First the chapter’s main events.

Revelation 12.1–2 opens with a sign—a woman clothed with the sun who’s about to deliver a child.

Then in 12.3–4 we have a second sign—a dragon with seven heads and ten horns, who sweeps a third of the stars of heaven down to the earth and seeks to devour the woman’s child.

Happily, the woman safely delivers her child, who’s ‘caught up to God and his throne’, at which point the woman flees into the wilderness (Rev. 12.5–6).

The text of 12.7–12 then provides a more detailed account of 12.5–6’s events. (That 12.7–12 recapitulates 12.5–6 can be seen by comparing 12.6, where the woman is nourished in the wilderness for 1,260 days, with 12.14, where she’s nourished for ‘a time, times, and half a time’.) War breaks out in the heavenly realms. After a struggle, the dragon and his angels are cast down to the earth, in response to which a song of victory rings out in the heavenly realms (Rev. 12.7–12).

Once cast down, the dragon chases the woman into the wilderness. But, like the ancient Israelites, the woman is given the wings of an eagle in order to help her escape (Exod. 19.4).

Finally, its plans thwarted, the dragon heads off to wage war against ‘the rest of the woman’s seed’ (Rev. 12.17).

The Flow of Events & Cast of Revelation 12

The events of Revelation are underlain by a clear internal logic, each following directly on from what precedes it.

• The dragon casts a third of the stars down to the earth, which is what leads/enables it to pursue the woman’s child.

• Next, the woman’s child ascends to God’s heavenly throne, which is what brings about the expulsion of the dragon.

• The dragon then turns its attention to the woman because it’s been expelled from heaven.

• And, finally, the dragon heads off to persecute the woman’s ‘seed’ because his attempts to destroy the woman have been thwarted.

As far as possible, then, we should seek to interpret these events in terms of a continuous sequence of events. (To insert gaps in between them is to negate the text’s logic.1) Let’s see if we can do that as we identify Revelation 12’s main players.

The dragon is clearly Satan, who stands behind the earth’s powers and principalities and turns them against the woman and her child.

And the woman’s child is, equally clearly, Christ, since he’s destined to rule the nations with a rod of iron.

The woman must, therefore, be connected with Israel in some way (which would explain why she’s framed against the backdrop of the sun, moon, and twelve stars: Gen. 37). Yet the woman doesn’t seem to depict all Israel, since in Revelation 17 we encounter her unfaithful counterpart—a woman in the wilderness who’s not pursued by the dragon but is in league with it (Rev. 12.3, 17.3–4)—, which is difficult to make sense of if Revelation 12’s woman-in-the-wilderness depicts the entirety of Israel.

I therefore take Revelation 12’s woman-in-the-wilderness to depict the faithful remnant of Israel, and Revelation 17’s to depict (among other things) Israel’s unfaithful majority. In other words, the two women are Jerusalem above and below (Gal. 4). More on this later.

We thus come to the issue of the seven-headed-and-ten-horned dragon’s identity.

Here we need to disentangle three separate questions. First, what’s the relevant OT backdrop to Revelation’s image of a ten-horned beast? Second, how does Revelation utilise/apply this? And, third, why does Revelation describe a ten-horned dragon rather than a ten-horned beast?

We’ll deal with these questions one at a time below.

Q1. What’s the OT Backdrop to Revelation’s Ten-Horned Beast?

The notion of a ten-horned monster is clearly rooted in Daniel 7, where Israel’s overlords are depicted as a sequence of four beasts. The first is Babylon, the second is Medo-Persia, and the third is Greece. That much is clear, since it’s explicitly stated by Daniel (Dan. 1.1, 5.28, 6.8, 10.20, 11.2).

The fourth beast isn’t so easy to identify. It would seem natural to identity it as Rome (since it succeeds Greece) or Jerusalem-allied-with-Rome or some similar hybrid. But none of these suggestions ultimately make sense of the text of Daniel

And it no doubt includes aspects of Rome’s dominion. But it doesn’t seem to be identical with Rome.

The distinctive feature of the fourth beast is its hatred of God’s people (Dan. 7.23ff.), which Rome exhibited at times but not as a general rule or in a way that distinguished it from, say, Babylon or Greece. Our battle isn’t ultimately against flesh and blood (Eph. 6.12). Consequently, in the book of Revelation, the Church isn’t said to be persecuted by the Jews or the Romans per se, but by ‘the devil’, ‘the synagogue of Satan’, ‘the serpent’, and ‘the dragon’ (Rev. 2.10, 24, 12.3, 14, 17, 13.4–7). I don’t, therefore, take the fourth beast to be identical with Rome or with Jerusalem-allied-with-Rome or with any other earthly entity; rather, I take it to depict what the NT refers to as ‘the world’ or ‘the kingdom of darkness/Satan’.

This isn’t a common view of the fourth beast, but it makes good sense of a number of otherwise awkward features of Daniel’s visions. In particular it explains:

• why the fourth beast is said to be so ‘different’ from the world’s previous kingdoms (which Rome wasn’t in any relevant way) (Dan. 7.7, 19, etc.),

• why the fourth beast is left unnamed in Daniel’s visions and isn’t associated with any particular geographical region (which Daniel could easily have done if the fourth beast was Rome),

• on what basis the fourth beast can be described as ten-horned,2

• why the fourth beast’s demise marks the end of the saints’ battles and the nations’ submission to the Son of Man’s rule (Dan. 7.21–22) (which Rome’s demise didn’t).

My proposed view of the fourth beast is also attractive for two other reasons. First, it takes its cue from the overall tenor of the New Testament. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ ushered in a new era in world history. Jesus’ incarnation was met by a surge of demonic activity in Israel, and, with his ascension, the time came for ‘the prince of the present age’ to be cast down (John 12). World history no longer, therefore, revolves around a battle between Israel and the nations. It concerns a battle between two coterminous kingdoms—the kingdoms of God and Satan, light and darkness (Matt. 13, Acts 26.18, Col. 1.13)—, which is precisely what’s depicted in the book of Revelation.3

Second, it means that Daniel’s beast continues to exist until the time of Jesus’ bodily return, which makes good sense given the climax of John’s visions in Revelation 19–20. The book of Revelation is all about the vindication of Jesus and his beleaguered saints. It would, therefore, be odd if Revelation never explicitly mentioned Jesus’ bodily return or his saints’ bodily resurrection. And if it does mention these events, then it presumably does so in Revelation 19–20 (when the heavens are opened, the King of Kings descends on a white horse, and those who haven’t worshipped the beast ‘come to life’), which is also the time when the beast is judged (Rev. 19.19ff.). As readers, we’re therefore faced with a choice. Either we have to claim that the beast continues to exist until the time of Jesus’ bodily return in Revelation 19–20 or we have to claim that the book of Revelation never explicitly mentions Jesus’ bodily return or his saints’ bodily resurrection. Of these options, the former strikes me as far easier to maintain.

Q2. What does Revelation Do with Daniel’s Ten-Horned Beast?

We thus come to the issue of Revelation’s ten-horned beast, which is subtly different from Daniel’s.

Revelation’s ten-horned beast has seven heads, and involves elements of all four of Daniel’s beasts (a lion’s mouth, a bear’s feet, a leopard-like appearance, and ten horns: Rev. 13.1–2), with a particular focus on the fourth and final beast. Revelation’s beast evidently, therefore, depicts ‘the times of the Gentiles’ as a whole, beginning with the conquest of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar and concluding with the conquest of the nations by Christ. (The ‘times of the Gentiles’ clearly don’t end in AD 70 because Jerusalem’s captivity is said to begin in AD 70 and then to continue for as long as the times of the Gentiles continue: Luke 21.24.)

Granted that premise, we can identify the beast’s seven heads as follows.4

• The first three heads are Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece.

• The fourth head depicts the Jews who ruled Judah in the aftermath of Antiochus’s fall, and whose rise is implicit in the reference to ‘the end’ of Greece’s dominion over Judah in Daniel 8.20–23.

• The fifth head depicts the rise of the Herodian dynasty, the actions of which are precisely what’s depicted in Revelation 12.4, where the dragon seeks to devour the newborn Jesus. (The fifth head therefore depicts the rise of a fundamentally new regime in Judah—one headed up by a non-Jew and hostile to the Jewish religion.)

• The sixth head depicts the present kingdom of darkness, i.e., the kingdom that now ‘is’ (Rev. 17.10) and that is currently at war with the Church (Dan. 7.19–21, 1 John 5.19).5

• And the seventh head depicts the final stage of the beast’s existence, when ten kings will rise to power (for ‘an hour’) (Rev. 17.12).6

Each of these seven ‘heads’ thus reflects a distinctive stage of Gentile history. And, happily, each of them is referred to in the text of Scripture.

An Excursus on the Fourth Head

At this point a brief excursus on the fourth head’s historical context will probably be helpful.

The majority of Christians are (relatively) unfamiliar with inter-testamental history. It’s an integral part of Daniel’s visions, however, and any continuous description of the events between the rise of Daniel’s first beast and Jesus’ incarnation has to cover it. Before we go any further in our discussion of Revelation 12, then, let’s consider some of the key events of the inter-testamental period (from Judah’s perspective).

In the aftermath of Medo-Persia’s fall, Alexander the Great arose (333–323 BC). Alexander’s rise to power was meteoric (to put it mildly). But as quickly as Alexander rose, he fell, and his kingdom splintered into four sub-kingdoms (Dan. 8.8).

From one of these four sub-kingdoms, Antiochus Epiphanes arose.

Antiochus wrought havoc in Judah until Judas Maccabees overthrew him, which marked a significant event in Judah’s history. Indeed, in Daniel’s visions, the rise of Antiochus coincides with ‘the latter end’ of Greece’s period of dominion over Judah (Dan. 8.22–25), and so his fall marks the dawn of a new era.7

On the back of Judas Maccabees’ success, Jonathan Apphus (152–143 BC) established Judah as a semi-independent state, which paved the way for the rise/formation of the Hasmonean Dynasty (143–37 BC). (The Hasmoneans held the office of both king and high-priest.) The Judaeans thus enjoyed a period of respite from foreign oppression.

But with the rise of Herod (a non-Jew) all that began to change. In 40 BC the Roman Senate declared Herod ‘King of the Jews’, which spelt disaster for Judah. First Herod convinced Mark Antony to execute the last Hasmonean king (Antigonus II) (37 BC), then he drowned Judah’s high-priest (Aristobulus III) (35 BC), and finally he disposed of a former Hasmonean king known (Hyrcanus II) (30 BC). He also executed his wife and her two sons for good measure.

What we read about Herod in the New Testament is, therefore, consistent with what we know about him from other sources.

Q3. What’s Revelation’s Ten-Horned Dragon?

We thus come to the issue of Revelation’s dragon. Daniel 7, Revelation 13, and Revelation 17 all refer to a ten-horned ‘beast’, but in Revelation 12 we encounter a ten-horned dragon. Why?

The answer is because it’s a picture of the world’s heads/kingdoms insofar as they’re energised and directed by Satan (and by extension hostile to God’s people). Daniel’s beasts are to some extent neutral entities. What matters is who rides them. In Cyrus’s day the Medo-Persian bear returned the Jews from exile and helped them rebuild the temple, but in Haman’s day the bear turned nasty (until Esther tamed it). Similarly, Revelation’s beast has an element of neutrality. It’s not necessarily or ceaselessly hostile to God’s people. But in Revelation 12, energised by Satan, it becomes hostile, which is the sense in which John’s vision is a ‘revelation’. It reveals the forces at work behind the world’s power structures.

