Thank you so much for joining into the conversation on “Girls, Modesty, and the Christian Community.” I was so honored to receive so many stories—here on Substack, Facebook, and many sent privately as the sting of the shame associated with the story was still a bit too raw to put on a public forum. I was struck by how many stories there were. Of women of all ages being approached by near strangers to have their clothing and figures assessed. I was particularly struck by the oft’ repeated stories of women in ministry who finally gave up on attempting business clothes in the pulpit because whatever they wore drew comments on their figures, their legs, and/or how distracting their appearance was in the pulpit. Likely my favorite line was “I finally started wearing a robe so that people would start talking about my sermon instead of my body.”

In the podcast you’re about to listen to we got to a number of these topics. I think we’ll have to schedule another to get to what I think is the core of the problem here—a society that thinks women’s bodies are designed for public consumption. A society that, on one hand, tells all of our girls via every means of communication available that the only way to be “pretty” is to be “sexy,” and then vilifies those same girls for believing that message. In sum, the constant commodification of a girls’ bodies and the constant communication of shame.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

As you will hear, this discussion will not circle around WHAT dress codes should occupy our lives—we all readily admit that life and work demand certain attire in certain spaces—it will instead circle around what women are experiencing regarding the public scrutiny of their appearance and why. Some topics covered:

• What is modesty (1 Tim 2:9-10; 1 Peter 3:3-5)

• Who is responsible when lust happens (Mat 5:27-28). One therapist said: “From a spiritual formation perspective, a man’s management of lust becomes externalized as the women’s issue to solve, instead of being viewed as a formation invitation.”

• What should be some of the guidelines when we put together a dress code for our community?

• How should we go about communicating dress codes once we’ve got them?

• Who should be talking to an underage girl about her body? Who should be talking to an adult woman about her body?

Let us know what you think!

I’m going off script a bit this next week. By that I mean, I’m doing a podcast this Monday that has little to do with Old Testament or ANE backgrounds, and more to do with current issues … and I want your feedback.

For those who know me, you know I’ve been in ministry of some form or another since I was nineteen. And during that time I experienced a ton of folk who seemed to think my body was available for public consumption, and were therefore quite forthcoming as to how I should dress that body of mine.

I’m well-past that chapter of my life now—that whole “post-menopausal” thing makes the world stop staring. And then there’s the fact that most the folk who would have leaned in, gazed at some part of my body, and offered free advice a decade or two ago, are now scared of me. Not a bad thing.

BUT now my emerging adult daughters, who are daring to involve themselves in ministry, are experiencing the same thing. So my dear friend Preston Sprinkle and I—and my young adult daughter who is a singer/songwriter and worship leader—are meeting up this coming Monday morning to hash it out on his podcast, Theology in the Raw.

YES modesty is a biblical expectation. YES modesty is bigger and wider than whether a young woman wears a one piece or a two piece. YES we want to show up in public as women who are citizens of another Kingdom. But why is it always women? Why do complete strangers feel they have the right to invade a woman’s personal boundaries by commenting on the most private parts of her body? Why does a 30-year-old youth pastor feel it is appropriate to pull a thirteen-year-old aside (a girl who likely does not yet see herself as a sexual being) and make her body the subject of grown men’s sexual attraction? Even dicier question: Might it be that our obsession with women’s bodies isn’t holiness, but perhaps yet another expression of our society’s constant sexualization of girls and women (hmmmm)?

So before we launch on Monday morning, I want to hear your stories. Your questions. Your comments. As always, my page is safe space—no yelling, no public crucifixions. But please, tell us your story! Comments are OPEN.

If you would like to submit a story privately, you can email me directly to srichter@westmont.edu. Please put “My Story” in the subject line so it doesn’t get lost.

³Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not contend with man forever, because he also is flesh; ³nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.”

⁴The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

The question I am most frequently asked about Noah’s flood comes from the paragraph that, in our English Bibles, ushers us into the narrative: Gen 6:1-4. Here we are introduced to the “sons of God,” the “daughters of men,” and their nephilim offspring. And ever since the Intertestamental book of 1 Enoch declared these “sons of God” to be fallen angels … well, this passage has gotten a lot of press! Those fascinated by spiritual warfare and hierarchies in the heavenlies cannot seem to leave it alone.^[2] Let’s take a look.

The mystery of this paragraph emerges from its antiquity and is largely due to a lack of clarity and consensus regarding the identity of the principal players. Who are the “sons of God” (bĕnê hāʾĕlōhîm בְנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים), the “daughters of men” (bĕnôt hāʾādām בֱנוֹת הָאָדָם ), and the Nephilim (nĕpilîm הַנְפִלִים)? There are an array of theories, all taken up in detail in the 2^nd edition of The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament (pre-order now!), but in this post we are only going to deal with the most sensational. The theory that the “sons of God” are fallen angels who married human women (“the daughters of men”) and thereby produced the Nephilim—semi-divine, superhuman warriors and/or giants similar to Hercules and Achilles in Greek mythology.

I anticipate that for most of you this reading of Gen 6:1-4 has you thinking, “Oh my goodness, this sounds more like Percy Jackson than it does like the Bible!” And you would be right. Although there are indeed occurrences in the Bible where “sons of God” means “angels” (see Ps 29:1; 82:6; 89:6; Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7), there are also occurrences where “son(s) of God” means human beings (e.g. Lk 3:38; Exod 4:22; 2 Sam 7:14; Ps 2:7, 12, Gal 3:26; 1 John 3:1-2).^[3] More important, this idea that angels can or do copulate with humans cannot be found anywhere in the ְbiblical witness. In fact, Jesus specifically states that angels do not “take in marriage” as do the “sons of god” in Gen 6:2 (cf. Lk 20:35-36). Rather, as Meredith Kline says, if this angel-human-coupling is the correct reading of Gen 6:1-4, this is nothing less than “a piece of raw mythology” imported into the Bible out of the Mesopotamian world, or as Robert Alter states, a representation “of Greek myth”^[4]—the same Greek myth that produced Hercules and Achilles (and Percy Jackson)!^[5]

As for the “raw mythology,” there are a number of instances in Mesopotamian myth and legend in which heroes are understood to be semi-divine—not the offspring of angels, but the offspring of gods.^[6] Gilgamesh is an important example. He is described as two-thirds god and one-third human, as he was the son of a deified Sumerian king and the goddess Ninsun.^[7] But as the God of Israel expressly does not reproduce, this sort of association is highly problematic. As Yehezkel Kaufmann argued decades ago in his groundbreaking work, The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, one of the great differences between monotheism and polytheism is that whereas the deities of the pagan world are regularly described in sexual terms, Yahweh is never described in a reproductive or sexual fashion. The gods of the nations do reproduce (regularly), with each other and with human beings; Yahweh does not.

What about the gods of Greece? As in Mesopotamia, the Greek pantheon has hundreds of divine beings, infamous for their sexual exploits and scores of demigod descendants (a.k.a. Percy Jackson). But Genesis 6:1-4 found its way into the Bible centuries before the Hellenistic (i.e. “Greek”) era, which began in Israel in 332 BCE with Alexander’s conquests. So how could a Greek religious worldview find its way into the book of Genesis? Well, maybe this is not an issue of Hellenism influencing Genesis, but of Hellenism influencing the interpretation of Genesis.

As J. Daryl Charles tells us, with the Hellenistic era, Jewish interpreters became fascinated with angels. And one of the products of Intertestamental Jewish interpretation, was a number of outlandish and highly speculative descriptions of heaven’s supposed multi-tiered hierarchy and the involvement of angels in an array of human activities.^[8] One of the resulting Intertestamental books was 1 Enoch.

You may have never heard of I Enoch, but like all pseudepigraphical books, Enoch is falsely attributed to a well-known biblical character (from the Greek pseudo ”false” and epigraphein ”to inscribe”). In this case, the highly esteemed character is Noah’s great-grandfather Enoch, who famously “walked faithfully with God; then he was no more, because God took him away” (Gen 5:24 NIV). Most important to us is that 1 Enoch is an apocryphal book—meaning that the authenticity and teachings of the book were such that it was refused canonical status. If you check it out on Google, you’ll find that the contents of I Enoch are quite bizarre, offering a detailed report of the descent of two hundred angels (named “Watchers”) who were assigned to teach humanity the arts of civilization, but abandoned their appointed task because they were lured away by the beauty of human women.

²And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: ‘Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.’ ³And Semjâzâ, who was their leader, said unto them: ‘I fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed, and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin.’ ⁴And they all answered him and said: ‘Let us all swear an oath, and all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan but to do this thing.’ ⁵Then sware they all together and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. ⁶And they were in all two hundred; who descended ⌈in the days⌉ of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. (1 Enoch 6:2-6)

According to 1 Enoch, the result of these marriages were the nephilim.

²… great giants, whose height was three thousand ells [cubits]:
³Who consumed all the acquisitions of men.
And when men could no longer sustain them,
⁴the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. ⁵And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood. ⁶Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones. (1 Enoch 7:1-5).

As you can see, although 1 Enoch would make a great movie (it actually has already made a not-so-great movie), there are many points of departure from the biblical witness. So how did this apocryphal book, rejected by the Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant canons, and its interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4, find its way into Christian interpretation? Good question.

The answer is that in Jude’s (very) brief epistle—written to a community of Jewish and Gentile Christians immersed in the Intertestamental Jewish literature of their day—the biblical author makes an allusion to 1 Enoch: “And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6).

Keeping in mind Enoch’s non-canonical status, why would Jude be making use of the book? Also a great question. The answer is that New Testament authors often allude to apocryphal texts as a part of their rhetoric (e.g., Heb 1:3; 11:35, 37; Rev 8:2). In fact, in this same letter Jude refers to the “Assumption of Moses” (also not in your Bible). So clearly Jude understands that these fantastical Intertestamental writings are familiar to his audience and apparently he believes they will help him land his argument against the “ungodly people” (Greek asebeis) who have “secretly slipped in among [God’s people]” (Jude 4).^[9] As Charles says, what we find here is a “strategic use of extra-biblical sources” as Jude “mounts a sharp polemic against his opponents who are distorting the faith.” But note as well that Jude does not endorse the book of Enoch as Scripture, and he doesn’t actually make any reference to Enoch’s view of fallen angels copulating with human women. (Any more than he endorses the authority of the “Assumption of Moses” or its bizarre storyline). In point of fact, Jude is likely using this book because it is one of the texts that the heretics were utilizing to mislead his people.

In sum, Enoch’s mythical interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4 emerged in the late 3^rd/early 2^nd century BCE (centuries after Genesis was written) in a book that was falsely authored and excluded from the canon. And although Enoch’s interpretation of Gen 6:1-4 remained very popular during the Intertestamental period (popping up among documents recovered with the Dead Sea Scrolls and in other Intertestamental literature such as the book of Jubilees and Ben Sirach), by the 2^nd century CE the early church fathers were forcefully challenging the view. John Chrysostum and Augustine named the theory “absurd” and “blasphemous.” And with the Reformation, John Calvin states: “That ancient figment, concerning the intercourse of angels with women, is abundantly refuted by its own absurdity; and it is surprising that learned men should formerly have been fascinated by ravings so gross and prodigious.”^[10]

But good hermeneutics are not nearly as engaging as lusty angels, giant “Watchers,” and secret keys into the spiritual realm. As a result, Enoch’s commentary on Genesis 6 continues to play the circuit. Want to know what I think is going on in Gen 6:1-4? Stay tuned for Part II: “So Who Were the Nephilim?”

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^[2] One of the most famous authors who championed this fantastical view was (much discredited) Hal Lindsey in his 1972 publication Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth. Jesse Penn-Lewis and Evan Roberts’ War on the Saints (1912) and Derek Prince were also well known for this position and its impact on “spiritual warfare.” In the current era, Michael Heiser is the most visible champion of these views in his The Unseen Realm in which he echoes many of Penn-Lewis, Lindsey and Prince’s original arguments.

^[3] The exact phrase, “sons of (the) god,” appears several times in the Bible. Two are in Genesis 6; in Job 1:6; 2:1; and 38:7 these are clearly divine beings of some sort; in Psalm 29:1 the “sons of god” are commanded to exalt Yahweh; and in 89:6 it seems that the “sons of god” are other divine beings. In Daniel one “like a son of the gods” walks in the furnace, refering to either an angel or a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus (3:25). But note that Adam is also referred to as a “son” of God (Luke 3:38); Israel is repeatedly referred to as Yahweh’s “firstborn son” (e.g. Exod 4:22); David and his heirs are referred to as Yahweh’s “sons” (2 Sam 7:14; Ps 2:7, 12); Jesus, of course, is “the son of God”; and Christians are spoken of as “sons” and “daughters” of God as well (Gal 3:26; 1 John 3:1-2; and Rom 8:14). These differences have somewhat to do with the flexible use of “son of” in Hebrew. The phrase can communicate an actual father/son relationship, broader kinship association (real or fictive), one’s vocation or guild (1 Kgs 20:35; 2 Kgs 2:3, 5, 7; Neh 3:8), someone’s age (“a son of twenty years”), or belonging to any recognized grouping.

^[4] Meredith Kline was a reformed theologian who spent his career at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. His work in Kingdom Prologue, vols. 1-3 and By Oath Consigned shaped a generation of scholars and pastors (see M. Kline, Kingdom Prologue, 2:78 and Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary [W. W. Norton, 1996, 26n1; cf. E. A. Speiser, Genesis, 45-46).

^[5] “Hellenism” refers to the historical spread and influence of ancient Greek culture, language, and thought following the conquests of Alexander the Great. Alexander arrived in the land of the Bible in 333 BCE and the entire fertile crescent was transformed by the influences of Greek thought and religion.

^[6] There are literally thousands of divine beings known to the various Mesopotamian pantheons. Many of which were known to copulate with humans.

^[7] Tablet 1, ii:1; tablet ix, ii:14-15. See Dalley, Myths of Mesopotamia, 41, 51, 52.

^[8] J. Daryl Charles, “Jude’s Use of Pseudepigraphical Source-Material as Part of a Literary Strategy,” New Testament Studies 37 (1991): 134-35; cf. R. H. Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Clarendon, 1913); cf. W. E. Nickelsburg, “Enoch, First Book Of,” ABD 2:508-16; Ladd, “Pseudepigrapha,” ISBE 3:1040.

^[9] Jude’s polemic is complex, and you’ll need to pick up a commentary to fully engage it. See Bauckham, Jude–2 Peter or Ruth Anne Reese, 2 Peter and Jude.

^[10] For online access see https://biblehub.com/commentaries/calvin/genesis/6.htm.

In the course of teaching “The Epic of Eden,” I am asked this question all the time. And by it, people usually mean why do babies die, why are young parents struck with cancer, why are good citizens killed by drunk drivers? Sometimes the people asking this question are thinking more globally: Why do tyrannous governments thrive? Why does terrorism reproduce itself? Why are tens of thousands of children on this planet orphans?

So let me say up front that when I am asked this question, my heart breaks right along with the person asking it. Even the most casual perusal of my inbox on any given day reports more horrific realities than this heart can hold. But I am also intrigued by this question. The reason I’m intrigued is because the very voicing of this question demonstrates to me that humanity remembers where it came from. Our DNA seems to know that it is wrong for babies to die, for disease to pillage our bodies, for governments to abuse those they are called to protect. We seem to know intuitively that these things are wrong … even though this is the only existence we have ever known.

