Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

Hebrew Voices #180 - SBL Reactions 2023: Part 1

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Kim: This is not an artificial product. It’s not, as you said, that the Masoretes sat down and said, “Okay, here’s the half verse marker.” Extraordinarily, this has been preserved since before the fall of the Second Temple, the way naturally that the text is read.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m Dr. Nehemia Gordon with this year’s SBL Reactions. And joining me from last year is Nelson Calvillo, who’s a research assistant at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research.

And for the first time joining me for SBL Reactions is Dr. Kim Phillips, who is a research associate at the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, an affiliated lecturer at the Divinity Faculty at the University of Cambridge Biblical Hebrew, and last, but certainly not least, a research fellow at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research. Shalom, Nelson and Kim!

Kim: Shalom. Good to see you.

Nelson: Shalom, Nehemia, shalom, Dr. Kim Phillips. Great to be here.

Nehemia: Thanks for joining me, guys. So, what we’ve done in the past, Kim, is everybody shares the top lectures they went to. SBL, for those who haven’t seen one of these before, is the Society of Biblical Literature’s annual meeting. It’s gone back to the 1800’s.

It’s funny. I once, in one of my articles, quoted something from the 1905 meeting, and at that meeting there were 5 or 10 lectures the entire meeting. Well, now there are over 1,000 lectures, so you can’t go to all of them.

There were lectures that I wanted to go to that I couldn’t go to because I was speaking at the same time, and all kinds of things like that. So, I’m going to let you start, Kim. What was the top lecture that you went to?

Kim: I think I’m going to have to have a pair of lectures, if that’s okay.

Nehemia: Fair enough, absolutely.

Kim: Sophia Pitcher works in Masoretic studies, particularly focusing on the ta’amim, the accents, and she gave a couple of papers, one of them in the Biblical Hebrew Poetry section, where she was co-presenting with Emmylou Grosser, and the other she was presenting in the Masoretic Studies section. And she was speaking alone at that point, and in both of the papers she more or less gave us an overview, an introduction, to her very particularly linguistic way of looking at the ta’amim, the riddle of the ta’amim.

Nehemia: Tell the audience what ta’amim are. Let’s assume people don’t even know Hebrew. What are the ta’amim?

Kim: Okay. So, when you open a Hebrew Bible, you are faced with a whole gamut of information on the page. First of all, let’s say it’s a Tiberian Bible codex. You’re faced with three columns of the biblical text, assuming it’s one of the prose books, so Genesis through to 2 Kings, or Second Kings… whichever I’m meant to say, Nehemia. I remember from last time that…

Nehemia: No, it’s fine! I’ve since found out that it’s a very British thing to say, “One Corinthians”, and “Two Kings.” So that is something the British do in general, I found out.

Kim: Okay, phew, good! So, let’s say it’s one of those books. There are others in three columns as well, but let’s just say it’s one of those. And at the top and the bottom of the page of this Masoretic codex, and in the margins of the three columns, you’ve got all of the Masoretic notes. We’re not talking about those; we’re talking about the biblical text itself.

The biblical text itself is formed up of three different strands: the consonants, the consonantal text, and then a series of dots and dashes above and below those consonants, and sometimes in the middle of the consonants themselves, representing the vowels. But then in addition, there’s a whole other set of lines and dots which represent the accents.

So, the vowels and the consonants are together sufficient for somebody just to read the biblical text, so “Bereshit bara Elohim et ha’shamayim v’et ha’aretz,” et cetera. I didn’t need any accents there except to know that “ha’aretz” was the end of the verse. So, I guess I kind of did need an accent, sort of.

But the accents are in the Tiberian Bible. They appear on every single word, and the big question, the question that has occupied scholars for centuries now is, what is their primary function? We know a cluster of their functions, but we’re still really trying to pin down, what is it, at root, that these accents do? I’ll pause there in case somebody wants to respond, but I can carry on.

Nehemia: No, I’m riveted. Keep going Kim.

