OT History - Creation to Jacob
Vern Peterman · Jul 18, 2004
Bible Backgrounds, No. 03
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4826239587913

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Everybody have the handout for this morning? Everybody get one or everybody in need of one? Oh, that's right. You were missing last week. Okay. And then, yeah. So that should get you current on the handout. Now, I also have some things to add to the appendix. Do you need a binder? Okay. All right. And then you should have the third week. What I'm going to hand out... Oh, by the way, if you weren't here last week, you need these. Do you have this? Do you have this? Okay. All right. I think you probably do, but go ahead and try it. You can always check afterwards.

Something you don't have, I'll go ahead and... Distribute one we just take it Take take there's two pages and then Pass it along and these are for the appendix and this is also for the appendix Okay And that's that's not all just that my my printer ran out of colored ink and so I had to quit and I thought I had a spare and didn't. I always like to keep one. At any rate, I'll have some more to get to you but I most certainly don't want you to feel deficient in paper, right? So, lots of paper.

Okay Now what we're going to do here is we're going to take a look at this next section Old Testament history creation to Jacob and Get you Up to speed on that what we're doing by the way in these history sections some of this you may look at and say what burn? I already know this stuff I'm just trying to make sure we're all on the same page in terms of key points and also have gotten into your hands some, what hopefully is some good resources for your own, you know, study later. So if you look at it and you say, Hey, you know, I know this, or I know most of it or something, that's great. Uh, we're just want to make sure everybody's on the same page and we've got some, some key points that we can kind of keep in mind. And speaking of keep in mind last week, we went through this.

We looked at key points in, in Bible history. with the idea that if you can fix these in your mind, that these are good points to put other events as you read about them in between. Abraham about 2,000 BC, Moses after about 1,500 BC, David about 1,000 BC with David and Solomon, each reigning about 40 years. So you've got a hint point there, a point that you can anchor things on. the Jews exiled to Babylon in 586 and the New Testament in the first century. If you've got those, then you can put other key events between those, right?

Because one of the things we've said is, ultimately, it's the sequence that matters. The other thing we brought out as a key principle is match the right background to the text. Bringing that up, here's a couple of books that are kind of real quick, like for example, Everyday Life and Bible Times. The good thing is, it's a nice quick summary. I like the fact that there are good color illustrations.

The downside is, everyday life changed depending on where you were and what time, right? If you were in the time of Abraham, polygamy would have been the norm. If you lived in the Roman Empire era, polygamy would have been thought of as disgusting and reprehensible. So the time that you live in matters.

So you need to match it up. That's both the upside and the downside of some of these brief summaries that you'll run into. A lot of times they don't give enough differentiation as to time and place. So be aware of that. And then the other thing is matching the right background to the text requires that we respect the inspiration and authority of scripture. Last week we pointed out that there are those authors who don't do so. and will sometimes present factual information alongside bias. Bias that's not based on respecting scripture.

Okay. Now, you've got in the appendix, and by the way, that A means it's in your appendix, a sheet that looks somewhat like this. And what we find is this first section here is covered by the book of Genesis. And so you'll see up at the top there, Adam, And if you look at the time bar, look how long Adam lived, and notice that there is almost an overlap between the end of the life of Adam and the beginning of the life of Noah. Can you imagine that?

Amazing, isn't it? Methuselah, his life ends the year the flood begins. And interestingly enough, we pointed out last week, Methuselah's name means, when he dies, it comes. Interesting, huh? Okay, then the last name we focus on here is Jacob. Jacob was also called by God, Israel.

And so these are kind of the bookends that we're looking at here this morning in terms of our time span. This time frame here gathers together some assumptions. And we looked at these last week. I said, if we assume that the ages and timeframes given in the Bible are taken at face value, are given without gaps, and we mentioned last week that that point is the one where there's probably the most flexibility to look at changing the time. And third, if we take the days of Genesis 1 as literal solar days, then we arrive at creation at 4,000 BC. I've not put 4,000 BC on the timeline, because I think there is room for looking at latitude for change in that time. The prior chart takes the numbers and the genealogies and the Masoretic text, that's the Hebrew text that was copied by the Jews for centuries, at face value.

