're also to protect the people from coming into too close to God's presence and being struck down. For it's only the priests who were called to bear the burden of holiness. And so, you know, transt forwarding to the letter the Hebrews, it's that there certainly is a discontinuity in one sense, right because all of a sudden, you know what, why would you want to go past the courts right into this right holy place where people are struck down. So there is something very new that has happened because of what Christ has done. But it's it's still best framed by thinking through it with the analogy of God's covenantal relationship with his people at the temple where his glory dwells.
00:12:49
Speaker 1: And so when you think through it like that, is that sort of what you mean when you're saying that scripture is going to guide the study of scripture? You know, you said it. This is differentiated from the work you do more inter biblical interpretation, you know, used to the Old Testament, the New and those kind of fun things. So is that is that sort of thrust this this deeper understanding of how the priests, for instance, are functioning in the Old Testament now drawing forward and helping us understand the mantle that we take on a gift we've been given. However, we're going to phrase that within the New Testament under the New Covenant. Is that sort of an example of what you mean or would you explain it in a different way?
00:13:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, that might be a pre understanding of say, the big story that I was talking about a few minutes ago, But no, it's this is more nuts and both than that. This is even before that. This is probably I can think about it this way that it's right. We want to frame everything centered on the gospel story of the entire Bible. But then the book, really the main chapters go through genre by genre in the Bible, and we learn how to interpret story from the way a biblical story teaches us to interpret the biblical story. Look at say Deuteronomy chapter six, where you know, one day your children will ask you, what's the meaning of this commandment and it's alluding their back to the Ten Commandments, and the parent is instructed us to tell a story and to show how the story relates to this covenental relationship. Or again, in let's say Zachariah one, here's a prophetic oracle, but it's about studying prophetic oracles, and so it challenges us and shows us how to study prophecy in the prophecy, or in ps one, where there's wisdom and there's study of scripture, and that shows us how to study poetry and wisdom in the poetic wisdom. Intro to Palms Luke for is a really great example one of my favorite chapters where Christ is there in the synagogue of his hometown and he's teaching from Isaiah, and just this spectacular teaching from Isaiah sixty one. But right in Isaiah sixty one, the Lord scrolls back to Isaiah fifty eight six and just inserts this connection based on a catchphrase, and then finishes this out with Isaiah sixty one. And so the Lord there is upsetting his hometown for sure, but he's showing us something about how to interpret scripture. And he finds the message that really upsets them, that the good News has always been there for the gentiles. He finds that in the Old Testament stories of Elijah and Elijah, and that's what really moves the congregation at Nazareth from sarcasm to sort of this collective homicidal action. And of course Jesus just walks away. But that whole thing is set up by Lucas as was his custom to do. I mean, this is what Jesus did. He studied scripture, and so that's a good example of how to study scripture from the scriptures. Yeah, you know, I think that there's chapter on how to read Paul's Letters. From Paul's Letters, how to read if you will Visions new and old and there. You know, it's a tricky chapter to write for an introductory book, but focus on Daniel studying Jeremiah in Daniel chapter nine. Yeah, and the one of the important things that comes out of that chapter. And I have to confess it myself, you know, writing a chapter on Daniel, and I've had to do it a few times in my adult life. It's scary. I've had to ask for help from my Daniel friends who are specialists in Daniel, and Daniel himself he needs help when he gets these visions. And so that's one of the important things for us too, for especially when we're getting started and studying the scriptures, is you know, when we're in these really hard genres, we need to be careful to ask for help and seek guidance and get what we need so that we don't go off the rails into some weird stuff.
00:17:50
Speaker 1: I think one of the texts there are several texts that come to mind when you're describing that, right, I could go back to Exodus fifteen, which I think is just this beautiful re rendering of what we've read in the you know, the narrative prior to it.
00:18:06
Speaker 2: It is, but it's actually in a reverse order, right, because the song is first.
00:18:09
Speaker 1: It's first, that's told later. Yes, you probably make a similar kind of observation on Hannah's song and for Samuel. You know, the themes that are included in Hammond's song tend to recur throughout the rest of this narrative. They provide a framework through which we are guided into the interpretation of why is David doing the way he's doing things, the way he's doing things. What is this really trying to do as narrative literature that you might get a sense of if that song or if that that song wasn't there, but the song just makes it so explicit. Yeah, you know, but the one I one I'm really thinking of that I think is kind of interesting now that you you've kind of talked through this is the narrative of Josiah's reforms. He gets the law, like, he rediscovers the law of God, and what does he do. He goes about reforming even though God tells him these reforms are not going to save the people, not going to save the nation. He continues reforming. And it just strikes me that that's a really fascinating way to think about what you're talking about, this deep connection of scripture. You know, how to study scripture through the scriptures Josiah's reading the law, and his conclusion is that the law doing the law, doing what is right by God, as an end in itself. It doesn't need further justification, it doesn't need a pragmatic or utilitarian outcome. It doesn't have to be quote unquote successful. So there's just a few narratives that come to mind as you talk through that.