Kim: So, we can list some of the things they do. Generally, the accents, as it appears on each word, will appear on the accented syllable of each word. So, melech, king, is accented at the beginning of the word. But if I take the same consonants and put in some different vowels, malach, he ruled, and you can hear that the stress is at the end of the word. So, usually, not always, but usually, the accent appears over the stressed syllable, melech, at the beginning, malach, at the end. That’s one thing. That’s kind of the easiest part.

Most scholars, I think, agree that in some sense the accents show how to divide the text into sense units. I deliberately put that pretty vaguely because I think expressing it like that, almost everyone would agree, to some extent, that it shows where one unit of sense ends and the next unit begins.

Nehemia: Can you give us an example of what you mean by sense units? Nelson and I might know, but maybe the audience doesn’t.

Kim: Sure, yeah. Let me open up a Hebrew Bible here. In fact, since we were working from Genesis 1 just now, let’s do so here.

Nehemia: To give another example, you talk about accents. So, for example the word Elohim, that you read, or recited by heart, we know it’s Elohim and not Elohim. Now Elohim isn’t a thing in Hebrew, so that’s why your example is better, melech and malach, or ka’tavti and katav’ti, or b’katav’ti, where it actually does change the meaning. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.

Kim: Yeah, sure. So, as I said, every word, more or less, in the Tiberian Bible has an accent, and those accents… I’m already running into problems here, where we’re trying to get an example of how the sense is broken up by the accents here.

So, back to Genesis 1:1. According to the accents, I would read it like this, in terms of sense, “Bereshit, bara Elohim, et ha’shemayim v’et ha’aretz.” So, I break it up, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And we can kind of sense already intuitively in English how… I’m already going to be taking sides here, how pausing or lengthening at certain points in the sentence just gives a very different sentence.

For example, if I were to say, “To learn Masora, you must study hard.” Then I would be saying something quite different if I was speaking to a young lady called Masora. And let’s say there’s a textbook she has to study, and that textbook is written by a guy called Hard, so in that sense I would say, “To learn, Masora, you must study Hard.” Whatever I’m talking about, whatever field of discipline, let’s say it’s economics, Masora can only learn about this economics if she studies the textbook by Hard.

So, even there, in those two example sentences, “To learn, Masora, you must study Hard,” and, “To learn Masora, you must study hard,” we can see that the way that we pause, the way that we divide up the individual groups of words, makes a difference to the meaning. So that is another aspect of what the accents do.

And just finally, the accents as a third element. At least nowadays and for centuries… but we’re not quite sure how far back it goes, but for centuries we can say at the very least, the accents have also indicated the various melodies by which the biblical text is sung or is chanted or is cantillated. I’ll pause there.

Nehemia: That’s a great explanation. I want to bring an example. This is an example that the medieval commentators talk about, Deuteronomy 26:5. There’s a ceremony where you bring this basket of your tithe, and you present it before God. And then it says, “Arami oved avi,” which is always translated, I think, “My father is a wandering Aramean.” And so, now that I’m thinking about it, this is a mishpat shemani, “a nominal sentence”. The word “is” actually doesn’t even appear there; it’s implied by the juxtaposition of these two nouns.

So, the way the accents divide that up, famously, is “Arami, oved avi,” “An Aramean destroys my father”, or “destroyed my father”. And then the rabbis explain, who’s the Aramean that destroys “my father”? That is Laban, who tried to destroy Jacob. Which is like, “What?” No, this is talking about Abraham, who is “the wandering Aramean.” He came from Aram Naharaim, “Aramea between the two rivers,” in Mesopotamia. But the accents actually seem to indicate a different interpretation of the phrase, that it’s referring to “Laban who tried to destroy my ancestor, my father.”

And so, there’s an example where the accents are contrary to what we would expect the plain meaning to be, and maybe we’re wrong. Or the accents are taking a side against the plain meaning. That’s possible too, right?