We mentioned last time that we don't have time to go into the creation and evolution, the time frames, we just don't have time to go into that. Even allowing for some possible gaps in the records, there is an evident time conflict. We acknowledge that and we just won't have time to go into it. But the point we made last time was that it is the time sequence that is going to matter most when it comes to most of Bible interpretation. So, you know, exactly what the date is, is not going to be as critical as the sequence.

Why? It's because of cause and effect. It's because what both the Old and New Testament teaches is linear. Alright. So here's what counts. It's the sequence. Even though we, in some cases, will be uncertain as to the exact date, and a lot of that's not because the event is disputed, but establishing the date is sometimes hard to do. We talked about that some last week. For example, from an interpretation standpoint, it's generally more significant to know that Adam preceded Cain and Abel than to establish specific dates for each. So the sequence is really what's going to matter, not have I got the exact date.

Sometimes people try to sharpen the pencil more than it will sharpen. I've heard things like somebody says that creation occurred at 9 a.m. on September 23rd, that sort of thing, and that's sharpening the pencil way too sharp. And as far as what the Bible is revealing to us from God's standpoint, details of that fineness do not really matter. One of the things we pointed out, and you may recognize this slide from church history, and I think it's key to bring it out here, is the views of church history.

The materialist looks at history as either random and meaningless or mechanical and meaningless. Those are the viewpoints of the pure materialist standpoint. Meaning is only what you create as a human being from a strict materialist standpoint. Eastern philosophy and religion, rooted in reincarnation, looks at history as cyclical.

The Hindu viewpoint of time looks at the ultimate age of the universe as around 4 trillion years, because it sees history basically as a dream of God, which will all be absorbed back into the impersonal Godhead at the end of that 4 trillion year period. History isn't really going anywhere as much as it's going around in circles. That's the Eastern viewpoint. In Biblical Christianity, history is linear.

It starts with a purpose, it continues with a purpose, and it ends with a purpose. Very different perspective, and it's important to keep in mind. When we're looking at history, we're seeing, from our standpoint, a different history than basically the rest of the world is. Is that interesting?

Genesis and Revelation, here's a contrast that is interesting to look at, and you also have it in your handout. And that is, if you look at Genesis and Revelation, that linearity of history and the fact that things are going somewhere, there's a correspondence from the beginning to the end. And notice, the heavens and the earth were created in Genesis 1-1. In Revelation 21-1, new heavens and new earth. Genesis 1, sun's created. Revelation, no need of the sun. It's an interesting correspondence, eh? The night established in chapter 1 of Genesis and Revelation, no night.

The seas are created in Genesis 1.10 and Revelation, no more seas.

Isn't that interesting? As you go through that, there is a direction and a linearity and a correspondence that says this is headed somewhere. This has a direction that it's going. And we go on down the list there. Death enters history to no more death. Driven from the tree to restore to the tree. See, all the way through the books of the Bible, this theme is carried out. Sorrow and pain begin in Genesis, no more sorrow and pain in Revelation.

Here you have a chart very much like that, and what I handed out in the appendix is the lifetimes of the patriarchs. What you saw before was a chart where you overlapped those times. Now what this does is it says, let's forget about the sequence and just line those up.

How long did these people live? And what we find, because these aren't all the people that lived up to that time, is it? So what we have here is a sampling. It's not the full data that you might get. Just like now, we have sort of a scatter, right? But this gives us a sampling.

And one of the things you notice is that prior to what the Bible records as the flood there in Noah's time, that with the exception of Enoch, who was taken away, And Lamech, who lived 777 years, the average lifespan appears to be in the 900-year range, Methuselah being the most long-lived of those.

From there, rather than dropping down after the flood in a sudden truncation and stopping at some level, what you see instead is a gradual change. if you're familiar with the term in scientific or engineering circles, a decay rate change, okay? It drops down. Look at right after, Shem, the next generation, still a lot of longevity compared to our day, but a significant drop. The next generations down, you see in the less than, between 400 and 500 years, but less than 500 years range, and then down to roughly half of that in the next few generations. See that?