00:19:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that you're right on it that. I think that we have a lot Every publishing house has this. There's so many books on interpreting the scripture. So in part yeah, almost, why in the world would you write another book. I have plenty of other things to do, but this particular book has been on my mind for decades. I mean, just to use the scriptures. They're teaching on how to study the scriptures, to study the scriptures, I think that I think that we've looked all sorts of things to help us study the scriptures. Lots and lots of clever and wonderful books out there. Yeah, but I don't think we've put enough time into the tools that are right there in scripture. And I think that we need to because if we think about what the later Old Testament authors, we can tell by the way that they quote scripture so much and the way that the New Testament authors are building through earlier scriptures, that reading scripture with scripture was just the natural way, and that's one of the reasons why there's such great continuity throughout the scriptures. Yeah, you know, this whole Josiah thing that you bring up is a wonderful example. There's several terrific things about it. When I when Josiah hears the scripture, he does something very different than jehoia Kim does when he hears Jeremiah read. He Johakaen tears the scriptures and burns them. Yeah, worse than just Baruk, the scribe of Jeremiah and Jeremiah that just reread it. Whereas there's a connection there where Josiah tears his clothing and so there's you know there, he really sees something from this youthful age where he wants to reform his kingdom in a Torah shape, and he probably succeeds better than any king before him because he legislates a tor shaped kingdom and it's you know, it's a high point. But it's also written in kings from a maybe forty thousand feet view, because we don't get into the weeds and find out how people feel. But it's in Jeremiah forty four, where after Jerusalem has been destroyed and Jeremiah has he's stuck with these people who are left behind, and they say to him, should we go to Egypt? He says no, and they take them to Egypt anyway, and they're in Egypt, and then the people there in the middle of Jeremiah forty four they say, and so this is where the Bible is wonderful. It gives us a counterpoint. From the counterpoints perspective, the women and men both say, hey, none of this happened when we used to worship the Queen of Heaven. It was when we stopped worshiping the Queen of Heaven that all these terrible things happen. So we're not going to listen to you, Jeremiah. And so we're left forward because the only thing that they could be talking about is Josiah's reforms when he said stop worshiping the Queen of Heaven.
00:22:58
Speaker 1: That's right.
00:23:00
Speaker 2: And then these are eyewitnesses who saw the destruction of Jerusalem, they lived in its last days, that were there for Josiah's reform, and they're blaming Josiah. They're blaming Jeremiah for this exclusive monotheism that's what ruined everything. And we're reading the scriptures like saying, well, Jeremiah, if he doesn't get it yet, he's got it that these people are never going to get it.
00:23:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
00:23:27
Speaker 2: It's just an extraordinary moment in the history of Israel that there's so many angles that the Bible takes on Josiah's reform right there before the fall of Jerusalem.
00:23:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great. I wonder how you think about a book like Deuteronomy. So I did my dissertation on the Sabbath Commands, and it's you know, it's one of these tensions in Old Testament scholarship because you have some people who advocate sort of reading the pentitud backwards. Right, Deuteronomy is almost the interpretive key to the rest of the Pentituke and then you know, you obviously have the canonical order and the narrative structure that's leading you all the way down to Deuteronomy. My tendency is not to choose either one, but to kind of let both play on each other. But when I do read something like the Sabbath commands. You know, I kind of sit back and say, this is an interesting riff. Right, Deuteronomy switches things up and roots it in the Exodus, adds a couple of other little pieces, whereas the Exodus command is rooted in creation, it's looking back to that. But it's this beautiful connection between all these different events you have. You moved from Creation, which obviously ends in Sabbath, through Exodus after the Israelites have been delivered, then into Deuteronomy on the cusp, and they're reminded not that God is the creator necessarily, but they're reminded that he is the one who has redeemed them slavery. And so there's a beautiful interwoveness about that. But I'm wondering just if you can wax philosophical a little bit on Deuteronomy and how how you think about Deuteronomy is helping us study other scriptures.
00:25:09
Speaker 2: Well, first let me just say I love those are PhD studies.
00:25:14
Speaker 1: That was my PhD studies.
00:25:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So everybody out there, if you're a doctoral student, you heard it. You heard it here both and that's what you do. That's right, both and and there's your dissertation topic, right.
00:25:27
Speaker 1: There exactly. There's a lot of room in the both and space.