Towards an Interpretation of Revelation 12

Granted the above backdrop, we can summarise the events depicted in Revelation 12 as follows.

In 12.1–2, the time for the Messiah begins to draw nigh. Satan therefore incites Herod to acquire dominion over Judah, which he accomplishes by the deposition of two Hasmonean kings-and-priests and a high-priest (Antigonus II, Aristobulus III, and Hyrcanus II) (Rev. 12.3).

Hence, just as Antiochus deposes Judah’s priests and rulers in Daniel 8, in which sense he ‘casts the stars of heaven down to the earth’ (Dan. 8.10–11), so too does Herod. And, significantly, insofar as Herod executes three Hasmonean lights, he deposes ‘a third’ of the fourth head’s ten kingly/priestly stars (Rev. 12.4), and by that token becomes an eleventh.8

As such, Herod’s career constitutes a remarkable foreshadow of that of Satan’s final king, who subdues three of the beast’s ten horns (and by that token to become an eleventh) (Dan. 7.24).

In Revelation 12.4–5, the woman’s child is born (Jesus), whom Satan seeks to devour.

Happily, Satan’s aims are thwarted. The child is caught up to God’s heavenly throne (12.5), and the woman is protected by God in the wilderness for a period of 1,260 days (on which see below).

Revelation 12.7–16 then fills out these events in more detail.

In the aftermath of Christ’s ascension, a war breaks out in the heavenly realms (Rev. 12.7), which is evidently a protracted affair: Michael and his angels fight against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fight back (12.7).9

In the end, Satan is defeated and cast down to the earth. Just as he dethrones others by means of Herod, so he is dethroned (Rev. 12.8–9).

Satan is unable to bring a valid accusation against those who have died in Christ and been cleansed in the blood of the Lamb (12.10–12), so he turns his attention to the woman on the earth (i.e., the early Jewish church), though to no avail (12.13–16).

Chronological Considerations

We now come to the issue of chronology. Two different periods of time are associated with the woman in Revelation 12—first 1,260 days and second ‘a time, times, and half a time’ (Rev. 12.13–16). Why?

Part of the answer could be that the 1,260 days aren’t meant to be taken literally. (The words ‘time’ and ‘times’ are fairly vague, and their use is odd if Revelation 12 simply has a three-and-a-half year period in mind.) Still, why 1,260 days rather than, say, 100 days or 1,000 days? The answer requires us to consider Daniel’s seventy week prophecy.

Daniel portrays the future of God’s people and holy city in terms of a seventy-week period of time. These weeks are said to culminate in the following events.

• The Messiah is ‘cut off’ (Dan. 9.26a).

• The people of ‘a prince to come’ destroy Jerusalem and its sanctuary, which plunges Jerusalem into a state of ‘desolation’ (9.26b).

• A week-long covenant is established (9.27a).

• Midway through this week, the Temple sacrifices are terminated,10 which brings about a state of ‘desolation’ and culminates in the judgement of the source of desolation (9.27b).

How these events fit together and what they describe isn’t immediately obvious. Most Christian agree on what’s described in Daniel 9.26: the Messiah is slain and the Temple is destroyed, which plunges Jerusalem into a period of desolation. Where Christians disagree is on the following verse’s interpretation.

Futurists take Daniel 9.27 to mean that Israel’s sacrificial system will be re-instituted at some point in the future (and later terminated), which seems a reasonable enough way to read the text. It doesn’t, however, strike me as the best way to read the text of Daniel 9.27 given the New Testament’s treatment of Daniel’s prophecies.

Before we consider the relevant New Testament texts, however, let’s spend a bit more time considering Daniel 9.26–27 itself.

As we noted in our discussion of Revelation 12, prophecies can involve recapitulation. And Daniel 9.27 looks suspiciously like a recapitulation of 9.26, since the two verses seem to describe the same period of time (from different perspectives). They start with the onset of Daniel’s 70th week, go on to describe the end of a sacrificial system, and conclude with a period of ‘desolation’ leading on to a ‘decreed end’, which seems unlikely to be a coincidence.11 The two verses also contain numerous lexical and phonological connections, which I’ve highlighted in red below.

Rather than predicting a re-institution of Temple sacrifices, then, Daniel 9.27 may simply be a recapitulation of the events of 9.26, emphasising their significance in religious/covenantal rather than military/political terms. If it is, the cessation of sacrifice described in 9.27b isn’t a separate/subsequent event to Temple’s destruction (9.26b). The Temple’s destruction is what brings about the cessation of sacrifice in 9.27b, and Daniel’s 70th week is a symbol of the entire present age.12 (Symbolically, therefore, time slows down as we approach the moment of Christ’s return, which is a distinctive theme of the New Testament: Christ’s return is unexpectedly delayed: Matt. 24.48, 25.5, 19, II Pet. 3.3–4.)

The ‘covenant’ referred to in 9.27a can then be interpreted as a reference to the Hagarite covenant, which came into effect in the aftermath of the crucifixion. Prior to Christ, the old covenant was a source of life, but on the far side of Christ’s rejection it became accursed, and left ‘the many’ in Judah in a state of bondage (Gal. 4.22–27).

This interpretation of Daniel’s prophecy might strike many readers as bizarre (or worse), but it finds support in multiple passages of Scripture. For a start, consider Jesus’ statement in Luke 21.20–24.

In the aftermath of AD 70, the Jews were carried away into exile, and Jerusalem was plunged into a state of ‘desolation’ (Luke 21.20–24), in which she’s destined to remain until she cries out to her Messiah (Matt. 23.38–39). In the meantime, Jerusalem will be ‘trampled underfoot by the Gentiles’ until ‘the times of the Gentiles’ are fulfilled (Luke 21.24). Luke 21 is thus highly relevant to our present enquiry for at least two reasons.

First, its events parallel those of Daniel 9. Both of them describe Judah’s rejection of her Messiah followed by the fall of Jerusalem and the onset of ‘desolation’. We therefore have good reason to think that Daniel 9.26–27 and Luke 21 describe the same events, and that those events began to unfold in AD 30.

Second, the events of Luke 21.24 are clearly alluded to in Revelation 11 (below), where they’re associated with a period of forty-two months, i.e., half a week.

If the best way to interpret Scripture is by means of Scripture, then we should interpret Luke 21 and Revelation 11 as descriptions of the same period of time,13 which places Jerusalem’s fall at the start of a particular half-week in Israel’s history.

Further evidence for our interpretation of Daniel 9 then emerges when we consider Revelation 11’s relationship to what precedes it.

Revelation 11 in Context

The events of ‘the seven seals’ (Rev. 6.1ff.) began in c. AD 30, at the time of Jesus’ ascension.

In Revelation 4, John is shown a vision of heaven’s throne-room without a risen Lamb in its midst. (Its song isn’t, therefore, a song of redemption, but a declaration of God’s holiness.) An angel then asks if anyone present is worthy to open the scroll in God’s right hand. John weeps because no-one with the necessary qualifications can be found (Rev. 5.1–4). Suddenly, however, the situation changes. A risen Lamb is seen in heaven (Rev. 5.5)—a Lamb who’d previously been slain and is now said to have ‘conquered’, and whose act of conquering makes him the focal point of heaven’s worship.

Needless to say, the appearance of this risen Lamb is significant. When the angel claimed that no-one in heaven could open the scroll, he could hardly have overlooked the focal point of heaven’s worship. The opening of the scroll must, therefore, have taken place in the aftermath of Jesus’ ascension, i.e., in AD 30. Or, to put the point another way, if the reason why the scroll wasn’t opened prior to AD 30 was because there wasn’t a risen Lamb in heaven, then once there was a risen Lamb in heaven, the scroll would have been opened. (Any later date that we posit for its opening undermines Revelation 4–5’s logic.)

Given the above considerations, it follows that the seven seals of Revelation 6 began to unfold in AD 30, which is supported by at least three independent lines of evidence:

• the judgments of Revelation 6 reflect the outpouring of God’s vengeance on those who’ve shed the blood of his servants, which is precisely what Luke 21’s events reflect (Luke 21.22 with 11.49–51, Matt. 23.29–38, Rev. 6.10),

• Jesus said that all of Luke 21’s events would befall ‘this generation’, i.e., the generation that rejected him (Luke 11.29–32, 50–51, 17.25, 21.32), and

• the events of the seven seals exactly mirror those of Luke 21, as shown below.14

Suppose, then, we take the seven seals to have unfolded over the period 30–70 AD, culminating in the fall of Jerusalem. (We can plausibly take the seven seals to depict more than the fall of Jerusalem, but we shouldn’t take them to portray any less than it.) This allows us to arrive at four further conclusions about the book of Revelation’s visions.

First, the seven seals unfold over a (symbolic) period of half a week (1,260 days).

The text of Revelation 7 describes 144,000 Jewish believers who are ‘sealed off’ from the events of Revelation 6 (Rev. 7.2–3), which can reasonably be identified with Revelation 12’s woman in the wilderness (i.e., the faithful remnant of Israel who are persecuted by Satan in the aftermath of Jesus’ ascension). This explains why the 144,000 are later described as the ‘first-fruits’ of God’s harvest (Rev. 14.4) as well as why, at the end of Revelation 12, in 70 AD, Satan abandons his pursuit of the woman (the early Jewish church) and turns his attention to ‘the rest of the woman’s seed’ (the largely Gentile church of later times) (Rev. 12.17).

Second, the conclusion of the seven seals in Revelation 8.1 mark the start of the sounding of the seven trumpets (since the seven trumpets unfold within the seventh seal) (Rev. 8.2ff.).

Third, just as the interlude between the sixth and seventh seals describes what takes place while the seven seals are unfolding on the earth (Rev. 7), so the interlude between the sixth and seven trumpets (Rev. 10–11) describes what takes place while the seven trumpets are sounding. The seven seals therefore unfold against the backdrop of a forty-two-month trampling down of Jerusalem (as described above) together with the events of Revelation 10.

Fourth, the events of Revelation 10 depict the unification of Jew and Gentile in the body of Christ. They’re initiated by an angel who descends from the heavenly realms, sets its right foot on the sea (the Gentile world), sets its left foot on the land (Israel), and then raises its hand towards the heavens. These actions are highly significant: they depict the unification of Jew and Gentile under heaven’s rule. Consequently, at the end of the days of the seven trumpets, the ‘mystery’ of God is said to have been completed (after a long ‘delay’) (Rev. 10.6–7). The full number of Jews and Gentiles are finally gathered in (Matt. 24.30–31) and united in the Church (Rom. 11.25, Eph. 1.9–13, 3.4–12, Col. 1.24–27).

Chronological Conclusions

Granted the above points, together with our earlier discussion of Daniel 9, we can chronologise the events of Revelation 12 as shown below, where the first half of Daniel’s week runs from the time of the Messiah to the fall of the Temple in AD 70, and the second half runs from the fall of the Temple to the end of the present age.

This chronology may seem strange to some readers. If the first sixty-nine ‘weeks’ of Daniel’s prophecy are seven-year blocks of time, then why wouldn’t the last one be? (And even if the weeks aren’t seven-year blocks of time, they’re clearly not periods of time that last for thousands of years, so why should the last one be?) I grant the force of this objection, but all interpreters of Daniel’s prophecy ultimately have to confront it (or some variation of it), since if Daniel’s seventy weeks span the crucifixion and the fall of the Temple (as Daniel 9.26–27 implies), then either Daniel’s final week has to span a long period of time (which the other weeks don’t) or Daniel’s 69th and 70th weeks have to be separated by a long gap (which the others aren’t). And, of these two options, the former seems the most Biblically defensible given the considerations set out below.

