Transcription
And when I say fullness, what does that make you think of in the New Testament? Where do you see that word? Yeah. The fullness of the Gentiles. So just hang on to that thought.
So if we were to again look at, you know, where this term is used in the Hebrew Bible, it's used, you know, all over the place. But the question that's kind of interesting is what is the Septuagint rendering of that word? And you get a number of options for, um, for fullness, you know, for *melo* rendered into Greek. One of those is *pleroma*.
Or we go the other extreme and we have like two peoples of God and they're sort of on the same status. You know, we have to keep Israel separate from the Gentiles and that affects, you know, again, how you view end times and eschatology and whatnot, how you read the book of Revelation, all that stuff.
Maybe instead of just sort of opting for a typical Christian trajectory again that we get in our systematic theology books or we get in our church traditions, maybe if we actually went back and we looked at Genesis 17 and Genesis 48 and other passages—I'm only picking those two out where you get this fullness language and you get multitude of nations language of Abraham. Maybe that should start us thinking thoughts like, well, maybe God had something bigger in mind from the very beginning.
Anyway, so, you know, we talk on the podcast a lot about intertextuality. Uh, the importance of letting scripture interpret scripture. So, intertextuality is just a fancy way of saying that that principle. But you again know if you're listening to the podcast a lot and you're using, you know, some of the resources that, you know, we recommend on the podcast, or including journal articles and books and whatnot. What we mean by this is it extends to more than just, hey, in your English Bible translation, the publisher puts those cross-references in there for a reason. It's not just, oh, we have white space, what do we put in there? Okay. You know, yes, I mean, cross-references are important and that's sort of a way, uh, kind of an initial way for people to check how scripture might be interpreting scripture, but it's a little haphazard.
If, if you're a Bible student and you do use the cross-references in your Bible, sometimes you'll go to a cross-reference and you'll think, "What in the world does that have to do with the passage I I'm just reading?" In other words, they they appear kind of random. And and honestly again, you know, I'll confess for the publishing industry here, you know, honestly, a lot of those things do have peripheral connection. They're they don't have a real, you know, text-based connection.
So, what we try to do in the podcast is encourage, you know, you and anybody listening to do things like, hey, you know, when you're in the New Testament and you're reading along and you come to a place where the writer quotes the Old Testament, and in English Bibles, they'll they'll usually do something stylistic there. They'll put it in cursive or a different font or whatever. You know, go back into your Old Testament and read the whole passage. And then even better, if you have access to the Septuagint again in an English translation or, you know, if you can read Greek, that's fine. Uh, go back and read that too because it's important to sort of learn how a New Testament writer was reading his Bible.
Okay, this is this is sort of your gateway into what we call intertextuality. Intertextuality is how a biblical writer repurposes, you know, understands, interprets biblical material. And we do this and reference it a lot on the podcast, but I wanted to actually go through three examples, you know, fairly quickly. We're not going to get into too many nuts and bolts here because this this, you know, I get asked all the time, you know, how, what should I do for Bible study? What should I do that this or that? This is one of the things you should reflexively always do. You're always looking for how a passage that you're in might be either repurposed and referenced by another biblical writer or in the passage you're in, how they, that writer, is doing that same process. It's really important. Uh, and and the writers won't always telegraph it. Sometimes they'll say, "as it was written in the scripture." Well, that's kind of a dead giveaway. All right. But other times you will need to sort of get into the weeds of, you know, certain resources like a good commentary, a journal article. I recommend the Net Bible a lot because it will, you know, in the in the notes, it'll give you, you know, connections like this.
You need to get into the weeds because even if the New Testament writer doesn't preface something like, "as it was, you know, said in the scriptures," and then, then you know that he's quoting from somewhere, when they don't do that, how do you know? How do you know when they just have something in their head and they might be drawing on something from the Old Testament, Septuagint, you know, whatever, uh, without telegraphing it? Well, the way you do that is what I'm going to try to show you now, again, when it's a little less obvious, how to find and ferret out some of that information because I think this is one of the most fundamentally important things to do. And if you learn to do this, again, you you only need a handful of resources to do this. Software is great because you can do it with speed. But if you learn to do this, it will put you a number of steps ahead, okay, of, you know, the general Bible student, even the dedicated Bible student.