Kim: In that case, I think the example of Laban, “Laban was attempting to destroy Jacob,” is also represented in Targum Onkelos, if I remember correctly there.

Nehemia: I don’t remember off the top of my head. But I know for sure that that’s an early Rabbinical Midrash and that it seems that the accents are giving the break-up of those three words in Hebrew, “Arami oved avi” according to this Midrashic interpretation rather than the peshat, and maybe that is the peshat and we’re just wrong. I don’t think so, but… So, it actually can affect interpretation.

And we’ve actually, in previous SBL Reactions, talked about Sophia Pitcher’s hypothesis, but I’d love to hear it from you. What I find so intriguing about it is… look, I gave a paper. I don’t know that my paper is going to… well, maybe it will actually, I don’t know. Most papers that you hear aren’t going to fundamentally change the field if the hypothesis is accepted. Whereas if hers is accepted, this is a game changer. So, tell us what her hypothesis is now that you’ve explained the overall scholarly approach to the accents.

Kim: Well, okay. I should give a disclaimer that Sophia is working from a very, very heavily linguistic framework, and that’s pretty new to me. So, I’m still very much trying to piece together my understanding new word by new word. There is so much terminology in this field.

As far as I understand, Sophia is using a linguistic model called prosodic phonology, which I had to look up! And I think all that means is that, when we speak, we cluster words together. We use different speeds, we give different words different pauses, different stresses. Sometimes our voice goes up, sometimes our voice goes down. Sometimes our voice goes up in pitch, sometimes our voice goes up in volume, or down in volume, et cetera. So, those are the kind of contours that we’re very, very used to when we actually speak, but which linguists now study very, very formally and try to understand how it is cross-linguistically. So, across different languages, how is it that pitch, or volume, or stress, or pause, or rhythm… how are they used? How do they all combine into the grand process of making sense of what somebody is saying? I think that is, more or less, prosodic phonology. And Sophia, if you are listening, forgive me please if I’ve got it completely wrong!

Nehemia: Well, she’s promised to come on the program and explain her hypothesis.

Kim: Oh, that would be brilliant!

Nehemia: But the audience might not hear that for another year, so you’re sharing the gist of it.

Kim: I hope I’m sharing the gist of it! Yeah.

Nehemia: So, the big departure that she’s presenting, really from my perspective, is what she calls the continuous dichotomy theory, or model. I forget what she calls it.

Kim: The law of continuous dichotomy.

Nehemia: The law of continuous dichotomy. There it is, LCD.

Kim: LCD, that’s it.

Nehemia: And I was taught that at Hebrew University of Jerusalem as fact… say “fact.” That this was common knowledge… say “common knowledge.” The audience, not you guys. But you could if you want. And she’s coming along and saying, “No, that’s not correct.” And what’s so amazing to me is… one of my teachers at Hebrew University, Simcha Kogut, he has two books on the accents, and in both of them he’s analyzing how the medieval commentators reacted to the accents. But all of his reactions assume the law of continuous dichotomy. Well, now maybe we have to go back and look at what these medieval commentators said if the law of continuous dichotomy is wrong. Or more importantly, maybe it’s still right, but maybe they didn’t know about it. And we had this conversation as we were walking back from one of the lectures, Kim, about William Wykes.

Kim: Yeah.

Nehemia: And Sophia Pitcher says William Wykes invented the law of continuous dichotomy. And when I heard that a few years ago it blew my mind because, I thought, that’s just a fact. That’s common knowledge. Ibn Ezra is engaging with the law of continuous dichotomy. And I forget who all the other rabbis are… Radak is engaging... These are examples from the Middle Ages, but who says? Maybe they looked at the accents in a completely different way and we don’t necessarily know what that way is. Maybe they were wrong, but we can no longer take the law of continuous dichotomy for granted. To me that’s the biggest challenge of her research, whether she’s right or not.