First, Revelation 12 refers to a symbolic half week (i.e., 1,260 days) that begins soon after Jesus’ ascension. To argue otherwise is to undercut the flow and logic of the text.

Second, Luke 21 refers to a period of desolation that begins in the aftermath of AD 70, which Revelation 11 associates refers to as half a week (forty-two months). To argue otherwise is to refuse to allow Scripture to interpret Scripture.

And, third, the seven seals unfold against the backdrop of a period of half a week (1,260 days) and culminate in the fall of the Temple in AD 70. To argue otherwise is to undercut the flow and logic of Revelation 4–5.

Conclusion

We’ve covered a fair bit of ground in this post. Far more needs to be said about it all, but I hope that I’ve been able to make the gist of my interpretation of Revelation 12 clear, and that it strikes you as attractive at least in some ways. Let me close by outlining (what I take to be) the major points in its favour.

First, it doesn’t require the insertion of gaps or discontinuities in Revelation 12’s vision (or in any other of Revelation’s visions).

Second, it allows Scripture to interpret Scripture. When two passages seem to be describing the same thing, it takes them to be describing the same thing. And so, by extension, it doesn’t require us to posit two occurrences of particular New Testament events—e.g., two destructions of Jerusalem’s Temple (one in AD 70 and one in a day to come), two expulsions of Satan from heaven (one in the Gospels and another before a seven-year tribulation begins), etc.

Third, it allows us to take Jesus’ statement in Luke 21.32 at face value. Everything that Jesus prophesied in the Olivet Discourse came upon the generation to whom he was speaking—which makes sense. (Why would Jesus judge a future generation of Jews for Judah’s rejection of him in the 1st century?)

Fourth, it doesn’t require us to posit a particular date of composition for the book of Revelation. Most preterist interpretations of Revelation take the beast’s sixth head, which is at large in John’s day, to be Nero. They therefore have to posit a date of composition some time in the period 54–68 AD, and have to reject whatever evidence they encounter for a later date of composition.

Fifth, while it takes some of Revelation’s visions to have been fulfilled in the 1st century, it doesn’t take all of them to have been fulfilled then, which means it can interpret the climax of the book of Revelation in light of Christ’s bodily return. (On many forms of preterism, the book of Revelation never explicitly mentions the bodily resurrection of the saints or the bodily return of Christ, which we wouldn’t expect a book about the vindication of Jesus and his saints to do.)

That’s not to say my view of Revelation is entirely without difficulties, but it’s got a lot going for it.

The book of Jonah is far more than an unusual sea-story. It’s a story about a God who hurls a wind down to the earth in such a way as to stir up a previously undisturbed sea, so as to lead its sailors to hurl/cast lots and subsequently hurl Jonah overboard just in time to be swallowed by a fish and spewed out on the dry land three days later, all of which has been convened in order to foreshadow Israel’s long history, ultimately to be lived out by God’s own Son in his (Jonah-like) death, resurrection, and acceptance among the Gentiles.

The Scene is Set

The life of a prophet frequently pictures his message. Hosea marries a prostitute (and remains married to her) in order to picture his people’s relationship to their God. Ezekiel packs his bags and leaves Jerusalem in anticipation of the exile. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey as a picture (and fulfilment) of the arrival of God’s king. And the life of Jonah, I suggest, pictures his message in a similar way.

But what is Jonah’s message?

Well, the main distinctive of the book of Jonah is its focus on the Gentile nations. It therefore seems significant that Jonah spends a lot of his time at sea (unlike Israel’s other prophets), since the sea regularly depicts ‘the nations’ in prophetic literature (e.g., Isa. 11.9, 23.11, 43.16, Dan. 7.2, Joel 2.20, Hab. 1.14ff., 2.14, 3.8).

We can plausibly, therefore, take Jonah’s life to be a picture of Israel’s existence in the midst of the Gentile world.

With that piece of the puzzle on the table, other features of Jonah’s story can be slotted into place.

Jonah is marked out by his disobedience. As a result, the first (documented) part of his life as a prophet makes an apt picture of Judah’s descent into exile. Jonah rejects God’s call, hands over his ‘wages/riches’ to foreigners (Ezek. 16),1 and sets out on a downwards trajectory (Jon. 1.3–5, where the verb Y-R-D = ‘to descend’ occurs three times in quick succession). Before too long he is overcome by a deep sleep, his eyes firmly shut, just like those of Yahweh’s prophets (Isa. 29.10). And, as time goes on, things only get worse. The waves become more and more tumultuous, as the nations do when God stirs them up against his people (Isa. 5.30, 10.26, 17.12–13, 51.14–15, Jer. 6.23, Ezek. 26.3, Dan. 7.3). In the end, the only option is exile (2 Chr. 36.16).2 Jonah-Judah is thus picked up and tossed into the Gentile sea, at which point the previously tumultuous world goes quiet (Jon. 1.11–12). The sound of millstones is no longer heard within Judah (Jer. 7.34, 16.9, 25.10 w. 5.25–26); her land lies desolate, enjoying its Sabbath rest (Lev. 26.34–35, 2 Chr. 36.20); and the nations grow still and silent (Zech. 1.15).

Lexical Connections: Jonah & Jeremiah

Jonah’s life is thus a poignant picture of Judah’s descent into exile, which is underscored by the connection between its vocabulary and that of Jeremiah.

• Just as Jonah is beset by a ‘storm’ (se‘ar), so Jeremiah thrice likens the arrival of the Babylonians to the onset of a ‘storm’ (se‘ar) (Jer. 23.19, 25.32, 30.23).

• Just as Jonah’s sailors say they’ll ‘hurl’ (T-W-L) him into the sea, so Jeremiah thrice says Yahweh will ‘hurl’ (T-W-L) Israel into exile (Jer. 16.13, 22.26, 22.28).

• And, just as the sailors do ultimately ‘cast’ (SH-L-K) Jonah into the sea, despite their best attempts to save him, so Yahweh ‘casts’ (SH-L-K) Israel into exile (Jer. 7.15, 22.28, 52.3).

Other choices of vocabulary then associate Jonah’s stay in the belly of the fish with Judah’s stay in Babylon.

• Just as Babylon is granted (M-N-Y) a time to govern Judah (per the Mene Mene of Daniel 5), so the fish is granted leave (M-N-Y) to swallow Jonah.

• Just as Jeremiah thrice describes how the Judeans grow ‘faint’ (‘-T-P) in the aftermath of 587 BC (Lam. 2.11, 12, 19), so Jonah is said to grow ‘faint’ (‘-T-P) in the ‘heart’ (levav) of the sea. (Levav is ‘Babylon’ spelt backwards.)

• And, after he’s been swallowed up by the fish, Jonah explicitly describes himself as ‘expelled/exiled’ (G-R-SH) from Yahweh’s presence. Like Daniel, he turns towards the Temple and prays. And, happily, God hears and answers Jonah-Judah’s prayer. (What seems like an out of place reference to Jonah facing the Temple therefore makes perfect sense: Jon. 2:5.)

All this is underlined in Jeremiah 51’s prophecy of Jerusalem’s fall where Nebuchadnezzar is portrayed as a ‘sea creature’ (tannin) who ‘swallows’ the people of Israel, strips them of their ‘luxuries’, and then holds them captive until her ‘bars’ (brikheha) are broken in pieces (as are the ‘bars of the earth’ in Jonah 2.6). Judah are even said to be led forth from the king of Babylon’s mouth (Jon. 2.6, Jer. 51.30, 34, 44, Lam. 4.5).3

We therefore have multiple reasons to see Jonah as a picture of Israel, to which we can add the correlation between Jonah’s gradual descent into the sea and Judah’s gradual descent into exile as it’s set out in Leviticus 26.

Jonah Part Two

We thus come to the second panel of the book of Jonah (chs. 3–4), where God gives Jonah a second chance.

As before, God commissions Jonah to take his word to the Ninevites. And, this time round, Jonah obeys. He arises, goes to Nineveh, and proclaims the word of God to the Ninevites, who respond in faith and repentance (3.5–10).

So, what are we to make of Jonah’s second journey as far as its symbolism is concerned? Or, to put the question another way, if the book of Jonah’s first panel (chs. 1–2) depicts Israel’s exile to and return from Babylon, then what does its second panel depict?

The answer is fairly straightforward: it depicts Judah’s second exile from Jerusalem—or, more precisely, it depicts the time when the early Church is scattered abroad and Peter (bar Jonah!) proclaims God’s word to a Gentile audience in Caesarea (Acts 8–10). In light of these considerations, we can helpfully view the two panels of the book of Jonah against the backdrop of Scripture’s other sea-story, namely the flood story.

We can spell out some of these parallels more fully as follows. Noah sends out a dove (a yonah). The first time it’s sent out, the dove encounters a world engulfed in water (the world of Daniel’s colossus). Just as the dove finds no place of rest for her foot (Gen. 8.9), so Israel finds no place of rest among the nations (Deut. 28.65) (note the similarity between Genesis’s לא מצאה היונה מנוח לכף רגלה and Deuteronomy’s לא יהיה מנוח לכף רגל), and so the dove (Jonah-Judah) returns to square one. Seven days later, however, the dove is sent out for a second time. The dove’s seven days correspond to Jonah’s references to a three day stay in the belly of the fish, three-day journey to get to Nineveh (or to walk around it), and one-day journey into Nineveh (Jon. 1.17, 3.4). And, happily, the second time the dove-Jonah is sent out, it’s not simply confronted by a world under judgment; it returns with signs of new life in its mouth, just as Jonah-Peter returns with a story about new life in his mouth (which he reports to the Jerusalem council).

All well and good, one might say. But do we have any reason to think that Luke wants us to see Peter’s journey to Caesarea as an event that ‘fills up’ the story of Jonah?

We do. For one thing, Peter and Jonah’s story are set against similar backdrops. In Acts 9.30, Paul is forced to flee to Tarsus (Tarshish!). Afterwards, we find Peter in Joppa, where he’s said to be ‘by the sea’. And, just as Jonah’s story involves three occurrences of the verb ‘descend’, so too does Peter’s (cp. the use of katabaino in Acts 10.11, 20, 21).

Peter and Jonah’s stories are also, however, connected in more specific and instructive ways. The text of Acts 8–10 portrays Peter’s mission to the Gentiles as a redemptive echo of Judah-Jonah’s past failures.

Hence, just as Jonah became a light to Assyria only on the far side of his death and resurrection, so Judah becomes a light to the Gentiles only on the far side of Jesus’ death and resurrection, which brings new life to the world at large (Isa. 53–56, Ezek. 37).

The Parable of the Plant

Finally, then, we come to Jonah 4, which draws an unusual book to an unusual conclusion. The sequence of events is roughly as follows. In 4.5, Jonah builds himself a shelter from the sun and sits down beneath it. In 4.6, God then causes a plant to spring up and overshadow Jonah. Jonah rejoices in the shade that the plant affords him, although whether he attributes it to the plant or his shelter isn’t entirely clear. Either way, the next day God sends a worm to gnaw through the plant’s root (Jon. 4.7), which causes it to wither. Jonah thus finds himself exposed to the east wind that subsequently arises, at which point he realises how little shelter he has in the plant’s absence (4.8ff.).4

How do these events fit into Jonah’s story? Is the point of chapter 4 simply that Jonah is small-minded while God is merciful? Or is the parable of the plant meant to teach us a more nuanced lesson than that?

