Other biblical cultures

We've been going through this Bible background series for now less than 20. We've been through different cultures. Last week we looked at Jewish culture. And now we've got other biblical cultures, and so what that is, is a brief look at different cultures that we encounter in the Bible, different groups and cultures that show up here and there. Aside from the main ones we've looked at, which are either empires or the Jewish culture and background. So, here in this biblical culture, something I want to introduce, can anybody identify what this is?

Tell me what that's about. You know, if you're puzzled, good for you because actually the archaeologists are puzzled too. The reason I wanted to show this up, it's a curiosity. There's one, there's another one that's kind of broken but similar construction. Here's another one and another one. And you look at it and you say, well, that's very interesting. You know, where are all these knobs and what are the holes?

And the truth is nobody knows. But they've been found on these locations in Europe in what was the Roman Empire, extending largely in France and in Britain. And it appears sometimes along the border and sometimes in the middle, but those are the locations where they've been found so far. And nobody knows what they are. I mean there's been some guesses, but nobody knows for sure what they are. Is that interesting?

So distributed, they're not in other parts of the Roman Empire, but just in those parts. And so it kind of goes to show you, we don't know everything. You know, the Romans knew, but they're not telling us. And God knows, and apparently he hasn't decided to disclose that either. So we don't know. If you have any guesses, we can forward that. But nobody knows what they are.

Okay. Now, let's go take a look here. Here is the timeline that we've been using. Here, and this is the time of Abraham, 2000 BC. Moses, about 1500 to 1400. Here's David, about 1000 BC. And the New Testament era. And we show the year zero. Actually, nobody lived in the year zero. It was a sad time. Nobody at all lived in the year zero. Okay? Because actually, the way historians count it is 1 BC and 1 AD, but not zero. They don't even count that. Alright, so that's our big timeline. You have on page 2, I believe it is, this map.

Here is Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived by the culture in the area of Haran. They had during that time, and we saw during our study of the book of Genesis, they had a culture that included multiple wives, sister or cousin wives, and actually sister wives were most highly prized. And in fact, if a wife was not a sister, they would adopt them as a sister in order to have the best possible standing. And so when Abraham married his half-sister, Sarah, that was like, you just almost can't get any better than that in that culture.

A male heir is a priority. Here is Abraham just going crazy because he wants a male heir. You see him stewing about it and concerned. In the mindset of that culture that he was from, having a male heir was just exceedingly important. And you see it in the pages of Genesis. He was obsessed about it. It was a great, great concern to him. And so we see that in the culture. And then the wife slave offered if the wife is barren because of having a male heir, right? the importance of having a male heir. So if the wife is barren, it was considered her responsibility to offer her slave to the husband. So what we see in Genesis for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is exactly that pattern. So here's Abraham.

Abraham goes from Ur where he basically was raised in a Gentile pagan household, right? And the Lord selects him and says, I'm going to make a covenant with you, and there's a land that I'm going to show you. We'll be taking a look at that initial covenant in our main service. He goes from Ur to Haran, which is where the culture of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is centered.

Because remember, Abraham goes down even to Egypt, but what does he do when it's time to get a wife for Isaac? What does he do? Sends Isaac back up here. to the area around Haran. And then it's time to get a wife for Jacob and what do they do? They get a Canaanite wife? No. They get one around Haran. So they keep going back there and so the culture from around the city of Haran is the culture that you see reflected in the book of Genesis from Genesis 12 where it begins talking about Abraham to the end of the book.

Yes? Oh, this, let's see. I'm trying to make sure. Here you got eastern Turkey and you got Iraq and you got Syria in here. Not sure, but it may be northern Iraq and that's not certain. I'd have to check it out. Yeah, in our current geographics. I'd actually have to check on that. I don't know for sure.

But that area around Haran is the culture that you see carried out from Genesis 12 to Genesis 50 and of course then you start seeing the influence of Egypt, but as much as possible they stuck to the culture of Haran even when they moved you know, down to what we now call Israel. Yes? So Job, did he come from the land of Ur? Ah, Job is an interesting case. Job was probably a contemporary of Abraham, but probably not the land of Ur, but another area to the east of Israel. I thought it said it is, but maybe not. Wait, why is there two r's? That's why I was asking. Oh, that's an interesting thing is is you've got a r here, right? And where have you got another one right up here?