00:25:31
Speaker 2: Nice job, James, Well, yeah, let's pick up on that perhaps. But I think if I were to think about more of the kind of thing that's going on and connected, uh, I think that sort of this recycle ten commandments as part of it. But Deuteronomy sets up a culture of scripture study. So we have we have at the great command to love Yahweh. There is the teaching to instruct your children the next generation everywhere, all the time, no matter what you do. And when we think about prophets, right, they have to teach. This is Deudonomy thirteen in acord with Torah. And if they don't, that's how you know they're a false prophets. The prophets aren't being innovative, they're being very conservative. And the Levites in Deuteronomy twenty three, they're set apart to teach Israel and kings are defined in Deuteronomy seventeen as they have lots of jobs to do. There's some stuff they shouldn't do. Don't marry too many women, don't have too much wealth, and spend your days studying scripture. And so you think about the Great institutions of prophet, priest, king, they're all scripture oriented. Deuteronomy twenty seven looks ahead to a specific monument that's going to have the tour written on it when the people get into the land of Promise. Deudonomy thirty one talks about not only the covenant, the tourist roll being set by the ark of the covenant. And we have to notice what Deuteronomy thirty one says there to bear witness against you. Yeah, not only that, but that set a little bit after the people are told gather every seven years, and it's the whole Covenental community. So it's right, the men, the women, the children, yes, and the residing foreigners. And that connects back to your Sabbath command, where it's not just the slave owner, the household, the men that get off. Everybody gets off.
00:27:49
Speaker 1: Everybody gets off, everybody.
00:27:50
Speaker 2: Gets off, the work animals, the slaves, the residing foreigners. And then they're all part of the Covenental community. So even the the Covenental gentile element, if you will, they're there gathered to read scripture. So when we talk about Deuteronomy, I think there's a culture of scripture study that's a part of this generation that needs to go in and do God's will and live in the labit he set apart for them. So it imagines a scripture centered sort of way of life. When they think about Deuteronomy.
00:28:32
Speaker 1: I will say, it's interesting you bring that up, because whenever I talk about biblical authority I've been it's not like I never reference, you know, inspiration in the New Testament. You know, Second twenty three sixteen, and you know that passage. We all know it's, you know, useful for rebuke and instruction and all that kind of good stuff. I almost always go back to Deuteronomy seventeen. This instruction of the king to write his own copy of the law. It's compelling interesting write your own copy, but then also have it authorized by the priests. So there's a reminder that the king is not writing his own copy and it has to match all the other copies, right, and that this is under the auspices of the priest, and they're going to check this for the king to make sure that he's studying the right things. And so there's a real sacred social order that's in place there that's reminding the king that his job is to reflect God's sovereignty on earth to some degree, he is God's reflection and servant in that moment, and then he's reading scripture day by day in order to learn to fear the Lord. And so when we just think about the dynamics of that little passage there, and why studying scripture is so crucial, it's like the character that is being formed in that king is the character that is trying to be formed in us when we read the text. And I think it's just a little bit easier of an example to understand. I'm finding the dynamics there are such that you have, you know, this high figure in society who is now subjecting himself to the Word of God, sitting himself within the within the priests who sort of represent that holiness, who carry the holiness community, and then ultimately just getting so familiar with the Word that ultimately he comes to fear the Lord. I find that passage so fascinating. So I'm glad you brought that up.
00:30:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's I mean, it's part of this culture of scripture study, but it's you know, it's very different. I love how you've thought through that in place that I haven't thought of some of those things, Jams, I hope I can write them down when we're done before I forgot. But I think that's.
00:30:45
Speaker 1: It.
00:30:46
Speaker 2: You know, there's there's not sort of a how to like be a good king exactly. The important part is aligning ones for the king to align himself with Torah, with God's word, and that's what takes priority. I'm sure that the king needed help with the other stuff, probably, yeah, but that's not what on Moses's last day on this earth, that's not what he talked about. He talked about a few things, make sure you don't do this, this and this, but he spent most of his time talking about studying scripture.
00:31:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, such a crucial aspect, I think, especially today as where we're in this sort of tech age where you do get a lot more messaging. And I don't think it's a I don't think that's a new problem, right, We've always had to your point, you know, the Queen of Heaven, that message was out there, right, that would have been a temptation for the Israelites at that point. They're looking at this and saying, wow, life was better under the Queen of Heaven than it was under the Lord, and we should have made different choices with our lives and so but I do think the intensity is ramped up, and I think that it's just crucial for us to get into the Biblical text, understand how it reads itself, and also learn to read it well for ourselves.
00:32:10
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's that's the gist of this book. And again again I would say to any of your viewers that if you've not thought enough about how the scripture is connected, this this book might help. But it's also something that's designed in a way for teachers, and whether in a church context or in a study context, or even academic context, this is a different way to look at how to study the Bible. And it's this is on the bottom shelf.
00:32:46
Speaker 1: This is.
00:32:48
Speaker 2: A person doesn't have to know anything to use connected And but you know, so this is maybe the one book that my mom can actually read and say, oh, you know what you're talking about. Yeah, most of my books don't put them in your grandmother's stocking, but this one not so bad.