Some have suggested that the early chapters of Genesis reflect not years, but moons. What would be wrong with that? How would you critique that if someone were to suggest that based on this chart? There's 12 moons in a year, okay? And so if that were true, then the lifetimes before the flood would be more like our own in magnitude. Ah, that's the problem. If they had a system that was based on moons and they suddenly shifted to a solar year as measuring the age, then you would expect a sudden truncation. And what you see instead is one that fits a curve, a gradual reduction, and then where does that fit? So it's like a theory that when you look at the numbers doesn't test out. But I'd mention that just in case you run across it. All right.

There's key people in Genesis. We've got them listed here because the Bible has them listed from Adam to Jacob. But Adam is, of course, key. Adam is mentioned in the New Testament. Paul makes mention of Adam in Romans and in 1 Corinthians. We also have Enoch. He is a key person, not because the Bible says a lot about him, but because of what? He didn't die, and what else does it say about Enoch? The Lord took him, and what else? Pardon? He pleased God. He walked with the Lord.

It's interesting. What it says about him is very brief, and yet what it says about him is very substantial, even in its brevity. Another one, a couple you see here is Noah, and then Shem. Noah is obviously real critical, and mentioned in the New Testament repeatedly. Shem being the line through which the Jews came. So he's significant. And then finally, of course, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are mentioned through the Old Testament. Much of the rest of the book of Genesis is founded on them. And then into the New Testament mentioned as well. You have a genealogy. We won't study the whole thing here this morning. Isn't that good? All right? But you have this chart in which you have handed out There's some others that go along with it. I apologize. My printer didn't cooperate with me, so you don't have now, but I will get them to you.

Nonetheless, what you see here, there's plenty to study from. You have a genealogy all the way from Adam and Eve at the top. And by the way, I noticed the punch holes went through part of the name Eve. Apologies there. But you can write that in, in case you want to make sure that's clear. But the detail is there to follow all the way through the descendants, immediate descendants of Jacob and Jacob's sons. So you've got lots to work with there if you want to spend some time studying it. Or if, at some later point in time, you're studying one of these people and you say, well, where does he fit in the lineup? So it may be valuable to you.

Here is the historical timeline that we keep referring to, and I'll keep drawing back to it, and the reason being that that way we kind of keep oriented. What we see is Adam was created on the sixth day of creation along with his wife Eve. After that came the fall of Adam, Genesis 3, and all mankind with him, Romans 5, 12. The next major pivotal event, because there are things in between, but the next major pivotal event was the flood that took place in the days of Noah just after the death of Methuselah in that year.

Isn't that interesting? Here's Methuselah with his name meaning, when he dies it comes. You can imagine everybody just kind of looking at him. You know? Methuselah? Stay healthy, right? Real interesting. And even with that, there just wasn't much response. But nonetheless, the meaning of his name was pretty clear.

The flood of Noah was pivotal in many ways, but One of the things that we see you know comes in the scripture right after the flood is the Lord makes some changes he says here on out the rainbow will be a kind of a continuing symbol of the promise never to flood the Things in the way this was done as well as you see a change also in the diet That is allowed what was that change?

Pardon meat yes eat eat the meat And then a reiteration of multiply and fill the earth. By the way, the Jews considered that one of their 613 laws. Multiply and fill the earth. And so those who did not were looked down upon as not fulfilling that law.

Interesting. Okay. This is the initial paths of the population of the earth post-flood. Now, this I'll make note of. This oval is roughly the area that the Bible really gives any detail about. And so the rest of these lines that you see have been those determined by anthropologists in terms of the initial population movements into these areas. So this is kind of a combined anthropological biblical map. This was prepared by Arthur Custance, who went home to be with the Lord, oh, I think 1985. But he was a anthropologist and put this map together.

