In episode 133 of the Enter the Bible podcast, co-hosts Kathryn Schifferdecker and Katie Langston discuss a series of audience-submitted questions in a lightning round episode with guest Dr. Rolf Jacobson.
Rolf Jacobson is Professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary and Dean of the Faculty. He has served as co-host of Working Preacher's Sermon Brainwave and Narrative Lectionary podcasts.
Questions addressed in this Lightning Round:
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Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7r1VOmcY_ZA
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Enter the Bible podcast, where you can get answers, or at least reflections on everything you wanted to know about the Bible but were afraid to ask. I'm Katie Langston .
And I'm Kathryn Schifferdecker, and we have as our special guest today, our friend Rolf Jacobson, who is another professor of Old Testament like me at Luther Seminary. And he's going to help us. Well, first of all, welcome, Rolf. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you. Glad to be here.
And, today we're going to do a lightning round. So for those of you who don't know what that is occasionally we do, we bunch a bunch of questions together that came to us online on Enter the Bible.org, and we try to answer them as succinctly as possible while still giving them some time. So all of these questions came from listeners at Enter the Bible.org. If you have a question that you would like answered on the podcast, please go to Enter the Bible.org and enter it. We can't address all the questions, but we'll try to address as many as we can. That's what we try to do. So, first question in this lightning round, we're going to do four questions. And we're going to do it kind of along the lines of, you know, the order of the books in the Bible that they refer to. So, first question from a listener is where did Cain get his wife? What is the background of her ancestry?
Because only four people lived at the time: Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel. And then Abel died. And then Seth.
Right. Exactly
How did Cain get a wife? The Bible isn't true.
One of the things about the Bible that would drive you nuts if you let it, is all the questions you have that the authors apparently don't care about. Uh, whether it's I mean, that there's.
No that's true, that's true.
That there's no way to put it though, the questions like, hey, um, was it just Jesus that saw the bird descend, the spirit descending like a dove or did other people? Doesn't say. Did Jesus know he was the Messiah already? Doesn't say. I mean, so that there's all these questions that will drive you nuts. And this is one of them, I suspect.
The answer is: nobody knows. Is that it?
Well, it does, it doesn't say. It just says, like you said, apparently there's four people living. But then Cain has a wife, and then he's given the mark of Cain to protect him so that anyone who comes upon him won't kill him. Well, wait. Where did those people that are going to come upon him come from? And so the Bible is not interested, or at least the authors that don't seem to be interested in those questions that, uh, like, where did the other people come from? Did God just make a bunch of other people?
Doesn't say. Yeah. And obviously this also addresses or begs the question about whether this is a historical tale or not, which I think we've perhaps talked about in other podcasts. But, if you believe it's more of a theological, even mythological tale, then obviously, this isn't as important, probably. If you if you do believe it's a historical tale and that's fine, you are welcome to believe that we're not going to try to dissuade you. Then I think, yeah, Rolf's answer is probably the best. We don't know. And the biblical writers don't seem to wonder about that.
I might try to dissuade you from reading it as a historical tale. I don't think your salvation depends on, you know, if you read it or don't read it that way. But I think I would say that the evidence is pretty clear that it's not a historical tale, but that doesn't make it not scripture. We've talked about this a lot in terms of, um, different genres, of different books, and I think people get tripped up in their faith, unnecessarily over questions like this, where, people say, well, it's obvious that, you know, that, that we can't trust the Bible because, there are only four people living and there's this contradiction that other people, you know, are around at the time and therefore, you know, we can't believe what the Bible says. And so while I respect and, you know, would still consider you a brother or sister in Christ, if you have a more literal reading of the Bible, I might try to dissuade you from that reading of this particular passage, just because it can be a stumbling block to people, and it doesn't need to be.
I think that's fair. Yeah. All right. Our second question is related to the first one, in the sense that it comes also from the first chapters of Genesis. And that second question is this. Can you put some perspective to the old, old age of the humans referenced in Genesis: 900 plus years? Question mark. Exclamation mark. Question mark. So 900 plus years. S o for those people who don't know what this particular listener is talking about, there are genealogies in Genesis, particularly in Genesis one through 11, that, talk about really long lived people. So look particularly at chapter five in Genesis. So, Adam himself, lives 930 years. So the first man lives 930 years. Methuselah is the longest lived, man in the Bible. So starting in verse 25, he talks about who he, his children. And then in verse 27, 5:27, thus all the days of Methuselah were 969 years, and he died. So that's a very long time to live. So, Rolf, what do we what do we say about this?
Well, it's it's not even it's not even just those. But those are, the longest Abraham is said to live 175 years, and then Moses even lives 120 years.