So with that introduction, we've got some familiar starting points here. And, you know, most of you can probably quote, you know, these passages, but for those who don't necessarily have them in their heads, Deuteronomy 32:8-9, you know, that's a familiar passage to all of us. "When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided humankind..." I don't know why that's not showing up here. You know, Trey, we don't have this showing up on the screen, but go to... Why don't you just turn to Deuteronomy 32:8-9? And it's not landing on the... Yeah, it's not on the screen. So, "When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God." Is Trey, Trey, can you see me back there? Is Trey back there? Yeah. If there's if there's a way to show the other screen, we're going to need that, uh, that the software actually shows up on.
So the other passage, let me go back here. Genesis 12:1-3. "The Lord said to Abram, 'Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation.'" Then of course in verse three, "'I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonors you I will curse and in you all families of the earth will be blessed.'" Again, these are very familiar passages.
And then Genesis 48, of course, which when we reference it on the podcast, we typically, you know, talk about the the two powers thing, the, you know, Elohim and the angel connected there by a singular verb in Genesis 48:15-16. But the passage is actually important for something else, you know, something different. And that's what I want to sort of get to today. Genesis 48:19. So, if you have the Bible, because I it's not going to show here, go to that passage and there's something in there that I mentioned real quickly on one episode of the podcast and I want to develop a little bit here. This is again Jacob's blessing of Joseph's children and they're getting to the crossing of the hands part and Jacob, you know, says, "Yeah, I know. I know. I got the order, you know, reversed and but, you know, don't don't worry about it." So, you get to verse 19. "His father Jacob refused again Joseph to to correct the position of the hands. He says, 'I know, my son. I know. He shall also become a people, uh, and he shall also be great.'" We're talking about Ephraim and Manasseh here. "Nevertheless, his younger brother shall be greater than he and his offspring shall become a multitude of nations." Now, the word multitude there is going to be our point of interest. A multitude of nations.
If, and you're just going to have to take my word for it since we can't show it here, if you did a a study, just a quick, you know, word study on multitude there, it's *melo* in Hebrew, means full or fullness. And when I say fullness, what does that make you think of in the New Testament? Where do you see that word? Yeah, the fullness of the Gentiles. So, just hang on to that thought.
So if we were to again look at, you know, where this term is used in the Hebrew Bible, it's used, you know, all over the place. But the question that's kind of interesting is what is the Septuagint rendering of that word? And you get a number of options for, um, for fullness, you know, for *melo* rendered into Greek. One of those is *pleroma*.
Okay, fullness, that should be familiar again, if you're a podcast listener, from the book of Colossians. If you then, you know, once you you see that connection, you see what we did. We looked at a word in English. You could use a Strong's Concordance to do this. Oh, it's *melo* in Hebrew. You can find out where all the the occurrences of that term occur in the Hebrew Bible. And then if you move to a Greek translation, well, I wonder what the Greek translation, the Septuagint, says in that passage. You're going to find the word *pleroma*. Now, that's often where, if if people even get there, that's often where they stop. But the best thing to do is actually to search on that word. Where is that word used in the Septuagint? And that's where things kind of get interesting because Septuagint's in Greek and the New Testament's in Greek. And so what you're looking for is where might Paul, when he talks about the fullness of the Gentiles in some New Testament passage, where might he be referring to just with that word? And if if you start to get two or three words in a passage that show up in another passage, it gives you an idea of what Paul might be thinking of when he writes something down, you know, when he directs attention.
Now, in this case, if we, I'm just going to run it here. If we actually did search for *pleroma* in both the Septuagint and the New Testament, what we're going to find, let me see here. Just run it real quickly. You can go to Romans 11. That's where we're going to end up here. Okay. I'm having to do everything manually here, which is a bummer.
So, okay. In Psalm 23, we're going to get this occurrence. Again, the the phrase, "This is the earth is the Lord's." It's actually in the Septuagint, it's Psalm 23:1. It's not the same in English or Hebrew. "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." Again, let me just run that. Okay.