Kim: Yes. But the more I dig into it, the more I think that actually lots of useful parts of what we learned with LCD can be maintained. Now, I think Sophia would want to push back against that and say, “No, we need to have a whole new framework.” But yes, in essence, what Sophia is saying is, “Look, we now know this prosodic chronology. We now have analyzed how languages rise in intonation, fall in intonation, and in pitch, et cetera, et cetera. And actually, what the accents are doing is marking that for the reading of the biblical text,” which is a very beautiful matching of a phenomenon that we see in the biblical text, in the Masoretic text, with the sort of phenomenon that linguists are studying from modern spoken languages.

And to my mind it’s quite intuitively plausible because, over the last two to three decades, I think one of the major strands of development of understanding within Masoretic studies in general is that the Masoretes really didn’t make this stuff up. It’s not that they sat down after the Talmud was finished and thought, “Right, what are we going to do now? I know! Let’s get to work on the biblical text!”

And so, what the Masoretes weren’t doing was sitting down with a bare consonantal text and working out, word by word, “which vowel we should put here? which accent should put here?” That’s not what they were doing. They had received an oral tradition of the correct pronunciation, the correct reading of the biblical text, which had been preserved orally for centuries.

So, what the Masoretes are doing towards the end of the first millennium is finding ways to write down what had been passed on to them orally. Namely, a correct way that the text should be read, the correct places where the text should be emphasized, the correct places where your voice should go up and should go down, and where you should pause. And what Sophia is saying is, “Yeah, absolutely. And the accents are a part of that big picture.” I think that just makes reasonable…

Nehemia: Wow, this reminds me of… I forget his name, one of the 20th century physicists who came up with this rule to explain how subatomic particles work, and he said, “The law knew more than I did,” or “The formula knew more than I did.” He came up with this formula, and then he started to discover things based on this formula. And I think what she’s saying is, and I think what you’re saying as well is… What I was taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 90’s was that… I don’t know if this was said explicitly but it was implied, that the Masoretes decided, “Okay, this is the middle of the verse, we’ll put an etnachta there.” “Now this is the middle of the first clause, we’re going to put an accent here.” “Now this is the middle of the first half of the first clause, we’ll put an accent there.”

And what Sophia seems to be saying, and I think what a lot of the work of Geoffrey Khan and his students really bring out, is that they had this oral recitation, and these people are referred to in the Talmudic sources as “ba’alei mikra”, “the masters of Scripture”, the people who are reciting the Scripture. And then you also had Tanna’im, who were reciting the Oral Law. You had people who would recite this vast knowledge of information without necessarily understanding everything they were reciting. They just knew, “Here is where you put this word, and here is how you pronounce that word.”

Then the Masoretes came along and said, “How do we record this in graphic form?” And they might not have understood the linguistics behind it, they just knew, “here’s where your voice goes up”, “here’s where your voice emphasizes”, “here’s where your voice has a trill”. I’m thinking of the shalshelet, assuming that’s what it really is… you know, “va’yitma’hame’ah” or something like that, where you’re kind of pausing and really emphasizing that word.

So, they had these linguistic patterns that they recorded with graphic symbols, and this is why her explanation is so attractive. To do what scholars have told us for centuries, we don’t need more than five or six symbols. You have two keisars, a melech, a mishneh and a shalish, and then you have a conjunctive accent… six, and you’re done. Maybe you had one more for some disambiguation or something. We don’t need all the numerous symbols that we have.

So, the explanation was, “Well, that’s for cantillation, and we’re not really interested in cantillation.” That’s actually what I was taught at Hebrew University. “Why do we have more than six or seven symbols? Because that’s for the cantillation. They’re chanting it in the synagogue in some kind of stylized way.” “Okay. Why are they doing that?” So, she says they’re doing it because that’s how people spoke. Wow!