The answer, I suspect, is the latter. Jonah isn’t simply an example of small-mindedness; his attitude towards the plant is meant to teach us something about God’s attitude towards Nineveh (Jon. 4.10–11). Let’s see if we can identify what that is.

The first thing we should note is that Jonah 4.5–8’s events are described in highly exaggerated terms: the shade that the plant affords Jonah is said to ‘deliver him from evil’; the plant is said to be ‘smitten/slain’ by a worm; and, as a result of his exposure to the east wind, Jonah says he wants to end his life. Like Jonah himself, then, the plant, worm, and wind seem to be symbols of deeper realities.5 But what?

We’re given a clue by the fact that all three things (the plant, worm, and wind) are said to arise by divine ‘appointment’ (M-N-H), which brings to mind the fish (Babylon) that God ‘appointed’ earlier in the book.

Let’s therefore see if we can establish some helpful connections between the two panels of the book of Jonah. Suppose we take the last appointed entity in Jonah’s second panel (the wind) to depict the last appointed entity in the first panel (Babylon). Does that help us to understand any other aspects of the parable?

It does. It associates Jonah’s imagery with that of Ezekiel since Ezekiel depicts Babylon as an ‘east wind’ (Ezek. 17). And, by extension, it allows us to identify what the plant is likely to depict. If the wind is Babylon, then we can reasonably take what previously shielded Jonah from the wind (i.e., the plant) to be Assyria, which constitutes a further point of resonance with Ezekiel since Ezekiel depicts Assyria as a tree in whose ‘shade’ Israel has enjoyed protection (Ezek. 31).6

Granted these observations, we can start to see the analogy between Jonah’s attitude towards the plant and God’s attitude towards Nineveh. Jonah was grateful for the plant’s existence. As soon as it died, Jonah wished it had been ‘spared’ (KH-W-S). And the same could have been said about Assyria. True, Assyria was a hostile empire. But its existence had sheltered Judah-Jonah from other hostile forces. Indeed, as soon as Assyria disappeared (like the plant), Babylon came (like the east wind). Many of the Judeans who endured the Babylonian invasion in 587 BC might, therefore, have wished that God had spared Assyria in order to shelter them from Babylon.

That being so, the events of Jonah 4 are highly instructive. God’s world is an unfathomably vast, beautiful, and interconnected place (Job 38–41). You can’t pull up the tares in it without also pulling up a lot of wheat. While Jonah was angry with God because of his failure to judge Assyria, he had no right to be, if for no other reason than the fact that he couldn’t comprehend what a world without Assyria might look like.

Assyria provided valuable shelter to 120,000 children together with huge numbers of animals, not to mention Judah—the nation from which God’s Messiah would arise. God alone knew what the destruction of Assyria in Jonah’s day might have meant for the wider world, and so God alone could determine whether Assyria should have been smitten or spared.

That doesn’t mean that nations should never go to war against one another. (All of our actions are based on an imperfect knowledge of the relevant counterfactuals.) But it does mean that we can’t justifiably be angry with God for choosing to spare a given nation—all of which brings us back to the grand narrative of the book of Jonah where God hurls a wind down to the earth in such a way as to stir up a previously undisturbed sea, so as to lead its sailors to hurl/cast lots and subsequently hurl Jonah overboard, just in time to be swallowed by a fish and spewed out on the dry land three days later, all of which happens in such a way as to foreshadow Israel’s long history, which is ultimately to be lived out by God’s own Son in his (Jonah-like) death, resurrection, and acceptance among the Gentiles. How can you second-guess the actions of a God like that?7

Most academics are specialists. And most specialists specialise in pretty obscure things. As a result, they like it when their field of expertise bears on the Bible in some way. After all, billions of people are interested in the Bible, which can hardly be said of, say, the use of line-dividers in early Akkadian administrative texts. (Yes, people really write about such things.)

The problem is, not all specialists-in-obscure-things know much about the Bible. And so it’s not uncommon for them to make confident but misguided assertions about it.

With that in mind, I’d like to share some thoughts about a couple of videos that recently popped up in my YouTube feed. The first was a two-hour interview with a scholar named Irving Finkel, who’s deservedly earned the rather grand title of ‘Assistant Keeper of the Ancient Mesopotamian Script’ at the British Museum, and the second was pretty much the same thing but with a different interviewer.1 (Once I’d watched the first interview, YouTube assumed I wanted to be made aware of everything that Irving Finkel has ever said.)

Thoughts on the Interviews

My thoughts on these two interviews are mixed. I’ll start with the positives. Finkel is an excellent communicator, hugely engaging to listen to, loves his subject, and has probably handled and/or read more cuneiform tablets than anyone else alive, which means his claims come from a position of knowledge. These are all good things if you want to wax lyrical about Akkadian literature on podcasts that have now been watched by over a million people.

Finkel also, in the course of his interview, had some words of warning for his fellow Assyriologists, which struck me as very wise. He began by citing a statement attributed to Sherlock Holmes. ‘Properly analysed’, Holmes said, ‘it’s possible to infer the existence of the Niagara Falls from a drop of water’. Finkel’s application of this statement was characteristically provocative. The Ancient Near East, he said, was a vast place filled with millions of people saying billions of things, only a tiny fraction of which were recorded, only a tiny fraction of which were preserved, and only a tiny fraction of which have been unearthed and published. As such, Assyriologists work with mere drops of water. It’s possible to infer a lot from them, but Assyriologists should be cautious in their claims, and shouldn’t go beyond what they can reasonably infer. As I say, wise words.

Now, however, for less positive matters.

Midway through both interviews, Finkel spoke about the Akkadian flood story (or stories). Finkel claimed that this story pre-dated the Bible’s by at least a thousand years, and that the Bible ‘indisputably’ got its flood story from Mesopotamia. Finkel gave two arguments for his (indisputable) claim. First, not many floods took place in Jerusalem in the 7th century BC. (Yes, he really said that.) Second, the Bible’s flood story uses words that don’t occur elsewhere in the Bible and are known to have been borrowed from Akkadian.

I don’t feel any great need to engage with the first of Finkel’s arguments, but I’d like to make a general point about his method and then go on to address his second argument.

I’ll start with the general point, which is that Finkel’s claim about the Bible’s flood story seems to be a remarkable example of not taking one’s own advice to heart. If there’d been a global flood in Noah’s day, and if God had subsequently entered into a covenant with Noah and his descendants, wouldn’t we expect accounts of that flood to have been handed down from father to son throughout the ancient Near East (and beyond it)? And if that had happened, wouldn’t the Akkadian and Biblical flood stories represent a mere couple of drops of water collected from a Niagara Falls’ worth of flood stories circulating in the Near East? Surely, then, claiming that the Bible’s flood story is dependent on the Akkadian one (without a very good reason for doing so) is a textbook example of going beyond what we can reasonably infer.

We thus come to Finkel’s claim about Akkadian loanwords, which, as far as I can tell, is largely if not entirely incorrect. (It’s hard to be sure because Finkel didn’t stated which words he takes to have been borrowed from Akkadian.) Below I’ll explain why.

Deducing a Word’s Origins

Ancient Semitic languages commonly loaned words to one another. Working out when and how they did so isn’t always easy, but we can make informed guesses about potential loanwords by considering questions such as those listed below.

First, does the word look ‘foreign’ in some way? By way of illustration, take the word ‘café’. In English, a final e isn’t normally pronounced (which is why it has to be marked with an accent), so the word ‘café’ looks decidedly non-English.

Second, how widely attested is the word? If it’s attested throughout the various branches of the Semitic family tree, it would seem more natural to view it as inherited from a common ancestor language than as a loanword.

Third, was there contact between the languages that the word’s supposed to have been loaned to and from? For instance, café could easily have been loaned from French to English because France and England are close to one another. Note: Hebrew and Akkadian speakers didn’t actually live very close to one another, but, as Finkel rightly points out, the exiled Jews and resident Babylonians shared a common language, namely Aramaic, which could plausibly have acted as a ‘donor language’.

Fourth, does the word occur throughout the Biblical text or is it specific to a particular passage (in this case, the flood story)?

By considering these questions, we can work out which words in the Biblical flood story look like they’re loans from Akkadian. And when we do that, the answer turns out to be, None of them. Instead, a very different picture emerges, which we’ll consider shortly.

The Data

Listed below are some of the more distinctive words of the Bible’s flood story together with brief notes on each one. As you’ll see, few if any of them look like Akkadian loanwords. (In what follows, I’ll talk about the Semitic languages in terms of a basic ‘East’ versus ‘West’ division.)

ma‘yan (מַעְיָן) = ‘fountain’
◆ the standard Biblical word for a fountain, cognate with ‘ayin = ‘spring’
◆ occurs throughout the Biblical narrative
◆ doesn’t have a cognate in Akkadian (where namba’u is the standard word for a fountain)

tehom (תְּהוֹם) = ‘the deep’
◆ the standard Biblical word for deep places, especially underwater
◆ occurs throughout the Biblical narrative
◆ present in Arabic as tihāma (‘coastal plain’)
◆ present in Akkadian as tiāmtu (‘the sea’), but this word doesn’t occur in Akkadian flood stories

mabbul (מַבּוּל) = ‘the deluge/flood’
◆ occurs only in the Bible’s flood narrative (though not unexpectedly since the Bible only describes one worldwide flood)
◆ has Hebrew cognates, viz. yaval (יָבָל) (‘a stream’) and yabbal (יַבָּל) (‘a discharge of fluid’), as well as Arabic ones (wabl/wābil = ‘a downpour of rain’)
◆ could be Akkadian (if it reflects B-B-L < W-B-L), but is unattested and doesn’t occur in Aramaic (the expected donor language)
◆ not reflected in Akkadian flood stories, where the flood is referred to as an abūbu

geshem (גֶּשֶׁמ) = ‘the rain’
◆ occurs throughout the Biblical narrative
◆ also occurs in Ugaritic and possibly Arabic (as S-J-M = ‘to rain’)
◆ not reflected in Akkadian and doesn’t feature in Akkadian flood stories, where the word for rain is zunnu

tevah (תֵּבָה) = ‘the ark’
◆ occurs in the Exodus narrative as well as the Biblical flood story
◆ borrowed from Egyptian
◆ doesn’t have a cognate in Akkadian

gopher (גֹּפֶר) = ‘gopher wood’
◆ an unknown type of wood mentioned only in the Biblical flood story
◆ not reflected in other languages (unless it’s related to the Greek κυπαρισσος = ‘cypress’)

kopher (כֹּפֶר) = ‘pitch’
◆ occurs only once in the Bible (Gen. 6)
◆ present in Aramaic as kŭfor and in Arabic as kufr, which may be cognate with K-F-R = ‘to cover/clad’
◆ present in Akkadian as kupru, which occurs in Akkadian flood stories

tzohar (צֹהַר) = ‘skylight’ (?)
◆ occurs only in Gen. 6
◆ perhaps cognate with the Hebrew tzohorayim (צָהֳרַיִם) = ‘light/noon’ and the Arabic dhuhr (ضهر) = ‘midday’
◆ not reflected in Akkadian

arubbot (אֲרֻבֹּת) = ‘windows’ (of heaven)
◆ occurs throughout the Hebrew Bible
◆ also occurs in Ugaritic and Eblaite
◆ not reflected in Akkadian outside of Eblaite

qinnim (קִנִּים) = ‘rooms/nests’
◆ occurs throughout the Hebrew Bible
◆ also occurs in Aramaic and Akkadian (though not in Akkadian flood stories)

tahor (טָהוֹר) = ‘clean’
◆ occurs throughout the Biblical narrative
◆ a common West Semitic word
◆ not reflected in Akkadian

lo-tahor (לֹא טָהוֹר) = ‘not clean’
◆ occurs only in the Biblical flood story
◆ reflects a pre-cultic era, prior to the more fully developed notion of ‘unclean’ animals (טָמֵא)

In sum, then, few if any of the key words of the Bible’s flood story have an Akkadian flavour (with the possible exception of mabbul, though even this is uncertain).2 The same is true of the name Ararat (Gen. 8.4), since its final a would have been lost if it had been loaned into Hebrew via Akkadian (which refer to Ararat as Urartu). And the story’s numerical details lack an Akkadian flavour as well, since while Mesopotamian flood stories have an ark whose surface area is 120 x 120 x 120 cubits, which resonates with Mesopotamia’s sexagesimal numeral system,3 the surface area of the Bible’s is 300 x 50 x 30 cubits, which better fits the Bible’s decimal system in that all of these numbers are divisible by ten while only one of them is divisible by six. (In the Bible, tens and hundreds are seen as ‘round numbers’: Gen 15.13, 18.24ff., 23.15, 24.10, 55, 60, 31.7, 32.6, 33.19, etc.)