Every great movie you’ve ever watched, every fabulous novel you’ve ever read, every hero who has ever stepped off the pages of a comic book, movie script, or epic saga is that person who is able to defeat the tyrant, rescue the abused, and cheat death against impossible odds. Heck, the earliest literature we possess speaks of humanity’s quest for immortality (I’m thinking of the Gilgamesh Epic). So it would seem that somehow the children of Eve know that poverty, disease and death are wrong. Even though in all of our collective experience and memory humanity has always experienced poverty, disease and death. If expectation is built upon memory as the cognitive specialists insist, then why do we expect something other than what thousands of years of human existence has taught us to be true?

And let’s not dismiss this “sixth sense” that there is something better out there as an intuition born of faith. No, all of humanity somehow knows that our current existence is not what it is supposed to be. It takes very little effort to convince my seatmate on an airplane that there is something profoundly wrong with our world. Even the most committed atheist will readily state the same. So how is it we know something is wrong when we have never seen anything else? I am convinced that this “sixth sense” is evidence of the residual presence of the image of God in humankind. And that image remembers. It recognizes the “wrongness” of this world and cries out for the world as it should be: the blueprint of God’s original intent that was Eden.

So how do I go about answering this question when it is asked? Typically in two parts. The first part often doesn’t sit well with my audience: “There are no good people.” You can feel the silence in the room as people shift in their seats. But even though most folk are a bit shocked (and a little offended) at that response, reality is that in comparison to what humanity was designed to be, we are a broken, twisted, evil race. A quick perusal of today’s headlines or the most recent docu-drama will convince you of the same.

The prophet Isaiah (and the apostle Paul) put it this way: our finest actions and most selfless deeds are like “filthy rags” before the Father (Isa 64:6; cf. Rom 3:9-18). So although I might think of myself as a fairly “good” person, in comparison to what I was designed to be … not so much. In reality I am wholly corrupted—both morally and physically. Like the female wraith in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce who foolishly preened and primped her decaying body to charm the saints in heaven, my degree of degeneracy escapes me, but is wholly obvious to the one who created me. So am I a “good” person? Not if the definition of “good” is the “good” of Genesis 1.

The second part of my answer has to do with the fallen-ness of our world. No longer ordered according God’s perfect seven-day structure, no longer subjected to his ideal authority, this world is at war with itself. Our gene pool is flooded with death and disease, our relationships are consumed by self, our resources are limited, our planet is poisoned. Death is everywhere, anxiety abounds, and sin reproduces itself in every context. In essence, God has done exactly what we’ve asked—he has yielded this world to the authority of his stewards. The Creator’s guiding grace has been withdrawn. The reason bad things happen is not because God lets them happen in our generally good world, but because the nature of Adam’s world is evil—bad is now the norm.

I will never forget a paradigm-shifting lecture I heard in seminary. There I was in Lecture Hall 1 at Gordon-Conwell Theological listening to my professor, Meredith Kline, lecture on Old Testament hermeneutics. Dr. Kline was a man of deep conviction. But he was also a raging introvert. So when he had something profound to say, something he wanted to “shout from the housetops,” it seemed to violate his standard sense of self. So instead of shouting, he would start making this “hurumphing” sound (and know that all of my past classmates are now chuckling). And this was one of those moments. Laser-focused, his voice breaking, Dr. Kline flipped my world view on its head with a single statement:

“We should not be surprised that in this fallen world babies die and marriages fail; we should be surprised that some babies live and some marriages thrive.”

Up until that moment, like most of us, I had assumed that the world was mostly good and bad stuff was the anomaly. I was wrong. This is Adam’s world, it is mostly broken, and good stuff is the anomaly.

We tend to think of the fall as somehow localized—either in region or impact. But truth be told (love that song), the entire system is broken. Think of a machine that is still running, but its gears are fractured. With every movement it is shearing and shattering its own parts, belching acrid smoke, chugging toward catastrophic failure. If that image doesn’t connect, try a garment with a large stain right there on the front, or a well that has been poisoned. You can’t just “pull that back” with some sort of localized repair. The entire system, garment, water system is ruined. So although our tendency is to ask why God doesn’t step in and stop one particular instance of abuse, one murder or one corrupt official, in truth, the only way to fix this cycle of sin and death is to tear it down and build it again: “For creation was subjected to futility …” (Rom 8:20).

So truth be told, sometimes God does step in and interrupt human history by rescuing that one victim of abuse, taking out that one corrupt official, reversing the impact of that one natural disaster. In fact, every one of the redeeming acts of God reported in your Bible is just such a moment. When God spares Adam and Eve the annihilation they had chosen; reveals himself to Abraham, delivers Israel from the crushing hand of Egypt, gives Israel a leader that has some chance of success (David), and offers us a mediator who can deliver our race from certain death (Jesus). But know as well that the evil of our world will not be fixed until this broken world is born again—until death is swallowed up in victory and a “new creation” results (1 Cor 15:54; 2 Cor 5:17; Rom 8:19-21; 2 Pet 3:7). That moment will finally and irreversibly deal with the predator and the pedophile, the thief and the tyrant. It is in that moment that those crushed under the hand of the oppressor will finally walk free. This is God’s final intent.

So my answer to the question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” is, one, there are in reality no “good” people; and, two, we as a race must reconcile ourselves to the fact that every child starving in the famines of the Sudan, every young Arab woman slaughtered in an “honor killing,” every body laid to rest because of 9/11 is not the result of a “bad thing” that happened to “good people”—these are each the victims of Adam’s choice.

The updated edition of the Bible Study, The Epic of Eden: Understanding the Old Testament as Your Story Bible Study releases on September 15th. This Bible Study provides you and your group a clear, practical framework to transform the way you read your Bible. Step past modern cultural assumptions and discover the very real people of the ancient text, helping you organize the scattered pieces of biblical history into a clear, unified story of redemption. Would you rather read the book, The Epic of Eden? The 2nd edition releases on November 17th!

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When asked what was their favorite part of “Understanding the Old Testament as Your Story,” here is what they had to say:

I think my favorite aspect of the Epic of Eden Study is the ease in which Dr. Richter explains deep theological and historical concepts in such relatable terms that enables the laity - without going to seminary - to understand the true meanings. This also enables learners of all levels to have a clear, concise peek into the world of the scriptures.
-Rev. Debby Stikes

I appreciate how she articulates why our OT closets are so messy and unorganized. I then understood and was able to get clarity so I could embrace their stories as part of my faith journey. The way she explains all the terms of the Ancient Near East have allowed me to experience so many AHA moments and be blown away by how God loves us.
-Louise McEvoy

I grew up in the church. My father was a pastor for 42 years. I taught Sunday school and was the pastor. The Epic of Eden Bible study helps me become a better teacher and follower of Christ as it helped me understand the cultural context of the Bible.
-Steve

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We then asked a few people what they would say to someone hoping to lead the Epic of Eden Study this Fall. Here are a few of their answers.

Epic of Eden is by far the most accessible and practical study of the Old Testament I have ever seen. I have done this study in at least 5 different churches and every group has found it to be one of the best studies they've ever done. Epic of Eden is just the beginning and a great springboard, especially for people who are relatively new to in depth Bible Study. The "organizing the closet" metaphor was the hook they needed because everyone relates to the idea of having far too many jumbled Old Testament stories from Sunday School that they are not quite sure what to do with. This will likely continue to be the first study I introduce in any new congregation I serve.
-Craig Sefa

It will change how you read the Bible and transform your spiritual life. For me, it took my faith journey onto a whole new trajectory that still impacts how I look at the Bible, how I teach my classes, and how I share the story of God’s redemptive love with others. It is a springboard or a tool to share the gospel and get others excited about Jesus.
-Louise McEvoy

Trust God to lead you, so you may lead others to trust God.
-Janine Plum

My classes had students on both ends of the spectrum: some with zero knowledge of the Old Testament, others with solid knowledge of the stories taught in Sunday School. I also had a number who were way too familiar with the well-crafted morality-lesson sermons that highlighted Abraham, Moses and David. Epic of Eden gave them so much more. They learned to put the stories into real space and time. To connect the characters one with another and to see God’s work in each encounter, revealing himself and bringing his people closer to the new covenant we have in Christ. Sandy put it all together for us, showing us how every story leads to the culmination we will experience when the Kingdom comes in all its fullness.
-Dori Barber

Are you contemplating leading Epic of Eden this Fall and have questions? Drop them in the comments below!

Preorder the Epic of Eden Bible Study

Bulk Pricing Available on ChurchSource

What does make this one different? Well, if you know the story, JD Walt and I launched the first study when Seedbed was just a dream and no one was filming Old Testament professors! So we filmed the first curriculum—forged in the furnace of hundreds of weekend intensives at as many different study groups in all the major time zones—over the course of three months at the new studio at Asbury College (now university) after hours. And when I say “after hours,” I mean like 7:00 pm to midnight! We gleaned a studio audience from the dining hall of Asbury Seminary (and my Biblical Archaeology class that had just sat through six hours of lecture), I changed clothes every session in the women’s bathroom, friends were dabbing at my hair and make-up, and we went for it. The end result was what has transformed your study group from “Yeh, let’s stay away from the Old Testament” to “Man, is there another study we can do on the Old Testament?!”

But as I know you know, the filming and the study guide need a bit of a “tune up” from that first wholehearted (but not as whole-resourced!) effort. Hence, what you have in this new edition is the same heart of our Seedbed product, but cleaned up, tightened up, targeted, and updated via the amazing resources of Harper Collins. Some new data for sure, twelve more years of experience teaching this material, but still the same magic!

Is this only for theologians or Bible teachers?
Oh my goodness, no. I literally get texts and emails and letters and DM’s constantly from folk who have deployed this study in every context imaginable. There are folk who do it on their own, with their families, their home groups, student groups, military Bible studies abroad, huge Sunday School classes who put me on the “big” screen and retirement communities in the lounge. I have a dear one right now who is doing one of my studies with her long time Jewish friend who is apparently loving the chance to better understand her own Scriptures. Any one who wants to understand their Old Testament can jump into this one.

Can I use this in my church small group?
Absolutely. In addition to the emails and DM’s I also get pictures of study groups of every sorts (love that). And sometimes I get presents! As the streaming videos will play on the big screen, computer, or your TV these lectures can be shown anywhere. The study guide has been distilled into four study days per week. We’ve worked really hard to update and target the guide to make it as user-friendly as possible.

Why is it important that we study the Old Testament?
Now this is my question! Although there are certainly folk out there who would speak of the Old Testament as “the unfortunate preface to the part of the Bible that really matters,” reality is that the Old Testament is the first two-thirds of the great story of Redemption—first two thirds! Picking up the story of the Christian faith in Matthew chapter one can certainly be done, but it’s like picking up Harry Potter in book three. Or the Lord of the Rings in book two. There’s a reason that Matthew one starts with a genealogy. From the gospel writer’s perspective there is NOTHING more important or exciting about Jesus than that he is the son of David, the son of Abraham. It is my honor and privilege to introduce you to David and Abraham! I want you to know them as the real people that they were, to be able to put your Bible together so that you “get it,” to feel the Exodus story that shapes your story, and to have your heart absolutely break with joy when you realize that God the Son has come for us, the lost children of Adam, the exiles of Eden, the second Israel and his objective is to bring us home.

If I did this study before, should I do it again?
That is, of course, up to you. There are five other “Epic of Eden” studies that you could head to after this one. But I hear from folk all the time that they’ve done this particular study a number of times. This one is content heavy—it is not “Bible 101” for the thousandth time. There is likely always more you can get from it. AND if you want to push farther, check out the IVP book version of The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament that is also coming out in a 2nd edition soon.

Preorder today!

This is an updated edition with the new addition of streaming videos. (No more purchasing the videos separately, the code is right inside your Bible study!)

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We, as Christians, we want to understand our Bibles, don’t we? We want to be able to put together the great story of redemption, catch a glimpse of what this book meant to its original authors and audience, and therefore what it should mean to us. This is our story, and we’re eager to claim it. But when we attempt to study our Old Testament, we struggle. But let me tell you, as someone who has taught Bible to everyone from the toddler church of St. Pat’s Anglican to the doctoral students at the London School of Theology, I’m convinced that there really are only three controlling issues that make us shy away from the study of our Old Testament. And my goal as your teacher over these next 12 weeks is to solve those issues.

This study guide has everything you need for a full Bible study experience, including:

• The (completely rewritten) study guide itself—with discussion and reflection questions, video notes, and a leader’s guide.

• An individual access code to stream all video sessions online (meaning you can do this study with three or thirty or even by yourself!).

Here’s the breakdown of content that would be helpful as you consider if this study is right for you and your group:

Session 1: The Great Culture Barrier - Learn why people struggle with the Old Testament and how our first step to getting past the “great barrier” is to understand Israelite culture.

Session 2: Redemption - Learn what the word “redemption” really means and how the entire concept grew out of the family structure of ancient Israel.

Session 3: Real Time and Real Space - Learn how the Old Testament fits into real-world geography and history. We’ll focus on five key figures: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David … and three essential spaces: Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Canaan.

Session 4: Covenant - Let’s get organized! Discover how the ancient Near Eastern concept of “covenant” explains the Old Testament and God’s relationship with us.

Session 5: Treaty - Learn how God used an ancient concept (treaty-making) to explain Himself to his people.

Session 6: God’s Original Intent - Study God’s “blueprint” for creation and his original intent for humanity. How do Genesis 1 and 2 relate to each other, and how does the “framework theory” help us understand Genesis 1?

Session 7: God’s Final Intent - Put your Bible together by learning how Jesus (the “last Adam”) restores what the first Adam lost and how Eden’s icons point us to the new Jerusalem.

Session 8: Noah - Learn how Noah and the Noahic covenant begin God’s rescue plan, and how the flood connects to re-creation and other ancient flood stories.

Session 9: Abraham - Study Abraham’s story, the second stage of God’s great plan of redemption, his call and journey from Ur to Haran to Canaan, and how he became “the father of the Jews.”

Session 10: Moses - Study why Moses stands at the center of our Old Testaments, how theocracy and the tabernacle shaped Israel, and why the Mosaic covenant is central to our Christian faith.

Session 11: David - Meet David! The shepherd boy chosen as Israel’s ideal king. Study David’s covenant, how it is built on the Mosaic covenant and serves as the platform for the New Covenant.

Session 12: The New Covenant - Re-learn your New Covenant through the eyes of Old Testament faith. Jesus as prophet, priest and king—he is the last Adam, the son of Abraham, and David’s heir. Study about the “already and not yet” of your citizenship in the Kingdom of God.

If you’d like to lead this study with your group:

Step 1: Preorder your copy of the book (link below)
Step 2: Decide on a meeting place. Don’t forget the right technology to play the videos!
Step 3: Invite your community and make sure everyone has a copy of the book, a Bible, and a pen.
Step 4: Let Dr. Richter do the heavy lifting for you. Your job is to facilitate the experience by cultivating a safe environment for growth.

This study is great for all types of groups:

• Sunday school Bible study

• Men’s Bible Study

• Women’s Bible Study

• Mixed Bible Study Groups

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CALLING ALL EPIC OF EDEN BIBLE STUDY TEACHERS!

If you have facilitated a study with Epic of Eden before, we are looking for comments from experienced leaders who can speak to how the original study impacted their groups. Our objective is to reach out to new leaders to help new audiences engage the Bible as you have. Can you help us? Any commentary on how the study impacted your group. Tell us how many times you've taught the series and why. How did it help your experienced believers organize their Bibles? How did it help you as a leader disciple new believers? Specific experiences are welcome!