And I give the website address there in case you're interested in pursuing that. Now, then the next thing you see, men sought to build the Tower of Babel which God confounded by introducing languages. This is a ziggurat of King Ur-Nammu. By the way, the kings of city of Ur, where Abraham left from, Those have been well chronicled and documented. We have from that era a number of what they call ziggurats, that's the archaeologist term, and people have said, well, do we know exactly which one is the Tower of Babel?

The answer, no. However, some of the things we see is this is one of a number of ziggurats, so that area seems to have that background. The second point is as archaeologists have gone through and done analysis of a lot of these, because a lot of times they don't, like this one's in very good shape, they don't want to go taking them apart. But what they've been able to determine is many of them have been built like once and then another time and sometimes even a third time. So there's a lot of history in these ziggurats that makes it difficult to know without digging the whole thing up and ruining it, to know exactly what went together.

So what we see is not a specific, see here's the Tower of Babel. What we do see is a general confirmation that this was something of that era. We see a general confirmation that it fit the time and the place and the fact that things were built multiple times. So the Tower of Babel may be any one of those ziggurats that we see and it may also be something that was taken apart subsequently that we're not aware of.

Then here's the distribution of the table of nations we see in Genesis 10 or places where they spread out. This also fits in with the map that you have there in your handout as well. And the places where different population and language groups went in varying directions.

This is one that I'll get a copy to you. I want to include in the appendix. There's obviously lots of detail. What it does, it goes through Genesis 1 through 10, and it shows basically the creation and sequence of personalities. These are very good charts.

You will notice I got permission from the author to produce these for this class. You'll notice I put an additional note there. Priestly source concept is based on the liberal view of scripture. The guy did a really good job of the charts, prepared the charts, taking a literal view of scripture, but then put this priestly code thing on it, and I have to tell you, I radically disagree with it.

But nonetheless, he's done that, so you'll see that note on this and the other subsequent charts. So when they get included, you'll be able to look at that a little more carefully. There's obviously lots of detail, but I think it's good because it helps if you're studying some aspect of it to be able to put the details together and to look at that part of it.

Next thing, God's covenant with Abraham, which began in Genesis 12, is the basis for the outworking of his purposes in all of human history. This is part of this linearity that is true that is true of the biblical viewpoint of history, that history is going somewhere, what you find is the things that are promised to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12. Those get spelled out through the rest of the Bible all the way into the book of Revelation.

And the three things are land, seed, and blessing. You find into the Millennial Kingdom, the Jews are brought into their land, and what the Old Testament describes as their land is much larger, even into Iraq and Jordan and Saudi Arabia, much larger than what Israel has now. The seed is Christ, and of course Christ comes the first time and is the sacrifice. Then the seed is also the one who comes again as the Messiah, and the blessing is the blessing through Abraham to all nations, again through Christ.

Okay. Abraham, as you see, starts from the city of Ur, which was involved in some of the early action of the Iraq invasion this last year. And from Ur, you see this little square here, this little rectangle I'm going to kind of zero in on. And so Abraham began here, Genesis 11, 27 through 12, 20, and then travels up along the Euphrates River route and then see Haran there at the top? That's one of the names you'll notice is one of Abraham's ancestors. The city was named after one of Abraham's ancestors.

So he's just traveling into old hometown, old home country. And then from there he travels down and heads into the area of Israel and does a little detour down in Egypt. Okay, with the time of Abraham, we begin to see more general correspondence between secular history and what we see recorded in scripture. Prior to that time, we see more radical divergence between what you see from a literal understanding of the first chapters of Genesis and secular history. So, right here we begin to see more general correspondence, things line up.

The names Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah. Those names have all been found in tablets of this era. Okay? All right. Abraham and Isaac and Jacob constitute a series of patriarchs. They have similarities in culture. We pointed out before that one of the similarities in the culture of the time was the polygamy, or one of the things you'll see patterned through there. If the wife is unable to bear, then you take the wife's maidservant and Have a child that way that is a pattern that you see and it's also a pattern you see in the tablets of the time Fits the culture. Okay, so it was typical of the time All right, so there we proceed from the Covenant with Abraham to the founding of the nation of Israel. That's the towards the end of book of Genesis there So what we have there from around 2000 BC to, and I'll guesstimate there, about 1600 BC, 1700 and there is kind of the lifetime of the patriarchs.