But how many places called Denver are there in the United States? There's over a half dozen, right? There's over a half dozen places called Denver. And it's it's that phenomenon takes place again and again, you know, where you have towns and cities with the same name. And then sometimes they'll keep the same name and put new in front of it. Right? They put new in front of it. Okay.

We have various people groups during the period of Joshua and the judges. We're going to kind of step through this map here. Beginning with the Amalekites, and that's what's on the first slide on the front page there, we'll proceed clockwise around the map more or less. So here are the Amalekites down in the southern portion here. They're sad in this, you know. Okay.

So anyway, here on page two, we have a list of the various judges that they encounter, the Jews encounter as they go into the promised land. And you see with each of the judges, there's the passage and then here's the enemy. In some cases, we are not told who the enemy is. But nonetheless, we do have throughout the book some information about each one of the judges and who was the enemy and how long was the oppression and how long was the peace, etc. So there's some information given. It's not complete information. What is thorough in the Book of Judges is who the judges are. That's thorough. The rest of the information is partial.

Now, so for the Amalekites here, Aaron and Hur hold up the hands of Moses. Amalek was first mentioned in Genesis 36, 12 as a descendant of Esau. And the Amalekites fought the Israelites, that's Exodus 17, when Moses held his hands up. And how did that holding hands up happen? Did he just hold his hands up or what else happened? He had help. He had somebody helping him hold the hands up. So as he held the hands up, then the Israelites prevailed, right?

And what's interesting is here is this group called the Amalekites. They were last encountered during the time of Hezekiah and not heard from after that. What's real interesting is that here is Jacob and Esau, both, you know, Born at near the same time and as a matter of fact Jacob was the second born of of twins and Yet as time goes on Esau Drops out By by New Testament times by the end of New Testament times the descendants of Esau had disappeared But the Jews continue as descendants of Jacob even today isn't that amazing I So here you have Amalekites, one of the branches of Esau, the last we hear of them is in the time of Hezekiah, about 700 BC. Archaeology knows almost nothing of this tribe since they appear to have been fairly nomadic.

What are you going to find when a nomadic people are living in an area? Yeah, campsites maybe, right? And so you find a ring of stones where they made a fire, something they might have left. Other than that, they're going to take everything and pick it up, right? So you have this nomadic people. So we know almost nothing. There's no permanent foundations and structures and things of that sort.

Now you have related to them the Midianites. The Midianites were also descendants of Abraham through his wife, Keturah. So here are actually relatives of the Israelites. It was among the Midianites that Moses found his wife, Zipporah. So here was a Midianite who was actually brought into Moses' clan. Moses' father-in-law Jethro continued with Moses and the Israelites in their exodus from Egypt. So there was that inclusion of the Midianites, but in every instance of contact with the Midianites after that, they were hostile to the Israelites.

So very interesting. There's this family connection with Moses and marrying Zipporah and his father-in-law being included. Every other connection was hostile. every other mention of the Midianites hostile, including that list that we showed from the time of judges.

Here you have this map. It's on page three. I think it may be a full page map there, and it'll give you some idea of location. I would bring it up for this. This is where the Amalekites first fought Israel, towards the southern end of the Sinai Peninsula. That's where they first fought them. It's not where they last fought them. So here is the oasis where the Amalekites took them on.

You can imagine, here you are in this desert area. Are you going to be real happy to see other people competing for your oasis? No. So you can imagine the Amalekites thinking, hey, look, this is our oasis. We want to keep it. And so having these Israelites, even if they're just passing through, it looks like a threat. So they're going to try to take them on. Then, we have here, here's Midian, the other side of the Gulf of Aqaba. And here's the son of Abraham by Keturah, tribe of Moses, wife Zipporah. So, here's a sample of the landscape there and the Midian, tribe of Midian hat. Another sample.

Not the greatest terrain, you know, if you're looking for something lush, Not going to find it. You know, Nancy and I lived for a number of years in Nevada, and it's kind of like that. We used to joke that the cows had to keep moving five miles an hour or else they'd starve to death. You know, because you have to get to the next blade of grass quick.

So anyway, it's kind of that land. Philistines, that is a name that crops up quite a bit. As a matter of fact, descended from that name, we have a name that is still used today. Palestine, that name, is descended from the name Philistines, and the Palestinians are from that Philistine name. That's where the name comes from. It doesn't mean that all the people who claim to be Palestinians are descended from the Philistines, but that's where the name comes from. So here we have the group called the Philistines. The Philistines are also known as the Sea People.

