The Bible and Culture

BEN: Another thing that puzzled me was you don’t ever discuss the Hebrew concept of shaliach, or agent--- “a man agent is as himself”. The agent of a person who sends him out as a messenger or active emissary has authorized the agent to speak for him and as him and act for him, but his is clearly a derived authority. It seems to me that this better explains the places where the ‘malak’ who is clearly not God in any sense, speaks and acts for God, for instance in the Abraham and the three visit … [Read more...]

BEN: In various places in the OT, seeing the idea and presence of the divine council seems a no brainer. But I must confess I have a hard time seeing it in the Garden in Genesis. God’s appearance in the Garden after the sin, doesn’t really tell us what things were like before then, and the angels who guard the back door when Adam and Eve are expelled, do not seem to be in evidence before then. And to press one more point, nothing in Gen. 1-3 suggests that a mountain is in view, only a gar … [Read more...]

BEN: Much of your case depends on the starting point of what’s going on in Eden. I completely agree with your repeated argument that God created those in his image with a measure of freedom of choice, indeed the power of contrary choice. This is unlike what Jonathan Edwards once suggested, namely freedom of choice means one doesn’t feel compelled to do X or Y, even though your choices were decided in advance by God’s predeterminations. In other words, God programmed risk into his plan from t … [Read more...]

BEN: Let’s address a difficult issue. You are arguing, rightly in my view, that we must understand the OT in light of its ANE contexts. Fair enough. But what happens when we realize that the OT writers are borrowing ideas and terms from mythological literature in these other cultures. Are we supposed to simply embrace the mythology as if it was reality? For example, as you point out, the ancients thought stars were heavenly beings, the heavenly host, not merely pieces of inanimate m … [Read more...]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWabCSjZ_0E … [Read more...]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpIiIaC4kRA … [Read more...]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPCzEP0oD7I … [Read more...]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CulBuMCLg0 … [Read more...]