All right. Whoops. Jumping here. Sorry about that. Another one of these charts, again, you don't have this chart, but it's got lots of detail, even to, you know, putting a little illustration that you see on the right there of the judgment against Sodom and Gomorrah. I mean, so it's got lots of detail on the chart. We'll get that to you next week here. Alright, now, so here's a question that comes up. We have this historical timeline.

We've noted that the Old Testament was written here after 1500 BC. So the question, how did the people and events which took place from creation to about 1400 BC get into the Old Testament? Yeah, one of the things that you look at is someone will say, okay, it's stories that were handed down from generation to generation. That's one idea that's been put forward, that it's been oral history and then finally Moses wrote it down.

That would be one possibility. Any other thoughts? All right, that somehow Moses was given these truths directly, that might be another to account. What I would like to present here is, and I'll have to still put it in the realm of hypothesis, theory at best, okay, so this is not, you know, here's the fact and Vern said it, instead this is, it's something that seems to fit the facts, but there is not, final confirmation of it in such a way that would say this is how it happened. But I think it's still worth presenting. Take a look and see what you think of it.

We mentioned before that the earliest written records we have are of clay tablet type. This is the kind you see at the lower left there. Up above there is more of a New Testament era where you'd have papyrus and it might be sealed up or on the right a scroll either of papyrus or of skins. But So that's kind of the pattern in the earlier documents that we have. And I mentioned previously, I forget whether I mentioned it in this class, but I'll say it.

Of these clay tablet types, 95% of them have never been translated. So there's lots of data out there that hasn't even been touched. But imagine, how many people want to sit there and learn that stuff really, really well? It's unusual. How many people have you ever run into that are real experts at Akkadian and Sumerian? It's just not too common.

And so for the mass of tablets that's out there, and for the very few people who are experts in the language, you can understand why the vast majority of them have never even been translated. There's lots of data. Possibly some of it could be real valuable data, but we just don't have the horsepower, the work, Because it just takes lots of time, but people are very knowledgeable to be able to translate it. Nonetheless, a possible explanation of the origins of the Book of Genesis is called the tablet theory, proposed by P.J. Wiseman and then subsequently by his son, who is a professor of Assyriology.

These are both British fellows. And they came up with this idea. Look at these tablets here. One of the things that they would do is that they would write They would write messages on the face of the tablet, and they would also write things on the sides of the tablet. And quite often these things on the sides were kind of like what we would have in a book, where here you see the book and there's the content of the book, right? And then when you put it on the shelf, how do you know what's in the book? What's on the edge. So as they put these tablets, you can imagine having a bookshelf with all these clay tablets.

Oh boy. So you don't want to sit there and pull out a bunch of, is this it? Is this it? Is this it? Instead, no. What do you do? You write on the side, this is what this is. This is da-da-da-da-da-da-da. So that would be the normal way of doing it. And we find that the tablets indeed have this edge writing on it, and that edge writing is called a colophon. C-O-L-O-P-H-O-N. I think, there you go, on the next slide there.

Now, in the Hebrew, the Hebrew, the way of saying it is Toledoth. Okay? Sometimes pronounced Toledot. Toledoth. And that shows up in our book of Genesis with this is the record of. Alright? So now, here you find in the Hebrew you know, Bible, a repeated, and we'll have a list here shortly, a repeated, this is the record of, and Adam, and it goes on with different families, okay? That's, in Hebrew, the Toledoth. A colophon would be the archaeologist term for what they would see on the edge of the tablet, okay?

Now, here is the Toledoth tag list for the book of Genesis. And what you do is you go through the book of Genesis and each one of these references, what you're going to find, this is the record of Adam. This is the record of the family of Noah. And that would be the kind of writing that you would see on the edge of the tablet so that the person who was looking at the tablet would be able to see that on the edge and say, here it is.