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So glad to see you back for this last installment of an important conversation. In Parts I & II we’ve learned that the words history, historicity, and historiography have specific definitions that must be attended to when asking about the historical reliability of the Bible. We’ve learned that ancient history-writing and modern history-writing have different running rules, and if we’re going to examine the Bible as an historical document, we are going to have to play by the rules of ancient history-writing. We’ve also learned that not every book in the Bible claims to be history-writing, but for those that do (specifically the Deuteronomistic History and the Chronicler’s History), the Bible has proven itself historiographically respectable.

This brings us to the biggest question —how do we in the 21^st century go about critically assessing these ancient histories for their historicity? How do we determine what is real historical memory versus what is not?As you can imagine, these events happened so long ago that assessing them can be quite complicated.

We work with what I call internal and external evidence and the intersection of the two. Internal evidence is what the Bible has recorded for us—the narratives of Abraham and Isaac, Deborah and Samuel, Saul and David, Omri and Hezekiah. External evidence is what we have managed to recover from the ancient world: archaeology and epigraphy. Archaeology is the “stuff” that a society leaves behind: buildings, fortifications, terracing, storage silos, weapons, tools, pottery, etc. Epigraphy is the writing that a society leaves behind: building inscriptions, treaties, contracts, votive inscriptions, victory stelae, letters, receipts, etc. And because the bar for demonstrating biblical historicity is very high (arguably higher than any other record of ancient history), the rules of the game are that until a scholar can demonstrate an event or person named in the Bible by means of external evidence, that event or person is assumed fictional. We call this the “hermeneutic of suspicion.” People and events in the text are assumed guilty (of being non-historical) until they are proven innocent (historical) by means of a collaborating artifact or inscription.

And so for someone like me, I work with two categories of data: (1) A careful reading of the text (deploying all of my linguistic and literary skills); and (2) a careful reading of the archaeological record. And it is when these two bodies of data intersect that I am allowed to use the word “historical.”

Ok, let’s talk external evidence.

The first category is archaeology, and it is way easier to find. Every society leaves stuff behind. “Stuff” as big as palaces and as small as jewelry and spindle whorls. But one of the perennial problems in Syro-Palestinian archaeology, is that cities are way easier to find than … most anything else. So the bulk of archaeological effort has been focused on urban centers. Palaces, fortifications, temples, storage facilities are by far the easiest (and sexiest) things to locate and excavate.

But think this through with me, cities require not only urbanization but centralization. Centralization that creates a federal government, that creates a tax base, that makes the construction of temples and palaces and public works systems possible. So whereas one would expect to be able to locate a major urban center and the palace and temple gracing its acropolis, one would not expect to be able to locate a smallish kinship group of nomadic pastoralists living in goat-hair tents with acacia wood poles following the seasonal pasturage of Canaan with their rekûš (the Hebrew term for “moveable property”) piled on the backs of their donkeys. You see the problem.

What about Epigraphy? Well, first know that finding any inscription is a very big deal. And it does not happen as frequently as finding “stuff” (which is why I am still bitter about the esteemed Dr. David Schreiner pictured below who found an inscription on the first day of his first dig while washing pottery for the first time … all on a scholarship that his esteemed professor had knocked down doors to secure on his behalf). I digress.

An example of how challenging (and important) an inscription can be would be the man pictured below, Avraham Biran—an absolute luminary in Israeli archaeology. Biran dug the city of Dan for 30 (count them) 30 years from 1966-1999. And he waited for 24 of those years to find the most significant inscription of his career.

It was July 21, 1993. Biran and his associate Gila Cook were exiting the tell. And just outside the Iron Age gate complex Cook paused over a chunk of cut stone—she paused because she saw script. Paleo-Hebrew script--an epigraphic find that would transport king David out of the land of fiction and fairytales into the cold hard light of history.

It was a chunk of an old victory stele, erected by the king of Aram-Damascus bragging about defeating both “the king of Israel” and the “house of David.” And as up until July 21, 1993, the academic world had declared the United Monarchy and its most famous king fictional (see in particular Phil Davies’ 1992, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’: A Study in Biblical Origins with T&T Clark), this was a very big deal. Does this inscription confirm every detail of David’s life as we know it in 1 & 2 Samuel? Of course not, but it does confirm that he and his dynasty are indeed historical.

So what sorts of inscriptions might an archaeologist find that could help us with questions of historicity?

1. Building inscriptions are the largest category—a king’s dedicatory celebration of the completion of his palace, defense wall, or the temple of his deity.

2. Votive inscriptions, found on gifts and statues placed in the temple as a gift to the gods.

3. Administrative texts: letters, contracts, bills of sale, boundary stones, treaties, etc.

4. Religious texts: songs and poems and ritual legendary tales.

Each native and necessary to a complex government and economy. But each of these texts (like the urban archaeology discussed above) require a centralized government to be produced and preserved.

And herein lies the problem with our Bible and “external evidence.” Much of the biblical narrative happened before Israel was a state. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the twelve. The sojourn in Egypt. The Exodus and the wilderness wanderings. The Conquest & Settlement and even the early emergence of the monarchy under Samuel & Saul … no centralized government. So no tax base, no monumental architecture—palaces, temples, fortifications. No federal storage facilities. Not because our people weren’t there, but because we can’t locate them in the archaeological record.

As for epigraphy. What permanent records does a non-landholding pastoralist keep? What building inscriptions or foundation deposits, boundary stones, treaties, or official correspondence? And if one has no national boundaries or professional army, what reason would another nation have to celebrate defeating this not-yet-a-nation who has no army?

So although it is true that we have very little “external” evidence for example, of the patriarchs, as historians we should expect very little “external” evidence. But AFTER the formation of the monarchy, with its tax base, building projects, and professional army, well, surprise, surprise, so much “external” evidence it would take me hundreds of pages to offer you the most cursory introduction. As a result there are very few scholars who question the veracity (historicity) of the Biblical narrative after the Divided monarchy begins in 931 BCE. And as the rules of the game are that I must be able to verify the biblical narrative (internal evidence) with external evidence (archaeology and epigraphy) before I am allowed to name it “historical,” then very predictably, I’m not going to do very well until after 931 BCE.

So as I tell my students, when we look at the timeline of the biblical narrative (please find my teaching timeline below, and please know that all of the dates prior to 931 BCE are up for debate), any events prior to the monarchy live “under the shadow.” The shadow of “I don’t have enough external evidence to prove historicity.”

And although we have some very reliable evidence, both archaeological and epigraphic, to reconstruct the era of the patriarchs ... so much so that esteemed Israeli archaeologist, Amihai Mazar states that, “I find the similarities between the MB II culture and that illustrated in the Genesis stories too close to be ignored” (Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, 1990). And the Mari Archive removes any doubt that there were Semitic pastoralists moving between Haran and Canaan in this era. And the Amorite Onomasticon give us their names (Abram, Sarai, Isaac, and Jacob—or at least names just like theirs). And we know that these same Amorites traveled to Egypt in times of drought and famine … reality is that I can’t prove Abraham’s existence. And it is very unlikely that we will ever find direct evidence of our Abram and his personal story.

The same is true of the Exodus. I can easily demonstrate that Semites were migrating into Egypt in the Middle Bronze Age, settling in the Wadi Tumilat (you know it as Goshen), and were elevated to high administrative posts by the end of that era. It is no secret that with the rise of New Kingdom Egypt foreigners were enslaved for massive building campaigns, and that the eastern defense system made it as hard to get out of Egypt as it was to get in—Jim Hoffmeier has spent his career accumulating this data. Manfred Bietak, one of the greatest Egyptologists of all time, states point blank that he is not nearly as pessimistic about the historicity of the Exodus as biblical scholars are (“Comments on the Exodus” in Egypt, Israel, Sinai: Archaeological and Historical, 1987). But I can’t “prove” an exodus with external evidence.

But when we at last arrive at Israel as a nation-state, well, then the shadow lifts. David and his dynasty are named. Monumental architecture of massive proportions appears in Jerusalem and Solomon’s strategic military cities. Samaria (the northern kingdom’s capital) is transformed under Omri into one of the most luxurious cities of the ancient world. Omri is named in the Meshe Stele, Jehu is named and portrayed on the Black Obelisk. We have found the ivory that decorated Ahab’s “ivory house” (cf. Amos 3:15; 6:4 and 1 Kgs 22:39). We have Hezekiah’s seal (think “signature pad”), Isaiah’s seal, even Jeremiah’s scribe Barak-yahu’s seal. And the wars that brought both the northern and southern kingdoms to their knees are so well documented out of the archaeological and epigraphic record that … well, we could write a movie script.

So all told, yes, there are significant challenges in demonstrating the historicity of the biblical text prior to 931 BCE. It is ancient history-writing and there is still much work to be done. But the evidence clearly demonstrates that the historical stages upon which the characters of our early narratives live out their lives can be reconstructed in compelling detail. And the national histories recorded in your Bibles? The events and the people they describe are, by any ancient standard, “history.” Come on with the questions!

We’ve already dealt with our vocabulary: History, Historicity, and Historiography. Now let’s engage the next question. What did history-writing look like in the ancient world?

Obviously, the events in our Old Testaments happened long, long ago and far far away, but even in an ancient world there were historians. And there were histories. But the expectations of what “history-writing” should look like were significantly different than ours. And that because you and I are children of the Enlightenment. Meaning that reason, individualism, skepticism, and what we call “objectivity” are the values we purport in any intellectual enterprise. As a result, we expect “history-writing” to be chronologically linear, event-oriented, “objective” (meaning no particular value system attributed to the events recorded), and any record that rehearses the acts of the gods, well that—by definition—would be myth, not history. So our histories are also atheistic.

But is that what ancient history-writing looked like?

No. Ancient history writing was not chronologically linear or event-oriented. It was instead character-oriented. As a result, our narrators circle around the story of an esteemed ancestor or leader until that person steps off the stage in death. At which point these histories circle back and turn their attention to the next character. Much like what you see in what scholars call the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob “cycles,” which do not disengage their central character until that character dies. It is then that the next character moves to center stage.

Or perhaps 2 Kings, what scholars know as part of the “The Deuteronomistic History,” that tells the story first of king Ahaz in the south (2 Kgs 16), then Hosheah in the north (2 Kgs 17), then king Hezekiah (2 Kgs 18-20), Manasseh (2 Kgs 21), and Josiah (2 Kgs 22-23) each in the south. Here we find boundaried narratives of each king, even though we can demonstrate conclusively that Hezekiah ruled as a co-regent with his father Ahaz, and with his son Manasseh (meaning that all three reigns overlapped).

The same is true of the book of Judges. Each judges’ narrative is told in its entirety before we move to the next, even though we know that some of them were reigning concurrently, in separate regions, because the nation was facing multiple threats at one time.

Ok, so character-centered and not necessarily chronologically linear.

But likely the greatest difference between ancient and modern history writing is that ancient history-writing was un-apologetically theocentric. Meaning that the gods always played a role in these accounts of the past. AND that theology (the not-objective view of the narrator) was essential to the telling of the tale. The supernatural and miraculous? All the time.

So the Law Code of Hammurabi, the Annals of Sargon II, Sennacherib, and Ashurbanipal; the Babylonian Chronicles that record the essential political and military events of the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 745 BCE to the 3rd c. BCE; the Meshe Stele that rehearses the liberation of Moab from the hands of Omri and Ahab, and even the Black Obelisk that shows us Israelite King Jehu with his butt in the air grovelling at the feet of Shalmaneser III—all of these speak of the gods’ intimate involvement in human history. A reality that, in a modern mindset, would render each of these essential historical sources illegitimate. But of course if we rule these ancient sources out … well then we have no ancient history at all.

All told, our Bible, in the books in which it claims to be history-writing (another very important point) completely echoes the expectations of history-writing in its day.

And, actually, let me pull that back just a bit. As Martin Noth (a giant in my field), first observed, the Bible is actually more circumspect regarding its utilization of sources than its ANE analogues. Even John Van Seters, a distinguished professor of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill (who we’ll come to know as a “minimalist”), finds the historiographic method of the Bible’s “Deuteronomistic History” so meticulous, so sophisticated that he attempted to date it to the days of Herodotus (the Greek “father of history”). Why? Because surely the Israelites could not have come up with “good” history writing before the Greeks!

And let’s all linger over the fact that our biblical historians, unlike surrounding historians, actually dare to contradict and criticize the leaders and heroes of their day. Think of the narrative of David and Bathsheba, Hezekiah’s foolishness at the end of his life, and Jeremiah’s resistance to his own calling. Not only do the Annals of Sennacherib completely fail at this sort of journalistic integrity, heck, so do the Washington Post and the NY Times!

So recognizing that the national histories contained in our Bibles are in fact ancient history writing, we find that they are quite respectable. The first of these national histories is the pre-exilic Deuteronomistic History which encompasses Joshua- 2 Kings; the second is the post-exilic Chronicler’s History which encompasses I & II Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. Two different authors, two different eras, two different agendas. A lot of shared source material, but a lot of distinct source material as well. Both do their research, name their sources, offer editorial comments, criticize their leaders, incorporate the miraculous, and are clearly directed by theological intent. And both are, by any historiographic evaluation, careful, circumspect expressions of ancient history-writing.

As for the books that you are likely most interested in, Genesis & Exodus, well, these books are not recognized as pure history-writing, and there are many would like to write them off as etiological fictions (stories created to explain current realities by creating fictional pasts). But as William Foxwell Albright first said, and most biblical historians continue to echo, “the broader framework of the narratives recorded in these books has proven to reflect historical memory.” Yes, there are a fair number of caveats in that quotation. And, yes, it is unrealistic to expect to prove or disprove individual episodes in the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But the majority of historical biblical scholarship (e.g. Lawrence Stager, Amihai Mazar, Allan Millard, Richard Hess, Jeffrey Tigay and so many more) finds historical memory even in the books of Genesis and Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

Which brings us to the biggest question—how do we in the 21^st century go about critically assessing these ancient histories for their historicity? How do we determine what is real historical memory … and what is something else? Stay tuned!

Let me lead by saying that I also love Pete Enns. We went to Harvard together, I remember when his babies were born. Pete now runs an outfit called “The Bible for Normal People” where he speaks of himself as a “Christian Universalist” and an “Agnostic Christian,” a postmodern theologian who I am well aware is not terribly interested in issues of historicity. But as I also know that ours is a faith built upon the Exodus and the Empty Tomb, well, I was willing to engage. So I prepped, sent my slides ahead, packed the carry-on, and headed out to Minneapolis. Preston will be releasing a video at some point soon, so you’ll be able to get the “rest of the story.” For now, let me say that it was good to reconnect with an old friend. Pete is winsome and well-trained. But I am disappointed to report that the actual question of the day, “Is the Bible Historically Reliable?” did not get a seat at the table. Hence, the goal of this post is to offer here what didn’t get discussed there, an historian’s response to the question, “Is the Bible Historically Reliable?”

So let’s start with some definitions.

We begin with “History.” According to Johan Huizinga, a prominent dutch historian from the early 20^th century, history is defined as: “The intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of the past.” Each phrase of this definition is significant. “The intellectual form …” tells us that the recording of histories is not a spontaneous exercise. It is not random. Rather, the writing of a “history” is intentional. Someone has gathered sources and resources, interviewed witnesses, and engaged the task with the intention of creating a history. That history can be written, it can be oral, it can even be pictographic. But it is intentional.