They appear to have come originally from Greece and Macedonia, although their origins are a little bit uncertain and debated. They attacked coastal areas all around the eastern Mediterranean, including the area around Israel. And what they tended to do is to attack coastal areas, find a place where they could become entrenched, and then maintain a coastal city.

That seems to have been their pattern. Here is, they actually took on the Egyptians. in northern Egypt. In fact, that Egyptian relief shows the Philistines during one of their attacks. And so they took on the Egyptians, they came in along Israel, and they did find a place where they established themselves for some centuries of time, and also to the north there in what is now Lebanon. So here's the Philistines, invading sea people, kind of mysterious in terms of we don't know a lot about where they came from, but boy, they sure were aggressive about wanting to get themselves established in the eastern Mediterranean. Here's a drawing where the Egyptians drew pictures of their battles with the Philistines. The Philistines coming in on boats, and they said, but that was quite a time, you know.

So, key Philistine contacts with Israel. The Philistines continue to be mentioned into the time of the Babylonian captivity. So, this was around 586. They continue to be mentioned into about that time. So, for some centuries, the Philistines were in some relationship, usually antagonistic, with Israel. Samson defeated the Philistines, was overcome by them, and then defeated them in his last act of destroying their temple. David opposed Goliath, who fought for the Philistines. That's in 1 Samuel 17, is that account.

We'll take a look at that briefly here in a moment. The Philistines at one time took the Ark of the Covenant, and about that they were sorry. Not because they were penitent, but it proved damaging to them. You guys can have this, because this is a problem.

Here is the Valley of Ela, and you see where Jerusalem is located here. So this is about 20 miles to the southwest is the Valley of Ela. Let's take a closer look. Here's the valley. Here's a picture of the valley. Here's 1 Samuel 17. Here is where Saul's camp, the Israelites, were located. That hill right there. So here's where Saul's camp was. The Philistines' camp was across the valley in the woods over there. So that's the layout. And right here is the brook where David picked up his five smooth stones. By the way, why did he pick five? Why did he pick five smooth stones? I mean, he's only going to kill one guy, right? Or was he? Yeah.

Goliath had some brothers. Yes, Goliath had brothers. And so some people say, well, what if he missed? I'm not so sure that David was concerned about missing as he was thinking, he's got some brothers here who are similar in size. Yes. So Goliath then really wasn't part of Philistines, was he? Actually, he was, and we'll take a look at that map. He was Goliath of Gath, and there's some good evidence to back that up. Let's take a look at that in a minute. We'll finish looking at this first.

So here's Saul's camp over here. Here's the Philistines' camp, and here's the brook. And you imagine Goliath comes out on this plain and says, hey guys, you chicken, you know? Here's the brook, a couple different shots of the brook and it's most of the time a dry brook and then during, you know, the rainier season would have some water flowing in it but always some rocks, right? So you can imagine David goes down, he says, hey, these are some very convenient rocks, I'll pick five of them, right? Picks those up.

So here he meets Goliath after picking up his stones down there and such a thing had never entered Goliath's head before. Now, so here is the valley of Elah, and here is Gath, which is 20 miles from Jerusalem to the valley of Elah. Here is Gath, just a few short miles, that's where Goliath is from. And when the Philistines saw that Goliath had fallen and David whacked his head off, they ran to Ekron. That didn't work very well, because the Israelites were right behind him. So a lot of the Philistines had a tough time getting to Ekron and didn't make it. But at any rate, you can see Gath, where Goliath is from, is right in the neighborhood of that area.

And as it turns out, recently, and I mean in the last few years, this in gas was found, and this is a piece of broken pottery, and from right to left in the script of the time, it says Goliath. Isn't that very interesting? So the name Goliath of Gath, here's the name Goliath scratched into that. We don't know if it's exactly the Goliath, but it was indeed an identifiable name at the time and for the location.

So it fits. So here, interesting collection and between what has been found there, just to the north end of there is a place where they're excavating and it appears to be when David was a king, one of David's outlying fortresses to watch out for the Philistines.

Okay, here's the Jebusites. And that's the next group here. The Jebusites were the people that inhabited the area around what is now Jerusalem. It's called Jebus. And it ended up being the place where David settled. And what you see outlined here, here's the Temple Mount, right? This is the Temple Mount in that rectangular area. that is the Temple Mount was built up by under Herod the Great sometime later.