Now, so far so good? Making sense? All right. So what would happen then, here would be Moses. And again, this is according to theory. Moses didn't say this. We have not found these specific tablets. So again, keep it as the level of confirmation that we have, not as a statement of fact. But if that were the case, it would fit.

It would make sense that Moses would have had these tablets and then would have taken the colophon, which we call in the Hebrew the Toledoth tag, And said, this is the record of Adam. This is the record of Noah. This is the record of Jacob and his sons. See that? These are the generations of, is maybe another way that it comes across. And so that you would have this entire list. And one of the, one of the other things that seems to confirm this is when you get into the book of Exodus, which gets into Moses time, the Toledoth tags disappear. the pattern of sitting there writing down, here's the family of da da da, that just about goes away. You find very little record of that.

So, does it fit the facts? It seems to fit very well. Is it an assured fact? No, we cannot say that. What would it take to make it an assured fact? If you found the tablets and you say, man, here is this stack of tablets, then you would have something that you could look at and say, this is confirmed. So we need to Keep in mind that.

Nonetheless, I think it's helpful as you're going through the book to look at that and in view of the different theories about how is the book of Genesis put together. This one seems to fit the facts. It's not ultimately confirmed. I think it's helpful to look at in terms of how Moses might have put things together, that he was drawing upon records that were made available to him.

It's interesting too. Think through this. How would he have gotten these tablets? Pardon? When he was in Egypt, Yeah, the truth is we don't know. Is it even possible, and that's as much as we could say, is it even possible that these tablets were, say, handed down through the Jews? Is it possible that tablets are on the Ark with Noah? The ones that were prior to Noah's time?

Could be. And again, we're stepping in a realm where we can say, is it possible? Yes. Do we have confirmation of it? No. And we need to leave it at that. Yes, yeah. And now, on the other hand, this is not that many tablets. So, and as you look at it, for example, we brought up the fact that, you know, this is the book of Noah, excuse me, of Adam, and we only have like 32 verses. So it's not a massive amount of information that's given on each one. It's reasonable that that would have been on a record. So, anyway, I'll offer that as just some thought.

It's an example of where looking at the history and the culture and putting the facts together gives you, I think, a reasonable understanding of how things could have taken place. It is both consistent with what we know historically, as well as fitting what we see in Scripture, and is also fitting with what we see as respect for Scripture. If this were true, if this scenario were the case, it would not put aside God's inspiration of the record. So anyway, I offer that just for your consideration. Key points to examine so far. As we look at scripture, we want to understand the language, history, and culture.

That forms the complete context. You've heard repeatedly, you know, don't take a passage out of context. And that's good. But remember that the complete context is language, history, and culture. That is the full context, not just the literary context, which is only just one part. The next thing is the language, histories, and cultures of Genesis varied from beginning to end. Let's put ourselves in the place of Adam. What kind of culture does Adam have?

He and Eve are just walking out of the garden. No kids yet. They're walking out of the garden. Here behind them is this cherubim and the flaming sword. It's a nice garden that's been prepared for them that they just were created in, and now they walk out. Uh-oh.

Really, they've got a whole bunch of culture to develop, don't they? Because now they have to survive in a world which is suddenly quite different, and in which they most certainly don't have the protections that they had before. A lot of culture is yet to be developed, isn't it? Basically, they have to invent it. We, as we're born, step into a culture. Adam and Eve are in a place where they haven't got any idea what culture is. What is culture? Now, by the time you get to the end of the book of Genesis, Jacob and his sons, boy, there's all kinds of culture. So there's a lot of change taking place in that one book. That's why it's important to think through when we're looking at language, history, and culture, what's it like during the particular time? that's being written about. We also see that history matters and that there are promises yet to be fulfilled and really big problems yet to be resolved.