“in which a civilization ….” This means that histories are not written by a rando with a Substack account; nor an aggregate who’ve launched a commune; not even a kinship group during the rainy season. But a civilization.

“… renders an account to itself of the past.” Do you hear it? An account to itself. This means that each civilization, in recording their national histories, makes decisions as to what cultural and historical issues they believe shaped them.

An example. When I was in high school in Montgomery County MD oh so many moons ago, my curriculum in world history included American History (the 13 colonies, the revolutionary war, the civil war, the industrial revolution, etc.), then European History, and (because I was a good student) my AP World History course took me back to the Greco-Persian War (499 BCE). And … well, that was it.

Whereas right now, world history in the public school system of the great state of California includes California history (with an emphasis on Native Americans and the Spanish catholic missions), the ancient Nubian Kingdom of Kush (I’m intrigued by that one), Islam, and Japan. That’s elementary school. Then in 6^th grade China and Africa. And in High school the 13 Colonies, Revolutionary War, Civil War and all the stuff I learned. (With an emphasis on Mexican Repatriation, Japanese American incarceration, and the roles of women and minorities.)

The point here, is that when I was in high school (back in the dark ages) the United States of America (on the east coast) defined itself as descended from European expansion, and therefore no one thought I needed to know about East Asia (even though China is like the largest country in the WORLD), or the continent of Africa (with 54 recognized sovereign states).

Why? Because the intellectual form in which my civilization rendered an account to itself of its past, only focused on those historical persons and events that my civilization (at the time) understood to be important. Those decisions were made by the intellectual elite (just as they are now), and looking at high school history curriculums in 2026, well, it’s obvious that the intellectual elite have broadened their perceptions as regards the cultural and historical forces that shaped our country.

Ok, that’s super interesting all by itself. But in this discussion it is particularly interesting because it demonstrates in real space and time that histories, all histories, are biased by definition. The national histories of Israel are not interested in Mesopotamia or Egypt, the Canaanite City-States or the Hittites unless they perceive that those massive historical achievements (the arch, the pythagorean theorem, chariot warfare, etc.) somehow crossed paths with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So the next time someone tells you that the Bible can’t be “historical” because it is biased … you just pull out your 7^th grade history textbook and say, “yes, and that surprises you?”

Additional issues with history-writing that you may not have pondered are (1) a civilization has to survive long enough to write a history, so know that it is the winners who tell the story. And (2) as history-writing requires sponsorship—someone needs to feed, clothe, and house the historian as he/she writes and researches—patronage is required. Which means that history is typically written by the educated elite, sponsored by the wealthy and the powerful.

Ok, how about “Historicity”? This term refers to the historical authenticity of the persons and events recorded in a text. And yes, “historicity” is important to the Christian faith. I could offer a thousand illustrations (not the least being the Old and New Testament’s constant command to remember, remember, remember the mighty acts of God) but let me summarize by pointing out that the historical prologue of Israel’s covenant (the reason that Israel should keep the covenant made on Mt. Sinai) is that: “I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” AND in the New Testament our man Paul says “if Christ has not been raised from the dead, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins …we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:17-19). These claims of FAITH are also claims of HISTORY. Even the Apostle’s Creed, one of the few things Christendom agrees on, makes the very specific historical claim that “He suffered under Pontius Pilate”—a mid-level Roman provincial governor, who ruled the equally obscure province of Judah from 26-36 CE. That’s our creed. So, yes, historicity is important to biblical faith.

Last vocabulary term, “Historiography.” This has to do with the study of history-writing, and determining what aspects of a record are historical by critically engaging the credibility of the sources and authors of that record.

So that’s our vocabulary: History, Historicity, and Historiography. Next question … “What did history-writing look like in the ancient world?” Stay tuned for part two coming soon!

What is it that makes everyone and their brother feel they have the expertise to leverage the Bible’s ancient authority to support whatever their social-media-fueled cause might be this week? Whether it’s politicians or health fanatics, social activists or scientists, I find biblical quotations in the oddest places. Typically stripped of their original contexts and deployed to support causes and campaigns that would’ve made the biblical authors’ jaws drop. Do people do this with chemistry? Constitutional law? Do we really assume that a Google search and one GE course in college makes us ready to perform surgery or resolve the immigration crisis? I don’t think so. But for some odd reason, everyone wants to claim their expertise in Bible. And as someone who has spent nearly four and a half decades of my life formally studying this text (yes, I am that old), it honestly makes me a little nuts. So will you indulge me while I spend 700 words talking about the concept of hermeneutics, the science of interpreting Scripture?

I think that one reason folks play “fast and free” in their interpretation of the Bible (sometimes over personalizing it; sometimes trying to leverage its authority for a personal agenda; sometimes forcing it to answer questions the authors never intended to answer) is because the Bible is so familiar to Western Civilization. And because it has so much cultural influence. So if someone can corral the Bible’s authority for their cause, well, that could prove to be a very strategic victory. The unintended consequence of all this grappling for influence, however, is that honest folk are left with a hodgepodge of readings that leave them saying, “there are so many interpretations of that passage, does it really mean anything at all?” And instead of questioning the interpreters, they question the Book.

But here’s the news flash, there are actual rules for engaging any text, especially one as ancient as the Bible. First can we recognize that contrary to what some might claim, the Old Testament is not a hodgepodge of unrelated materials thrown together by some late, uninformed redactor. Nor is the Bible the result of an empty-headed secretary copying down some mysterious message verbatim. No, the biblical writers were historians and theologians, scribes and poets, and, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have written a carefully formatted piece of literature designed to reveal to us the character of God and the great story of his people. So our goal as interpreters is not to force these words to say what we want them to say, but to discover what it was they want to say.

Hence our first guideline, we need to recognize that the Bible is an intentional act of communication, and to understand any book or passage within it we need to be willing to engage an ancient author, who has purposefully engaged a particular audience, by means of a recorded text. And because this is the Bible, a modern interpreter has to engage two authors—the human author who first put pen to parchment (or stylus to clay) and the divine Author whose ambition was to reveal himself to a present and future people.

We also must engage (at least) two audiences—the original and immediate audience and the intended future audience (our biblical authors were well aware that their act of communication was going to be preserved for future incarnations of the people of God). And as any act of successful communication requires that an author and his audience tap into a shared notion of the world, it is essential that the modern interpreter also tap into that shared notion, doing her best to understand what the shared world of her ancient author and audience looked like. And just like us, these writers communicated via their own language/vocabulary/idioms and their experienced social settings. So if we are going to understand them, we need to allow their words and cultural references to mean to us what the meant to them.

A fun little example (and I hope I don’t lose you). How do you feel about puppies? Here in sunny Santa Barbara dogs have acquired nearly human status—they are fed Blenders down on State Street, clothed in designer outfits, and transported in baby carriages and bike seats. People speak of their four-footed-friends as “fur babies” and my neighborhood website refers to pet owners as “parents.” As a result, no one is surprised to find a dog in a library, restaurant, post office, grocery store, classroom, or (my) office building, and everyone in my town is fiercely protective of the dogs who share our world. That is our cultural reference for the creature we know as a dog. In ancient Israel, however, most dogs ranked somewhere around sewer rats. Dirty. Vermin. Dangerous. To kill a dog was to do your community a favor. This is why Goliath shouts at David, “What am I a dog, that you come at me with sticks?!” and David defends himself to Saul saying that his status is no more than a “dead dog” (1 Sam 24:14; e.g. 2 Sam 9:8; 16:9). That is their cultural reference.

Next rule? We must deal with the text itself. What sort of literature is this? Is this poetry or prose? Am I reading an international treaty, a letter, an archived royal inscription, the prayer of a desperate and bereaved mother, a law code, parable or proverb? If you don’t know what you’re reading, you have little chance of figuring out what it meant to say. Genre, vocabulary, and literary context must all be accounted for—just as any other intentional act of communication. And each of these genres have vocabulary and literary conventions that are specific to that genre. The word “love” in Deuteronomy (political document) does not mean the same thing as “love” in the Song of Songs (an erotic poem). Thus, to understand these texts, we need to know something about genre and the vocabulary of the original languages. Too often, in the words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

So how are we going to accomplish this? Well, we have some hard work to do. First, we need to get past the great barrier that divides us from them— the chasm resulting from millennia of linguistic, cultural and historical changes. Then we have to put the great Story in order so that we modern interpreters can get a handle on our Old and New Testaments as one unified story. We need to know what we are reading and attend to particular vocabulary—context, context, context. All this so that we can begin to see the people of the Bible as real people, who lived in real places and struggled with real faith … just like we do. That’s why I wrote The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament in the first place, and it is my prayer that the second edition will do it only better.

Good places to start in reading about hermeneutics: Richard N. Longenecker, “Major Tasks of an Evangelical Hermeneutic: Some Observations on Commonalities, Interrelations, and Differences” BBR 14.1 (2004): 45-58, 45, and Jeannine Brown, Scripture as Communication: Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic 2021).

You are looking at a Golden Eagle: A native of the Negev desert just south of Israel. These “masters of the sky” grow to as tall as 3.5 ft, their wingspan can reach 7.5 feet, and they weigh in at 14 lbs. They can take out deer, calves, gazelle up to 100 lbs! Granted they can’t carry such a large animal off into the air, that max is 10 lbs, but they are completely unafraid of engaging animals four and five times their size in battle. These are in every sense the apex predators of the sky. And I’m sure that when their massive wings cast a shadow on those below, their piercing cries announcing that they were on the hunt, shepherds, like Moses, took notice. So we should not be at all surprised that this majestic creature found its way into Israel’s most prodigious tale of rescue and redemption, when the Master of the Universe himself swooped down into human history, to rescue a people and carry them out of bondage to Himself.

Now perhaps I’ve spent too much time reading the Lord of the Rings (is that even possible?) but I love this passage. How could anyone fail to be moved by this portrayal of Yahweh rescuing his people from the grip of Pharaoh and carrying them to safety on the wings of eagles? Hence, I was deeply disappointed when I engaged this passage for an essay several years back,[1] only to find that most commentators write this avian image off as artistic license or the hyperbole of poetic metaphor. This even though Deuteronomy 32:11 references the same behavior: “Like an eagle stirs up its nest on account of its young, and hovering, spreads its wings to catch them and carry them aloft”! They argued that the nešer (“eagle”) of the biblical text does not actually “carry” its young and this depiction has no grounding in actual eagle behavior. Well, as an avid bird watcher, a card-carrying member of Audubon, and someone who does not like the word, “no,” the game was afoot and my hunt for real data began.

So for those of you who are not bird watchers, you will be interested to learn that the Golden Eagle builds huge nests (known as “aeries,” the largest on record being 20 feet high), and they are notorious for building them in the highest and most inaccessible locations. As the objective is safety from predators and the ability to spot prey for miles, a Golden Eagle’s favorite nesting site is a cliff ledge—as much as 2,000 ft off the ground.

So if you were a young eagle, perched precariously 2,000 ft in the air on the edge of a cliff … how might you muster up the courage to launch off that cliff in order to learn to fly? That question was answered for me when I finally found the data I was looking for: an edition of the Condor journal from 1918. A long-running ornithological journal (now named Ornithological Applications) recognized as the premier publication in its field. And in the 1918 edition, a certain Loye Miller related an account of a Golden Eagle teaching its fledglings to fly. Success! And when I learned that Loye Holmes Miller is so highly esteemed that the American Ornithological Society offers a lifetime achievement award annually in his name, I realized that I had located the expert I was looking for. What does Miller say about our Exodus image?

In recounting the field observations of one of his students (F. E. Schuman), Miller reports a firsthand account of a mother Golden Eagle doing what mother eagles do, teaching their young to fly.

“The mother started from the nest in the crags and, roughly handling the young one, she allowed him to drop, I should say, about ninety feet, then she would swoop down under him, wings spread, and he would alight on her back. She would soar to the top of the range with him and repeat the process. One time she waited perhaps fifteen minutes between flights. I should say the farthest she let him fall was 150 feet. My father and I watched this, spellbound, for over an hour.”[2]

What do I learn from this? One, yes eagles do carry their young on their wings and this stirring image of Yahweh rescuing his fledgling nation on the back of eagles’ wings is not artistic license.^[3] That data alone resolved my exegetical crisis, assuring me that what is recounted in Exodus 19:4 and Deuteronomy 32:11 is indeed grounded in real eagle behavior. Better, I was reminded that often a well-executed shove is a necessary aspect of the journey.

Stay tuned for more material from the second edition of The Epic of Eden—coming to a bookstore near you, November 2026!

[1] “What Do I Know of Holy? On the Person and Work of the Holy Spirit in Scripture,” pp. 23–38 in Spirit of God: Christian Renewal in the Community of Faith, eds. Jeffrey Barbeau and Beth Felker Jones (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015).

[2] Loye Miller, Wilson C. Hanna, and Austin Paul Smith, “From Field and Study,” The Condor 20, no. 6 (1918): 212.

[3] This practice is also reported by famed American ornithologist, Arthur Cleveland Bent (1866–1954), known particularly for his 21-volume work, Life Histories of North American Birds (1919-1968). The story is related in “Aquila Chrysaëtos Canadensis: Golden Eagle,” United States National Museum Bulletin 167 (1937): 302. And by and Sir William Beach Thomas , The Yeoman’s England (London: Alexander Maclehose & Co., 1934), pp. 135-36.

Morning came early. Ethan and I headed “downtown” to grab a coffee at The Well--a cute little coffee shop on Main Street. Settling down outside, it eventually dawned on me that besides Ethan and I, the sidewalks were empty. At nine in the morning. On a Thursday. The Mayberry RFD storefronts lining the street made it obvious that this was once a bustling working class town, but ours was the only car parked outside of what I quickly realized was the only coffee shop in town.

We headed over to Ethan’s church. An imposing brick building dating back to the 1800’s, easily three stories high and adorned with beautiful stained glass windows. The economy that produced Main Street United Methodist Church was obviously enjoying prosperity. But as Ethan would tell me, this landmark of community and faith in Tazewell is failing. Although deeply committed to outreach, and a church that’s attracted a number of new families in the past five years, the reality is that far more have been forced to leave Tazewell due to a failing economy and lack of medical care. And too many of those who remain are struggling with addiction, agoraphobia, and tangles with the law. As a result, membership at Main Street UMC has dropped by 50% since Ethan arrived, attendance now topping out at 80. Brad Davis of McDowell County reports the same of his five point charge. As both pastors asked, how does one go about doing outreach and building programs when your community is experiencing profound unemployment, a myriad of mental and physical health issues, and has no reason to hope that anything better lies ahead? Particularly when that community is convinced they’ve been forgotten.

We toured the church. The cathedral ceilings, plastered walls and crown molding; the solid wood pews and wainscoting communicated the history of the place—the craftsmanship and pride. Vibrant and intricate stained glass windows marked every external wall. But the marks of a declining population were everywhere. Portions of the structure essentially abandoned; classrooms being utilized for storage; deferred maintenance. And then there was the enormous coal burning stove in the basement. Now I’ve seen my fair share of coal burning stoves, but this was a big one. Ethan explained to me that in his region power is extraordinarily expensive. As Appalachia was one of the epicenters for powering America’s industrial revolution, I found this ironic. Folk with older homes spend as much as a $1000 a month to heat their houses. And as that price point is simply out of reach for many, propane heaters designed for industrial buildings have become the norm. As a result, so have house fires. Ethan reported that 3-4 houses in his county burn down every year largely due to the common man utilizing uncommon practices to keep his children warm. Main Street UMC? It burns two tons of coal every couple of weeks.