But this area to the south of that is called the City of David and David got that from the Jebusites who were previously inhabiting that area. Yes, what happens, David established this as his royal city, but Bethlehem was where he was from, right? His family is from Bethlehem. So Bethlehem, about six miles to the south of Jerusalem, sometimes called the City of David because that's where his family was from. This was called the City of David not because that's where he's from, but because David founded it as a royal city.

Yes, this is now part of Jerusalem. As a matter of fact, this is part of Jerusalem. Here is the Temple Mount. This over here is part of Jerusalem. And so things have been developed. But the Jebusites were the people who lived here at the time of David.

This is a fairly steep drop-off right in here. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons why they would build a wall along here is you'd have a wall and then a slope, and that's real hard to attack, right? Because you don't have a level area for people to come in and start attacking it. So it was a very defendable area.

Additionally, this is where Hezekiah built his tunnel underneath in here so they could keep the water supply inside the walls, right? Oh, yeah, and matter of fact, you know, they call this Mount Moriah. Well, you know, Colorado, we wouldn't call it a hill, you know, right? So yeah, this isn't Colorado definitions.

Here is a stone structure in Jerusalem which dates from the Jebusites in the time of David. So here is a structure from that time. Some of these parts of it were subsequently added, but the stone structure itself dates from around the time of David and the Jebusites. And that's part of that steep hill area that you're asking about.

Okay, now we have the Hittites. Hittites, it's important we make a point here, the origin of these people is not certain. It is possible these are different people with a similar name to those of the Hittite Empire, which is up in what is now called Turkey. So, if they are connected, that may or may not be the case. It's not been established archaeologically. It may be that they have simply a similar name and are not necessarily the same people. Here is the Hittite Empire, and this would be an example of what that looks like up in Turkey. So because of the uncertainty, it's one you don't want to make too many claims about. You know, people can get in trouble by claiming things that aren't sure, right? So we don't want to do that.

The Hivites is another one, and then there's the Mosquitobites. No, I'm sorry. The Hivites are not a particularly warlike people. They readily surrendered to Israel. They say, oh, you want to come in here? OK. And so rather than battling the Israelites, I mean, some groups would battle the Israelites aggressively and look for a chance to fight with them. When the Israelites came up to the Hivites, the Hivites just kind of said, all right. They just backed off and gave in, gave up. The Hivites appear to have occupied four main cities in Canaan.

Joshua 9.17 records that. The cities are Gibeon, and then there's three others. We're going to look at Gibeon here. Here's Gibeon. So you notice it's located fairly close to Jerusalem to the northwest. And here's the site of Gibeon today. It's the middle of this picture here. It's this little mound. So that's one of the cities.

Then here we have the name Canaanites. The Canaanites were both a smaller group and sometimes all the other groups in this land were given the general name Canaanites. So it can be a little confusing because you're talking about the specific small group or you're using it as a general name. Deuteronomy, before Moses had the Israelites come up into the land, he gave them Deuteronomy. What's the name Deuteronomy mean?

Anybody tell us? Pardon? Yeah, Deutero is two, and namas is law, so the second giving of the law. Second giving of the law. So he basically repeated a lot of things just to remind them and put it in place. He warned them in Deuteronomy 12.31 about what they were going to find.

He says, every abominable act. These Canaanites are terrible. And you know what? Even the other pagan people believed that the Canaanites were morally awful. They grossed out the other pagans. That's the way they were. Yes. And it wasn't just their acts. being that simple, but it was also the fact that they did it to their gods, their pantheism beliefs, right?

Yes, they had a pantheistic belief and they would do awful things, including burning children, in order to satisfy these gods. The Canaanites' religious rituals included child sacrifice, some of it in fire. They would take the firstborn and sacrifice their firstborn to the god Molech. Burn the firstborn child right there in front of the parents. Incest was common among the Canaanites. Another one is bestiality. We have a record of one Canaanite man disrupted a business meeting so he could go, you know, be intimate with his bull. Homosexuality, very common among the Canaanites.

We're getting there. Male and female cultic prostitution, where they would have cultic prostitution, both male and female, which of course included homosexuality, right? So all these things were going on, and those are just examples of some of the things that have been found by archaeologists. Here's an artist's depiction of sacrificing the firstborn child to Molech. Yes?

The reason I brought that up is because today our society is tending toward those sinful acts, not toward God. That's right. And that's why it's more acceptable in our society, because it's like the frog in the water. We're being acclimated to this type of act, but it would never go if people would say they were doing it to their children.