Kim: Yes, I think that’s right. I think that, if I’m reading her correctly, then she’s saying this is a natural language phenomenon. That phrase comes up quite a lot. So, to come back to what you were saying, this is not an artificial product. It’s not, as you said, that the Masoretes sat down and said, “Okay here’s the half verse marker.” It’s that this has been preserved, extraordinarily, since before the fall of the Second Temple; the way, naturally, that the text is read. Perhaps in a stylized kind of a way, in a very intentional, formal, stylized kind of way, but nonetheless, it is a natural language phenomenon and therefore it should be accessible to be analyzed using the tools that we know from other natural languages. And that’s exactly what Sophia is doing as far as I can understand it.

Nehemia: Well, we’re going to stick with that until she comes on the program and corrects all of us!

Kim: Yes, that’s what I’m counting on!

Nehemia: Alright, I’m going to bring my… I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite lecture. In all sincerity my favorite lecture was Kim’s lecture, but we’ll save that for a different discussion. Maybe we’ll do a whole episode for just that. No, it really was mind-blowing because it brought up some issues of how I’ve been dealing with the manuscripts where I now have to second guess. “Okay, so I need to reevaluate a lot of what I’ve been doing with some of the manuscripts because there’s different…” and I knew that there are different types of manuscripts. I’ve talked about this, I’ve written about it, I’ve taught it, but I never applied it in the way that you apply it. So, we’ll save that for a different lecture, or a different episode, not a lecture.

So, my favorite lecture was Kim’s, but the one I want to talk about is, I went to a review of a book written by Dan MacClellan, Dr. Dan MacClellan. He is actually quite famous as a TikToker, and he actually referenced that in his… It was basically a review. You had several people, scholars who were giving reactions to his book, which is about… I forget what it’s called. Nelson, if you could Google it. It’s like The Nature of YHWH, which he pronounces as “Adonai”, or something like that. And what he’s talking about is, what was the understanding of God, of deity, in ancient Israel? And then they had several scholars responding to his view. And there was some critique, but by and large they agreed with him.

And what I found so interesting was the reaction of one of the critics. I forget her name. Actually, I never knew her name, I’ll be honest… I’m sure she said it at the beginning. But I didn’t know a lot of the folks who were speaking. And she said that what she’s looking for when she studies the religion of ancient Israel is, whatever the biblical text was opposed to, that was the original religion of ancient Israel.

And I thought, “Wow! She said the quiet part out loud!” Because that is the approach that a lot of particularly critical scholars of so-called “higher criticism” of the Old Testament… And look, I deal with what’s called “lower criticism.” And it’s called lower because it’s lower on the page, not that it’s lower in importance. But textual criticism, where the people are trying to figure out how the biblical text was written in the first place.

She explained her starting approach. Or what she’s really interested in, I should say, is, what was Isaiah opposed to? That must have been the folk religion, the original religion, even the official religion of ancient Israel. What was Jeremiah opposed to? That was the religion of ancient Israel. And I thought that was such an interesting way to explain it.

Did you find the name of the book, Nelson?

Nelson: I think so. The one that comes up most recently is… and I’m going to pronounce it “Yahweh” just because I think he…

Nehemia: Yes, but he says Adonai actually.

Nelson: Oh, okay.

Nehemia: He pronounces it Adonai.

Nelson: So, it’s YHWH’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach

Nehemia: There you go, okay. Oh yeah, and a lot of it was the cognitive approach, which I don’t know that we need to get into. But I thought her comment was so interesting; that, if Deuteronomy is telling you to cut down the Asherah poles, that’s because Asherah was the original religion of ancient Israel. And YHWH, Adonai, Yahweh, however you pronounce it, had a consort. Which in a sense is correct, but is that the original religion of ancient Israel? Or was that a corruption of the religion of ancient Israel?

And then it depends… do you believe that the prophets, as we have them, were inventing a new religion and coming out to oppose an existing religion? Or were they the official original? And official is an interesting word because, if you went to the court of King Manasseh, even according to the Tanakh, yes, Asherah was the wife of God. And if you didn’t believe that you’d be executed for heresy. Or if you didn’t bring the sacrifices, maybe, I don’t know… now I’m making stuff up. I don’t know if he actually executed people for heresy! I don’t know if they had that concept.