From Tazewell, we headed over to Bishop. On the drive I asked Ethan about the role of the local church in Tazewell and surrounding communities. He spoke with passion of how the local church provides one of the few centers for social cohesion in the region. There are almost no public spaces—the pubs, parks, libraries, playgrounds, and diners one would expect in a typical town can’t seem to stay open. The local library? Closed for two years for structural repairs. So most folk hang out in either private spaces … or churches. But actual church attendance? Well, many congregations are down to less than a dozen people.

In Bishop I met Pastor Daniel Bradley. Dan pastors Alexander Memorial United Methodist Church—a church built for coal miners, by coal miners. The first thing that struck me as we pulled up was the monument that marks the turn onto Church House Hollow Road. Marked with the seal of the United Mine Workers of America, the monument (now streaked by algae and acid rain) commemorates “The men who gave their lives to the coal industry at Bishop Mines 33, 34, 35.” Do you hear it? Not the men who gave their lives for freedom or the defense of hearth and home … but to the coal industry. A sentiment that runs as deeply in the veins of this community as coal runs in the seams of their mountains.

We sat in Daniel’s office as he told me about his congregation. The son of a coal miner, Dan grew up on company stores and company medicine and furniture and toys. As he would later show us, coal mining towns like Bishop always have an “Upper Camp” where the bosses live; and a “Lower Camp” where the miners live (in Dan’s town “the colored people”). Daniel spoke of the 1980’s when the mines shut down and the town collapsed. A student at Duke Divinity, Dan took over Alexander Memorial in 2010. A church which had recently declined from “100 people with $100K in the bank to five people with $56 in the bank.” He speaks of how his people have been forgotten, and the harsh reality that “if you’re on the wrong side of the mountain, you’re sub-human.”

But Daniel isn’t leaving. He sees his church as a “lighthouse in a stormy sea” and he spends his days distributing meals (120 per week), clothes, personal hygiene products, and sharing the Gospel in word and deed. He believes that if his church closed, the town of Bishop would collapse. And after meeting some of his people, I believe him. Who are the wolves in this man’s pasture? “Drug dealers” he tells me—both the illegal sort and the pharmaceutical sort. You see, the mixture of broken bodies from years in the mines, economic collapse, corporate corruption, and despair have left his flock deeply vulnerable. As a result Daniel has a stack of Narcan boxes on his file cabinet—he never goes on a pastoral visit without it.

So we piled into Dan’s truck, and went to visit “Lower Camp.” Within one hundred yards of the church building we find a row of what had once been lovely old two-story farm style houses with big front porches, and generous windows. Many of them had been designed as two-family dwellings. The first house was still relatively whole, but the side yard was filled with abandoned equipment and building supplies, covered with weeds and piled within a few feet of the family’s swing set. The next house? Just a cement slap covered with debris. House after house had missing rooves, blue tarps pulled over broken windows, front porches mostly collapsed. Overgrown and broken down, many with evidence of past fires. But this was not an abandoned neighborhood—there were still families living in these houses. Dazed men sat on collapsing front porches. According to my hosts, these men were likely lost in meth.

We stopped at one such porch and Daniel jumped out to check on news. His parishioner, an older woman with a ready smile, came bounding out eager for the visit. Her adult son, sitting to the side, seemed unaware of our presence. We got the update on her grandson (also living in the home). Apparently the boy had collapsed at his high school basketball practice. An emergency evacuation ensued. It turns out that the lack of local medical care had resulted in an infection pushing him into renal failure, and as there is no hospital within reach, the emergency evacuation was required to save his life. As I sat and listened I was so deeply aware that everyone standing on that front porch had just learned to accept these conditions as “normal.”

So what does a pastor do? What does the Church do? Bishop is not the “inner city.” These housing conditions and drug issues, the food and medical desert these folk are experiencing has not emerged from crime or gangs or the range of ills resident in the bowels of our urban centers. These were the widows and the orphans left behind by the coal industry.

One of the things I speak of in Stewards of Eden: What the Scripture Has to Say About the Environment and Why it Matters is the inextricable link between environmental abuse and the widow and the orphan. As Pavan Sukhdev, author of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) report states: “Poverty and the loss of biodiversity are inextricably linked.”1 And as both the Old and New Testament demand that our faith display itself in our care for the marginalized, we need to pay attention. “Reprove the ruthless! Defend the orphan! Plead for the widow!” Isaiah preaches (1:17). “Real religion” James teaches us is “to care for orphans and widows in their difficulties” (James 1:27). I am proud to say that typically the Church is very good at caring for the widow and the orphan. The Church created both the concept and institution of the hospital; we created both the concept and the institution of the orphanage. Our hall of fame includes giants like George Müller, Mary Slessor, Charles Spurgeon, Amy Carmichael, Catherine Booth, Lyman Stewart, Rebecca Pratts, and hundreds, thousands more. But what today’s Church often does not realize, is that environmental degradation produces widows and orphans and the first people to be impacted by environmental degradation are always the “least of these.”

In Coal Country, these orphans and widows have been created by a predatorial industry who has taken what it wanted … and walked away. The counties of West Virginia, Eastern Tennessee, Western Virginia and Eastern Kentucky are riddled with stories of big coal moving into the ancient forests of Appalachia, stripping the land, poisoning the water, crippling the populace, and then packing up to go do the same a county away.

So where is our federal government? How could these conditions be tolerated in the United States of America? I am outraged when I think that the coal fields of Appalachia lie within a three hour’s drive of our national capital and that our current Vice President spent his summers in Eastern Kentucky. He has seen what I have seen. And yet … the only federal plan for “change” in Appalachia is more coal. (see Executive Order 14241, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/reinvigorating-americas-beautiful-clean-coal-industry-and-amending-executive-order-14241/).

In my next installment I’ll tell you about some of the early resistance to the abuses of the good people of Appalachia, the march of the “Red Neck Army” in 1921, the largest single environmental disaster east of the Mississippi at the Big Sandy River, and the agonies of Rawl West Virginia. But right now let me say that in the past fifty years our country has made great strides against the abuses of the coal industry. There has been a steady decline of coal use in our country. We have gone from a 52% dependence on coal to generate our electricity 20 years ago, to a 16% dependence in 2024. In 2024, Appalachian Voices reported that nearly 40% of the “active” surface permits in KY had been sitting idle since the Biden administration. New legislation has forced the coal industry to restore the land and water it has destroyed and to support their retired miners with pensions and health insurance. But the coal companies have found avenues around that new legislation.

As Joshua Macey & Jackson Salovaara offer in their essay, “Bankruptcy as Bailout: Coal Company Insolvency and the Erosion of Federal Law in the Stanford Law Review in 2019, our country’s Bankruptcy Code has been systematically engaged to evade corporate responsibility. Thus, whereas the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 requires a coal company to restore the lands affected by surface mining to “a condition capable of supporting the uses which it was capable of supporting prior to any mining,“2 reality is that such reclamation is expensive. So if a company manipulates its assets carefully, it can shirk those responsibilities by filing Chapter 11. Thus, in the 2017 restructuring of Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources (the second and third largest coal producers in our country):

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of the Interior (DOI), these restructuring agreements were “obviously a carefully constructed scheme to evade environmental liabilities through discriminatory classifications and treatments of environmental general unsecured creditors as opposed to other general unsecured creditors.3

For those of us who are not attorneys, this means that Chapter 11 was utilized to “discharge or otherwise avoid” $1.9 billion in environmental liabilities, leaving those costs instead to the “taxpayers, regulators, and retired miners” who must now address the degraded mines; polluted water and farmland that big coal has left behind.4 The 250,000 abandoned and inactive mines that have yet to be reclaimed in Kentucky alone, testify to the profound irresponsibility of these massive and massively profitable companies. And what of the Coal Act that demands that these companies support their retired miners with pensions and health insurance? Via bankruptcy claims Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources just a few short years ago dodged $3.2 billion worth of owed retiree benefits as well as the ongoing health insurance that could have addressed the disease and injury that a career in the mines leaves in its wake. The cases are complex, but the outcome is the same—the Coal company gets rich, the land entrusted to us by our Creator is stripped of its fecundity, the forests are eradicated, and the poor are “crushed at the gate” (Prov 22:22).5

Here is a bit of the story of Coal Country from my hosts, Rev. Brad Davis of Welch, West Virginia and Dr. Rev. Ethan Johnson, Clinch Mountain District, Emory Virginia (previously of Tazewell).

Would you like to learn more? See what the Nature Conservancy is doing to redeem and preserve Appalachia for its people https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/priority-landscapes/appalachians/. And check out Appalachian Voices, a grassroots organization committed to the care of the people marginalized: https://appvoices.org/ And while you’re on those websites … pull out your credit card. Let’s put our money where our mouths are and shore up the folk on the ground bringing about change.

My host asked me to present on environmental theology: the first presentation an overview; the second a local issue. As we were in Northeast Tennessee, I chose Mountain Top Removal, Valley Fill (MTR-VF) Coal Mining for the second plenary. For those who know my work in Stewards of Eden: What Scripture Says about the Environment and Why It Matters, you know that I locate this issue under the chapter on the care for the widow and the orphan—helping the Church to see that environmental degradation hits the marginalized first and hardest. And if you’ve read that chapter, you also know that the impact of MTR-VF on both the environment and the poor is bad, really bad.

So I gave my first presentation and it was warmly received. Lot’s of enthusiasm. Wonderful! But then I gave the second presentation. And as is often the case when it comes to “local issues” … well, sometimes the folk who asked for such a discussion wind up wishing they hadn’t. Because environmental stewardship in your own backyard is far more challenging to engage than in someone else’s backyard.

Let’s get some background. What is MTR-VF? A relatively new form of coal mining, MTR-VF requires the targeted site to be clear cut and then leveled by the use of millions of pounds of explosives. The goal is to reach the coal seams buried deep within the mountain without the expense of manpower and excavating. The demolition can extend as far as one thousand feet below the surface. Valley fill (VF) emanates from the need to dump the “overburden” created by this method of coal extraction. In other words, what was once a thriving mountain ecosystem— trees, underbrush, topsoil, and stone—is dumped into adjoining valleys, suffocating thousands of miles of habitat including healthy streams and springs.

As with most coal mining in our country, the regions targeted for exploitation are inhabited by the poorest of the poor: West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, northeastern Tennessee, western Virginia and parts of Pennsylvania. The geographic region is known as Appalachia (pronounced “Appa-LATCH-uh”—I bought the t-shirt), and if you don’t have the accent, you really can’t say it correctly!

The impact of the constant explosions, flying debris, the lunar landscapes and poisoned ground water left behind, and the toxic particles inhaled by every man, woman, and child living within range of these “mines” can be quantified in the medical records, cyclical poverty, drug addiction, and life expectancy of this forgotten community. Incalculable, inhumane, and invisible. Thus, whereas coal mining in the United States has a long and troubled history, MTR-VF has brought the abuse of the land, the miner, and his community to an entirely new level.

So there I was, calling on this group to hear and see the issue at hand and ask the question, “What should citizens of the Kingdom of God, who are also citizens of the United States of America, be doing about ‘defending the orphan’ and ‘pleading for the widow’ in this long neglected corner of our country (Isa 1:17)?” But, as these things always are, the conversation is complicated.

You see, historically, coal has provided the good folk of Appalachia their most significant source of employment and infrastructure. To quote Rev. Brad Davis, who has a five point charge in McDowell County (the poorest county in America), the citizenry is “indoctrinated from birth that coal is all we are and all we’ll ever be. If coal goes away, we go away.” But even a cursory review of the region makes it expressly clear that the coal industry has not provided for these people, it has exploited them.

Predatory extraction of the region’s resources has left the land decimated, groundwater poisoned, towns surrounded by toxic (unlined and un-fenced) sludge ponds, and local economies and school systems in near-collapse. As Pastor Daniel Bradley of Alexander UMC explains, in his town of Bishop there is no work, no medical care, no grocery stores … no hope. What there is in Bishop is rampant opioid addiction, ubiquitous medical issues, and the remains of what used to be homes and stores and towns standing rotting in the sun.

Perhaps most troubling to the environmentalist in me is that the devastation to these Mountain Top Removal sites and their adjacent waterways is irrecoverable. Scores of experts have been shouting about this for decades. But they have been silenced by industry and indifference. One particularly courageous study conducted by an independent research team of university biologists and geologists in 2010 states: “Current mitigation strategies are meant to compensate for lost stream habitat and functions but do not; water-quality degradation caused by mining activities is neither prevented nor corrected during reclamation or mitigation.” Rather MTR-VF coal mining causes “permanent loss of ecosystems that play critical roles in ecological processes.” The experts agree that the impact on land and waterways is “pervasive and irreversible” (M. A. Palmer et al., “Mountaintop Mining Consequences,” Science 327, no. 5962 [2010]: 148-49, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/327/5962/148). What this means in layman’s terms is that the 500+ mountains of this ancient range that have already been “removed”— their adjacent waterways, and their communities—can never be healed.

Perhaps more troubling is that our current administration has recently signed an executive order to “turbocharge” the coal industry—lifting regulatory barriers to coal extraction, and suspending the planned closures of many coal-fired power plants in our country. That means that rather than the hardwon reductions in coal use that have landed our country at a current 15% dependence on coal as a source of electricity, we are targeting a rise back to the 53% of the 1960’s. Consider as well the companies that withdrew from Appalachia in bankruptcy in recent decades rather than dealing with the environmental impact of their profits on the region. It appears that they are moving back into Appalachia under new names. This ugly story is not over.

So there I was, standing in front of several hundred academics, having concluded my presentation with a call for Christian action, and the room had settled into the kind of silence no speaker wants to hear. The microphones were open for Q & A, and I stood there on the platform awaiting the storm. And then I saw him. Coming down out of the bleachers. A younger man for this crowd; he wore a suit jacket. Based on the mood of the room and his measured approach, I took a deep breath and prepared myself for combat. He spoke to the audience first, introducing himself as Ethan Johnson, a UMC pastor. I didn’t know his name, but I could tell my audience did. Then he named his church, Main Street UMC, in Tazewell, VA. Once again, I did not recognize the names, but I could tell that my audience did. You see, Main Street UMC in Tazewell used to be the crown jewel of Tazewell County … the very bowels of coal country. And Ethan? He has his PhD in New Testament from St. Andrews and therefore, credibility.

Knowing none of this, I saw the man at the microphone turn to the audience first. And to my very great surprise, he said: “I need you to know that everything she just said is true.” And then he turned to me and said, “And we need your help.” Never have I seen a room flip faster.

So as soon as we were done with the Q & A, I made a beeline for the Rev. Dr. Ethan Johnson. I found out he’d been raised in coal country in a pastor’s home, that he loved this region and its broken story, and that he was deeply discouraged. I learned that this “wicked problem” of exploitation, poverty, distrust, addiction and environmental degredation had knocked the wind out of his vanishing congregation. As a leader he was struggling to imagine a path forward toward the sort of changes necessary to the flourishing of his people. And so we made a date. I was headed to Winchester, VA later that year for a speaking engagement, and I promised to come a few days early, land a little further west and south, and meet his people, see his town, and better understand how what I knew to be a devastating environmental issue causing untold suffering for the population of Appalachia, was also crushing the widow and the orphan in his congregation.