Yeah. No, as a matter of fact, what we do is we divorce it from anything spiritual, right? And so do we sometimes sacrifice our firstborn? Well, yes. And so we give credence to that. Are we saying, you know, homosexuality is fine? Yes. So we're moving in that direction in various ways. Giving it official sanction. As a matter of fact, saying that that's constitutional, right?

So here are the Canaanites. A substantial portion of the Mosaic law forbids the socially and morally destructive practices that were ingrained in the Canaanite culture. Practices so bad that the other pagan religions and pagan countries around them thought that the Canaanites were terrible. The historical books of the Old Testament record the assaults against and the seductions of the Canaanite religion to the extent that Israel had failed to drive out the Canaanites. The Israelites were told, drive them out. Don't get mixed up with them. Don't do it. So what did they do? Instead of driving them out, they just stopped and said, well, you can live with us. You can live next door to us.

And then they ended up getting those gross things happening within the Nation of Israel. Here are excavations of the Canaanite city of Hazor. We've got Joshua 11 through Jeremiah 49. Hazor is mentioned. They're supposed to have driven them out. The Amorites is another group there. The Amorites were among a number of tribes which established city-states. In other words, we would call them Amorites. They wouldn't call themselves Amorites, however. They tended to identify themselves with whatever city that they were in.

So here's the Amorite city of Ashkelon during excavation. There you see the city gates. So a fairly substantial gate structure there. The various people groups during the period of Joshua and Judges included the Sidonians. This was the area just north of Tyre in what is now Lebanon. So here are the Sidonians, or otherwise known as the Phoenicians. It's a name from Hebrew. The name Phoenicians is from the Greek, phoenikos, which means red people. A few years ago, I ended up emailing with a fellow who was a Christian from this area, and he says, yeah, he says, I'm one of these guys, you know, but I'm a Christian.

And so it was real interesting to talk to him. The main port cities of the Sidonians were Sidon, Tyre, and Byblos. Those were the main cities. The important Biblos is where we get our word Bible, okay? Because it was one of the places where they would import the papyrus that they would make, you know, their paper out of. And so we ended up using that word adapted from the port city of Biblos to get our word Bible, okay? The Sidonians tend to refer to themselves by the city from which they came.

In other words, if you say, you know, are you this? Are you that? Are you Phoenician? They say, what? Because their own identity happened to be this is the city I'm from. That's how they tend to think of it rather than the umbrella term that we tend to use. National Geographic had an article not too many years back Who are the Phoenicians? And apparently what they were doing is looking at DNA studies to try to identify who are the Phoenicians and who are the Phoenician people now.

Let's see. This is a sarcophagus from 13th century BC, Byblos, again where we get our word Bible. Here's a Crusader area castle at Sidon. The nearby port is silted up. And then here is the modern port city of Tyre. So these are part of the area of the Sidonians. Here is the satellite view of Tyre, one of the things we talked about in the time of Alexander the Great.

Alexander the Great came with land troops, no ships, right? Land troops, and that's all he was equipped with. This out here, was an island and this area in between was just water. So Alexander the Great said, all right, if you're going to go out there on that island and escape from us, we're going to fix you. We're going to make it so you don't have an island anymore. And he took all the building material that was on the main part of the land and had his soldiers shove it out into the water. and they made a land bridge out to the island and therefore took the island out and to this day, it's no longer an island. It's all been filled in and that island is no more.

And by the way, that was all prophesied in the Old Testament. So fulfilled. So anyway, that's why you find it, but that's one area of the Sidonians again, but they would recognize themselves by the name of Tyre, not being Sidonians or Phoenicians. Yes? Yeah, in other words, he first dealt with this place and then moved down into Israel where he was greeted rather expectantly. That is, the Jewish high priest said, hey, we were expecting you. Why? Because the book of Daniel says that you were coming.

Here are major Greek shipping routes and colonies around the Mediterranean and notice even up towards southern Britain. And here are major Phoenician shipping routes and colonies. So the Greeks and the Phoenicians both did a lot of establishing colonies and having shipping routes just that they would pick different places so they weren't in conflict with each other. But they both carried on that pattern.

Now we have the summary name, the group Mesopotamians, and of course in great part that ended up being Assyrians and Babylonians and things of that sort. Those are groups we've covered before. Here's the Ammonites and the Moabites. Where did the Ammonites and the Moabites come from? Pardon? From Lot, right? Here is Lot, he escapes from Sodom, right?