But definitely it talks about how, in the time of Josiah, they were taking all these idols out of the Temple. So, her approach… and again, I forget her name. I apologize to her, and we should try to find out, Nelson, and interview her. Her approach is, “No. Josiah is making up a new thing. Before that all the ancient Israelites worshiped in that way, and Josiah is inventing a new approach.” So, I’ll let you guys discuss.

Kim: I have thoughts, but I don’t want to hog the conversation!

Nehemia: No, please! We want to hear what you have to say.

Kim: Well, my first thought is how strikingly that uncovers the preconceptions and the preunderstanding that you’re bringing to the table. And I’ll explain what I mean. If you are willing to accept… let’s call it a hypothesis for now, that God really did appear to a bunch of condemned slaves at Mount Sinai, and really did enter into a special relationship there, and really did reveal something of His nature, et cetera, then, to my mind, that really decisively answers the question, “what is the original or authoritative religion of Israel going to look like?”

And so, for somebody to be willing to entertain different understandings of what the “official religion,” or popular religion, or whatever, it suggests to me that there is a kind of default assumption. “Okay, we’re assuming there was no Sinai, or we’re assuming if there was a Sinai, what we have in the biblical texts isn’t a faithful reflection of what was spoken there. And therefore, all that we’re left with is this kind of historical soup from which we need to drag out the various ingredients as best we can from inscriptions or from reading between the lines of the biblical texts itself, or from archeological remains,” et cetera.

So, I think, if I’ve understood correctly, that that’s quite a nice demonstration of how this whole business of biblical criticism actually depends a huge amount on your preunderstanding that you actually bring to the text before you start reading it. I’ll pause there.

Nehemia: I think they would openly say that. I don’t think that’s something they’re hiding. I’m going to put words now into the mouth of the lady whose name I can’t remember! Which is always a dangerous thing, because maybe I’m wrong. But I think she would say, “Well, that’s the approach of a conservative apologist to say that God actually revealed Himself at Mount Sinai. And we have to, as historians, assume that’s not the case and that was all made up later.” And then when they approach the New Testament, they’ll say the same thing. I’ll give you an example. James Tabor has said, “As an historian I can’t engage with Jesus rising from the dead. What I can engage with is that people believe that Jesus rose from the dead.” Which is actually more than people are willing to stipulate in the case of Mount Sinai.

And I agree with the statement in the sense that, as critical historians, I don’t know if we can say that. I mean, I believe that God revealed Himself at Mount Sinai, but the question we can engage with is, did the ancient Israelites believe? Whether He did or not is a question of faith, because we weren’t there. But did the ancient Israelites believe that? And I think these folks would say no. They look at that like legends about King Arthur, that they were made up hundreds of years later.

And I think you’re absolutely right, Kim. It shows their starting preconceptions, and I’ll even use the word bias. And I don’t have a problem with them having a bias, because I have a bias when I study Islam. I don’t believe the angel Jibril revealed himself in a cave to Mohammed, but I also believe that Mohammed’s disciples believed that the angel Gabriel revealed himself, and maybe Mohammed himself believed that, even. And so, here we have to, I think, distinguish between faith and what we can talk about as critical historians. So…

So, here’s the problem I have with their approach. I think they would say they don’t have a bias and we do. And I think we should acknowledge that everybody has some sort of a bias. My starting assumption is that God did have this covenant with Israel.

Kim: Yeah, I think acknowledging that we all have biases is very important, rather than lobbing it like a brick over the fence to explain why they’re wrong, “it’s just their bias”. We all have biases; we all start from a particular place.