Oh, yeah.
I didn't realize that.
But then it says in the book of Psalms, the measure of a human life is 70 years or 80 if someone's really strong. So, in general, the in Genesis through the Pentateuch, then the, the the age of people goes down. I think there's I think there's two general ways of interpreting it. I've normally interpreted as the Bible is signaling to you that that it is moving from prehistory tales with some mythic elements. They're not myths, but they're they have some mythic elements. So the by the age, it's signaling to you they're moving from this prehistory into into history, and that the ages aren't, that they're not they don't only decrease, you know, with every generation, you know, Methuselah lives a little longer. B ut I think that's the interpretation that I go with. I think the Bible is telling us that we're we're not to read those early chapters as history. I think, another way of reading it might be some sense of moving away from, from, like, the Golden Age. So, like a sense of sin increasing. Some people read it that way. I think that doesn't make as much sense to me. because the flood story in Genesis 6 kind of doesn't this that suggests that right there, you're you are full on sin. There's no increase of sin.
That's true. There is, there is that weird story right before the flood story. I'm looking at Genesis chapter six of the the Daughters of Men and the Sons of God, you know,
intermarrying.
Intermarrying.
That is a weird story.
But then in verse three it says then he Lord said, My Spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh. Their days shall be 120 years. So that seems to be the turning point, right? That that human sin or this kind of crossing of boundaries between the heavens and the earth, leads God to say, yeah, no, no more 900 year old humans. You only get to live to 120 years. So which, of course, you know many of us. Yeah, that's pretty unusual. Even today, I don't even know if people live that long, but,
very few,
very, very few. So, yeah. So there's some, some textual, signaling there. I think that the biblical writers realize that that's a really long kind of mythic time, length of life, though. 900 and some years. Yeah. But, yeah, I like that. So that so part of, you know, what we were talking about in the first question, like part of that, the character of those first stories in Genesis, is signaled by these incredibly long lifespans as well.
That makes sense
All right. Next ones, are really can be lightning round, I think, because they're well, two related questions. Who wrote the book of Joshua ? Who wrote First Chronicles? I think we can say, we don't know.
Joshua. Mr. Chronicle.
I think we could say more than that. Yeah, yeah. First of all, Joshua, like most of the books in the Bible, is anonymous. It doesn't say anywhere in there who wrote it. Traditionally it was, I think especially in early Jewish and Christian legend, it was viewed that Joshua was the author, even though it doesn't say that. Most modern scholars believe that Joshua is part of something called the Deuteronomistic history, which is everything from Deuteronomy through 2 Kings except Ruth, which was written later and inserted. And the belief is that I follow the school that believes that that block of books was, edited together, really not authored, edited together by a group of, a group of scribes who lived shortly before the exile. And then, it was then the last few chapters of Second Kings were added during the exile, when it reached its final form. And because no one likes to say the word deuteronomistic, we just say DTR.
It's a lot easier now.
And it's related to the book of Deuteronomy. Obviously, yes.
Because it... Correct me if I'm wrong. If I'm remembering from my classes with the two of you back in the day. That really the, maybe theological question driving these books is why did we get exiled? Like, what did we do wrong? Right? And the answer from this DTR source is like, cause we really messed it up. Is that oversimplify oversimplifying, or am I forgetting something?
The if if the school of people that thinks it was written once during the exile or edited together, by the way, from sources so that there's really ancient material in it, of course. I mean, I just want to say that so it's not like somebody in exile wrote it down, right? They're using really old sources.
And compiling it and crafting a narrative. Yeah.
The group of scholars, and they're mostly Germans. Where this, originally theory was that yes this happened during the exile in one edition. And that was the main question. An American scholar named Frank Moore Cross. I don't know if he originated with him, but, said, no, there's a lot more going on. And it seems that there was an earlier ending point, about the time of the Joseon, uh, Reformation. King Josiah, he remodels the temple, and then he has a reformation. And probably then that the first edition, was part of that reformation. And, it's as part of the Reformation. The story is the national story is brought together. Yeah.