With his two daughters. His wife doesn't make it. She turns into an old salt, right? And so his daughters say, well, and this again, from the time of Abraham, the insistence, like, we've got to have, you know, descendants. His daughters, you know, commit incest with him in order to produce offspring. This is the high priority imperative of the culture of the time. Yes?

I heard that they felt that because they thought the whole world was destroyed when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, right? Because they had no idea that it was only those two cities. You know, I don't know that the Bible says that explicitly. It would kind of be speculation.

But the one thing that is clear from the culture, remember Lot was Abraham's nephew, right? From the culture is this strong cultural imperative, we've got to have a male heir, we've got to have a male heir. There would be that pressure there, whether there was a sense on the part of the daughters that, you know, There's nothing else, you know, around, I don't know. That may be the case, but I'm not sure the Bible makes that clear. And by the way, that Lot's cave has been not positively identified, but likely identified.

Yes? Incest was acceptable then. Yeah, and so incest was acceptable except for one thing. Like marrying a sister was fine. Even the father-daughter thing would have been over the line. So while we say incest, brother-sister would have been fine. Father-daughter, even during the culture of the time, that would have been unacceptable.

Here are the Ammonites and the Moabites. There descends a lot via incest with his daughters by the daughter's designs. That's Genesis 19, gives that account. Ammon and Moab were the fathers of their people. Here are the present-day plains of Moab. The country of Jordan largely encompasses the area of the Ammonites and the Moabites.

Now, the next one here called the Edomites, it is not exclusively so, but it is the area that the descendants of Esau settled, among others that we've mentioned. Though some broke off to establish their own tribes, the descendants of Esau, brother of Jacob, were the Edomites. That was one of the core groups.

The last we hear of the Edomites is they actually volunteered to help the Jews fight the Romans. And so they let them into the city of Jerusalem. But how did that battle go? Not so good, right? And that's the last we hear of the Edomites. The last we hear are the Edomites.

So, here is kind of pictures of the desert landscape there. The city of Petra is in that area, and you may recall seeing this. I've shown it from time to time. It also showed up in, you know, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This is one of the places that they had in the movie. Now, there's some others here.

We have the Barbarians and the Scythians, the Parthians and the Cretans. All of those names show up someplace either by name or inference in the New Testament. Let's take a look at the Barbarians here first. The name Barbarian is a term that comes from trying to imitate the jabbering sound of the Barbarians. bar-bar-bar-bar-bar-bar, you know, I don't know what they're saying, they just go bar-bar-bar-bar-bar-bar, you know, and so it's actually from trying to imitate the sound of the barbarians talking. That's where the name comes from. So here are the barbarians, there are actually several different groups coming through or from Eastern Europe, sometimes even so far away as Asia, but if they came through or from Eastern Europe, that was the name given to them. I would make the point here, the barbarian name came from imitating the sound that others heard them making. The barbarians are depicted in the movie Gladiator. I don't know if you have a stomach for that, but at any rate, the opening scenes there, they're fighting the barbarians.

There were times when the Roman soldiers suffered badly. against the barbarians and the main difficulty was if the Romans were caught in a surprise attack and they weren't able to get in formation and they get their weapons of warfare in the right place and the barbarians would catch them by surprise, they in one case lost an entire legion, just completely wiped out by the barbarians. If the Roman soldiers were, for example, in some narrow little valley or in a narrow pathway in the forest, they'd be spread out, and they wouldn't be able to get in formations and use their equipment. And the barbarians would then attack them from that disadvantaged position. And they, in some cases, lost badly.

The Scythians is a name that Paul points to. They're up in this area. north and east part of the the Black Sea area. Paul mentions them in Colossians 3.11 and Roman soldiers encountered them from time to time and they sometimes would make their way into the Roman Empire. So Paul was aware of them. They would sometimes cross paths with them.

The Roman soldiers didn't have a great deal of major battle with them. It was just a group they tended to encounter. Scythians had a reputation for being dirty and slimy and nasty. Parthians is a name you do not see in the New Testament. However, they did have some interactions with the Jews.

In 40 BC the Parthians came in and liberated Jerusalem from the Romans for a short period of time. And the Romans drove them back out. And when they drove them out, that's when they put Herod the Great, the not so great, in place. Because they knew he was nasty and he would keep out the Parthians, right?