Provisional Conclusions

Experts on Biblically relevant topics don’t always get things right when they talk about the Bible.

The Bible isn’t averse to using loanwords or unusual numbers. For instance, when we move on from the last chapter of Ezekiel to the opening chapters of Daniel, we suddenly find ourselves in a new environment, confronted by Persian loanwords, a new language (Aramaic), and a 60 x 6 cubit image. We don’t, however, find such things in the Bible’s flood story. If you had to describe its vocabulary, the best way to describe it would be ‘common Semitic’ or possibly ‘common West Semitic’. Either way, it would reflect vocabulary with a long history, and without any distinctly Akkadian influence. The words for rain, the fountains, and ‘the deep’ are common Semitic ones; mabbul, qinnim, and kopher are just as likely to be common Semitic as Akkadian (given their widespread attestation); gopher is unknown elsewhere in the Semitic languages, Akkadian included (which may be because the gopher tree didn’t regrow in the Near East after the flood); arubbot looks to be West rather than East Semitic; tzohar (‘skylight’) is an unusual word, which is presumably indicative of the ark’s unusual construction and isn’t reflected in Akkadian (but is reflected in West Semitic if it’s derived from *tzuhr = ‘noon’); tevah is Egyptian; and the words for ‘clean’ and ‘not clean’ are West Semitic, and seem to pre-date the Tabernacle.

The Bible’s flood story thus looks more like the kind of text that would/could have been handed down to Moses in Egypt than to Ezra in Babylon. And so to claim that the Bible got its flood story from Mesopotamia feels pretty dubious at least on the basis of the arguments that Finkel’s provided to date. On the basis of the evidence that we’ve consider above, it seems that the Bible tells its story in its own words, and its Akkadian counterpart does likewise.

What exactly is God doing in the present world? A large part of the answer lies in Ephesians 4. (I say a large ‘part’ because, being omnipotent, God can do many things at the same time.) God is in the process of building a new Temple—a structure built around Christ, its ascended head (vs. 8–10), with gifts poured out upon those beneath him (vs. 7 & 11–12), which unites his people into one body (vs. 4–6, 13). As such, Ephesians 4’s form matches its message—a human ziggurat, with its head in the heavens.

Again that backdrop, consider Paul’s use of Psalm 68.

Therefore it says, When he ascended on high he led away captive a captive host, and gave gifts to men. (In saying ‘He ascended’, what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth?)

Paul’s use of Psalm 68 raises at least a couple of questions. First, why does Paul say Christ ‘gave gifts to men’ (ἔδωκεν δόματα τοῖς ἀνθρώποις) when Psalm 68 says God ‘received gifts from among men’ (לָקַ֣חְתָּ מַ֭תָּנוֹת בָּאָדָ֑ם)? And, second, why does Paul quote from an exodus Psalm like Psalm 68?

    The chariots of God are twice ten thousand, thousands upon thousands;
        the Lord is among them;
        Sinai is now in the sanctuary.
    You ascended on high, leading captive a host of captives,
        and receiving gifts among men, even among the rebellious,
        that the Lord God may dwell there.

The answers to these questions are connected. At first blush, ‘receiving’ might seem to be a pretty different thing to ‘giving’. But of course it depends on what you’re receiving, and why you’re receiving it. God’s people receive gifts so they can give those gifts back to God in the service of his Church (e.g., the gift of apostleship) (Eph. 4.7, 11–12)—which is the essence of Christian worship. (What do any of us have that we didn’t first receive?) And, remarkably, that is precisely what Christ modelled for us in his incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension. He laid down his life so he might receive life from God and give it to his people, and took on human flesh so he might receive the Spirit from on high and pour it out upon his saints, ‘like the precious oil on the head, which runs down the beard and garments’ (Psa. 133).

We thus come to the reason for Paul’s use of an exodus Psalm. In and through the Church, Christ is ‘unplundering’ and redeeming Satan’s kingdom. Pharaoh took God’s people captive, and Moses led them out of Egypt, complete with Egypt’s wealth, which they duly gave back to God (Exod. 25). Similarly, Satan has taken the nations captive, and Christ is now in the process of unplundering them and turning their wealth to godly uses (as he leads captivity captive). The Church is thus gradually recycling a fallen Creation.

That is (part of) what God is doing in the world. And that is why those who invest their resources in God’s Church do so wisely.

Last week on the Theopolis podcast, Peter Leithart, Alastair Roberts, Jeff Meyers, and I worked our way through the first half of Hebrews 9. Below I want to highlight a feature of the Levitical system that became clearer to me as we did so.

Preamble

The Levitical system was, in many ways, a system full of paradoxes. On one hand it reflected Israel’s closeness to the God whom they worshipped. Yahweh was quite literally in their midst, and their life as a nation revolved around him. Yet, at the same time, the Levitical system reflected Israel’s distance from God. Yahweh was separated from the common people with a whole series of buffer zones in order to contain and maintain his holiness.

Against that backdrop, Hebrews 9 draws our attention to three rather curious features of the Levitical system.

Paradox #1: The Tent

The book of Exodus ends with a problem. The tent has been successfully erected and filled with God’s glory, but, unfortunately, no-one is now able to enter it. God’s holiness is too great for mortal man to approach (Exod. 40.35).

Against that backdrop, the Levitical system is inaugurated. The Levitical system allows Israel access into God’s presence via their priestly representatives. Yet access to God is highly restricted: only the priests can enter the outer tent, and only one priest can enter the Most Holy place, and that only once a year. Hence, while the Levitical system is a means of access into God’s presence, it is at the same time a barrier. As long as the outer tent is in place, the way into the Most Holy Place isn’t fully open (Heb. 9.8). The outer tent both grants access to God’s presence and restricts it.

Paradox #2: The Day of Atonement

A similar paradox underlies the Day of Atonement.

The Levitical system deals with only a small subset of man’s ‘sins’, and generally seeks to cleanse impurities rather than to take away sin.

The main exception is the Day of Atonement. Aaron lays his hands on the head of a live goat, and confesses over it “all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, i.e., all their sins” (Lev. 16.21).

These sins would have included things that were beyond the capacity of the Levitical system to deal with. The book of Leviticus prescribes no sacrifices for sins such as idolatry, Sabbath-breaking, disobedience to parents, etc. Such sins could be dealt with on the Day of Atonement (it would seem), but the text of Hebrews 9 seems to claim otherwise. On the Day of Atonement, the Writer says, the high priests goes into the Most Holy Place in order to offer sacrifices “for himself and for the unintentional sins of the people” (Heb. 9.7).

How are we supposed to square the book of Hebrews’ claim with the clear implication of the book of Leviticus?

The answer requires us to consider the fine print of Leviticus 16.1

The Day of Atonement’s ritual consists of three main steps, involving a bull and two goats. First Aaron offers the bull as a purification sacrifice in order to make atonement for himself (and his house), and brings its blood inside the Most Holy Place (Lev. 16.6, 11); then Aaron does the same with one of the goats in order to make atonement for the people (16.9, 15); and, finally, Aaron confesses all Israel’s iniquity and transgression over the other goat and sends it away to a remote place (16.21).

The Writer to the Hebrews’ point concerns what each of these steps accomplishes. The two sacrifices, he claims, have a restricted scope: they deal only with “unintentional sin” (hence the priest doesn’t confess Israel’s sins over them). What deals with Israel’s iniquity and transgression is the exiled goat, which is sent away in Step Three.

Consequently, at the heart of the Levitical system is a glaring paradox. The most powerful and extensive of all the Levitical sacrifices—the act of atonement par excellence—isn’t actually a sacrifice at all, and is only tangentially connected with the Holy Place. Blood, we’re told, is central to atonement (Lev. 17.11), and yet the blood that’s shed on the Day of Atonement doesn’t cover Israel’s most grievous iniquities and transgressions; it merely covers their unintentional sins.

Something thus seems deeply unsatisfactory about the Levitical system. Sin is merely sent away (in the hope it won’t return) rather than dealt with in the presence of the One who has the power to impute it to or expunge it from Israel’s account.

Paradox #3: The Golden Altar

The third paradox involves the golden altar. The golden altar belongs to the Most Holy Place (Heb. 9.4).2 Like the ark, it’s made of acacia wood and overlaid with pure gold (Exod. 30), and, in the context of the Temple, it’s said to “belong to the inner sanctuary” (I Kgs. 6.22) (cp. also Lev. 16.12–13).

Why, then, isn’t the altar situated within the Most Holy Place? The answer is simple: because if it was, the Levitical system couldn’t function. The high priest can only enter the Most Holy Place surrounded by clouds of incense that he has to bring from the altar into the Most Holy Place.

Like the role of the live goat, then, the layout of the tabernacle is paradoxical. The altar that should be in Yahweh’s presence is instead situated in the outer tent (to preserve the priests’ lives). And so the sacrifices that reconcile man and God are offered outside of God’s presence.

Conclusion

The text of Hebrews 9 draws our attention to a group of paradoxical features of the Levitical system, which it does in order to highlight its fulfilment in Christ:

• In contrast to the priests who served at an altar situated outside the Most Holy Place, Jesus died in the very presence of God at the end of a life of perfect obedience.

• In contrast to the scapegoat, Jesus didn’t merely ‘bear our sins away’ to a remote place; he became sin, took it down into the grave with him, where it was destroyed, and rose for our justification.

• And, in contrast to the high priest, Jesus doesn’t merely ‘represent’ us in God’s presence; he has torn the curtain of the Holy Place in two in order that we, along with him, might enter into God’s presence.

What was separated in the old order thus anticipated a time when it would be brought together in Christ in the context of a new and better covenant.

“Let us, therefore, draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. And let us hold fast the confession of our hope without equivocation, for he who promised is faithful.”

Cross-posted from the Tyndale House Ink Magazine, which you can have delivered to your inbox or postbox for free here.

Genesis 29–30 is a remarkable story. It’s about two women who bear great fruit despite difficult circumstances. It’s also a strange story. Consider its broader context. World-changing events are in train. In Genesis 11, human beings seek to ‘make a name for themselves’, which God isn’t happy about. He therefore scatters Shinar’s inhabitants throughout the earth (Gen. 11.4) and promises to make Abraham’s name great instead (Gen. 11–12).

God’s promise soon starts to bite. Wherever Abraham goes, he prospers (despite some debatable decisions). He betters men of the stature of Pharaoh (Gen. 12), defeats coalitions of kings (Gen. 14), and amasses great riches in the process (Gen. 13.2, 6, 24.30, 26.13).