00:33:11
Speaker 1: No, that's helpful, And I think it's going to be interesting. We're gonna close shop on this episode, but I think in the next episode we're gonna be talking about Ezra and Yamaya, And so my mind is sort of raising a little bit because you know, you have Ezra teaching the law to the people an awful lot, and so I think this sort of primes the pump for this in the next episode. I encourage folks to go out and get connected how scripture guides the study of scripture. This is something that's really important to me, is like just helping the church understand what God's words says and following the patterns that we find within it. And so just encourage you to get that. The link will be in the show description, so you can click there and purchase that book. It's on Amazon, and I'm sure of various other sites. Check out Gary's substack again, carpentersstudent dot com. That's with two s's Carpenters in the plural student dot com. It's probably not in the plural. I guessing there's an apostrophees, but you don't do that on websites, So Carpenters student dot com and yeah, go check out, go check out Gary's other writing. Really appreciate you being here today, Thanks again for coming on the show, and we'll see you in the next episode.
00:34:20
Speaker 2: Yeah. Thanks Jims real pleasure.
00:34:22
Speaker 1: All right, come back and see us next time. Everybody, take care,
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined today by doctor Gary Edward Snitcher, and we're going to be talking a little bit about the Old Testament today and particularly his book Connected, How Scripture Guides the Study of Scripture. Gary is also a Distinguished Professor of Old Testament in the School Divinity at Cairn University, and he has a sub stack at Carpentersstudent dot com that's with two s's in the middle, Carpenter's Student dot com, so you can check out more of his work there. Welcome very to the episode. Really happy to have you.
00:00:36
Speaker 2: Back, James. Thank you. I had a good time last time and I really appreciate the invite.
00:00:42
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, So today we're going to discuss a little bit about your book Connected, and part of what I think you do really well and Connected, which is how Scripture Guides the Study of Scripture, is you're looking at these sort of interconnections and why the Old Testament would ever be important to anyone in the first place is now that we have the New Testament. I've delved into this a little bit. I got into the conversation when Andy Stanley published his book Irresistible This is a few years back, and did a couple of pieces on Christianity Dot Calm on it. But I'm interested to hear your take on why would anyone bother studying in the Old Testament. That may be intuitived Old Testament guys, but maybe not to everybody else.
00:01:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll jump into that. Let me start first. This is Connected. Is not a book on the Old Testament, and it's on how to study the Bible according to what the Bible teaches us about studying the Bible. So it's a little bit different than the normal things that are out there and the other thing that some people just project onto it. Because the Bible is connected. That's why I called it connected. Ye, people think of some of my other research sometimes where I work on the Bible's use of the Bible. This book's not on that. This book is about how to study the Bible that's already connected for us and anyway. But it does start in the Old Testament. That's two thirds or three quarters of the Bible.
00:02:14
Speaker 1: A lot of yeah, a lot of it.
00:02:16
Speaker 2: So I think that the even when we ask that question, and I'm not picking on you, I think it's one that presses on us from Christian culture these days. But the question of you know, why study the Old Testament, I think that Jesus and the Apostles and the New Testament authors would think, what's wrong with you for even asking the question? That doesn't even make sense? I mean, I think that what we see across the New Testament is an understanding that there was the Gospel, there was Messiah, there was Christianity before there was a New Testament. But there could never be any of those things without the Old Testament. And so the basic understanding that the Old Testament is the scripture of Christians is just it's almost a prerequisite of sort of the outlook of the New Testament teachers. And I think that you know, just one example, we think of the probably the earliest Gospel Mark, how it begins, right, this is the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God. Even the term gospel Mark's not inventing it. He might be inventing the gospel genre. But he gets that term from Isaiah forty verse nine, because then he begins by quoting very well known sort of mix of these several Old Testament passages from Exodus chapter twenty three, Isaiah forty, and from Malachi chapter three sort of brings them together, and he points to Isaiah saying, you know, this is what Isaiah said, and he talks about the one who comes before. So even the way that Jesus is framed from the very beginning of the earliest Gospel, even the term gospel, all of that comes from the Old Testament. And it was just natural for the Gospel writers for Jesus, for the New Testament authors to read Old Testament forward to its culmination in the teaching, death and Resurrection of our Lord. There was nothing unusual about that. So I think the unusual thing is somehow, you know, all these centuries later, here we are amid these Christians who loved the New Testament, as we should, but somehow Christians have given the Old Testament sort of a bad rap, which is very ironic to say it is.
00:05:07
Speaker 1: I remember, I think it was my PhD program. I had a class called Continuities and Discontinuities, and it assumed the connectivity of the scriptures. But then you have these discussions about how contiguous is the Old Testament with the New Testament. Where does it actually remain interwoven across, and when is there a more stark disconnection between the two. How do you think about that? Inconnected? Like when you're when you're looking at the scriptures as connected, do you see points of true discontinuity or disconnection between the Old and the Testament or do you view it more as a as a total outgrowth across.
