Transcription
[Music] One of the areas that I deal with a lot is trying to help people understand the background of the ancient world and the Old Testament. And some people ask me, does it really matter? I mean, do I really need to know about ancient Babylon or ancient Egypt, uh, to read the Bible and to understand it? Uh, does background information really make a difference?
Well, I think that it does, but not necessarily in the ways that we might imagine. When I think about the learning about the backgrounds of the ancient world, one of the things that I try to help people understand is that if we don't know about the background of the ancient world, we're going to be filling the gaps with our modern world, and that's what can lead to trouble. So I want, want us to understand the ancient world, even if it's just so that we don't impose our modern world on it.
So, for instance, when you read about cities in the Old Testament, you can't think about London or Paris or Chicago. Jerusalem is not like any of those, nor is Babylon. We can't think in those terms. When you think about kings, uh, King David and King Hezekiah are more like kings in the ancient world, Sargon or Sargon, than they are like Charlemagne or Henry VII or Louis XVI.
Um, when we think about society, um, we can't read about marriages in the Old Testament in the ancient world and think that that has to do with love and romance. We can't read about slavery and think that that has to do with ethnic oppression or bigotry. Uh, those institutions aren't working the same way in the ancient world. Even when we think about our identity, um, we might be inclined to think about individuals, an individual identity. That's not how it was in the ancient world. There's a clan identity there that's much more important.
So, in that regard, we have to be willing to set aside the way we tend to think most naturally and to really try to understand more about the ancient world and how that was. Now, that means that we're going to need to have some translation. Uh, we know that we need the actual text translated for us because we don't know the languages, but you also need the culture to be translated for you because the fact is, even though the Bible was written for us, it's not written to us, and therefore we need some help. We all need help to try to understand the text.
Now, at that point, some people get, oh, frustrated and say, so I have to have experts to help me read the Bible? I can't just sit down with my Bible and understand it? Well, don't, don't get me wrong. Uh, we, we may need help in reading particular texts of the Bible, but you're not going to have a lot of trouble understanding the theology of the Bible. Uh, the basic doctrines, the God who has revealed himself in the Old Testament, that comes through clearly enough. Yes, there might be adjustments we make as we understand culture, but for the most part, uh, God has revealed himself in his word, and even though he revealed himself to and through an ancient culture, that revelation comes through pretty clearly, uh, as we read our Bibles today.
But we may need help in trying to understand the actual texts of the Old Testament. When we read about Joshua, uh, asking the sun and the moon to stand still, we're going to need some help with that. We can't, can't for a moment think that the text is talking about physics. Uh, they didn't think physics in the ancient world. In fact, they didn't even know that the sun and moon were objects. They only knew that they were lights. They didn't know about the movement of the heavenly bodies, and so they're not thinking in those terms. And when Joshua makes that request, he's not thinking that way. We have to figure out how he is thinking. What does he mean when he talks about the sun and the moon stopping or standing still or waiting?
Uh, how can we gain information from the ancient world? We have loads of texts from the ancient world which give us windows to that world. Um, we might think that some of those texts are better classified as mythology and they don't have anything to do with us, but those texts, even if they are mythological, can give us windows into how people thought in that ancient world context, and that's what can help us to get some insight on the biblical text.
And so when we go reading Joshua 10 and about the sun and the moon, uh, it can make a difference if we're aware of the fact that in the ancient world, lots of people used celestial divination, and that that was the way that they thought about the movement of the heavenly bodies. Now, we don't have to believe for a moment that Joshua thought that way, but he knows that his enemy does, and he knows how they will interpret the things that they see, and he's asking for something that will be meaningful to those enemies and that will be a negative observation for them. Uh, that's just a, a an example of some of the ways that we have to think differently, uh, when we think about, uh, the biblical law.
We have to understand how law worked in the ancient world, not just how it works today. And we have to try to read those, those texts in the ancient world from Babylon or from the Hittites or from the Assyrians that deal with legal sayings and legal concepts to try to understand what it is that they are thinking when they're talking about law. And that's going to give us a lot better insight into what's going on when God reveals the law to Moses and to the Israelites.
And so, as we approach the Old Testament, we have to learn that the background is important. It can help us kind of move off the table those ways that we are most inclined to think and to make room in our minds for how they would think in the ancient world and use that to inform our interpretations of the biblical texts. In that way, we'll be sure that we are getting the message, the authoritative message of scripture, uh, that that ancient author was trying to communicate to his ancient audience, and that's going to get us to God's revelation of himself. [Music] [Music]