This next series of substacks will tell the story of my encounters with Ethan, his colleagues Rev. Brad Davis in McDowell Country and Rev. Daniel Bradley in Bishop. Krea Merritt of Tazewell and Ed Evans (America’s Top Science Teacher, 2008 and a local politician) and our shared dream to move the dial … toward redemption.

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I’m grateful to say that my latest book (and first children’s book) is situated in the majestic countryside of Appalachia. A region of our country that is so staggeringly beautiful I had to share it with readers. In fact, the illustration of Abigail’s waterfall comes straight from western North Carolina! This book is an invitation for families to discuss what the Bible says about caring for this beautiful world of ours. Explore the wonders of creation with Abigail and learn to care for God's good earth! Releasing August 19; it is available for pre-order today!

Abigail and the Waterfall

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Some resources for you:

Sandra Richter, Stewards of Eden: What Scripture has to say about the Environment and Why it Matters (Downers Grove, IL: IVPAcademic, 2020)

“What Is Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining?,” iLoveMountains.org, http://ilovemountains.org/resources

Erik Reece, “Mountaintop-Removal Mining Is Devastating Appalachia, but Residents Are Fighting Back,” Grist, February 17, 2006, www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/02/16/reece.htm.

M. A. Palmer et al., “Mountaintop Mining Consequences,” Science 327, no. 5962 (2010): 148-49, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/327/5962/148.

James Bruggers, “Mountaintop Mining Is Destroying More Land for Less Coal, Study Finds,” InsideClimate News, July 26, 2018, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25072018/appalachia-mountaintop-removal-coal-strip-mining-satellite-maps-environmental-impacts-data.

Howard Berkes et al., “An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners. Regulators Could Have Stopped It,” All Things Considered, December 18, 2018, www.npr.org/2018/12/18/675253856/an-epidemic-is-killing-thousands-of-coal-miners-regulators-could-have-stopped-it.

Clifford Kraus, “Shareholders Approve Massey Energy Sale to Alpha,” New York Times, June 11, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/business/02coal.html.

Carol Morello, “Child’s Death by Mine Boulder Sets Off Avalanche of Rage,” Chicago Tribune, January 5, 2005, www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-01-09-0501090359-story.html

Tim Thornton, “Family of Boy Killed by Boulder Sues,” Roanoke Times Daily Press, July 6, 2006, www.dailypress.com/news/dp-xpm-20060706-2006-07-06-0607060311-story.html.

Visit the Christians for the Mountains website: www.christiansforthemountains.org/.

See a farewell tribute to Larry Gibson and his extraordinary resistance at “Farewell to Larry Gibson, an Appalachian Hero,” iLoveMountains.org, September 12, 2012, http://ilovemountains.org/news/3185.

From the get-go I have said that the topic under discussion is not actually women in ministry—but women in leadership in ministry. Why? Because even the most casual perusal of the state of the Church would demonstrate that if it weren’t for women serving in Christian ministry, ministry wouldn’t be happening! Historically, it has been we female-types who have taken responsibility for nearly all the Christian education, community events, children's ministry, missions committees, Royal Kids Camps, accounting, relief work, and short-term missions programs that come out of the local Christian congregation. So again, not women in ministry, but women in leadership in ministry.

In our review of the Bible we have noted that the Old Testament celebrates women as prophets and judges, and that the New Testament embraces women as prophets, apostles and deacons. So why is there an issue? Well, we’ve got two “problem” texts: 1 Timothy 2:12-15 and 1 Corinthians 14:32-34—passages which clearly forbid women in public ministry. This has led us into a discussion of hermeneutics (the science of interpreting Scripture) and the difference between a normative text (intended for all believers, everywhere, and for all time) and a situational text (intended for some believers, in a particular place, at a particular time). And in my last post, we started talking about one of these problem texts, 1 Tim 2:12-15.

Clearly Paul's issue with the church in Ephesus is false doctrine (1 Tim 1:3). Scholars agree that the error Paul is addressing has something to do with the influence of the Artemis cult resident in the city of Ephesus (see "Women in Ministry: Part 2"). Artemis required that her followers remain expressly loyal to her and to remain virgins. Thus it is possible that when Paul speaks of the false teachers at Ephesus, who have convinced the “younger widows,” not to remarry, young widows who have gotten into the “habit of being idle and going about from house to house … idlers … busybodies who talk nonsense, saying things they out not to … some of whom have already turned away to follow Satan” (1 Tim 5:11-15), and tells these young widows instead to get married and raise children (v. 14—the first century equivalent of “get off the couch and get a job!”), he may be targeting an Artemis-associated error. So Paul shuts it down. And in this particular situation, in this particular church, for this particular time, declares: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet” (1 Tim 2:12). Because this command contradicts Paul’s past directives, Paul has partnered with Priscilla to plant this very church (Acts 18:19), has written of Junia as “an apostle” in Rome (Rom 16:7), and directed the women in Corinth to cover their heads when they prophesy (1 Cor 11:5), I named 1 Tim 2:12-15 a situational text, not a normative one.

But what is the deal with Eve? After stating that he does not allow women to teach or hold authority over a man, Paul offers what appears to be his rationale in 1 Tim 2:13-15:

“For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing-- if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.”

There are many who would say that because Paul appeals to creation, this passage is normative. That Paul’s restriction on women leading or teaching in the Church must apply to all women of all time.

But there are several significant issues with that conclusion. First, obviously Paul cannot mean that women can only be saved (as in justified) by giving birth. Not only would that leave so many women outside the circle of grace, but this is Paul! And Paul would never tolerate such a works-based version of the gospel! Some have tried to soften the language, translating women will be “kept safe through childbirth,” but as Gordon Fee details, the Greek simply will not support that translation.[1] Some have hypothesized that the childbirth we’re discussing is “the Childbirth,” meaning Eve’s role in bringing Christ to us. Also very difficult to support.

So how about turning back to the particulars of the Ephesian situation for some help? Many tie Paul’s very unusual allusion to Eve back to the goddess and the emergence of proto-Gnosticism in Ephesus. Let’s start with, what is Gnosticism? Gnosticism is a Christian heresy that emerged in the early second century CE. It was birthed from the collision of a grab bag of religious and philosophical beliefs resident in the Greek and Roman world at least as early as 200 BCE, and emerging Christianity. The resulting belief system was dualistic in nature, separating the material realm (bad) from the spiritual realm (good). The claim was that the flawed and/or evil material realm had been created by a lesser (malevolent) god, but deliverance from it could be achieved by gaining access to a hidden high god via the enlightenment of secret knowledge (gnosis). This hidden knowledge (gnosis) could free a person from the limitations/wickedness of the material realm. Who was Yahweh in this mix? Often identified with the lesser deity who created the flawed material world. Who was Jesus in this mix? An emissary of the higher, hidden deity, sent to bring gnosis to humanity and deliver us from the material realm. The early church fathers named this belief system heresy and battled for literally centuries to purge the Church of its influence. Proto-gnosticism is an early, evolving version of this heresy. You can see why Paul was not happy about his people at Ephesus devoting “themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God’s work—which is by faith” (1 Tim 1:4) !!

Catherine Kroeger, a classicist, points out that in the Gnostic cosmologies, female activity was often understood as the origin of the material universe. She states that in certain Gnostic myths (there are a lot of them), it was Adam who was deceived, and it was Eve who embraced gnosis by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As Gnosticism advanced, Eve was speculated to possess the ability to procreate without male assistance. Kroeger states: ‘Eve is the first virgin, who gave birth without a man. She is the one who played her own doctor.’”[2]

Lynn Cohick, a New Testament scholar whose specialty is the book of Ephesians, identifies this same “conversation thread” in Paul’s day—a conversation suggesting that it was Adam who was deluded, and it was Eve who liberated him from those delusions. Thus, it was not Eve who sinned, but rather in her successful pursuit of gnosis she eventually educated Adam in the secret knowledge that liberated both of them. This of course makes Eve a heroine in the Genesis story. [3]

Why do we care about Gnositicsm? Because if this is indeed the false teaching that Paul is combating (1 Tim 1:3), he needs to correct that false teaching by reminding his audience what the book of Genesis actually says:

“For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner” (1 Tim 2:14)

Paul's words thus serve to clarify that Eve was created second (not first) and that she was deceived (not enlightened) and thereby our Apostle very handily clears the table of the proto-Gnostic nonsense circulating through his church.

Also of interest is Sandra Glahn’s argument that Paul is using the creation narrative to counter the tenets of the Artemis cult. The Greek myth claimed that Artemis and her twin Apollos were born in Ephesus, and their miraculous birth was the impetus for the founding of the city. The myth claimed that Artemis was the firstborn of the twins, that newborn Artemis assisted her mother Leto in Apollos’ birth (impressive!), and that her status as firstborn and eternal virgin made her both autonomous and pre-eminent. Glahn claims that by reminding his audience of their own Scriptures—that in Genesis 2 Eve’s creation follows Adam’s and that they as male and female are interdependent—Paul is poking at this idea that Artemis is pre-eminent because she is the first and free of any need for men. So again, Paul’s appeal to Eve here would serve as a pointed correction to those sympathetic to Artemis worship in the Ephesian Church.[4]

He closes with, verse 15: “But women will be saved through childbearing-- if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.” No interpreter would claim that this sentence is transparent or easily interpreted. But it seems that Paul is saying that if the women of Ephesus are going to be saved from being deceived (as Eve was), they will need to step away from the false doctrines they have been embracing (the Artemis cult and/or the tenets of proto-Gnosticism) and the idle lifestyle they’ve been living.[6]

So we must ask again, is Paul’s particular response to this complex (and disheartening) scenario at Ephesus normative to all churches in all times? Or is it situational—a specific response to a specific scenario? Are all women in every congregation to remarry when widowed at a young age and be stripped of their leadership and teaching ministries? Well, if that is the case, Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 7:8— where he instructs the young widows “to remain unmarried,” becomes a problem. And the fact that at the very moment Paul is penning these words, Priscilla is still teaching throughout the Mediterranean with Paul’s full support is a problem as well. If 1 Timothy 2:12 is indeed a normative text, we are forced to ask how both of these profiles of the early church can be true at the same time? How can in one breath Paul celebrate Priscilla’s teaching gift, and in the next say that no woman in the Ephesian church can teach?

Ah, that leads us back to where we began—hermeneutics. Brothers and sisters, some of these texts are normative, and some are not. Some apply to every believer everywhere, and some only applied in Ephesus where false doctrine was threatening to destroy the work of God in this young church. The ultimate concern of the first epistle to Timothy, pastor of the Ephesian church, is that there are laypeople in the mix who are propagating false doctrine. That doctrine seems to be infiltrating the church from the Artemis cult and proto-Gnosticism—both deeply embedded ideologies in the city of Ephesus in the first century. Paul’s response? Get these lay people under control. And for goodness sake, don’t let them teach! In this particular situation the propogators of the false doctrine were women, so Paul pulls them.

In sum, recognizing the difference between normative and situational texts is essential to the conversation on women in leadership. We do not build the church on “Timothy, take a little wine for your stomach”; nor do we build the church on “Let women keep silent in the churches.” But we do build the church on “There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all. And to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift” (Eph 4:6-7).

Let’s go build the church!

Friends, if you want to learn more about women leaders in the Bible, don’t miss my latest study on Deborah!

Order the Deborah Study

[1] Gordan D. Fee, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, New International Biblical Commentary, vol. 13 (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1988), 75.

[2] Catherine Kroeger, “1 Timothy 2:12—A Classicist’s View,” in Women, Authority and the Bible, ed. Alvera Mickelsen (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1986), 225–253, here 226, 232–35. “In Gnostic cosmologies, female activity was often responsible for the creation of the material universe, and Eve was a potent force” (Kroeger, “1 Timothy 2:12,” 232–34 quoting On the Origin of the World 114.4–5). Walter L. Liefeld feels that Kroeger’s view of Gnostic influence at Ephesus is too early. (Liefeld, “Response,” in Women, Authority &and the Bible, ed. Alvera Mickelsen [Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1986], see his response on pp. 244–48)

[3] Lynn Cohick, The Letter to the Ephesians (NICNT; Eerdmans, 2020), personal communication 9/16/2024.

[4] Sandra L. Glahn, Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2023), 117–20; 143–45.

[5] Fee, 1 and 2 Timothy, 76–77.

From what I've seen over the years, it would seem normative to choose a biblical character, who was also a mother and tell her story, right? So I pondered a message about Eve, appointed the co-regent of a perfect cosmos, the mother of all humanity, her great gift was to bring new life into the world. Her name, ḥavah, literally means “life”! And Eve's mothering was designed in a world without the stop-the-world-I want-to get-off; do not tell-me-you-love-me-right now realities of labor and delivery. (Or the fifteen-year-old slamming her bedroom door shouting, “I hate you!” thing.) That would be a good sermon …

Or perhaps I should talk about Sarah? The beloved (and apparently totally hot) wife of Abraham. The fact that Sarah's journey toward motherhood involved decades of infertility—complicated by the shame of having failed to produce an heir for her very wealthy and very influential husband in a very tribal and traditional society—makes her story far too familiar to many. Do you know that Sarah pursued every medical intervention available in her time? And in each encounter wound up in exactly the same place—a dream that simply wouldn’t come true. But God … in his abundant grace, saw Sarah, as he sees us, and he transformed her grief with one, precious, child. And that long after she thought the game was over. Isaac’s name means “laughter,” and knowing these texts intimately, I am very suspicious that our "laughing child" might also have been a Downs syndrome child.

Or how about Rachel and Leah? Sisters, who due to their father’s failed character, wound up the wives of the same man. Yowza. Two women; one man. Two sisters; one husband. I can hardly get along with sisters who live two time zones away! Sharing the same man? No way! These difficult marriages, predictably, bread jealousy and bitterness. Each one's perception that the other wife, the other mom had something better than she had. And that bitterness poisoned not only their relationship, but the relationships of their children as well. Not that any of us have ever witnessed that dynamic ….

Or what of Moses’ mother, Yokebed? A woman who risked her life to keep her child alive. Hid him from a society that saw him as an inconvenience, a threat, unwanted and unvalued. A woman who sacrificially journeyed the entire path of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, sleepless nights, and loved her child enough to allow another woman to raise him. That is uncommon courage.

Or we could pause over my hero, Deborah. The Margaret Thatcher of Israel's early history. As I've spent a great deal of time teaching, she was a complete boss woman. Prophet, judge, commander-in-chief all rolled into one. But do you know that her most elevated title was “a mother in Israel”?

All of these women are in our Bibles for a reason. All of them are role models. And each of these women was a real women, who struggled with the impossible demands that mothers face every day. Be it the agonies of infertility or a loveless marriage. A really demanding professional life or a disabled child. A child who isn’t what you’d hoped they would be, or a relationship with a child that isn’t what you’d hoped it would be. And always the never-ending negotiations and compromises that a mother makes on an hourly basis regarding the demands on her time and resources.

So how did these women stay in the game? How do we stay in the game? My answer? By recognizing that they/we are not simply raising the next generation (which is like SUPER important by the way!) But by recognizing that in our parenting, we are actively building the Kingdom of God one little life at a time. And our sacrificial investment in our children's lives has eternal consequences. That would have been a good sermon.

You see, a child raised well, might just be the most powerful force on this planet. A child who knows what it means to be loved, and disciplined; a child who has been taught to work and rest; a child who is able to take the risks necessary to responsible adulthood, because they know they have a safety net. That is the sort of adult who has the sort of character to, literally, change the world.