The Parthians were famous for riding their horses forward while shooting backward. And the Romans sometimes misunderstood that as, oh, we've got them on the run. Serious mistake, they found out. Because here you got these guys riding away, and you go, OK, we got them on the run now. And they drop their shields down, and that's when the Parthians would nail them with their archery. So that's what you see depicted here in the photo.

They're only listed as a language group in Acts 2.9. The Parthian Empire is east of the Roman Empire, and that's where a number of Jews were from the time of the Babylonian exile. The Magi were from Parthia, and so you can imagine Herod the Great, who was assigned to keep out the Parthians, is very interested when these guys from Parthia come to visit Jerusalem, right?

Now, you have the Cretans is another group here. Paul sent Titus to Crete to appoint elders and provide direction to them regarding the leadership of the church in Crete. Cretans made heroes of those who lied and betrayed others for personal gain. If you befriended somebody and then tricked them and stung them, they thought that was just the best. It just doesn't get any better than that. So they applauded that. Imagine going into that kind of a culture and trying to pick honest elders. That's Titus' assignment there. In a culture where people admire the person who is slimy and tricky.

So here's Titus 1, 1-4, Paul writes what he doesn't write anywhere else. He says, Paul, a bondservant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the faith of those chosen of God and the knowledge of the truth, which is according to godliness, in the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, you see the emphasis there? He is writing this letter in sharp contrast to the culture of the Cretans, where they admire and adore someone who is a very good liar. The God who cannot lie. Paul does not write that to anybody else, but he does write it to Titus who is sent to Crete.

Here is Titus 1.10-13, For there are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision. So the Jews that went to Crete were even worse.

Right? You can imagine, here's a Jew who is supposed to never tell a lie, and they get real good at it. They must be silenced for they're upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not teach for the sake of sordid gain. One of themselves, a prophet of their own, Epimenides, 6th century BC, so Paul quotes him, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true.

Can you imagine that? Okay, Titus, I'm sending you into a place where they love to lie and they've been doing it for centuries. And even their own people will say that. So, we find this variety of different cultures that we encounter in the Bible. What we find is that the characteristics, like here with Crete, the characteristics that we find of those cultures are relevant to understanding the Bible.

I mean, imagine Paul writing these things about, you know, these people are liars and lazy and deceitful. Imagine writing that, unless it's true, right? Which is what he says. And in order to say it, he quotes one of their own and then says, yes, this is true.

So as we go through those various cultures, we find from all the way from Genesis to the last books of the Bible, some of these miscellaneous cultures end up having an influence at one point or another. Yes. What you find is Islam has gone and taken over most of the Middle East. There are Christians in various parts, but they've got to be careful because Islam is aggressive and militant. The fellow that I told you about who was from Lebanon, who's actually of Canaanite background, He told me, he says, I had to leave because the Muslims were so forceful, they just made it miserable. Even though he was a Christian.

Yeah. And isn't many of their beliefs similar to what the Christians, what Paul said about them? Of the Muslims? Yeah. Well, here's the thing with Islam, is that it's okay to lie to an infidel. That's part of the morality. In other words, if a person is non-Muslim, then there would be an authorization to lie to an infidel. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Oh, even in their own culture, they would. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some similarities, but also some some differences, too, because what what Islam did is it is it took what Muhammad had and then spread that over other places, whether the culture was like that or not.

One part of Europe that has been Muslim for centuries is a place where we went in Bosnia, and they're Muslim for centuries. And that's Dalmatia that Titus had been sent into. So it was an area that actually was evangelized in New Testament times by Titus. Yeah, Dalmatia and Illyricum, those are the areas around that area we now call Bosnia. But the Muslims came in and it was an area where the Muslims were not pushed out, but instead maintained a dominance.

Oh, one more thing. You ever hear of Ezekiel 4.9 bread? Yeah, that's fine.

If you want to buy Ezekiel 4.9 bread, I would say go ahead and do so.

If, however, you ever are in the grocery store and you see Ezekiel 4.12 bread, never buy it. Run. Never buy it. Look it up. If you look up the Bible verse, you'll know why I'm telling you never buy it. Just, you know, don't even think of it. Don't even touch the package. It's that bad. Okay. Alright. Let's pray. Okay?

Lord, we thank you as we look at these things, we can see the influence that these various cultures have had in various parts of scripture, everywhere from Genesis to Revelation. And we thank you that as we look at your word, we can have understanding and insight into what you have inspired for our benefit because you love us. And we just thank you for our time together. We pray that you would use it as we study your word. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.