00:05:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I want to be clear for listeners, this is not a technical book. There's a very introductory book, but certainly the more technical, whether you fraindaimed, it undergoes it all. But yeah, I think that probably connected. You can hear it in the title is emphasizing continuity. And so one of the things that comes up in one of the early chapters is how we need to read the Bible in its interconnected way. So I use Nehemiah chapter nine, the Prayer of the Levites, and connect that with Acts chapter thirteen, Paul's first recorded sermon in the scriptures, and those are two retrospective, panoramic sorts of things, and so they tell the big story between them. The big story is the Gospel story. And looking at these two biblical stories for framing the Biblical story, you can see three parts really Torrah story, Israel story, and Messiah story, and those three parts together Torres story, Israel story, Gospel, Messiah story, they make the gospel story of the entire scriptures. And so one of the things that connected emphasizes is how we need to read each book, each passage within that biblical framework. So I think the dominant emphasis of certainly this approach to studying the Bible is more focusing on the continuity. But your question is really important. I mean, the thing that we always that gives us pause is just the surprising uniqueness of when God condescended to the incarnation in Christ. There's something new and bold that just can't be constrained. Right. That's where we don't want to just do continuity. We have I say, no, no, no, There's something new and a culmination of all God's revelation in Christ. So it just feels almost wrong to just, you know, look at what God has done in the Gospel of Christ and not see some measure discontinuity is not a friendly word, but to feel a sense of surprise and just a jarring that you know, the hinge of history is right there.
00:08:31
Speaker 1: Yeah. I just I just finished teaching on Hebrews. I did a I'd run a Bible stay on Wednesday morning, so I just finished reading on Hebrews. And what I was sort of struck with this time around was this notion that the author of Hebrews in talking about the good and the better or the copy, the shadow and the substance sort of ideas, right, what I came across this time and I just said, you know, we're we're not looking at Let's say he described the Temple and being in this outer court and not being able to enter into the Holy of Holies. It's very Old Testament language. You can't understand what even is going on there without looking back to the Old Testament and understanding it. But then the author of Hebrews paints this tension of because we're still in the outer court. We know that we're not we have not yet arrived where we really desire to be. But there's no sense in which he's saying the outer court is bad. This is a gift for which we should be grateful for. But at the same time, it's a gift that points us towards something better that's coming. And I think that some of that would be stronger framing in a discontinuity. It emphasizes this deep connection, but it doesn't flatten that connection to say it has to be uniform. No, no, no, it can be an advancement, it can get better, but it can't be really disconnected so in or woven. So I don't know thoughts on that.
00:10:02
Speaker 2: I just yeah, I think that that's a good example, because you know, at the outer Court we're already talking about the chosen people. We're talking about the covenantal relationship to be able to come into God's courts. But you know, thinking before there was the New Testament, at the Tabernacle, or at the First Temple, or at the Second Temple, there's the priests, and so coming into the courts is not to be a priest right. The priests are called specially to bear the burden of holiness, and I don't think today's Christians quite get that special burden that the priests alone had to bear, and they had to be very careful not to transmit holiness that was their birth onto the people. So they had the disrobe before they came out so that the holy garments wouldn't transmit holiness, and those cause things that weren't set apart that is owned by God to become holy. And so then the you know, once there was that whole debacle in numbers, especially chapter sixteen and seventeen, and God again says after that whole uprising with Cora and the other rebels were swallowed, God says through the Aaron's staff, butting, I chose Aaron. Now stop it. Yeah, And then chapter eighteen the teaching goes into reinforcing again the burden of holiness, that's the priests. And now the Levites are seen not just as carrying stuff through the desert, though they certainly started to do that, and they didn't always like that, but they're they're also to protect the people from coming into too close to God's presence and being struck down. For it's only the priests who were called to bear the burden of holiness. And so, you know, transt forwarding to the letter the Hebrews, it's that there certainly is a discontinuity in one sense, right because all of a sudden, you know what, why would you want to go past the courts right into this right holy place where people are struck down. So there is something very new that has happened because of what Christ has done. But it's it's still best framed by thinking through it with the analogy of God's covenantal relationship with his people at the temple where his glory dwells.
00:12:49
Speaker 1: And so when you think through it like that, is that sort of what you mean when you're saying that scripture is going to guide the study of scripture? You know, you said it. This is differentiated from the work you do more inter biblical interpretation, you know, used to the Old Testament, the New and those kind of fun things. So is that is that sort of thrust this this deeper understanding of how the priests, for instance, are functioning in the Old Testament now drawing forward and helping us understand the mantle that we take on a gift we've been given. However, we're going to phrase that within the New Testament under the New Covenant. Is that sort of an example of what you mean or would you explain it in a different way?