But I think what it does sometimes make me want to think is, “Well, I want to listen to what you say because I can see that you’re a good scholar. I can see that you’re going back to evidence. I can see that you’re doing the work carefully. But equally if at any point you say, ‘Therefore you are wrong for believing X, Y, and Z.’ I want to say, ‘Really! If I started from your set of assumptions maybe, but why should I start from your set of assumptions? If I have other good reasons for thinking that there really was a revelation at Sinai, then already we’ve started from very different places, and so we’re going to interpret the evidence differently.’” So, it gives me a kind of caution before I get too worried about some of the things that I hear getting said from my faith perspective.

Nehemia: To me this is a sort of missed opportunity. If you believe what the prophets say, then the Israelites were influenced by the Canaanite religion. And so, if you want to understand that Canaanite religion… Let’s say you went to the average house in Northern Samaria somewhere in the year 850 BCE and you said, “Okay, what is it you believe? How do you practice your faith?” I think they probably might not be too far off on their conclusions, in some ways. In some ways not.

But then the question is, how do we explain that? How did that come to be? And if you asked one of their priests in those days, they might actually agree with Dan MacClellan and say, “No, this is their original religion. And those people down south, and that pesky prophet Hoshea, he is coming to destroy our ancient faith. And we are the conservatives who are preserving the religion of our ancestors that goes back to Moses.”

That’s the whole point of Judges, of that story of Jonathan the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh, or apparently, Moshe, is that it seems that the people at these high places had a chain of tradition that claimed their faith went back to Moses. And the prophets we have in our Bible disagree with them, though. Most of them anyway. Some of them don’t really refer to that, necessarily, but most of the prophets seem to disagree with them. Maybe all of them.

Kim: I wish I’d been at the session; it sounds very interesting. I certainly think that examining ancient Near Eastern sources, examining the epigraphic evidence, et cetera, is very, very informative. I don’t have a problem at all with saying that some of the images that we see in Scripture are taken from ancient Near Eastern mythology, ancient Near Eastern ways of understanding the world. In fact, in my mind when you look at the comparative data, it seems blindingly obvious.

But I don’t have a problem with that at all. If a preacher today doesn’t use images and metaphors that are relevant to today’s culture, he’s not going to be understood. And in the same way, if the prophets back then… they were communicators, so they had to use images that were meaningful, viable to their audience.

Nehemia: That’s a profound statement, Kim. And the example that comes to mind is where it talks about God in Psalms, and it uses a bunch of metaphors that we have, that are in the ancient Near East, applied to Baal. He’s the rider on the clouds, and he’s the one that brings thunder and lightning. I may be misquoting it, but something to that effect.

But that doesn’t mean that they worship Baal. It means that… I’ll use a modern Christian terminology when they talk about Christmas. They’ll say, “This is a victory for the church.” That’s something I hear a lot. Some people say, “Christmas has Pagan origins,” the Yuletide log and all that. Okay, but if you’re trying to convert a bunch of pagans in Norway, and they’re not going to give up this symbolism, what you can do is reinterpret that symbolism as applying to Jesus rather than Zeus, or something like that. And it’s not the exact same thing, but I think maybe there is some parallel; it is a similar strategy. What do you think?

Kim: I’m aware that I really haven’t given Nelson much chance to respond! But yeah, I distinctly remember a sermon from many years ago, and it will clarify to the people of the relevant age how long ago this was, when the preacher was talking about our access to God in prayer. And he was saying that in Christ our access is like broadband internet rather than dial-up internet! It’s… which, if I was trying to preach a similar sermon today, I wouldn’t be able to use that, because people would go, “What’s dial-up? I haven’t got a clue!”

And so, it was an example there of an image or a metaphor being used which was incredibly bound to a particular period of time. Twenty years earlier, people wouldn’t have had a clue because, what on earth is broadband? Twenty years later, people would have a clue because, what on earth is dial-up? But for that short period of time, it was a metaphor that spoke to people, that communicated, so he was right to use it at that time.

Nehemia: I think that’s a perfect way to end, Kim. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you Nelson. Shalom.

Kim: Take care!

Nelson: Shalom also!

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