So it’s a bit odd when we get to Genesis 29–30 and find Jacob—the inheritor of Abraham’s promise (Gen. 28.4)—in a foreign land, breeding sheep for his kinsman Laban. (The particular way in which he breeds sheep is also a bit odd, as is the way he ends up married to Leah and Rachel.) It feels as if the story of Scripture has taken a strange and slightly anticlimactic turn, especially given the amount of time it devotes to these events. Indeed, the text devotes over four times as many verses to the birth of Jacob’s children as it does to the tower of Babel (Gen. 11.2–9, 29.31–30.24). Why?

A few answers can be given. One is that, in the context of the book of Genesis, naming is a big deal.

In Creation Week, God adds form to the world and then names what he has formed (the Day and Night, Heaven and Earth, etc.). Scripture thus associates the act of naming with dividing things up, which is a major theme of the book of Genesis. A single stream of humanity is divided up into two branches (Cain’s and Seth’s). Then, after the flood, Seth’s branch divides into three (Shem’s, Ham’s, and Japheth’s), which populate the earth. Not long afterwards, Shem’s branch divides into two (Gen. 10.25), and then Terah’s into three (Gen. 11.26). And so things continue, most often in divisions of two or three, until we get to Genesis 29–30 where the line of Jacob/Israel fans out into eleven branches, soon to become twelve with the birth of Benjamin (Gen. 35.16-18). Each of these branches is assigned a name by Leah and Rachel (with the exception of Benjamin), by which token it becomes ingrained into the fabric of world history. The names that Leah and Rachel give their children will be expanded on in Genesis 49, where their sounds and semantics become the foundation for many of Jacob’s blessings, and these names will later be borne before the Lord on the high priest’s ephod (Exod. 28.9-12), not to mention inscribed on the gates of the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:12). Leah’s and Rachel’s actions in Genesis 29–30 thus influence the shape of world history.

But it’s not the fact that Leah and Rachel name their children that’s significant; the meanings of the names they assign are also significant. Many of them reflect the grief that Leah and Rachel experienced as a result of their unhappy situation. The name Reuben has to do with ‘affliction’ (Gen. 29.32). The name Simeon concerns the fact that Leah is hated, and that God has ‘heard’ about it (Gen. 29.33). Implicit in the name Levi is Jacob’s lack of interest in Leah (Gen. 29.34). Dan’s name reflects Rachel’s belief that her decision to obtain a child through Bilhah (her maidservant) had been vindicated (Gen. 30.6). And the name Naphtali concerns Rachel’s continued ‘striving’ with her sister, as well as her ‘striving’ after a child (Gen. 30.8).

So, while Leah and Rachel are fruitful, their fruitfulness emerges out of a backdrop of pain and travail (as all children do to some degree!). As such, the story of Genesis 29–30 is distinctly reminiscent of a related story about fruitfulness in the midst of pain—the Exodus. Consider the similarities between them: Jacob-aka-Israel relocates to a foreign land, where he labours for a foreign master (Laban/Pharaoh). Although that master seeks to trick him and change his wages, Jacob/Israel is fruitful and greatly multiplies; indeed, the more his master seeks to hinder him, the more he prospers (Gen. 30.35, 41–43, Exod. 1.12). The relationship between Israel and Laban/Pharaoh thus starts to turn sour. And so, in the end, Israel is forced to leave the land, which he does along with Laban/Pharaoh’s riches, at which point the former master chases after him in an unsuccessful attempt to recover them.1

The similarities between these two stories are underlined by their use of certain key Hebrew words. Both Jacob and Israel are said to ‘increase’ (paratz) in size (Gen. 30.43, Exod. 1.12). As a result, both Laban and Pharaoh seek to ‘cheat’ (talal) Jacob/Israel (Gen. 31.7, Exod. 8.29). And, in both stories, deliverance comes because God ‘looks’ (ra’ah) down in mercy on the ‘affliction’ (‘oni) of his people (Gen. 29.32, Exod. 3.7), which are the two words from which the name Reuben is composed.

But, while five of the first six names of Leah and Rachel’s children reflect grief and sorrow, that’s not the case for all eleven. Three of Leah’s children’s names are more positive: Judah means ‘praise’, Gad means ‘good fortune’, and Asher means ‘blessed’. And these names seem to set the stage for better things to come. Rachel is soon to have a child of her own. Before that happens, however, the author of Genesis tells us about an unusual incident. Reuben comes across some mandrakes while he’s out in the field and gives them to Leah. And, in exchange for them, Rachel allows Leah to spend a night with Jacob. How we’re supposed to interpret this incident isn’t clear to me. What is clear, however, is its outcome—the birth of Issachar (Gen. 30.14–18). It is an important event, both because of the meaning of the name Issachar and because of an allusion to it in the book of Jeremiah.

The name Issachar is unusual. It’s built around the Hebrew word sachar, which denotes a ‘wage/reward’, and the way it’s spelt suggests it should be etymologised as yesh-sachar and translated as ‘There is a reward’. In fact, the prophet Jeremiah hints at precisely this translation in his description of Israel’s restoration.2

Prior to Jerusalem’s fall at the hands of the Babylonians (587 BC), Jeremiah likens Judah’s coming exile to Rachel’s barrenness. Just as Rachel went without children for much of her life (which was a reproach to her), so Judah will be left childless by the exile (Jer. 31.15). Nevertheless, Jeremiah encourages Judah not to lose heart. Her children and fortunes will ultimately be restored. Those who continue in their labours, Jeremiah says, will reap a reward—a statement he conveys via the Hebrew words yesh-sachar (Issachar!) (Jer. 31.16).

And the nature of that reward is noteworthy. It will come in the form of the new covenant, and will thus involve the reconciliation of two sisters—Judah and Israel/Ephraim (Jer. 3.6–7, 31.18–34, Ezek. 37.15–28)—, all of which brings us back to the events of Genesis 30 where the birth of Issachar marks a turning-point in the lives of Leah and Rachel. After Issachar’s birth, the two sisters’ rivalry is no longer mentioned, and the two sisters no longer assign sorrowful names to their children. Instead, Leah bears a sixth son named Zebulun (‘Honour’), at which point Rachel finally conceives and bears Joseph, whose name (which sounds like the verb ‘to take away’) describes the way God has (finally!) taken away her reproach (Gen. 30.23).

In sum, then, while the details of Genesis 29–30 might initially seem strange and even unnecessary for us to know, they are important. There is a significance to the fact that Leah and Rachel name their children, as there is to the specific meanings of the names they choose, as well as to the ways those names link up with the rest of Scripture. And undergirding and overarching all these things is the central message of Rachel and Leah’s story: even in the midst of great difficulties, God’s people can bear great fruit. The God whom we worship can transform pain into fruitfulness, which is neatly captured by Benjamin’s change of name. The son whom Rachel names Ben-Oni, which means ‘Son of Affliction’, is later renamed Benjamin, which means ‘A Son of my Right Hand’, i.e., ‘One who will Inherit (God’s Promise)’.

Most students of Scripture see the flood as a significant event in Biblical history. It’s hard not to. Few people, however, see its chronology—which the Bible goes to great lengths to record—as significant, which is a shame. (James Jordan is an exception, but then he often is.1) For instance, consider the way in which the flood describes a deluge of divine wrath, has a new world arise from an old creation in its aftermath on the first day of a new week, and culminates in a Pentecost-like period of fifty days, at the end of which a dove takes up permanent residence in the world.

Before we pursue these considerations in detail, however, we need to compile an accurate flood chronology, which I’ll try to do below.

The Data

Five features of the flood’s chronology are explicitly set out in the Biblical text. Some are explicit time-stamps—i.e., references to ‘the Nth day of the Mth month of the Yth year of Noah’s life’, here written NN/MM/YYY—while others are references to how many days elapse between two events.

• God sent rain on the earth on 17/02/600, which lasted for 40 days (Gen. 7.4, 10–12).

• 150 days later, on 17/07/600, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat (Gen. 7.24, 8.4).

• On 01/10/600, the tops of the nearby mountains became visible to Noah (Gen. 8.5).2

• On 01/01/601, the waters had ‘dried up’ (Hebrew root Ḥ-R-B) from the earth, and so Noah removed the ark’s cover (Gen. 8.13).

• And, on 27/02/601, with the earth fully dried out (Y-Š-B), Noah left the ark, built an altar, and offered sacrifices to God (Gen. 8.14ff.).

The other features of the flood’s chronology have to be assumed.

Assumptions

Q1. How are months reckoned in the flood narrative?

Answer: The flood narrative doesn’t explicitly tell us how it reckons months, but it does provide us with an important clue. It has the flood waters break forth on 17/02/600 and prevail on the earth for 150 days (Gen. 7.10–12, 24), and afterwards it has the ark come to rest on 17/07/600 (Gen. 8.4). The flood narrative therefore seems to employ a schematised 30-day-per-month chronology, which shouldn’t surprise us. Noah is unlikely to have been able to accurately observe new moons while he was in the ark.3

Q2. How are days counted in the flood narrative?

Answer: To determine exactly how the flood narrative counts days doesn’t seem possible, but, given the significance of a seven-day week in the book of Genesis, it seems reasonable to count the flood narrative’s references to ‘seven days’ exclusively. Hence, when God tells Noah it will begin to rain in seven days’ time, it seems reasonable to take God to have spoken to Noah on, say, the 1st day of a week and for it to have started to rain on the 1st day of the next week. (If we counted days inclusively, we’d have the rain start to fall on the 7th day of the same week.)

Q3. What do references to ‘the end of N days’ mean in the flood narrative?

Answer: The text of Genesis 8 contains two references to what takes place ‘at the end of a period of N days’. In Genesis 8.3 the water is said to recede from the earth ‘miqtseh 150 days’, and in 8.6 Noah is said to open the window of the ark ‘miqqets 40 days’. These two expressions thus sound similar, and seem to mean basically the same thing. The first can at least sometimes be shown to presuppose an inclusive count (i.e., to refer to ‘the end of a given period of time’ as opposed to ‘beyond the end of a given period of time’) and can never be shown to presuppose an exclusive count. For instance, the text of II Kgs. 18 has the king of Assyria besiege Samaria in the 4th year of Hezekiah’s reign (which is the 7th year of Hoshea’s reign) and capture Samaria ‘miqtseh three years’ in ‘the 6th year of Hezekiah’s reign’ (and the 9th of Hoshea’s).4 The same is true of the second of our expressions (‘miqqets + day-count’). For instance, in Deut. 15.1, the LORD tells the Israelites to grant their kinsmen relief from their debts ‘miqqets every seven years’, the purpose of which is to stipulate what should be done ‘in the seventh/Sabbatical year’ rather than ‘after the 7th/Sabbatical year’. (The Israelites thus enjoy their Sabbath rest along with the land; otherwise they would have to pay off their debts over the course of the Sabbatical year, which would seem counterintuitive: Lev. 25.4, etc.)

That’s not to say these expressions can’t, in the context of a narrative, look beyond the period of days to which they refer. Indeed, in the context of the flood narrative, the text of 8.3 refers to what takes place ‘at the end of a period of 150 days’ precisely in order to explain what will be the case on the 151st day. In and of themselves, however, the phrases ‘miqtseh + day-count’ and ‘miqtseh + day-count’ describe what has taken place by the end of the relevant period of days.

Q4. When did the floodwaters start to recede and for how long?