00:13:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, that might be a pre understanding of say, the big story that I was talking about a few minutes ago, But no, it's this is more nuts and both than that. This is even before that. This is probably I can think about it this way that it's right. We want to frame everything centered on the gospel story of the entire Bible. But then the book, really the main chapters go through genre by genre in the Bible, and we learn how to interpret story from the way a biblical story teaches us to interpret the biblical story. Look at say Deuteronomy chapter six, where you know, one day your children will ask you, what's the meaning of this commandment and it's alluding their back to the Ten Commandments, and the parent is instructed us to tell a story and to show how the story relates to this covenental relationship. Or again, in let's say Zachariah one, here's a prophetic oracle, but it's about studying prophetic oracles, and so it challenges us and shows us how to study prophecy in the prophecy, or in ps one, where there's wisdom and there's study of scripture, and that shows us how to study poetry and wisdom in the poetic wisdom. Intro to Palms Luke for is a really great example one of my favorite chapters where Christ is there in the synagogue of his hometown and he's teaching from Isaiah, and just this spectacular teaching from Isaiah sixty one. But right in Isaiah sixty one, the Lord scrolls back to Isaiah fifty eight six and just inserts this connection based on a catchphrase, and then finishes this out with Isaiah sixty one. And so the Lord there is upsetting his hometown for sure, but he's showing us something about how to interpret scripture. And he finds the message that really upsets them, that the good News has always been there for the gentiles. He finds that in the Old Testament stories of Elijah and Elijah, and that's what really moves the congregation at Nazareth from sarcasm to sort of this collective homicidal action. And of course Jesus just walks away. But that whole thing is set up by Lucas as was his custom to do. I mean, this is what Jesus did. He studied scripture, and so that's a good example of how to study scripture from the scriptures. Yeah, you know, I think that there's chapter on how to read Paul's Letters. From Paul's Letters, how to read if you will Visions new and old and there. You know, it's a tricky chapter to write for an introductory book, but focus on Daniel studying Jeremiah in Daniel chapter nine. Yeah, and the one of the important things that comes out of that chapter. And I have to confess it myself, you know, writing a chapter on Daniel, and I've had to do it a few times in my adult life. It's scary. I've had to ask for help from my Daniel friends who are specialists in Daniel, and Daniel himself he needs help when he gets these visions. And so that's one of the important things for us too, for especially when we're getting started and studying the scriptures, is you know, when we're in these really hard genres, we need to be careful to ask for help and seek guidance and get what we need so that we don't go off the rails into some weird stuff.
00:17:50
Speaker 1: I think one of the texts there are several texts that come to mind when you're describing that, right, I could go back to Exodus fifteen, which I think is just this beautiful re rendering of what we've read in the you know, the narrative prior to it.
00:18:06
Speaker 2: It is, but it's actually in a reverse order, right, because the song is first.
00:18:09
Speaker 1: It's first, that's told later. Yes, you probably make a similar kind of observation on Hannah's song and for Samuel. You know, the themes that are included in Hammond's song tend to recur throughout the rest of this narrative. They provide a framework through which we are guided into the interpretation of why is David doing the way he's doing things, the way he's doing things. What is this really trying to do as narrative literature that you might get a sense of if that song or if that that song wasn't there, but the song just makes it so explicit. Yeah, you know, but the one I one I'm really thinking of that I think is kind of interesting now that you you've kind of talked through this is the narrative of Josiah's reforms. He gets the law, like, he rediscovers the law of God, and what does he do. He goes about reforming even though God tells him these reforms are not going to save the people, not going to save the nation. He continues reforming. And it just strikes me that that's a really fascinating way to think about what you're talking about, this deep connection of scripture. You know, how to study scripture through the scriptures Josiah's reading the law, and his conclusion is that the law doing the law, doing what is right by God, as an end in itself. It doesn't need further justification, it doesn't need a pragmatic or utilitarian outcome. It doesn't have to be quote unquote successful. So there's just a few narratives that come to mind as you talk through that.