Have you ever talked to somebody who may believe in a God but doesn't really understand the biblical picture and they're trying to figure out how can there be a good God if all this awful stuff's happening? They don't get the picture, do they? They don't understand Because they don't have the understanding that we get from scripture. Oh, there was a fall, and God doesn't intend to leave things this way. And the long-term picture, people can be theists, they can believe in a God, and yet not understand this. Understanding what's happening through the course of scripture gives us a tremendous insight that those out in the world just don't have. Have you ever heard of a book I'm trying to think a rabbi wrote it, when bad things happen to good people. Ever heard that one? What's that? Yeah, yeah.

And basically, he doesn't even come up with very biblical answers. It is kind of in the nature of, you know, God feels real bad about the bad things that happen, but he can't do anything about it. That's a quick summary of the book. Hope it doesn't spoil it for you. But that's, that's the bottom line. Okay.

And the thing is, that doesn't take into view what scripture has laid out has happened. It doesn't describe what's taking place. And it certainly doesn't take into view what the Lord has in mind in eternity future. In which, remember we saw before in that chart with Genesis and Revelation, death introduced, sorrow and pain introduced, but in the end, no more death, and no more sorrow, no more pain, no more tears. Okay, next time we'll go through Egyptian slavery to David and look at that stretch of time.

Okay, now, can I answer any questions? We've covered thousands of years, real fast. Can I answer any questions? Can I... Let me send those charts. Okay, let me let me talk about that because I don't know that we've covered it anywhere previously. So let me give you the quick summary a Couple centuries back just to give a rough time frame a couple centuries back.

There were a couple of guys named graph and Wellhausen who proposed the idea with the idea that that The Bible wasn't really the first five books of the Bible weren't really written by Moses, but that they were actually different groups within the early Israelite history that contributed portions of it and that later some editor, unnamed editor, came and put these parts and pieces together. And the theory is based on the idea that, for example, those who were of a priestly background in Israel came up with some portions of the Old Testament. those who were of, for example, the Elohists, those where you find the name Elohim for God in the Old Testament, that that was from a different source.

Anyway, they have J-E-P-D, there's the different sources and some people throw in some extras. But there's nobody who has found any evidence of these groups Or any evidence of, you know, here's a documentary source and it was from this group. I mean, it's all completely conjecture.

And it's based on an evolutionary idea of Israel's religion that it really evolved out of polytheism and it kind of brought together over time into monotheism. So at any rate, what has happened is that theory has remained over time among those who don't see what the Bible claims and what's been the Jewish perspective, and that's the first five books of the Bible written by Moses. Obviously the first one was Moses pulling the parts and pieces together. So anyway, that's the quick summary, and so you'll find a reference to the priestly portion of that.

It's based on what's called literary analysis. It's just looking at names in there, but it's making assumptions that are not confirmed by anything archaeologically or or fact So it's it's purely inserting a theory over the text Laying it over the text that does that in quick answer your question. Okay, so that's the graph Wellhausen or documentary hypothesis is the the name that's given to that And so I've just told you a quick summary of what the theory is.

I don't believe a word of it. Because I think, for example, you could say, OK, here's a bunch of things that Vern has written and the stuff that has these words in it, that's really not Vern, it's somebody else's. And if it's got these other words in it, then that's somebody else's and pretty soon Vern's out of the picture. So they've taken artificial distinctions between certain sections of literature and drawn rather large conclusions based on that. Setting aside the record that we do have, which consistently points to Moses being the author. So it's in spite of the facts based on assumptions that are biased and I would say atheistic or non-theistic at the outset. with no independent confirmation. That doesn't get much of my respect. But, that's the theory.

Okay? Any other questions? Thoughts? Comments? Okay. Make sure if you came in a little bit later that you get caught up with the different parts. You're welcome to come up and take a look at these things here afterwards. And let's take a time to pray. Alright?

Lord, as we look at the lifetimes of these patriarchs and we recognize that even thousands of years took place from the beginning to the end, we also note, Lord, that as we see your interaction with these people, that you are indeed a faithful God and that you have purpose in the grand scheme of things that works its way down to purpose in our own lives. And Lord, for that, we are thankful. We praise you. We praise you for the marvelous blessings that we have in your dear son. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.