Have we pondered the fact that when God needed to rescue the descendants of Abraham, helplessly enslaved by the Empire of Egypt, He sent a baby? Or the fact that when the forces of evil sought to destroy him before he could fulfill his calling, it was a mother who protected him? And when God needed to rescue his New Testament people, helplessly enslaved by the Empire of Sin and Death. He also sent a baby? And when the forces of evil sought to destroy him before he could fulfill his calling, it was a mother who protected him?

So, I could have preached that sermon. But then I decided, “Nah, I think I’m going to go a different direction.” And as a result, landed on a NT passage and a book.

The New Testament passage was Philippians 2:5-9.

“Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature, God, Did not consider equality with God
Something to be used to his own advantage. But instead he emptied himself
Becoming obedient unto death— even death on a cross. Therefore God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.”

The book I landed on was given to me in my first few weeks of motherhood--those weeks we all went into with an exquisitely decorated nursery and such a great birth plan. Those days when we had space in our worlds to work out and keep our pregnant little selves all cute and tidy … those days before your water broke early and you wound up in 27 hours of slow-moving, agonizing labor? (And if you're one of those superwomen who produced a human in three hours and have no idea what a "level four tear" is, I don't want to talk to you today.)

Yes, the first few weeks of motherhood when every inch of your body hurts. First from pushing a basketball-sized creature out of a tunnel designed for tangerines, and then finding out that the only way to feed that little salami with a soul involved the medieval torture known as ‘breastfeeding’—those days. It was during that time of profound physical exhaustion, and honestly more profound confusion as to who am I now, that one of my besties (and I’m so proud to say that bestie was a male colleague--Brent Strawn of Duke Divinity fame), gave me both a book and my sermon: The Birth of a Mother.

I love the title. Because the point of the title is to shift our attention away from the birth of a baby (obviously a wonderful thing), and talk instead about the (long-neglected) profound psychological and spiritual shift that occurs at the birth of a mother. At the heart of The Birth of a Mother is an arresting premise: Just as a baby develops physically in utero and after birth, so a mother is born psychologically in the many months that precede and follow the birth or adoption of her child. And I would add that a mother continues to be rebirthed with every stage through which her child passes. This book helped me to sort through the new realities of being a mother. Because when my baby was born, I was ushered into a new identity as well.

Can I tell you a bit about my story? Can I tell you I’d never been much of a girly girl, not terribly domestic, and I come from a train wreck of a family. My mother died when I was fifteen and my Dad threw me out when I was sixteen. So in my family of origin, mothering and parenting was not exactly a priority. Hence, I would not have been anyone’s lead candidate for the task of motherhood.

But in my Christian marriage, I so wanted to ‘break the cycle’ of that train wreck of a family. I wanted to build something better. And as only a newlywed can say without getting laughed out of town--I wanted to expand our circle of love. I think I had counted the cost, I think my motivations were good, so, we gave it a shot.

Now the combination of the train wreck family of origin and the PhD slowed things down a bit. Meaning that I found my husband in my thirties, not my twenties. And I had to get past General Exams before it was safe to reproduce. So when we finally got to that space where we started trying to make babies … well, we found out we couldn’t. For us, seven years of wrestling with that thing they call “infertility”—which is oh so much bigger a dragon than just physiology—miraculously, and completely unexpectedly resulted in a pregnancy that took over our world. Our baby shower? There was a tent involved.

So, there I am, in my second year of professoring, a “high risk” pregnancy, 27 hours of nasty labor, feeling like I'd just gone three rounds with Muhammad Ali, but AT LAST I had my sweet, baby girl in my arms. Her name is Noël because she was the most precious Christmas present ever given!

But thennnnn came the 23 months of not sleeping through the night, the fact that I was the first faculty member in the history of my institution to dare to reproduce, so things like maternity leave had not yet been invented. We were hundreds of miles from family on either side. So to make the story shorter, it was the pediatrician who actually taught me how to put on a diaper. And then there was the fact that Steve had just started his PhD; I was the chief breadwinner; and sweet Noël … well, she might be identified as one of those “high maintenance” babies!

But in those weeks, and all the weeks to come, I learned some things. I learned the life-altering, universe-shifting, primal love that makes a mother a mother. The attachment that compels you to stay up all night doing everything in your power to comfort a baby with a fever, and when that same little human rears back and throws up in your face … in your eyes … in your mouth … and you find yourself concerned about her. A kind of love I did not even know existed before the birth of this mother.

That is not a love that grows from butterfly kisses and birthday cakes. It is a love born of sacrifice. Every mother knows that babies do not hug and giggle their way into our hearts, they carve out a bloody hole in our souls that for all eternity only they can fill. The love of a mother is the love that keeps you up until 2:00 am making valentines for the 3^rd grade party, even though you are fully aware that the final edits on your book are due at 5:00 pm on the same “tomorrow.” The love of a mother will transform a shy and retiring woman into a warrior, taking on the entire school board for the sake of her learning disabled child. The love of a mother accomplishes what under most conditions is impossible to the offspring of Adam: allowing my universe to be so re-arranged that I am no longer at its center … she is. And that is what makes a mother “a mother.”

And can I say out loud, that I would trade every degree I have ever earned, every book I’ve ever written, and every post I’ve ever filled for the vast privilege that is mine—Noël and Elise call me “Mom.”

So, if that is what a mother is, why do we celebrate mothers day with Hallmark cards and candy? It is likely far more appropriate to celebrate with purple hearts. And although our fallen world is inclined to diminish the role of mothers, to tell her that her sacrifices are foolish, expecting her to accomplish her sacred trust in her “spare time”—that same society that grimaces every time a Mom with a baby shows up on an airplane, or in a restaurant; that speaks of "stay at home moms" in hushed voices; "soccer moms" and "room mothers" as though that’s a bad thing. May I make another proposal to you? And that is that the act of mothering—in whatever fashion God has brought mothering into your world—is likely the most Christ-imitating activity human-beings ever engage in?

Why do I say that? Let's circle back to our passage. The words of the Apostle Paul in the book of Philippians. Paul is in prison, again. This time in Rome. And although this time he is only under "house arrest," know that life in any Roman prison in the 1^st century was dark and dirty and dangerous. And if you did not have friends on the outside, it would cost you your life. Paul has friends on the outside, so he is writing to his beloved community in Philippi, 1200 miles away, a Roman military town in what we would know as northeastern Greece. And here he is pleading with those he loves to recognize that a life lived in the imitation of Christ will be a life of self-sacrifice and suffering. But that this suffering, when embraced with joy and humility for the cause of the Kingdom, results in a life worthy of the Gospel.

And we're all nodding. Thinking, "Well, yes of course Paul is saying these things. He's an apostle and that's what Christian faith is all about!" But can I point out that this message was likely JUST as counter cultural and unpopular in Paul's day as it is in ours? That the faithful in Philippi, just like us, were trying to live out their faith with as little suffering as possible? That their version of the Sermon on the Mount was much like John Guerra's "American Gospel"?

Blessed are powerful;
blessed are the rich;
blessed are the merciless and the hypocrites …
Blessed are the super stars,
blessed are the famous;
blessed are the ones who make their faces ageless;
they will inherit the magazine covers of the American Gospel.

But our man Paul offers the antidote.

"Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit," Paul says. "Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others." Phil 2:3-4

This, Paul tells us, is what real Kingdom living looks like. BUT WHO ACTUALLY LIVES THIS WAY?!

Paul goes on:

“Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature, God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. But instead he emptied himself.” Phil 2:5-7

In case you don't recognize it, this is the great “Christological Hymn” of
Philippians 2. Many believe that Paul is reciting a piece that his audience already knows. A creed of sorts that they had likely rehearsed many times. A "collect" reminding all of us what it looks like to imitate our Master in this broken world, such that we might ¹⁵“shine like stars … in a broken and perverse generation.”

Theologically, this hymn rehearses one of the essential declarations of our Christian faith: the two natures of Christ—divine and human. Jesus, who in his humanity (what we call the incarnation) was “in his very nature God,” emptied himself. Or if you head back to Paul's source text in Isa 53:12, “poured himself out” (like a drink offering), in order to rescue us from our own rebellion. Folks, this hymn is the Gospel. God has died for man.

And although the sacrifice of the Christ is unrepeatable. We, as his people, are being called to IMITATE this posture. My husband likes to say it this way: "the way down, is the way up."

This way down is what has been modeled to us by the one whose name we claim. "Live this posture!" Paul says. "Bring the Kingdom," Paul says! And here is the point: Is there anyone in our worlds who willing embraces this posture of abandoning "selfish ambition" and valuing another above myself, not looking to my own interests but promoting the interests of others … more than a Mom? And might it be time for we, the Church, to look toward this incarnational representation of the sacrificial love of our God with the honor it deserves? The women of our world who have put their own lives on hold so that another life could begin. Those who are living their lives, hourly, in a posture of self-sacrifice. Those who have embraced suffering as the road to life? Who have chosen to "build something better" by embodying the "new thing" that breaks the cycle of death?

So, to the Moms out there … First to the new Moms, who likely are feeling completely overwhelmed with the task at hand. Who knew that those seven little pounds of sovereignty could turn your world into complete chaos?! Those wondering if you jumped too soon. Was it worth the cost? Who AM I now? Hang in there. Not only will it get better, but the task you have chosen is a sacred trust, well worth the cost.

To the mid-journey Moms who may find themselves saying, “Dear God where is the line between my needs and their needs? How is my marriage ever going to survive this? Will I ever get back to my dreams?!” Know that "¹³it is God who works in you to will and to work in order to fulfill his good purpose" and your "¹⁶labor is not in vain." He is faithful. There is a line in there somewhere; you’ll find it!

And for those of you who can see the first finish line—your emerging adult is sprinting toward adulthood and it looks like we’re going to make it! Congratulations!! Mission accomplished! But for those others, living right here, right now with a failed launch. And instead of starting his first job, he’s starting his third rehab program. And everything you’ve invested in just seems to be crumbling in front of you. Please hear me on this, your God is a God of second chances, and your labor is not in vain. “¹³It is God who works in you to will and to work according to his good purpose." And although we do indeed "work out our own salvation with fear and trembling" (translation: I blew it yesterday, I'm going to do better today), reality is that God's ultimate ambition in our lives is that we might "¹⁵become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe” and that is what your current suffering is accomplishing in your soul. My prayers are with you.

Folks, mothering well is in no way an easy task. But Moms, to mother is in every way to build the Kingdom of God. And contrary to the messages of our current generation, it is not a secondary task, designed to be tucked into the edges of our overflowing lives. It is the task. Stay the course. Finish the race. Run it well. And, friends, with all of my heart, "Happy Mother’s Day!"

My students were so excited.

As we toured the site with the inimitable Paul Wright of Jerusalem University College, we talked "Conquest" of course. Could the incredible story of Joshua 6 actually have happened? As you recall, the battle of Jericho was the very first battle the Israelites engaged upon crossing the Jordan River into the Promised Land. As both the book of Joshua and archaeology make very clear, Jericho was strategic in every sense of the word. From the perspective of military engagement, there was no way around it. If Israel was going to claim this new land they had to get past this massively fortified city first.

From a theological perspective, the victory at Jericho is the "first fruits" of the Conquest. Yahweh who marches on the city, he wins the day, and all of the loot (which would typically go to the soldiers as pay), goes to Yahweh instead. The important Hebrew term herem that dominates Joshua’s book, meaning to either to “utterly destroy” or to “utterly dedicate” to the deity, is in full play here. Jericho is both--utterly destroyed and utterly dedicated to the deity. Moreover, the message of the Gospel is here as well.

Where is the Gospel you may ask? Well, that would be the lens-setting narrative that launches the epic tale. It actually launches the entire Conquest. Right there in Josh 2:1 when a woman, a foreign woman, a foreign woman who operates a brothel, risks her life to assist Joshua’s spies in their quest. Why? Because she has heard of Yahweh’s mighty acts, and she knows that Yahweh has given the Israelites the land, and in her belief she requests their hesed (covenant faithfulness). And the spies and their God promise “our life for yours” (v. 14) and give that covenant faithfulness via the token of a “scarlet thread”—literally “the hope of a cord of scarlet.” In sum, anyone who will pledge their allegiance to Yahweh will be delivered from the battle to come and incorporated into this new people of God. All comers are welcome.

Ok, back to archaeology. My students were well prepared. They knew the controlling issues. IF the walls that the Bible claimed to have fallen were indeed from City IV Jericho, then yes, this story could actually be true. And as Kathleen Kenyon taught us nearly seventy years ago, the walls of that Middle Bronze, doubly-fortified City IV had come tumbling down. Her top plans document a massive number of mudbricks from that collapsed wall. And oddly, those mudbricks fell out … not in. The assault of an opposing army would push those bricks in. But an earthquake, well, that would push them out. And the conflagration triggered by said earthquake is painfully obvious in the crisis-type destruction layers of City IV Jericho. And I anticipate that you recognize that that story lines up very nicely with the holy war recorded in Joshua 6.

But my students also knew that the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1550 BCE) was too early for a biblical conquest. Too early for either the early date reconstruction of the Exodus-Conquest (1446 BCE) or the late date reconstruction of the Exodus-Conquest (c. 1270 BCE). How do we reconcile the Bible, the material culture, and our current dates?

So of course my students wanted to see it all for themselves. As you may know, Jericho might just be the oldest urban center on the planet. We toured the Neolithic tower and wall, the Chalcholithic remains, the Early Bronze stuff … but they wanted to see that wall. A sprint across the tell and a scramble down a slope produced this image. If you zoom in really close, you can see four of Westmont’s finest, proudly displaying a sign in English and Arabic declaring that this tower belonged to the Middle Brong Age. THIS tower was a part of the City IV defenses system. This tower might just have been one of the walls that came tumbling down. Do we yet know how to reconcile the destruction of City IV to the account in Joshua? Nope, not yet. But, hey, the fact that they are asking the right questions, and the smiles on their faces as they touch the real places of the Bible … well, that is worth the price of admission.

As rehearsed in my first post, there is a lot of Scripture that supports, encourages, and celebrates women exercising their gifts of leadership in the community of faith. Jesus had female disciples, Mary was celebrated for sitting at Jesus’ feet (a standard first century idiom for a disciple with her Rabbi). We saw that the Spirit-filled crowd in Acts 2 who spoke in tongues and prophecy included women; we heard about Priscilla’s renowned teaching ministry; and pondered the long list of women in leadership in Romans 16. And more importantly, we sat with the foundational declarations of the New Testament that in Christ there is “neither male nor female,” rather all receive the gifting of the Holy Spirit for the purpose of service.

But we also spoke of passages that speak against women in leadership. In particular, 1 Cor 14:34-35 and 1 Tim 2:11-15. And I asked the question: “How can Paul be so supportive of women in leadership in one context, and then refuse to allow them to teach or lead in another?” I answered that question with the technical term, hermeneutics—“the science of interpreting Scripture.” Specifically, I pointed out that not all instructions offered to the Church in the Bible were intended to be applied in the same fashion. Rather, good hermeneutics requires that the trained exegete discern between the normative and situational texts in our Bibles. A “normative” text is an instruction given by the biblical writers, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that was intended to apply to all Christians in all times and under all circumstances. In contrast, a “situational” text is one intended to apply only to a particular situation in a particular time. Typically, a reader recognizes a “situational text” intuitively. So when Paul instructs Timothy to “no longer drink water exclusively, but take a little wine for your stomach,” none of us take that as a normative command that all Church-goers should add wine to their diets —or at least none of us should! Or when Paul tells Timothy, “When you come, bring the cloak I left with Carpas in Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments,” no one responds (or should respond!) by quitting their job and buying a plane ticket to Troas to find Paul’s missing parchments!