So the, uh, let's just go right to Romans 11 to save some time here. So when you get to Romans 11, *pleroma* shows up two times, not just once, but two times in Romans 11. And the first one you get is not where you're thinking. You know, we're thinking of Romans 11:25 because that's the fullness of the Gentiles phrase. The first one is in verse 12. Let me read you verses 11 and 12. So it's the same chapter and this is the the section where Paul talks about the Gentiles being grafted in. So I ask, Paul says, "Did they stumble?" Speaking of again his people, "Did they stumble in order that they might fall? By no means; rather through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles so as to make Israel jealous. Now if their trespass means riches for the world and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean?" The word full there is *pleroma*. It's the same word that we see down in verse 25.
If you go down to verse 25 in Romans 11, hit that. "Lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in." So twice Paul has used *pleroma*, full inclusion, fullness of the Gentiles, in Romans 11. And that Greek word is a translation of *melo*, which occurs in Genesis 48:19.
Now, if you went back to Genesis 48:19, though, and you looked more closely in the Septuagint, you would discover there's a disconnection. Well, *pleroma* is not, it's in it's in 48:16, but it's not in 48:19. There's another word that's in 48:19 that is related to *pleroma*, and that is *plethos*. And so, if we look at that, where that shows up again, the related word, we're going to get again some interesting results here. But again, I I have to skip that for you. Let me go back to the search here and see if I can just hit the summary here.
In Genesis 17:4 and 48:19, we get this other derivative word. And if you look at Genesis 17:4, what does that say? I'll quote it for you here. "Behold," this is God speaking to Abraham, "Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations." Okay, let me read it again. "Behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations." Have you ever thought about that verse? Who is Abraham supposed to be the father of? Right? Isn't Isn't he the father of Israel? What's this multitude of nations business?
In the Abrahamic covenant, it's not just Genesis 12:3. "In you or through you, all the nations of the earth will be blessed." That's usually the way we think of the relationship between Israel and the Gentiles. In Genesis 17, the language goes beyond that. You will be the father of not just one nation, but a multitude of nations. And you know, okay, well, then there was Ishmael and and so on and so, okay, you know, we've got this South Arabian. Okay, we understand that. But then you're restricting multitude. And the Septuagint translator is going to use one of these words related to *pleroma*. *Plathys*, *pleroma*. You know, these words again come, share a common root. All of these this terminology, Genesis 17:4, Genesis 48:19, relate in some way to Paul, what Paul's thinking in Romans 11.
Now, the implications of that are pretty startling because when we do Bible study and when we do theology, and this is why I want to try to elevate intertextuality above tradition, what what typically happens in Christian circles is we we we take positions. We we sort of, you know, put our roots down in and, you know, this relationship of the is of Israel and the church question. You know, there's either one people of God and, you know, that we can, you know, who cares about, you know, ethnic Israel anymore? Who cares about the Jews? Who cares about Israel? You know, we're one people of God. And so we sort of exclude ethnic Israel, you know, Israel from the from, you know, view in modern times. Or we go the other extreme and we have like two peoples of God and they're sort of on the same status. You know, we have to keep Israel separate from the Gentiles. And that affects, you know, again, how you view end times and eschatology and whatnot, how you read the book of Revelation, all that stuff.
So what what I want to get get us to consider is maybe it's kind of both. All right. Maybe instead of just sort of opting for a typical Christian trajectory again that we get in our systematic theology books or we get in our church traditions, maybe if we actually went back and we looked at at Genesis 17 and Genesis 48 and other passages—I'm only picking those two out where you get this fullness language and you get multitude of nations language of Abraham. Maybe that should start us thinking thoughts like, well, maybe God had something bigger in mind from the very beginning.
And we've, you know, we we've said this as part of the Deuteronomy 32 worldview on, you know, in unseen realm on the podcast, that the the whole point, the whole enterprise of what God is doing with Abraham after the Tower of Babel is he's a starting point to do what? Okay. He he's God isn't coming to Abraham so that he can create a a nation called Israel and then that's the story. That's that's to be our f... No, he's creating Abraham out of which he's going to have a people for the express purpose of re-gathering the nations and going back to the Edenic vision. The Edenic vision doesn't have Jew and Gentile in it. Okay. The Edenic vision doesn't have Israel and the Nate, you know, it doesn't have any of that. It has one family of God and and you get ample, you get the feel for that in this language.