The floodwaters are the subject of six different verbs. The first three occur in chapter 7, where the floodwaters are said to:

• ‘rise’ (Hebrew root R-B-H) (Gen. 7.17, 18b),

• ‘prevail’ (G-B-R) on the earth (Gen. 7.18a, 19, 20, 24), which I take (at least) to mean ‘submerge the earth’, and

• ‘cover’ (K-S-H) the mountains (Gen. 7.20).

The last three occur in chapter 8 after the LORD has sent a wind across the earth (8.1ff.), as a result of which the floodwaters are said to:

• ‘subside’ (S-K-K) (Gen. 8.1),

• ‘return’ (Š-W-B) (Gen. 8.3a), and

• ‘decrease’ (Ḥ-S-R) (Gen. 8.3b, 5).

In literary terms, then, the shape and structure of the flood narrative is fairly clear. The text of 8.1 describes a watershed moment: in the lead-up to it the waters increase and prevail, and on the far side of it the waters begin to subside. What’s less clear is exactly when they do so. The events of 7.4–8.4 are set out below. (As we’ll see, the text of 8.3 is open to multiple interpretations. Below, I’ve paraphrased it in as neutral way as possible.)

These statements can’t describe events that occur one after the other in strict succession. We can’t have the rain fall on the earth for 40 days (from 17/02/600 to 26/03/600), then have the waters recede from the earth for 150 days, and finally have the ark touch down on 17/07/600 (since we can’t accommodate 190 days in the period 17/02/600 to 17/07/600). So at least some of the states of affairs described above have to overlap with one another. Granted that premise, two interpretations of the text are possible. One is to take 8.3’s 150 days to introduce an as-yet-unmentioned 150 days into the text (which is chronologically out of place in that the events of 8.4 represent a step back in time), and the other is to take the 150 days to refer back to 7.24’s 150 days.

As can be seen, Interpretation A has an attractive symmetry, but it’s hard to find a non-arbitrary way to accommodate its second 150-day period into a flood chronology. The text gives the impression that the world’s water-level starts to reduce when the fountains of the deep and windows of heaven are shut on 28/03/600 (8.2),5 but the 150 days would then come to an end on 28/08/600, which wouldn’t make sense because the text has the world’s water-level continue to decrease until 01/10/600. If only by default, therefore, Interpretation B seems preferable.6

Q5. On which day of the week did the flood begin?

Answer: The flood narrative doesn’t tell us anything about which days of the week it involves. Given its frequent references to seven-day periods, however, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to take the rain to have begun on the 1st day of the week. And, if we do so, many noteworthy details arise (which we’ll unpack below in more detail). For instance, if the events of the flood narrative ran from 10/02/600 to 27/02/601 (based on a thirty-day-per-month calendar), then they’d have covered a period of 378 days (counted inclusively), which means, if they began on the 1st day of a week, they’d have ended on the last day of a week, i.e., a Sabbath.

Q6. How long after Noah sends out a raven in Gen. 8.7 does he send out a dove?

Answer: When Noah first sends out the dove isn’t stated. It seems reasonable, however, to work backwards from Gen. 8.13 in order to obtain an answer. In Gen. 8.10–11, Noah sends out a dove which returns to him after nightfall with an olive leaf in its mouth, at which point Noah knows the waters have subsided from the earth. He then waits for seven days, sends out the dove again (which doesn’t return to him) (8.12), and removes the cover of the ark (to reveal the dry land) (8.13). The events of Gen. 8.10–12 therefore seem to have unfolded over the course of 8 days. And the events of Gen. 8.8–9 seem to have taken 15 days to transpire, since the first time Noah sends out a dove (8.8) it returns to him 7 days later (8.9), (hence Noah is said to wait for ‘another 7 days’ in Gen. 8.10). In total, then, the events of 8.8–13 appear to have taken 23 days to transpire, in which case Noah would have waited 27 days before he first sent out the dove.

Chronology

Given the above assumptions, we can compile a plausible flood chronology, as shown below.

The first thing we should note about our chronology is its neatness, particularly in its thematic use of the number 27. The deluge ends on the 27th day of the 2nd month of the flood; Noah waits for 27 days before he sends out a dove (an interval we’re left to deduce for ourselves); the narrative culminates when God speaks to Noah on the 27th day of the 2nd month of Noah’s 601st year and spans a period of exactly 54 weeks, i.e., 2 x 27 weeks; and those weeks span a period of 378 days, which is the 27th triangular number.

Our chronology is also noteworthy insofar as it is exegetically and theologically significant. The flood is a story of de-creation and re-creation: the boundaries established in Creation week dissolve, and the world is thereby returned to initial state, at which point a wind/spirit once again starts to move on the face of the waters. Viewed against that backdrop, several features of our flood chronology seem significant.

• The flood covers a period of complete weeks: it thus runs from a 1st day to a 7th day, and thus culminates on a Sabbath, on which sacrifices are offered.

• A new creation begins to emerge from the depths of the flood on an appropriate day, viz. on the 1st day of the week.

• And, just as the old world of Creation Week is filled with life on Days 4, 5, and 6, so too is the new world: the ark—a microcosm of the world to come—touches down on the 4th day of the week; the dove is twice sent out on the 5th day of the week (which is when birds were created); and the dove is finally released into the earth on the 6th day of the week.

At the same time, our flood chronology contains two important allusions to the events of the New Testament. First, the wrath expressed in the 40-day downpour comes to an end on a 6th day—i.e., the day when the first Adam was put to sleep and new life came forth from his side, and the day when the last Adam was crucified—, and, second, the 90-day period from 01/10/600 to 30/12/600, over the course of which a new creation emerges from the waters, divides into a 40-day period (marked out by Noah’s release of a raven) and a 50-day period, the latter of which is distinctly Pentecostal in nature. Not only does it consist of 50 days and anticipate the firstfruits of a new harvest (hinted at in the freshly plucked olive branch brought to the ark), but it culminates in the release of a dove which takes up permanent residence in God’s new creation. Our chronology thus hints at deeper events on which they are predicated. The death of Jesus marks the death of an old world and the rise of a new one in its place—a new world which is inaugurated not by him who wills or him who runs, but by the satisfaction of wrath in the person of the Son and the dispensation of the Holy Spirit.

Over the course of Biblical history, God raised up various Messianic figures for Israel. Curiously, however, quite a few of them were accepted by the Gentiles before they were accepted by Israel.

• Joseph was initially rejected in Israel and yet later exalted in Egypt. Even his brothers mistook him for an Egyptian.

• Moses’s story wasn’t dissimilar. Rejected by his brethren, he took up residence in Midian, where he too was mistaken for an Egyptian (Exod. 2.19). (As it happens, both Moses and Joseph took Gentile brides.)

• And David, hated and hounded by Saul, fled to the land of the Philistines, where he won the favour of the king of Gath and acquired many Gittite followers (II Sam. 15.18).

In each case, the reason why God’s Messiah was rejected was what he’d cost his people.

• Joseph’s brothers had to submit to Joseph’s authority, which they didn’t want to do.

• Moses stirred up trouble between the Israelites and their overlord (Pharaoh), which made him decidedly unpopular.

• And God’s choice of David meant the end of Saul and his dynasty, which didn’t go down well with (most of) the Benjaminites.

A related event then occurred later in David’s life, but with a twist.

David sought to bring the ark of God up to Jerusalem, which wasn’t a bad idea in and of itself. Indeed, initially things went well. As the ark went up, the people went before it with songs of joy and with cypress branches in hand.1

But things soon took a turn for the worse. When the ark reached Nachon, where it should have been steady (Nachon means ‘established’!), the oxen stumbled, and the LORD ‘broke out’ against his people (II Sam. 6.7–8). The presence of God evidently came at a cost.

David therefore rejected the ark. He dispatched it to (what sounds like) a Gentile household (viz. the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite), whose people were blessed, at which point David decided it might not be a bad idea to welcome the ark into Jerusalem after all (II Sam. 6.10–11).

As such, the ark’s entrance to Jerusalem was a miniature of Palm Sunday.

When Jesus travelled up to Jerusalem, like the ark, he was greeted with songs and greenery. And rightly so. Jesus was like the ark.

Yet when Jesus arrived at the place where he should have been welcomed, he became a troublemaker. Angered by the state of the Temple, Jesus broke out against the moneychangers and lambasted Jerusalem’s leadership. His Messiahship came at a cost. Consequently, Jesus was rejected by his own people, at which point, like many Messiahs before him, Jesus was embraced by the Gentiles. The age-old story thus began to replay itself. The one who thought he had ‘laboured in vain’ became ‘a light to the Gentiles’ (Isa. 49.4–6).

But God’s story isn’t yet over. The day will come when Jesus’ people will welcome him, just as the people of Joseph, Moses, and David did. ‘Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows’, they will say, ‘even though we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted’ (Isa. 53.4). And if Israel’s rejection of their Messiah has meant the reconciliation of the world, then what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead (Rom. 11)?

Joseph’s brothers hated him. He was his father’s favourite, which they resented, and if his dreams were to be taken seriously (as Jacob suspected), he would ultimately reign over them, the idea of which was intolerable.

As such, the events of Genesis 37 presented Joseph’s brothers with a choice: to become Joseph’s subordinates or to accept twenty pieces of silver in exchange for his life.

Sadly, Judah and his brothers took the easy way out. And yet, remarkably, Joseph gave them a chance to redeem themselves.

When the ten brothers went to Egypt to buy grain, Joseph took Simeon captive and sent his brothers back to Canaan with their ten portions of silver in their bags (Gen. 42). Consequently, when the brothers (Benjamin now included) returned to Egypt a year later to buy more grain, they took the ten portions of silver they’d previously given Joseph together with ten additional portions of silver (Gen. 43.12), only for Joseph to put all twenty portions of silver back in their bags, hide his cup in Benjamin’s bag, and send the brothers back to Canaan again (Gen. 44.1–2). Joseph thus engineered a repeat of Genesis 37’s events. His cup was found in Benjamin’s bag, which gave the ten brothers a decision to make: to become Joseph’s slaves (Gen. 44.17) or to go their way with twenty portions of silver in exchange for their younger brother’s life.

Happily, the brothers did not repeat their sin. They bowed before Joseph (like the sheaves in Joseph’s dream), and Judah sacrificed his freedom for the sake of his father’s favourite.

But the story didn’t end there.

Fast forward two thousand years and consider Judah’s descendants, represented by Judah the disciple together with the nation of Judah.

Their father had sent his favoured son to them—a son of Joseph as it happens. Yet rather than have such a man rule over them, Judah’s descendant(s) betrayed him, this time for thirty pieces of silver—the value of a slave rather than a son (Exod. 21.29–32). Their silver was returned to them (Matt. 27.3–5) (since they had a chance to redeem themselves). Yet, rather than repent, they went the way of the old Judah, i.e., the Judah of Genesis 37. Driven by envy, Judah’s descendants took Jesus captive, cast him into a pit, and sat down to eat (the Passover). Then, when they arose to see what had become of Jesus, they found his pit/grave empty and devised a lie to cover up what had happened. It was a sad recapitulation of an old story.

And yet that story is not yet over. Scripture cannot be broken, and the call of God cannot be reversed. The day will come when Judah’s descendants will be given the heart of their father. The inhabitants of Judah will look upon the one whom they have pierced, and will mourn for him as a father would mourn the death of a firstborn son, i.e., as Jacob mourned the death of Joseph (Zech. 12.10–12). On that day, just as water flowed forth from the son of Joseph’s side, so ‘a fountain will be opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness’ (Zech. 13.1).

The introductions to the books of Genesis and Revelation are underlain by similar grammatico-numerical patterns.