00:19:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that you're right on it that. I think that we have a lot Every publishing house has this. There's so many books on interpreting the scripture. So in part yeah, almost, why in the world would you write another book. I have plenty of other things to do, but this particular book has been on my mind for decades. I mean, just to use the scriptures. They're teaching on how to study the scriptures, to study the scriptures, I think that I think that we've looked all sorts of things to help us study the scriptures. Lots and lots of clever and wonderful books out there. Yeah, but I don't think we've put enough time into the tools that are right there in scripture. And I think that we need to because if we think about what the later Old Testament authors, we can tell by the way that they quote scripture so much and the way that the New Testament authors are building through earlier scriptures, that reading scripture with scripture was just the natural way, and that's one of the reasons why there's such great continuity throughout the scriptures. Yeah, you know, this whole Josiah thing that you bring up is a wonderful example. There's several terrific things about it. When I when Josiah hears the scripture, he does something very different than jehoia Kim does when he hears Jeremiah read. He Johakaen tears the scriptures and burns them. Yeah, worse than just Baruk, the scribe of Jeremiah and Jeremiah that just reread it. Whereas there's a connection there where Josiah tears his clothing and so there's you know there, he really sees something from this youthful age where he wants to reform his kingdom in a Torah shape, and he probably succeeds better than any king before him because he legislates a tor shaped kingdom and it's you know, it's a high point. But it's also written in kings from a maybe forty thousand feet view, because we don't get into the weeds and find out how people feel. But it's in Jeremiah forty four, where after Jerusalem has been destroyed and Jeremiah has he's stuck with these people who are left behind, and they say to him, should we go to Egypt? He says no, and they take them to Egypt anyway, and they're in Egypt, and then the people there in the middle of Jeremiah forty four they say, and so this is where the Bible is wonderful. It gives us a counterpoint. From the counterpoints perspective, the women and men both say, hey, none of this happened when we used to worship the Queen of Heaven. It was when we stopped worshiping the Queen of Heaven that all these terrible things happen. So we're not going to listen to you, Jeremiah. And so we're left forward because the only thing that they could be talking about is Josiah's reforms when he said stop worshiping the Queen of Heaven.
00:22:58
Speaker 1: That's right.
00:23:00
Speaker 2: And then these are eyewitnesses who saw the destruction of Jerusalem, they lived in its last days, that were there for Josiah's reform, and they're blaming Josiah. They're blaming Jeremiah for this exclusive monotheism that's what ruined everything. And we're reading the scriptures like saying, well, Jeremiah, if he doesn't get it yet, he's got it that these people are never going to get it.
00:23:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
00:23:27
Speaker 2: It's just an extraordinary moment in the history of Israel that there's so many angles that the Bible takes on Josiah's reform right there before the fall of Jerusalem.
00:23:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great. I wonder how you think about a book like Deuteronomy. So I did my dissertation on the Sabbath Commands, and it's you know, it's one of these tensions in Old Testament scholarship because you have some people who advocate sort of reading the pentitud backwards. Right, Deuteronomy is almost the interpretive key to the rest of the Pentituke and then you know, you obviously have the canonical order and the narrative structure that's leading you all the way down to Deuteronomy. My tendency is not to choose either one, but to kind of let both play on each other. But when I do read something like the Sabbath commands. You know, I kind of sit back and say, this is an interesting riff. Right, Deuteronomy switches things up and roots it in the Exodus, adds a couple of other little pieces, whereas the Exodus command is rooted in creation, it's looking back to that. But it's this beautiful connection between all these different events you have. You moved from Creation, which obviously ends in Sabbath, through Exodus after the Israelites have been delivered, then into Deuteronomy on the cusp, and they're reminded not that God is the creator necessarily, but they're reminded that he is the one who has redeemed them slavery. And so there's a beautiful interwoveness about that. But I'm wondering just if you can wax philosophical a little bit on Deuteronomy and how how you think about Deuteronomy is helping us study other scriptures.
00:25:09
Speaker 2: Well, first let me just say I love those are PhD studies.
00:25:14
Speaker 1: That was my PhD studies.
00:25:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So everybody out there, if you're a doctoral student, you heard it. You heard it here both and that's what you do. That's right, both and and there's your dissertation topic, right.
00:25:27
Speaker 1: There exactly. There's a lot of room in the both and space.
00:25:31
Speaker 2: Nice job, James, Well, yeah, let's pick up on that perhaps. But I think if I were to think about more of the kind of thing that's going on and connected, uh, I think that sort of this recycle ten commandments as part of it. But Deuteronomy sets up a culture of scripture study. So we have we have at the great command to love Yahweh. There is the teaching to instruct your children the next generation everywhere, all the time, no matter what you do. And when we think about prophets, right, they have to teach. This is Deudonomy thirteen in acord with Torah. And if they don't, that's how you know they're a false prophets. The prophets aren't being innovative, they're being very conservative. And the Levites in Deuteronomy twenty three, they're set apart to teach Israel and kings are defined in Deuteronomy seventeen as they have lots of jobs to do. There's some stuff they shouldn't do. Don't marry too many women, don't have too much wealth, and spend your days studying scripture. And so you think about the Great institutions of prophet, priest, king, they're all scripture oriented. Deuteronomy twenty seven looks ahead to a specific monument that's going to have the tour written on it when the people get into the land of Promise. Deudonomy thirty one talks about not only the covenant, the tourist roll being set by the ark of the covenant. And we have to notice what Deuteronomy thirty one says there to bear witness against you. Yeah, not only that, but that set a little bit after the people are told gather every seven years, and it's the whole Covenental community. So it's right, the men, the women, the children, yes, and the residing foreigners. And that connects back to your Sabbath command, where it's not just the slave owner, the household, the men that get off. Everybody gets off.