No, we recognize that these instructions are real, but that they only apply to Timothy, and only in a very limited circle of particular circumstances. Equally, when it comes time to care for the marginalized in our churches, we likely do not restrict our assistance to “widows not less than sixty years old” as Paul instructs the Church at Ephesus (1 Tim 5:9). And that because we, again, intuitively recognize the instruction as situational. Thus, we respond by gleaning the wisdom from the passage—that in our care for the marginalized we must be careful to discern who is truly in need of the church’s resources—but we will likely not restrict our care of the marginalized to only widows nor to widows only over the age of sixty!

But sometimes, because we are not native readers, that which was intended as situational gets accidentally promoted to normative . And that is what has happened with 1 Timothy 2:12. Is it that all women in every circumstance under the dictates of the New Covenant cannot teach or hold authority over a man? Or is it that in the particular circumstances of the Ephesian church under Timothy’s leadership that certain women could not teach or hold authority over a man? Let’s take a look.

We’ll start as all good interpreters should, by putting this letter in context. Paul is writing to Timothy, and Timothy has been stationed at the church in Ephesus, under Paul’s authority, as their pastor. What do we know about Ephesus? Well, we know that it was a major urban center in the New Testament era. A bustling seaport on the western coast of Turkey—affluent; one of the oldest Greek settlements on the Aegean Sea; named by Alexander the Great and Cleopatra. By the first century it served as the provincial seat of Roman government in Asia—which means it was not only a political and economic giant, but it sat upon the crossroads of an empire.

The strategic nature of Ephesus is likely why Paul spent more than two years there, why Priscilla and Aquila are also ministering there (Acts 18:19), and why 1 & 2 Timothy and the book of Ephesians address the city directly. And just in case you’re not already impressed, the city of Ephesus is named as one of the seven churches in the book of Revelation, AND as the guardian of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Which wonder? The Temple of Artemis! Pliny the Elder describes the temple in 77 CE as “the most wonderful monument of Graecian magnificence . . . a work in which all Asia joined!”. This breathtakingly beautiful edifice was celebrated for its splendor. And the influence of this goddess—the deity of the hunt and the “protector of the dewy young”—was profound. Ephesus was her city. Which explains the riot in Acts 19 when Paul and his allies become the target of the local craftsmen who see Paul’s gospel as a threat to their Artemis idol-casting business. Gaius, Aristarchus, and Alexander get dragged into what is still known as the “Great Theatre of Ephesus,” while the entire city goes ballistic shouting “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” For two hours! The other church leaders beg Paul to stay away lest he be martyred in the crossfire. Bottom line? No one messed with Artemis in Ephesus. And five-out-of-five scholars agree that the “false doctrine” that Paul is battling in Ephesus is somehow connected to the Artemis cult.

So what do we know about Artemis and her cult? Well, if you are a fan of Edith Hamilton or Percy Jackson, you know that she is the beautiful (sometimes ferocious) ever-virgin goddess who is also a skilled and devoted huntress—and the defender of the wild creature. She loves the wild places but is also famous for superintending borders and spaces of transition. She will be found where harbors meet highways and highways encounter cities. She will also be found where childhood meets puberty, and pregnancy encounters birth. Artemis was known as the midwife of the ancient world. Who protected girls, brides, and adult women from the dangers of reproduction.

But among the many paradoxes that characterized the Greek gods, she herself eschewed pregnancy, demanding of her father Zeus that she remain eternally a virgin. Thus those who served her were also expected to remain unmarried. And if her virgin priestesses (parthenoi) violated their vows of virginity, they could well find themselves a sacrificial victim offered to their goddess. The cult of Artemis was a uniquely female cult, and the celibacy of her priestesses was required.

Now as all good exegetes should, let’s place our passage in context. This epistle … well, it’s an epistle. Which means we only have one side of the conversation. Although everyone listening to the letter already knows what the problem that sparked the letter is, we only have Paul’s reaction to a problem. So we’re going to have to rely on the larger context and listen carefully to our author. And we hear right at the beginning that the crisis that triggered Paul’s letter is false teaching (aka “heresy”), and it is threatening the work of God in Ephesus. So the letter begins:

“³As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus, [Timothy], so that you may command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer, ⁴or to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God’s work . . . ⁶(Now) Some have departed from these and have turned to meaningless talk [fruitless discussions]. ⁷They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm” (1:3–7)

Ouch! I don’t ever want to be on the receiving end of a message like this from Paul! This is that moment when Paul says: don’t confuse your Google search with my apostolic authority! And what does our apostle have to say? “Timothy, this is a crisis. False doctrine and false teachers are threatening the work of God in the Ephesian church. So here I am authorizing you as my representative—deal with it!

So in our first step into Timothy’s book, Paul is openly confronting the influence of false teaching. He rebukes those who have “abandoned the faith” and fallen for the “devil’s trap” (1 Tim 3:7), he warns of “deceiving spirits” and “things taught by demons” (4:1). Those who “forbid people to marry” (4:3), and states that these false teachers are finding their most responsive audience “among some ‘weak-willed’ [or ‘gullible’] women, who are loaded down with sins and swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth” (2 Tim 3:6-7). And according to 1 Timothy 5, among these women are younger widows who “live for pleasure” (v. 6), have become “gossips and busybodies, saying things they ought not to” (v. 13), and by so doing are “bringing the gospel into disrepute (v. 14). Some of them have ‘already turned away to follow Satan’” (v. 15).

Ah, there is so much more here. But what I want you to focus on is that even a cursory read of this epistle makes it clear that Paul is unusually focused on false teaching that is somehow specifically attached to women. Apparently the false theology that is sweeping through the house churches is moving via young widows who “go around from house to house; and not merely idle, but also gossips and busybodies, talking about things not proper to mention” (1 Tim 5:13 NASB). Paul is also concerned about the elite women—whose wealth is displayed via their elaborate hairstyles, jewels, and expensive clothing. These women are just the sort of highborn girls and women who we know were representatives of the Artemis cult and the ritual textile gifts associated with the cult.

What is Paul’s suggested solution for these women, who, due to their current lack of maturity in the Jesus Way, are uniquely vulnerable to the false teachings flourishing in the city of Ephesus? Let’s take a look:

1 Timothy 2:11–15

“A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I [Paul] do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.” (NIV 2011)

It is this passage that inspires many churches to limit women’s teaching roles to the education of children and other women; and many denominations to forbid women as adult teachers, elders, or certain committees. Which often becomes a bit awkward. Like when women can teach the senior high youth, but not the college class. Or women are on committees that exercise authority over men, but can’t chair those committees. Or when women are allowed to be “directors” of various ministries but not “pastors” of those ministries. Or when a woman might be allowed to serve as an associate pastor but not the senior pastor … all in an attempt to allow women to serve the community of faith, but not to “exercise authority” over an adult male. And these churches and denominations who are busy culling (and contorting!) their leadership pool are doing so because they believe that in 1 Timothy they have a clear, normative statement from Paul that women are not to teach or exercise authority over men.

But do they?

Here Paul is clearly commanding the young widows of Ephesus step out of roles of leadership and teaching and step back into their standard place in society. Essentially, Paul their apostle is saying: “Accept a marriage proposal; have children; and get busy running a household (1 Tim 5:14)!” And this in contrast to “giving herself to wanton pleasure” and thereby becoming wanton against Christ as well (1 Tim 5:6). These women are instructed to dial back their elitist clothing, dress modestly, and do good. Instead of spending their days going about “from house to house” engaging in gossip and “things not proper to mention” (v. 13), they are now forbidden to teach, and have been re-enrolled in “How to be a Christian 101.”

If he were talking to young men, Paul would likely say something like: “Get your sorry self out of bed; put down the video games; GET A JOB; and become a productive member of society!”

Thus, as we attend to the fact that Paul is traveling, teaching, and planting churches with Priscilla—celebrating her teaching ministry, particularly in Ephesus (Acts 18:18-19, 26; 2 Tim 4:19); that Paul has greeted Junia as an “apostle” (Rom 16:7), and Phoebe as a “deacon” (Rom 16:1); that he himself is responsible for the covenantal declarations that in Christ there is neither “male nor female” (Gal 3:28) and announced the democratization of the gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12 (so much so that women are prophesying in 1 Cor 11:5) … well, this set of instructions to Timothy at Ephesus has got to be situational not normative. Context demands that Paul’s instruction to Timothy is best read: “In this case, I am not permitting a woman to teach. These women will instead learn.” As Gordon Fee translates, “in a quiet demeanor.” No more disruptive behavior, no more, “boisterous affirmation of heresies.” Step away from the goddess!

I know you’d like to hear more about what Eve is doing in this passage and what’s going on in 1 Cor 14:34-35. And I am just as eager to discuss it. But for that we will both have to wait for the lecture to come!

For further reading see Lynne H. Cohick, The Letter to the Ephesians, NICNT (Downers Grove: Eerdmans, 2020); Susan Guettel Cole, Landscapes, Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Gordon Fee, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, (NIBC; Peabody: Hendrickson, 1988); Robert Fleischer, Artemis von Ephesos und verwandte Kultstatuen aus Anatolien und Syrien, Etudes Preliminires aux religions orientales dans l’empire romain 35 (Leiden: Brill, 1973); Sandra L. Glahn, Nobody’s Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2023); Catherine Kroeger, “1 Timothy 2:12—A Classicist’s View,” in Women, Authority and the Bible, ed. Alvera Mickelsen (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1986), 225–253; Michael Immendörfer, Ephesians and Artemis: The Cult of the Great Goddess of Ephesus as the Epistles Context WUZNT 11; Reihe 436; (Tübingen: Mohr Ziebeck, 2017); Blum Trell, The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus: Mumismatic Notes and Monographys (New York: The American Numismatic Society, 1945); Martin Price, The Archaic Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (British Museum).

But as all the Moms I know, know, the likeliness of accomplishing all this without a fight or tears or the slamming of a bedroom door, me snapping at an equally exhausted cashier, or succombing to my annual gonna-kill-you virus … is highly unlikely. And when I toss into that equation all the folk I know who are struggling with the recent deaths of loved ones, marriages that have never met the mark, children who are wandering, jobs that are failing. Well, the risk of implosion just escalated 100%.

So I often wind up asking myself, “What is it that we are all working so hard for?” Is it a moment we recall from our childhoods when we felt "safe," when our family was all in one place at one time, and the biggest problem in our worlds was whether or not the Red Ryder BB Rifle was under the tree? Or is it, maybe instead that Christmas we’ve never actually known ourselves, but dangit we are determined to wrestle that moment from our broken worlds just once before we die for our own broken selves or the children we cherish. Is that what we’re working for?

Let me tell you about another group of folk, who were also deeply, agonizingly, awaiting the long-expected Jesus. The text is Isaiah 9:6. You have seen and heard this passage a bajillion times—on velvet banners hanging from the balcony on Christmas Eve, recited from the pulpit, embossed on your Christmas cards. But do you know where it comes from? More importantly, do you know who it comes from?

This oracle was first spoken by the great prophet Isaiah to the northern territories of Israel.

“There will be no more gloom for her who was in anguish.
In earlier times, He treated the land of Zebulun and Naphtali by the way of the sea with contempt, but He will make it glorious …”

These were the people who “walked in darkness.” Subjugated by the most powerful political force of the age, the Assyrian empire, the northern tribes had been repeatedly subject to the infamous cruelty of this world-power, whose kings celebrated the fact that they “instituted a level of destruction that disallowed rebirth” (H. Donner). Assyria specialized in terror, and torture, they created the concept of exile, and they were feared and hated throughout the known world. And they liked it that way.

As for our heroes, in 843 BCE Shaalmaneser III extracted a crippling tribute and forced the northern Israelite king to his knees; in 734 BCE, Tiglath-Pilesar turned their rivers red with the blood of the slain; and in 722 BCE Shalmaneser V brought the whole house down, the moment of exile, when the "10 lost tribes of Israel" were lost to the pages of history.

This is the backdrop as we enter our passage—war and looting has led to famine and disease and what had once been villages, farms and market places are now burnt out embers of what once had been “home.” The streets are empty, the front doors shattered, the orchards burned. And the survivors, well, they are just trying to pick up the pieces of what used to be their lives. It is into this agony that the prophet speaks:

²The people who walk in darkness will see a great light; those who live in a dark land, the light will shine on them. ³ You will multiply the nation, you will increase their joy; and they will be glad in your presence! … ⁴ For you will break the yoke of their burden and the staff on their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor will be shattered as at the battle of Midian … ⁶For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.

This oracle is spoken to a community who has watched their villages burn, their women brutalized, their children dragged off as slaves. And it is these people who the prophet says "will see a great light." Put yourself in their shoes for a moment. Think about the citizens of the Ukraine right now. Or the innocents in Gaza. Can you feel the heart of that ancient Israelite? He has no control over the forces that cause his world to tremble. She is powerless to gather the resources her family needs simply to survive. He does not have the strength to defend his wife or children. The people in power? Who knows what they’re doing. Do they care about my circumstances? Heck, do the even know about my circumstances? As you sit in that space, what do you think that once-citizen of the northern kingdom of Israel wanted? If we could ask, I anticipate she would tell us: "I want to know that this year, there will be no soldiers. No one charging up over that hill with swords, horses, fire. This year I want my husband to get to bring in the harvest, to deliver his spring lambs. This year I want to know that there will be enough. This year I want to be able to look into the future and not be afraid. I want peace."

Thus, the word of the prophet to a weary and injured land.

“A child will be born to us, a son will be given to us … this one will take his stand for those the world has forgotten, “his government will bring us peace."

Not long ago, one of my students made me notice Isaiah’s word choice in this powerful passage. That his word for “government”—Hebrew miśrâ—occurs in the OT only in this passage (vv. 5, 6). Considering how often the Bible addresses the idea of government, this is noteworthy. Why only once? It’s a loan word, borrowed from another language of another people. What was that other language? Akkadian—the native tongue of the brutal, oppressive, violent Assyrian empire who had broken the backs of Naphtali and Zebulun.

Isaiah chooses Assyrian vocabulary to describe the one whose government will actually change things. He dares to speak of a new Kingdom, a different kind of Kingdom. And whereas the legacy of Assyria was violence, fear, and loss … the legacy of this Kingdom will be peace.

So back to my first question. When you boil it all down, what is it that you and I are working so hard for this Advent season? I would say that even with all the centuries and circumstances that lie between us and them, we want the same thing the ancient Israelites wanted. We want to know that for one brief shining moment, I and those I love are safe from the vagaries of this world. And for that one moment, we will be able to look into the future and not be afraid.

So as the last few days of Advent stand before us, ponder the Christ child, and how profound it is that He be named the "Prince of Peace." That this would be the throne name chosen for his anticipated inauguration. And how appropriate that the prophet would use the language of brutal Assyria to announce this "Upside Down Kingdom" of which we are a part. The Prince of Peace, born in obscurity, marked by illegitimacy, ostracized by his own, will take back the throne of this broken world and usher in a new kind of kingdom. Brothers and sisters, we do not wait this advent season with anxious expectation, we wait with hope. The legacy of Adam's world be it then or now is a legacy of violence, fear, and loss. But the legacy of this child, this long-expected Jesus, is peace.

Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon virgin, mother and child
Holy Infant so tender and mild
Sleep in heavenly peace
Sleep in heavenly peace