And there's. Yeah. Thank you for expanding on my rather flippant response. We don't know who the authors are, but, yeah, that we think that they were this deuteronomistic school influenced by the book of Deuteronomy. And yes, I think, Katie, that is one of the questions, certainly of the final form of the book. The book of Joshua and the rest of the Deuteronomistic history. But it's also there's also like overarching themes, like covenant is a big theme in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic history, including the book of Joshua. And, you know, the worship of one God in, in one place in Jerusalem and various other themes that are present across that whole history. So, yeah, probably reaches into its final form. It has its second edition, you might say, during the exile, but certainly uses earlier material from Israel's history. What about First Chronicles? So the tradition, Jewish tradition and Christian tradition says that the scribe Ezra wrote first Chronicles, but again, it doesn't say that in first Chronicles. So what do we know? So often scholars refer to the person who wrote first and second chronicles, right? Which are originally one book. Uh, call him the chronicler. Whoever it is is writing, uh, later than the deuteronomistic history, because they use the stories from the Deuteronomistic history, especially first and second Samuel, first and second Kings. But they kind of they have a some, some theological aims as they retell those stories. So they kind of clean up the story of David, for instance, so that the story of Bathsheba and Uriah is not told in the Books of Chronicles. So do you want to add anything to that, Rolf, about how Chronicles differs from.
Yeah. Well, 1 & 2 Chronicles covers the same time period as 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings. Except for it cuts out the Northern Kingdom completely. So the Northern Kingdom is not included. And like you said, it's very pro Davidic. It cleans up David. And it, it really is much more positive about the Davidic monarchy in general. So it, like you said, they normally call the author the chronicler. And, we believe most people believe it was written, written down, after much later or at least 100 years post exile. So if, the deuteronomistic history is exilic, it's at least post-exilic. And a lot of people think it's probably 200 years later than DTR.
All right.
So I'll put in a plug for a previous episode that we'll put in the show notes. I don't remember what we ended up titling this episode, but it was with Cameron Howard and my internal title for it was "Chronicles: Not as boring as you thought," where we go into a little bit more on that history. If you're interested, I do remember one of the main takeaways from that was Cameron was saying pretty much the point of the chronicler was like, "yay, David!" So, yeah.
Good. All right. Last question for this particular lightning round is this: "why weren't the children of Israel born in the wilderness, circumcised during the wilderness experience? Why wait until after getting to Gilgal?" So, again, for listeners who may not be familiar with this story, it's told in Joshua, speaking of Joshua, Joshua chapter five, right around verses, well, one through eight, basically. And so, this is after the children of Israel, after the wilderness wanderings, after the crossing of the Jordan, but before, the fall of Jericho. And as they after they've crossed the Jordan, it says, all the surrounding kings heard that the Lord had dried up the waters of the Jordan, and their hearts melted within them. And then the Lord says to Joshua, "Circumcise the Israelites a second time." That sounds painful, but it's really, as you read on sounds, it's not quite that it's circumcise those who have, the men and the boys who haven't been circumcised yet, that is, it says later, those who were born during the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. So why weren't they circumcised in the wilderness when they were born? Rolf, what do you think?
The Bible: It'll drive you nuts if you let it. That we have questions that the biblical authors don't answer. And this is one of them, just like, just like, where did Cain's wife come from? Yes. The text doesn't say, yeah.
Is there any good midrash about it? Are there have the rabbis said anything about it?
Probably. I don't know though, do you, Kathryn?
I do not. I'm guessing that they did have something to say about it, but I do not know.
I don't have my Jewish study Bible with me at this location, so I can't look to see.
One thing to note, as you read along in verse three, it says: So Joshua made flint knives and circumcised the Israelites at Gibeah- Ha-arlow. Uh, sorry. Aloth uh, which translated means hill of the foreskins. So apparently this is a place that people know the name of. It's somewhere, around Gilgal or close to Gilgal. So some of this could be what we call an etiological tale. That is: How did this place get its name? That's a kind of weird name, right? Hill of the foreskins. How does it get that name? Well, this is what happened, right? Like, there was a mass circumcision at this place, and that's why it got its name. Now, again, as Rolf said, probably the best answer is we don't know because the biblical authors don't go into that detail and don't seem concerned with it.
I did just Google it for what it's worth, and according to the Torah. com, which could never be wrong, and I will share this link.
That is a good sign.
That's a good sign. Okay, good good, good. I t says the Babylonian Talmud notes the problem and says, probably, because it would it was dangerous. And then another reason they said, is the reason they didn't circumcise, since the northern breeze is what heals bloody wounds. And without it, circumcision would be dangerous. And they didn't have a northern breeze in the wilderness.
I'm going with that.
There you go. That sounds like a good answer. Yeah.
And I'll. And we'll share, there's more in there, too. If you want to read more.
All right. Well, that I think does it for this lightning round. We'll have another lightning round as well. And, thank you all for your input. And, we'll ask our listeners to go to Enter the Bible.org, to submit more questions. Perhaps one of your questions will be in a future episode or a future lightning round. And while you're there, check out the other resources there. There are. There are more podcasts. There are entries on on all the biblical books. There are blog posts, there are maps. There's all kinds of resources there. So like and subscribe if you enjoyed this podcast and share it with a friend. Thanks so much.