00:27:49
Speaker 1: Everybody gets off, everybody.
00:27:50
Speaker 2: Gets off, the work animals, the slaves, the residing foreigners. And then they're all part of the Covenental community. So even the the Covenental gentile element, if you will, they're there gathered to read scripture. So when we talk about Deuteronomy, I think there's a culture of scripture study that's a part of this generation that needs to go in and do God's will and live in the labit he set apart for them. So it imagines a scripture centered sort of way of life. When they think about Deuteronomy.
00:28:32
Speaker 1: I will say, it's interesting you bring that up, because whenever I talk about biblical authority I've been it's not like I never reference, you know, inspiration in the New Testament. You know, Second twenty three sixteen, and you know that passage. We all know it's, you know, useful for rebuke and instruction and all that kind of good stuff. I almost always go back to Deuteronomy seventeen. This instruction of the king to write his own copy of the law. It's compelling interesting write your own copy, but then also have it authorized by the priests. So there's a reminder that the king is not writing his own copy and it has to match all the other copies, right, and that this is under the auspices of the priest, and they're going to check this for the king to make sure that he's studying the right things. And so there's a real sacred social order that's in place there that's reminding the king that his job is to reflect God's sovereignty on earth to some degree, he is God's reflection and servant in that moment, and then he's reading scripture day by day in order to learn to fear the Lord. And so when we just think about the dynamics of that little passage there, and why studying scripture is so crucial, it's like the character that is being formed in that king is the character that is trying to be formed in us when we read the text. And I think it's just a little bit easier of an example to understand. I'm finding the dynamics there are such that you have, you know, this high figure in society who is now subjecting himself to the Word of God, sitting himself within the within the priests who sort of represent that holiness, who carry the holiness community, and then ultimately just getting so familiar with the Word that ultimately he comes to fear the Lord. I find that passage so fascinating. So I'm glad you brought that up.
00:30:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's I mean, it's part of this culture of scripture study, but it's you know, it's very different. I love how you've thought through that in place that I haven't thought of some of those things, Jams, I hope I can write them down when we're done before I forgot. But I think that's.
00:30:45
Speaker 1: It.
00:30:46
Speaker 2: You know, there's there's not sort of a how to like be a good king exactly. The important part is aligning ones for the king to align himself with Torah, with God's word, and that's what takes priority. I'm sure that the king needed help with the other stuff, probably, yeah, but that's not what on Moses's last day on this earth, that's not what he talked about. He talked about a few things, make sure you don't do this, this and this, but he spent most of his time talking about studying scripture.
00:31:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, such a crucial aspect, I think, especially today as where we're in this sort of tech age where you do get a lot more messaging. And I don't think it's a I don't think that's a new problem, right, We've always had to your point, you know, the Queen of Heaven, that message was out there, right, that would have been a temptation for the Israelites at that point. They're looking at this and saying, wow, life was better under the Queen of Heaven than it was under the Lord, and we should have made different choices with our lives and so but I do think the intensity is ramped up, and I think that it's just crucial for us to get into the Biblical text, understand how it reads itself, and also learn to read it well for ourselves.
00:32:10
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's that's the gist of this book. And again again I would say to any of your viewers that if you've not thought enough about how the scripture is connected, this this book might help. But it's also something that's designed in a way for teachers, and whether in a church context or in a study context, or even academic context, this is a different way to look at how to study the Bible. And it's this is on the bottom shelf.
00:32:46
Speaker 1: This is.
00:32:48
Speaker 2: A person doesn't have to know anything to use connected And but you know, so this is maybe the one book that my mom can actually read and say, oh, you know what you're talking about. Yeah, most of my books don't put them in your grandmother's stocking, but this one not so bad.
00:33:11
Speaker 1: No, that's helpful, And I think it's going to be interesting. We're gonna close shop on this episode, but I think in the next episode we're gonna be talking about Ezra and Yamaya, And so my mind is sort of raising a little bit because you know, you have Ezra teaching the law to the people an awful lot, and so I think this sort of primes the pump for this in the next episode. I encourage folks to go out and get connected how scripture guides the study of scripture. This is something that's really important to me, is like just helping the church understand what God's words says and following the patterns that we find within it. And so just encourage you to get that. The link will be in the show description, so you can click there and purchase that book. It's on Amazon, and I'm sure of various other sites. Check out Gary's substack again, carpentersstudent dot com. That's with two s's Carpenters in the plural student dot com. It's probably not in the plural. I guessing there's an apostrophees, but you don't do that on websites, So Carpenters student dot com and yeah, go check out, go check out Gary's other writing. Really appreciate you being here today, Thanks again for coming on the show, and we'll see you in the next episode.
00:34:20
Speaker 2: Yeah. Thanks Jims real pleasure.
00:34:22
Speaker 1: All right, come back and see us next time. Everybody, take care,