So the the question is, is was God's plan to regain the nations was that intended to subtract Israel? Okay. Was it intended to subtract Israel or to add to Israel? Or maybe there's just a different way of thinking about it. Now another way of asking is, is God's plan about geography, people, or both? Because in in our traditions, we will have people opt for one or the other term and out of that will come a view of Jewish Christian relations or eschatology. And what I'm suggesting is, well, certainly salvation has nothing to do with ethnicity of itself. Romans 1:16, "it's the gospel to the Jew first and also to the Greek." Okay. So so both of them are encapsulated.
But even beyond that, if we think about again what Paul's doing in Romans 11, when he's thinking about, okay, Genesis 17, he's thinking about Genesis 48:19, he's thinking a fullness of nations. "From him there will be a fullness, a multitude of nations." And Jacob in Genesis 48 uses the fullness language first of his own tribes. You know, the the 12 tribes that are going to descend from him, you know, Ephraim and Manasseh are included in that. But then he loops in Joseph's sons. And what's really interesting is that Joseph's kids are born from an Egyptian woman. Okay? They're they're they're not like, you know, full Israelite or pure Israelite. It didn't matter. You know, Jacob sees no violation. Oh, like how do I fit these kids in now because, you know, like we're we're Jew, we're Israelite, you know. No, it it it's like it doesn't even register. They are going to be subsumed in Israel, okay, to take the place of Joseph. And you know, if you look at all the tribal lists, sometimes Joseph is in there, Ephraim and Manasseh, they're they're in some sense they're interchangeable.
You know, the the Old Testament, here's what I'm getting at. The Old Testament itself in these passages, when it took sort of the the ultimate view, the ultimate outcome of what God is doing after Babel with Abraham, when the Old Testament itself, you know, this this, you know, Israelite Jewish document, when it takes the long look at at the whole point of this enterprise, it includes the nations. And and, you know, that ought to. So why why should we pick a side that favors one or the other? Okay, when the very end point from the beginning was to go back, not we're not going back to the patriarchal period. That isn't what our eschatology is about. At least it shouldn't be. We're our eschatology shouldn't be about reinforcing division between Israel and the nations. Our eschatology should be about, hey, what does the new Eden look like? And we don't have these distinctions. And this is, if you'll pardon the expression, this is a Jewish thing. Okay? This is in Genesis. This is what Paul's thinking about. Paul isn't thinking about, well, I better be careful what I say because the dispensationalists and the covenant theologians and the predestinarians, well, you know, no, he he doesn't care about any of that. You know, obviously that's anachronistic, but that isn't the point. The point is back to the time before we had any of these divisions. It's the whole point and it's sort of lurking under the surface. And so when you get to to Paul in Romans 11 and you start again looking at what he might be drawing on by virtue of his language, this is where you go.
So, you know, go with the Paul flow, okay? Like I mean, you you listen to the podcast and you know, and the reason we call it Naked Bible Podcast is we're not we're not really concerned with, you know, the the outer garb, okay, of denominationalism or preferences. I mean, they're not evil things. They're not sinister things. They they're incidental. They just sort of are what they are. But your, you know, your commitment in in in, you know, trying to discern what's going on in biblical theology should not be filtered through them. And I think this is a good example of how we we need to think a little bit better about this Israel-church relationship and and really kind of what what we're angling for when we do theology. Are we looking for a reason to justify not liking national Israel? Or are we looking for a reason to justify that, oh, Israel, you know, like like can't do any wrong? You know, look, the the point is not this entity geographically and and its people and whatnot. I mean, they have a place. They have a role. They have a role in eschatology, but but that isn't that isn't the endgame. It's not what God's shooting for. What God wants is what he told you he wanted back in Genesis, that Abraham would be the father of would extend not only to Genesis 48:16, you know, the the ethnic, you know, descendants of of Jacob, but also Genesis 48:19 to those who have gentile blood. Okay, this is what what he's angling for. And he does it, he does a really interesting job of it.
John 3, I mean, how much more familiar can it get? Um, if you go to John 3, just just turn there. We'll do a real quick cursory reading.