Genesis

The first three verses of the book of Genesis introduce us to three creative agents:

• the God who is the primary mover behind Genesis 1.1–2.3’s events,

• the Spirit/Breath of God who hovers above the waters, ready to act, and

• the spoken/breathed-out Word, by means of which God creates.

Then, as Creation unfolds, a host of allusions to the numbers three and seven emerge. God creates over the course of a seven-day period, made up of two three-day panels and crowned with a Sabbath. On Days One to Three God creates a three-tier world—sky, land, and sea—, and on the next three days he fills it with three created trios (the greater light, lesser light, and stars; sea-serpents, other sea-creatures, and birds; and beasts, livestock, and reptiles: 1.16, 21, 25). The text’s first two verses (a literary ‘Day Zero’) consist of 21 words (3 x 7). God’s actions on Day Seven are described by means of 21 words, which break down into three seven-word sentences (Gen. 2.2–2.3a). And the focal point of the God of Heaven’s activities—viz. ‘the earth’—is mentioned exactly 21 times.

Revelation

As Peter Leithart notes in his commentary, the start of the book of Revelation is replete with similar threefold and sevenfold patterns.

First of all we have a threefold chain of transmission (God to Jesus, Jesus to his angel, and his angel to John) followed by a threefold promise (to those who read, hear, and keep).

Next we have references to the three persons of the Trinity, in the same (unexpected) order as they occur in Genesis 1. Specifically, we have references to:

• the Father, who is described via a threefold title (as he who is, who was, and who is to come),

• the sevenfold Spirit stationed before the throne, ready to serve, and

• the incarnate sent-forth Word, who also has a threefold title, viz. he who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

Thereafter, the book of Revelation describes six sevenfold strands of world history—the lives/effects of the seven churches, seals, trumpets, thunders, kings, and plagues—, which culminate in the return of Christ and the inauguration of a Sabbath-like new creation (Rev. 21–22).

Hence, just as Jesus arrives at the start of the NT at the climax of six heptads (three fourteens, per Matthew’s genealogy), so he arrives at the climax of six heptads at the end of the NT (as well as at the climax of a period of 42 months).

Significance

These and other parallels between Genesis 1 and Revelation are, of course, no coincidence. Revelation is all about the de-creation of an old world and the rise of a new one in its place. And, as the book progresses, God’s people are brought into that new creation’s goodness. They are granted to eat from the tree of life, not to be hurt by the second death, and to share in the joys outlined at the close of Revelation 7 (Leithart 2018:343).

The primary task of many Biblical scholars (as they see it) is to explain how and why the Biblical text acquired its final form—i.e., what source material it used, how that material was expanded/redacted, who expanded/redacted it, why they did so, what the weather was like at the time, etc.

A few days ago on The-Platform-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter, I commented on a particular explanation of how parts of the exodus narrative acquired their final form, and evidently a few folk found it helpful, so I thought I’d put it in blog form. (Yes, sometimes some people find some things written on Twitter to be of some help.)

Introduction

Sceptically-driven explanations of how Biblical texts acquired their form generally consist of three steps.

Step One: Highlight various features of the text that don’t read as we might expect them to.

Step Two: Stress how awkward these features of the text are, preferably with words like ‘weird’ and ‘bizarre’. Put particular emphasis on what the text (‘weirdly’) fails to mention, and assume that your expectations require no recalibration.

Step Three: Proffer a hypothesis that explains how these features of the text arose, ideally in terms of a power play and/or of authors editing texts for self-serving purposes.

Consider the following example.

The Moses-Only Explanation of the Exodus

When we first meet Moses, he doesn’t have an older brother. A son of Levi marries a daughter of Levi, and has a son with her (Moses). Moses is watched over by his sister, but is not said to have any brothers.

Throughout Moses’s early life in Egypt and Midian, there’s still no mention of Moses’ brothers. (Odd.)

A bit later, however, God promises to provide Moses with someone to help him in his task, at which point his brother Aaron suddenly enters the narrative. Weird, right? Even more weird is the fact that Aaron was able to wander out into the desert to meet Moses. (Weren’t the Hebrews meant to be enslaved?)

Then, as the narrative continues, God gives Moses power to turn water into blood, but when the time comes to perform the relevant sign, Moses tells Aaron to do it, which also happens in the case of two other signs. Why?

The answer—or so the explanation goes—is that an Aaronite clan among Israel’s ranks wanted to cement their place in the priesthood, so they inserted their ancestor (Aaron) into the Exodus narrative, which was originally only about Moses. They thus created various oddities in the text which for some reason they either didn’t notice or didn’t smooth over and which allow us to infer what they did 2,000 years after the fact.

The Problem

What are we supposed to make of the Moses-Only Explanation? Well, one thing we could do is consider whether the ‘oddities’ it claims to have identified are really that odd. Given that Moses grows up in Pharaoh’s house and then flees to Midian on his own, is it really much of a surprise that his early years in Egypt and Midian don’t mention Aaron? And does the fact that Pharaoh wouldn’t let the entire Hebrew nation go out into the desert to worship their God for three days really mean it would have been impossible for Aaron to visit Midian?

We might also want to consider whether our expectations about how a 3,000-year-old text from a foreign culture would/should have been written (given certain conditions) count for a great deal.

But the most significant problem with hypotheses such as the Moses-Only Explanation is the fact that they can be spun any way we choose.

For instance, suppose we want to craft an Aaron-Only Explanation of the exodus narrative. No problem. We simply highlight a different set of ‘oddities’ in the Biblical text and proffer ‘the Aaron-Only Hypothesis’ as their solution.

After all, Moses’s appearance in the exodus narrative is pretty hard to believe, isn’t it? Why would Pharaoh’s daughter adopt a child whom her father wanted killed? And how would she have kept his identity secret? Besides, isn’t it a bit of a coincidence that the exodus narrative involves exactly the same number of plagues as the number of words/commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai?

Clearly, then, the exodus story was originally just about Aaron and the three signs he performed, but a rival clan of Mosesites wanted to muscle their way into Israel’s priesthood, so they added their ancestor (Moses) into the exodus story (complete with seven extra plagues), and claimed that Moses was the guy who really led Israel out of Egypt, not Aaron.

The Mosesites also credited their ancestor with a miraculous birth story, which they based on the events of the exodus (hence both stories revolve around salvation through water—a dead giveaway), and then in order to explain why Moses wasn’t mentioned in the official records of the time, they had him grow up in secrecy in Egypt.

That’s why we have various references to ‘the sons of Aaron’ in the Psalms and in the Chroniclers’ land allocation and yet not a single mention of the sons of Moses. (Weird, huh?) And that’s why God doesn’t summon Moses’s sons to appear before him on Mount Sinai (Exod. 24), but Aaron’s. (I mean, come on!)

Two priestly factions thus arose in Israel’s history—the Aaronites and the Mosesites—, and they continually strove against one another. As a result, we find Moses criticised for his Cushite wife in Numbers 12, which the pro-Moses faction countered with the story about the cloud and God vindicating their man. And look—some crafty Aaronites even inserted the letter nun in Judges 18 as part of an unsuccessful attempt to remove the name of Moses from priestly history!

Etc., Etc., Etc.

Conclusion

So what can we conclude from all this? The main point, I think, is nicely summarised in the old adage ‘That which proves too much proves nothing’. Hypotheses that can’t be falsified don’t ultimately count for much. And many text-critical hypotheses fall into precisely that category.

Of course, I ultimately disbelieve most sceptical text-critical hypotheses not because of their lack of falsifiability, but because of my belief in the inerrancy of Scripture. But it’s comforting to know that such hypotheses have defeaters aside from a belief in inerrancy.

Crossposted from Theopolis.

Like Yahweh’s advent in Old Testament times, Jesus’ advent is announced with an array of signs, one of which is a star. That star, however, isn’t merely an arrow on a map pointing to the place of Jesus’ birth; it’s a pointer to Jesus’ identity and status.

Stars teem with symbolism. They occupy a liminal position in God’s creation. They are points of contact between heaven and earth, reflecting the authority of the realm above on the earth below (Gen. 1.16). Hence, when rulers fight on earth, their battle is depicted as a battle between stars (Judg. 5.20). And, when rulers are deposed, stars fall from the heavens (Isa. 14.12–13), which leaves a dark sky/vacuum in their wake (Ezek. 32.2–10).

Stars also blend the heavenly and the earthly in other ways. They are windows into a heavenly realm of light, and yet they are part of space and time, and burn brightly. Angels can thus be described as ‘stars’ (Job 38.7)—creatures of great glory, and flaming fires (Psa. 104.4), and yet tangible and human in appearance.

The advent of Jesus is not, therefore, simply signified by the appearance of a star; it is the appearance of a star, on earth. Jesus is heaven’s glory, manifest on earth in human form. In him, heaven and earth combine, and will be united in and through his reign.

Jesus’ advent is also associated with stars in other ways. Almost two thousands years before Jesus’ birth, Joseph had a dream in which Israel’s eleven stars bowed down before him. At the time, the dream aroused envy in Israel’s patriarchs. Angered by the idea that a man like Joseph would rule over them, they sought to kill him, which resulted in Joseph’s exile to Egypt.

Similar events unfold at the outset of Matthew’s gospel, though with a twist. Another favoured son is born. The idea that he will reign in Israel provokes fear in Israel’s king (Herod), who seeks to eliminate his rival. And so a different Joseph is given a dream, a son is subsequently exiled to Egypt (and thereby preserved), and, upon that Son’s glorification, the brothers who once rejected him worship him.

Jesus is thus the Joseph-like star of the Old Testament. Just as Abraham’s star-like descendants find their fulfilment in one seed, so they find their fulfilment in one star. Indeed, the only grammatically singular reference to a star in the Old Testament (the ‘star-god’ of Amos 5.26 not included) occurs in relation to the rise of Israel’s Messiah. A star would arise from Jacob, Balaam said, which would be associated with power and great authority (‘a sceptre’). That star would dethrone Edom—a nation which is said to have raised itself up to the stars (Obad. 1.4)—, just as Jesus’ appearance resulted in the fall of the Edomite star, Herod.

Jesus’ role as the star of Jacob is also notable for other reasons. Stars do not generally appear in isolation; they appear alongside other stars. And so it is with Jesus.

Jesus arises at the end of Israel’s night. As he appears, angelic stars shine out in the night sky (Luke 2.8–11). Meanwhile, nations are attracted to his light, and kingly stars to the dawn of his rise (Isa. 60.2–3), with gold and frankincense from afar (Isa. 60.6). And then, as Jesus begins his ministry, the lesser light who previously ruled the night (John the Baptist) fades away in order to give place to the heavenly Day-Star (Luke 1.78, John 1.8–9, etc.).

Before we finish, a further OT incident deserves our attention. Consider the main ingredients of Matthew 2: wise men arrive from afar; a manic king is troubled by a divine message; his advisors are summoned and set a riddle; and a massacre is commissioned. What might these events remind us of? An obvious answer is the scene described in Daniel 2, with Nebuchadnezzar played by Herod. Jesus’ arrival is thus depicted in Daniel-esque terms, like the falling of a stone that sets an avalanche in motion. Cracks will soon start to appear in the Roman/Gentile colossus; the endangered Daniel/Jesus will outlive the manic Herod; Herod’s successor will be struck down as he refuses to give God glory (Dan. 5, Acts 12); and the Gentile colossus will topple while Jesus and his people go from strength to strength. The road for them will not be easy, but they will ultimately shine ‘like the brightness of the sky and stars above’ to ‘turn many to righteousness’ (Dan. 12.3).